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Last week my sweetie-wife and I watched a Giallo that we streamed on the ad-supported service Tubi; the film in question was titled Ring of Death, a 1969 Italian crime/thriller, and not to be confused with the early 80s martial arts movie. The film can be found on IMDb as Detective Belli. But Tubi, in addition to frequent breaks for up to 5 commercials in a row, hid another reason why budget streaming isn’t always the best option.

Belli (Franco Nero) is a corrupt senior police officer in Rome who is drawn into a web of blackmail, extortion, infidelity, and murder when he takes on investigating a rich man’s son who has begun associating with people of low character. As is typical of the giallo genre this movie is lurid and darker than the American genre of film noir with few if any admirable or moral characters. Everyone has a secret, and everyone is willing to do terrible things to keep their secrets concealed.

We, my sweetie-wife and I, prefer whenever possible, to watch these films with the original Italian language track but Tubi, being an ad-supported service, caters to the lowest common denominator and nearly always only has the English language dub for their foreign films, particularly with the older ones. Still, Ring of Death Detective Belli boasted a dubbed track where most of the actors provided their own English language dialog and as such was far superior to the vast majority of dubbed versions.

That is until the particular failings of this apparently hastily assembled version made themselves plain.

Random scenes, for no discernable reason, suddenly presented themselves with the Italian language soundtrack but without any accompanying subtitling. These instances where we were subjected to Italian never lasted more than scene or two, and never as long of a reel, before just as randomly switching back to the English dub.

For the most part this was tolerable, the context of the scenes usually provided enough that we could guess as to what transpired but this all fell apart with the final, and most ironic, sequence for this fault to reveal itself. As with most mysteries and thrillers there comes to scene where the detective, having finally worked out all the twists and turns of the plot, lays it all out for the other characters and the audience in a lengthy spot of exposition and Ring of Death/Detective Belli was no different in this respect, just for us, it was presented in Italian without subtitles. While the solution was plain, in this case Belli was explaining to the culprit just how he worked it all out, all of the nuances were lost in a language neither of us spoke. I could recognize names of characters as they flew by the explanation but nothing more than that.

My sweetie-wife searched the county and city libraries for the film on disc so we might check it out but that proved fruitless.

Sometimes with the free streaming services you get exactly what you pay for.