A Hyena in the Safe Blu-ray Review

Celluloid Dreams

Blu-ray Release: November 25, 2025

Video: 1.37:1/1080p/Color

Audio: Italian DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono

Subtitles: English

Run Time: 92:40

Director: Cesare Canevari

One safe. Six keys. Six robbers, each expecting their cut of a diamond heist when they finally meet to divide their spoils after months in hiding. But, before they can open the safe that guards their glittering hoard, they are mysteriously killed, one by one. With fear and suspicion growing among the shrinking group of survivors, it becomes clear that one of them is trying to take all the diamonds for themselves! (From Celluloid Dreams’ official synopsis)

It’s always exciting when an obscure giallo is rediscovered on video, but it’s especially exciting when someone finds a film produced before Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Italian: L'Uccello dalle piume di cristallo, 1970) turned a burgeoning subgenre into a fullblown cinematic fad. Released a solid two years before Argento’s film and having never made an official appearance on home video outside of Japan, Cesare Canevari’s tremendously underseen A Hyena in the Safe (Italian: Una iena in cassaforte, 1968) is one such film.

Canevari wasn’t a very prolific filmmaker, but his career was eclectic, beginning with B-western Die for a Dollar in Tucson (Italian: Per un dollaro a Tucson si muore, 1965). Shortly after Hyena in the Safe, he directed A Man for Emmanuelle (Italian: Io, Emmanuelle, 1969) – the first screen appearance of Emmanuelle Arsan’s character of the same name, predating Just Jaeckin’s Emmanuelle (1974) by five years – followed by his second western and, arguably, his best film, Matalo (aka: Kill Him!, 1970). But, for better or worse (definitely for worse), he will always be most remembered for the notorious Nazisploitation Video Nasty The Gestapo’s Last Orgy (Italian: L'ultima orgia del III Reich, 1977). 

Before Argento’s influence shifted the focus, giallo was a broad subject, ranging from playful Mario Bava potboilers and psychosexual Umberto Lenzi shockers to traditional noir thriller and tawdry Agatha Christie drawing room mystery. Hyena in the Safe is a playfully tawdry version of Christie’s Ten Little Indians (1939), populated by noir-like gangsters. With a couple of tweaks and cowboy hats, it could probably be reworked into a western. Given that spaghetti westerns and gialli peaked only a few years apart, this isn’t surprising, though it is surprising that there were so few, if any, direct giallo/western hybrids*. 

This comparison is kind of moot, though, because there aren’t really any other correlations to be made between Hyena in the Safe and any notable Italian western. Moreover, it’s not even consistently compatible with most Italian thrillers. With its magnified melodrama, surrealistic touches (some shots play out entirely within the confines of a black & white CCTV feed), stageplay aesthetic, and droll sense of humor, this singularly strange movie feels more in tune with ‘60s/’70s counterculture spoofs, like Elio Petri’s The Tenth Victim (Italian: La decima vittima, 1965) and Property Is No Longer a Theft (Italian: La proprietà non è più un furto, 1973), than its largely suspense-driven counterparts. The nearest another giallo gets in tone and imagery to Hyena in the Safe might be Sergio Bergonzelli’s equally absurd In the Folds of the Flesh (Italian: Nelle pieghe della carne, 1970). 

But what Hyena in the Safe mostly reminds me of is a moving comic book (a fumetto in movimento?). The shots are strictly bound by the shape of the frame and the camera angles are dynamically composed to evoke the squared-off panels of a comic page. While the camera is constantly rotating around the actors, a lot of actual movement is implied through choppy editing, which, again, sort of mimics the process of flipping through comic pages. The giallo genre was always steeped in pop art sensibilities, but even Bava and Lenzi, who both made visually wild fumeto adaptations (Diabolik [1968] and Kriminal [1966], respectively), didn’t bring that concept as literally to their thrillers as Canevari does here.

For the record, all of the Canevari films I’ve seen have been visually intriguing, usually beyond the genre expectations. Matalo, for example, is an increasingly quixotic acid western, made before the term was even popularized, and The Gestpo’s Last Orgy balances its revolting subject matter with uncharacteristic opulence. He directed one more giallo feature quite late in the genre’s original cycle called Killing of the Flesh (Italian: Delitto carnale, 1983). Hopefully an enterprising boutique label can rescue that one from obscurity, too.

