DEATH WALKS AT MIDNIGHT (1972)
Directed by: Luciano Ercoli.
Written by: Sergio Corbucci, Ernesto Gastaldi & May Velasco.
Director of Photography: Fernando Arribas.
Edited by: Angelo Curi.
Music by: Gianni Ferrio.
Released by: NoShame.
Language: Italian with English audio & subtitles.
Country of Origin: Italy/Spain. 102 min. Not Rated.
With: Susan Scott, Simón Andreu, Carlo Gentili & Claudie Lange.
DVD Features: TV version (105 min.) Poster & still gallery.

DEATH WALKS ON HIGH HEEL (1971)
Directed by: Luciano Ercoli.
Written by: Ernesto Gastaldi, May Velasco & Dino Verde.
Director of Photography: Fernando Arribas.
Edited by: Pedro del Rey.
Music by: Stelvio Cipriani.
Released by: NoShame.
Language: Italian with English audio & subtitles.
Country of Origin: Italy/Spain. 108 min. Not Rated.
With: Susan Scott, Simón Andreu, Carlo Gentili, Luciano Rossi, Frank Wolff & Claudie Lange.
DVD Features: Trailers. Poster & still gallery. Additional CD: The Sound of Love & Death: The Very Best of Stelvio Cipriani. Booklet.

Like a psychedelic and bloody Lana Turner vehicle, Death Walks at Midnight is easily the most entertaining of NoShame’s recent releases of ‘70s giallos – sexy, Italian crime thrillers (Secrets of a Call Girl, to name one). Top model Valentina (Susan Scott, whose head of long blond hair rivals Sharon Tate’s), stands out from the genre’s largely decorative women. Long before Ashley Judd, the feisty, smart, no-nonsense Valentina more than holds her own against a group of psychotic killers.

For cash, she agrees to be photographed by her boyfriend while under the influence of a new mind-bending drug. As he snaps away, her hallucinatory trip comes to a screeching halt. Staring out of a window, she claims she’s witnessing a woman being brutally murdered by a man with a spiked-iron fist. A police inspector laughs off her claim as part of her drug-induced imagination, while her boyfriend thinks she must have remembered a murder that had actually occurred six months earlier next door. Once you get used to the close-ups of wide-eyed terror, there’s a genuinely shocking twist amid all the contrivance. And Milan’s gothic Duomo, featured prominently in the background, adds a luster that no money can buy.

The title may sound like an Almodóvar farce, but Death Walks on High Heels hasn’t enough humor to be camp (with the single exception being a white woman’s striptease while in blackface and a fake ‘fro). Instead, it’s a heartless, red herring-stuffed mystery. Parisian stripper Nicole (again, Scott, the one wearing the ‘fro) is pinned to her bed and stripped to her underwear by a masked man with piercing blue eyes, who threatens her with imminent mutilation if she doesn’t reveal where her jewel thief father (killed off in the first scene) hid the diamonds from his last heist. Freed, she runs to her boyfriend’s arms, but finding a pair of blue contact lens in his medicine cabinet, she makes a quick escape and accepts the offer of a married, wealthy British doctor to run away to his love nest in the English countryside.

Women are dispatched here like last month’s Playboy, including a gruesome Black Dahlia-like slicing of a supporting character played by Claudie Lange. (Both Scott and Lange look so alike that one could almost interpret the film as a distaff Dead Ringers.) All the victims are killed off before their characters are developed, and the outcome depends on too many coincidences and contrivances to be remotely believable.

However, NoShame serves a sterling example for other distributors. To see how rich the colors are in their DVD transfers, compare the theatrical version of Midnight with the English-dubbed TV version with its shadowy, inferior print – the difference between the two is like day and night. Kent Turner
March 1, 2006