Death Walks at Midnight

Valentina (Susan Scott) agrees to take an experimental drug at the behest of her journalist boyfriend, having her reactions to it studied on the understanding that she remain anonymous and unidentifiable.

Within minutes of the HDS injection Valentina experiences terrifying, extraordinarily vivid – we might say cinematic – visions of a young woman being brutally battered to death by a man wearing a spiked metal gauntlet.

The incident soon passes and, thinking nothing more of it, Valentina breezes into the modelling agency the next day only to be summarily dismissed. Storming out the building she is then confronted by her name and features plastered all across the cover of the magazine Giovanni works for and furiously goes to confront him. Giovanni unashamedly admits the whole thing was a set up, designed to boost both their profiles. Just wait until the offers of work come flooding in, he comforts.

And so it proves. While her on-off boyfriend Stefano (Pietro Martellanza) is visiting and castigating Valentina for her foolishness, she receives a hand-delivered note calling her to a meeting in an office just opposite her apartment block. Valentina arrives to find the place suspiciously empty, then spies the man with the gauntlet. With the maniac punching his way through the door, Valentina manages to attract Stefano's attention. He rushes across, arriving in time to scare the maniac away but not himself seeing the man.

Then it emerges that a woman was in fact murdered in the selfsame apartment six months previously by a man using a spiked glove – except that according to the police the woman Valentina identifies was a suicide case, while the real killer has already been apprehended, tried and committed to a mental institution.

What is going on and who can Valentina trust…

While it was not impossible to incorporate screwball comedy elements into the giallo, as demonstrated by Dario Argento's masterful Deep Red, this 1973 entry from Luciano Ercoli proves too uneven in tone to really work.

This said, there are some clever touches, like a transparent edit between Valentina shouting at the newsvendor and at Giovanni and the frame of the shot that sees Stefano arrive whilst Valentina's assailant retreats along the other corridor unobserved.

With the identity of the murderer (too) obvious from the start Ercoli has to find an alternative to the traditional tension-raising subjective stalkers eye view shots. He finds one in the form of comic book stylings – Valentina tellingly being the name of one of Guido Crepax's fumetti heroines – but, these, combined with the resourceful, take-no-nonsense nature of Scott's Valentina – lessen the opportunity for woman-in-peril thrills.

As a result one is inclined to think that the screenwriting is down more to Ercoli's fellow spaghetti western specialist Bruno Corbucci, given the fun if messy nature of the likes of Django ; his work on the Crepax adaptation Baba Yaga the same year; and a drugs smuggling subplot that prefigures his subsequent contributions to the poliziotteschi cycle than co-credited gialli maestro Ernesto Gastaldi to whom might be attributed such conventional giallo motifs as the primal scene of violence, fetishised violence and ineffectual authorities along with the Blood and Black Lace-derived murder weapon.

While maybe too old to really convince as a model, Susan Scott – a Spanish born actress originally named Nieves Navarro whom husband Ercoli sought to establish as a giallo star after they had met doing spaghetti westerns – makes an attractive lead nonetheless, her gutsiness and willing to give as good as she gets making for an interesting contrast to the more typical screaming heroines portrayed by Edwige Fenech – even if she does have to be bailed out by a male rescuer (I won't say who) at the end.

Gianni Ferrio's breezy score, with its seductive title theme "Valentina", helps smooth over some of the cracks, as does the ever-enjoyable Luciano Rossi as a giggling, yellow- waistcoated knife thrower.

Finally, can anyone confirm whether one of the traffic cops also appeared in Death Smiled at Murder as Dr Sturges's mute assistant?

Mondo Macabro's Region Free PAL DVD of Death Walks at Midnight is sourced from a French print of the Spanish-Italian co-production and is presented with a choice of English and French audio tracks, both sounding fine to my ears. The visuals are more problematic, with some web discussions suggesting that the aspect ratio is either out and out wrong – 1.85:1 rather than 2.35:1 – or does not automatically adjust itself as it ought. As it is, while some compositions do appear slightly off at times, the less attentive viewer – or one used to worse pan ad scan presentations – is unlikely to notice.

Blood and Black Lace author Adrian (Luther) Smith appears in a 17 minute BOUM featurette, introducing the main characteristics, personalities and themes of the gialli, placing Death Walks at Midnight in its broader context and mentioning numerous titles for the curious to follow up on. There may be little or nothing in here that long term fans of the genre won't already know from Smith's book and elsewhere, but it's a comprehensive and enticing introduction for the newbie.

A text interview with Ercoli and Scott by Christian Kessler, excerpted from a longer version originally published in Splatting Image in 1996, is more worthwhile for established fans, covering as it does the golden age of European co-productions and throwing in some more obscure details on their intertwined and separate careers.

The profiles of Scott, Simon Andreu, Ercoli, Luciano Rossi and the somewhat mysterious Claudie Lange by Lucas Balbo are likewise better than the run of the mill (even if the date of Scott and Ercoli's wedding differs from that in the Kessler interview), once again showing Mondo Macabro's knowledge of its product and audience.

In summary, a film and DVD by cult cinema fans for cult cinema fans.