* The only giallo-like Eurowestern I can think of is Spanish director Agustín Navarro’s Four Bullets For Joe (Spanish: Cuatro balazos), which was released in 1964, the same year as two genre watersheds – Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (Italian: 6 donne per l'assassino) and Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (Italian: Per un pugno di dollari). Giallo/polizottescho hybrids, on the other hand, were very common.

Bibliography:

• Italian Giallo in Film and Television: A Critical History by Roberto Curti (McFarland, 2022) – In his review, Curti, who also compares the film to a fumeto, describes Canevari’s unconventional style as “blissfully oblivious of the standard rules of filming,”

Video

A Hyena in the Safe is a pretty obscure title and, from what I can tell, it was never released in North America, but there was a PAL DVD released in Italy in 2012, so I suppose people could find a fan-subbed bootleg if they knew where to look. That’s all irrelevant now, because Celluloid Dreams has finally officially brought the film to North American Blu-ray. The original materials were perhaps not worthy of a full 4K UHD release, but, as far as 1080p discs go, this is a very nice transfer. Grain, texture, and details are a bit soft without major signs of DNR, and there are only minor clean-up artifacts throughout. Occasional discoloration, contrast inconsistencies, and darker wideangle shots show room for improvement, but there’s zero reason to assume anyone else could do any better. 

IMDb lists the original aspect ratio as 1.85:1, but Celluloid Dreams has opted for an open-matte 1.37:1 framing, which serves the comic panel framing very well. I honestly have no idea how these compositions could even work in 1.85:1. Note that a strange thing happens at the very end of the movie, where the animated text “Fine” (the end) begins to appear, but is locked in a sort of looping, mid-animation throb as we watch a short coda. This is another strange touch, not some kind of printing error.

Audio

A Hyena in the Safe is presented in its original Italian mono and uncompressed DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0. A lot of the film’s whimsy comes from its strange sound design, which is often quite stark, and the pop jazz soundtrack is unexpectedly bouncy. Like most gialli from this period, the film was shot without sound and dubbed in post, so there isn’t any official language track. In this case, the issue of inaccurate lip sync is magnified by the international cast, including natural German, Spanish, Italian, French and (I believe) English speakers, performing in their mother language (it’s actually written into the plot that almost everyone is from a different European country, in this case). The dialogue track is, nevertheless, clean, while the limited effects track sometimes sounds muffled.

Composer Gian Piero Reverberi is best known for co-writing the theme to Django Prepare a Coffin (Italian: Preparati la bara! and aka: Viva Django!, 1968), “You’d Better Smile,” with his brother Gianfranco, which means he gets a screen credit anytime a movie uses Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy,” which sampled the theme. 

Extras

• Commentary by Guido Henkel – The critic, preservationist, software engineer, and game designer discusses the film’s ‘underdog’ production, its release and obscurity, the larger careers of the cast & crew (emphasizing Canevari), the history of the main villa location, possible production connections to the fashion industry, and this release’s slightly longer runtime (the PAL DVD is apparently full of micro-cuts). He also connects Hyena in the Safe to the James Bond-inspired Eurospy movement, rather than fumetto adaptations, which is definitely something I overlooked.

• 7 Guests for a Massacre (51:10, HD) – This featurette was made for the 2012 Italian Cinekult DVD release and includes interviews with director Cesare Canevari, actor Sandro Pizzochero, producer Ninì Della Misericordia, and journalists/critics Adriana Morlacchi and Diego Pisati. It covers each interviewee’s career from their own point-of-view, the development of the film, casting, production, securing the main location, and a handful of behind-the-scenes anecdotes. The clips are also in 1.78:1, in case you were wondering how much better the 1.37:1 framing works.

• Schrödinger's Diamonds: The Duplicitous Mystery of Hyena in the Safe (36:04, HD) – Critic and host of The Nasty Pasty podcast, Andy Marshall-Roberts, explains the thought experiment known as Schrödinger's Cat, then applies the theory’s quantum mechanics to the plot mechanics of Hyena in the Safe (sort of – it’s really more of a framing device). He also explores other obscure giallo titles, the careers of the cast & crew, the film’s unique style, and the ways that it bucks murder mystery and gender traditions. 

• The Mysteries of Villa Toeplitz (7:52, HD) – A 2025 Villa Toeplitz location tour hosted by Francesco Pollanetti. 

• Image gallery

• Theatrical trailer 

The images on this page are taken from the BD and sized for the page. Larger versions can be viewed by clicking the images. Note that there will be some JPG compression.