Watch Death Walks on High Heels For Free

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

Blistering performances.

After a heist, the notorious jewel thief Rochard is murdered in a train. In Paris, his daughter Nicole Rochard (Susan Scott), who is a stripper, is summoned by the police that wants to know the whereabouts of valuable diamonds that her father had stolen. She goes with her boyfriend Michel Aumont (Simon Andreu) and tells that does not know anything about the missing diamonds. During the night, a blue eye masked man breaks in her apartment and threatens her, asking where the diamonds are. Nicole seeks protection with Michel but in the morning she finds contact lens in his bathroom and she suspects Michel may be the masked man. She seeks out her costumer Dr. Robert Matthews (Frank Wolff), who had hit on her, and she asks him if she could go with in to London. Matthews, who is married, brings Nicole to a house by the sea in a village and she poses of his wife. But soon the masked man comes to England and begins a crime spree. The Scotland Yard Inspector Baxter (Carlo Gentili) and his assistant are assigned to investigate the case . "La morte cammina con i tacchi alti", a.k.a. "Death Walks on High Heels", is a giallo with a complex screenplay with many twists. There are many suspects but the killer´s identity is unexpected. The conclusion is well-resolved. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "A Morte Caminha de Salto Alto" ("The Death Walks on High Heels")

Luciano Ercoli's Death Walks on High Heels begins with the murder of a famed jewel thief on board a train by a balaclava-clad killer with piercing blue eyes. The police suspect the slaying may be linked to a recent heist during which millions of francs worth of goods were taken, and believe that the missing loot is in the possession of the departed's daughter, Nicole Rochard (Nieves Navarro, here billed as Susan Scott), whose life may be in imminent danger. They may just be right, as the beautiful exotic dancer starts to receive phone calls by someone speaking through a voice-changer. After discovering a pair of blue contact lenses at the home of her boyfriend Michel (Simon Andreu), she flees to England with rich admirer Dr. Robert Matthews (Frank Wolff), only to discover that her would-be assassin may still be lurking.Regularly paired with Ercoli's fellow giallo Death Walks at Midnight, made the following year, Death Walks on High Heels may not contain the same skill for ingeniously-structured set-pieces of Dario Argento or the gore level of Lucio Fulci, but it has in spades that other key ingredient of the giallo - fun. Many of the Italian thrillers to emerge in the 1970's contain a suitably bonkers and convoluted plot, but High Heels can boast one of the best. It's a film in which anyone and everyone could be the one behind the mask, with inexplicable red herrings at every turn and more than a few moments of extensive, but required, exposition. It plays on the camp appeal of the genre, and very much succeeds in doing so.There's also Nieves Navarro/Susan Scott, who is not only unbelievably gorgeous, but also manages to transcend the usual roles her type of character gets to play in these types of films (eye candy) and stands out as a playful presence. She also delivers a marvellously bizarre performance in the first of her exotic dance shows we get to see it, which she performs in blackface while wearing a trimmed afro wig as Wolff looks on utterly enamoured. It's weirdly endearing, and highlights the void between now and then in terms of our attitudes towards political correctness. If you try and piece the puzzle together yourself, you'll probably leave yourself in a spin. Like many of the best gialli the Italians have to offer, view it with a blind acceptance of anything the film throws at you and it'll zip by in a flash.

"Death Walks on High Heels" is a giallo style thriller that features Susan Scott as a stripper named Nicole who gets caught up in a murder mystery. The complicated plot involves a missing hoard of stolen diamonds that is being sought after by various greedy people. Nicole is the daughter of one of the original criminals responsible for the theft, so she soon finds herself threatened over the phone and then again in person by a masked attacker, who is sure that she can lead him to the jewels, even though she says she knows nothing. She flees Paris and makes her way to England with a rich admirer who promises to protect her - even her French boyfriend is one of the suspects in this mystery where no-one can be trusted. From here on, the plot becomes even more tangled and you'll need your wits about you to make it to the end knowing exactly what's going on. It's a credit to the writers that they are able to carry on pulling new surprises out of thin air right up to the very last moments of the story, and Ercoli is able to keep you hooked due to the marvellous cinematography, and of course the beautiful women who populate the film, namely Susan Scott and Claudie Lange. Scott is able to carry the film effortlessly, especially in a couple of pretty loopy striptease numbers, as well as the many changes of costume and wigs she sports throughout. And it makes a great change to see a strong female lead as although often in peril, Nicole is a character tough enough to take what's thrown at her with panache.While the film is fairly low on action and long on conversations, it does dish up one particularly vicious murder in which the female victim is repeatedly sliced with a switchblade knife (This idea was taken to a far more nauseating extreme much later by Lucio Fulci in "The New York Ripper"). Ercoli also stages another spectacular punch up towards the end, in a similar vein to the roof top climax in "Death Walks at Midnight" ...when Ercoli films a fist- fight, his men hit HARD!Speaking of those conversations, I watched the film in English, and the dubbing probably does the atmosphere a real dis-service, as none of the English script seems to adequately match the emotions the actors are trying to portray. Luckily both this and the other "Death Walks..." movie are out as a double bill by No Shame, and on this release the discs allow you to choose the Italian soundtrack with subtitles and I have a feeling that the translation might be quite a lot better in the subtitles than in the English dub, which probably robs the films of some of the subtler script nuances, and also makes the twists and turns harder to keep up with.Giallo fans will be happy with the sleek violence on display, and retro fans will revel in the lurid fashions of the era and the sumptuous lounge/kitsch musical soundtracks of both films. Susan Scott is a statuesque beauty who throws herself into the proceedings with vigour, and I enjoyed the film on account of her performance, without which it would probably be only half as entertaining.

Director Luciano Ercoli, screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi, and actors Susan Scott and Simon Andreu had greatly impressed me with their 1970 giallo offering, "Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion." Curious to see whether lightning could possibly strike twice for this same team, I took a look at 1971's "Death Walks on High Heels," and it turns out that this latter film is, remarkably, even better than the first. In this one, sexy redheaded stripper Nicole (appealingly played by Scott) gets into major-league trouble when a masked killer with a mechanical voice box starts to target her, whilst looking for some stolen diamonds. You may think that you know where this stylish thriller is headed (and Ercoli DOES direct with style to spare), but trust me, you're dead wrong. A shocking twist of plot around halfway through really does pull the rug out from the viewer's expectations here, sending us into very strange and uncharted waters indeed. Gastaldi has here provided us with yet another ingeniously plotted story that hangs together marvelously (unlike--for me, anyway--Ercoli and Scott's follow-up film, 1972's "Death Walks at Midnight"); composer Stelvio Cipriani has contributed a chic and catchy score; and some great-looking lensing of Paris, London and the English countryside provides some elegant backdrops for the film's very sinister doings. Add some touches of welcome humor (in the film's latter half), one genuinely nasty slice-and-dice sequence for the gorehounds, and some fairly brutal fisticuffs at the film's conclusion and you have one extremely satisfying giallo indeed. Good luck trying to figure out the killer's identity in this one! As icing on the cake, the DVD that I just watched comes to us courtesy of the fine folks at No Shame, who continue to impress with pristine prints of lost Italian wonders, and with excellent subtitling, to boot. Grazie, No Shame!