Watch Death Walks at Midnight For Free

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Best movie ever!

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

If you have a daughter make sure she's not dumb enough to end up with a partner like this. Valentina is a fashion model (this is a giallo, after all) whose journalist boyfriend manages to talk her into taking an experimental LSD-like drug for the sake of a magazine article. He assures her she'll be wearing a mask and a doctor will administer the drug, but once she's high as a kite he takes the mask off and starts taking pictures of her. While she's ripped to the nines and well muntered, larging it the 'nth' degree and chewing her cheeks, she also has some sort of vision where she sees a man punching a woman in the face over and over again with a spiked glove. Thinking it was all part of the trip, the next day she gets sacked from her job and finds her face plastered all over her boyfriend's magazine. She also finds out the 'doctor' was a doorman, goes mental, and throws a brick through her boyfriend's window. Then she starts seeing that killer around the place, and it seems that not only did she not hallucinate a murder, but the drug might have triggered a repressed memory of murder she may have witnessed six months before – and it gets even more complicated than that!We know the killer right from the start, but we have no idea who he is, what he's up to, or why someone is in a loony bin for a murder he seemingly committed! Many other characters turn up to badger Valentino, and two very shifty gentlemen, including a knife throwing, giggling Luciano Rossi, roll into town for some reason too. The police are pretty much useless in this one, so can she turn to one of her two boyfriends for help? That's right, two, and one of them is a sculptor looking after two Japanese kids, for good measure.Just like Ercoli's previous film Death Walks on High Heels, this one is a bit too long, but the pay-off is well worth it! Just about every character that makes it to the end of the film ends up on the roof of an apartment block for a final fight/punch up/stabbing/gun fight, and this is where Ercoli finally unleashes the nastiness. One character even ends up splattered across the pavement with his brains lying next to his head and his cigarette holder poking through his face. Kinds of wakes you up a bit when that happens in a film.So then, another good, solid, beautiful looking giallo from Ercoli. I can't wait to watch the next one: Open the Door, Get on the Floor, Death Walks the Dinosaur!

Valentina, a beautiful fashion model, takes an experimental drug as part of a scientific experiment. While influenced by the drug, Valentina has a vision of a young woman being brutally murdered with a viciously spiked glove. It turns out that a woman was killed in exactly the same way not long ago and soon Valentina finds herself stalked by the same killer...We should note that other than the lack of Frank Wolff, this film very much has the same cast as "Death Walks on High Heels". In fact, this was the third collaboration between director Luciano Ercoli and legendary screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi. This makes the similar title appropriate, and even more appropriate still that Arrow Video has decided to bundle the films together."Midnight" draws inspiration from Mario Bava's "Girl Who Knew Too Much" (and both would be precursors to John Carpenter's under-appreciated "Eyes of Laura Mars"). Another scene is clearly an homage to Hitchcock's "Rear Window". Tim Lucas points out that this further makes the case for Ercoli being the Italian Brian DePalma, as DePalma is seen by many as the American successor to Hitchcock.Lucas notes that the film unusually "visually conservative" for a giallo, due very much to Ercoli's preference for script over image. Lucas calls him a "carpenter" in his approach. Indeed, it is interesting to see how Ercoli works compared to, say, Dario Argento, who filled every inch with color. Ercoli, who was above all else concerned with producing, keeps it all very simple, very sparse. this is not to say he is without the clever shot here and there, but it is not the visual feast we might expect.Stuart Galbraith has written that Midnight has "a stronger, less-predictable screenplay and a bit more visual flair" than its companion film, High Heels. I would say he is spot on with this assessment. Although both are great films, and High Heels probably has the better killer and soundtrack, Midnight seems to be overall the stronger of the two and has more complex characters.Arrow Video has blessed the genre community yet again with their Death Walks twice set. As noted in my separate review, "Death Walks on High Heels" is packed with extras, and so is this one! Another very informative Tim Lucas audio commentary really sells it for me, but we also have a brand new interview in which Gastaldi discusses "Death Walks at Midnight" and a career script-writing crime films. Oh, and a visual essay by Michael Mackenzie exploring the distinctive giallo collaborations between director Luciano Ercoli and star Nieves Navarro. Amazing!

A full action spirited finale cannot make up for the fact that for the previous 100 minutes this has been pretty dire. The lovely Nieves Navarro (Susan Scott) does well with much screaming and wide eyed horror but barley removes her coat, let alone anything else. The dialogue is a real let down and until the very end there seemed to be little of interest at all. The visuals are nothing special, the music par for the course and for a giallo this is certainly lacking the sleaze element. Perhaps though this was intended more as a thriller, certainly the drug ring theme would seem to suggest this and viewed as such perhaps my comments are harsh. This certainly has it's moments, especially the weird penultimate scene in the flat with the crazies and the noose and then of course the marvellous rooftop fight, but is slow and unnecessarily confusing along the way.

Yesterday I watched a couple of giallos by Luciano Ercoli and starring Nieves Navarro (billed as Susan Scott) and Simon Andreu (of THE BLOOD-SPATTERED BRIDE [1972]) - DEATH WALKS ON HIGH HEELS (1971) and DEATH WALKS AT MIDNIGHT (1972). I was pleasantly surprised by the former but hugely disappointed by the latter; anyway, here's my take on both films.The meaninglessly-titled follow-up, DEATH WALKS AT MIDNIGHT, was pretty silly and tedious by comparison making use of dreary plot mechanics and wasting its two leads - Navarro (Scott) and Andreu.The film's most intriguing elements – violent images from the past materializing as drug-induced hallucinations, and the murder method itself (the spiked glove) – are thrown away as red herrings in an attempt to liven up a pretty tired formula crime-thriller, i.e. it's more than just a giallo but, unfortunately in this case, the whole emerges to be a good deal less than the sum of its parts!Unlike DEATH WALKS ON HIGH HEELS, the supporting characters of this one are often sleazeballs and therefore we are never involved in their actions and the motive behind them. A subplot involving a couple of oriental kids is, once again, irrelevant – padding the story for no reason at all – and the almost farcical fight sequence at the climax is not merely out of place but also rather badly staged! The music score (this time around composed by Gianni Ferrio) is OK under the circumstances but still nothing special, in my opinion.I don't think having watched the film panned-and-scanned (as opposed to DEATH WALKS ON HIGH HEELS' original Technsicope format) had anything to do with my low estimation of DEATH WALKS AT MIDNIGHT; actually I'm surprised that Mondo Macabro decided to release this on DVD (albeit in a compromised version, as it is both dubbed in English and cropped!) over its vastly superior – if still basically unremarkable – predecessor which, in view of its plentiful nudity (of which this has none!) and a far more engaging plot, I think would have made for a more popular title!In any case, I'm interested in catching up with more obscure giallos now and, as such, I especially regret having missed out on Sergio Pastore's SETTE SCIALLI DI SETA GIALLA aka CRIMES OF THE BLACK CAT (1972) just a couple of days ago! I also look forward to Blue Underground's 'Giallo Collection Vol. 2' Box Set which, incidentally, should include Luciano Ercoli's FORBIDDEN PHOTOS OF A LADY UNDER SUSPICION (1970).