You’ll need your running shoes for ‘Death Walks at Midnight’
By: Lucas Hardwick
Tags: Giallo, Film, Movie Review, Horror, Movies

EVANSVILLE— How do you involve an innocent woman in an elaborate string of murders that are tied to an international drug cartel? You get her doped up on a hallucinogenic substance that causes her to have a bad trip that reveals a murder that happened in the building next door six months ago, duh. And this is the delightfully unexplained catalyst for Luciano Ercoli’s 1972 giallo flick Death Walks at Midnight where supermodel Valentina (Nieves Navarro, a.k.a. Susan Scott) is injected with the experimental hallucinogenic drug HDS while journalist pal and maybe boyfriend Gio (Simón Andreu) photographs her as she trips, which goes from what looks like could turn out to be a pretty good time for Gio to sheer terror in no time flat as Valentina gets a vision of a woman being bludgeoned to death with a spiked gauntlet by a man in butterfly shades and a trench-coat with a Phil Spector hairdo.

Title card for “Death Walks at Midnight.”

In spite of Valentina bargaining with Gio to not show her face or reveal her name in the tabloid he works for, well, of course Gio reveals Valentina’s face and prints her name in the tabloid he works for and now she’s the “most famous drug addict in Milan.” And of course no authority in the world is going to believe a woman who can only substantiate a murder by way of a bad trip. This doesn’t stop the independent and determined Valentina from searching high and low for the sissy-haired, face-jabbing killer who is now suddenly following her around all over Milan! See how quickly that happened. And at the same spanking pace Valentina glides from one distracting situation to the next, throwing all of us off the trail at every turn after she happens into Verushka (Claudie Lange) who, after reading Valentina’s story in the tabloids approaches her and reveals she is the sister of a woman named Helena who was the one who was actually murdered in the building next door and not the woman in Valentina’s trip. Verushka tries to prove this by taking Valentina to the asylum where the murderer is being detained so she can verify that this is the same man in Valentina’s vision, who turns out isn’t, and after some squirrelly behavior, Verushka bails leaving Valentina high and dry forcing her to catch a ride with a pervert, and on the way back to town the Phil Spector murder-man appears again in the back of a hearse carrying a woman who eventually turns out to be the woman she saw in the bad trip she had at the beginning of the film.

No need to get pissed off because you can’t follow the break-neck speed at which the plot changes, that’s the sign of a great giallo flick. And don’t worry that it doesn’t make any sense and that there are no serial deaths happening in the night as the title implies. Giallo films are never great at making sense, and that’s what makes them great because the good ones are done so thoroughly that it seems more thought goes into making them not make sense which honestly trusts the audience’s intelligence and to stay engaged. And while we can’t seem to figure any of this out or tell you what we know, we can certainly tell you what we don’t know, and the more distractions the film throws at us, the harder we find ourselves looking for any relevant clues, which also usually end up being undone by the end. The bottom line is a giallo film isn’t supposed to make any sense, and if that’s not your scene — which is fine — then you should probably surf out.

Death Walks at Midnight isn’t really a conclusive title but it sounds much more thrilling and a lot less stupid than the crappy sentence fragment U.S. title for the film, Cry Out In Terror. And while we’re nit-picking, the title in Italian, La morte accarezza a mezzanotte, more accurately translates as Death Caresses at Midnight, which doesn’t roll off the tongue, and I get the mental image of Joe Spinell gently stroking the fiberglass breast of his scalp-wearing mannequins in the 1980 film Maniac, so Death Walks at Midnight it is.

Death Walks at Midnight is the second of only two Death Walks films, the first being Death Walks on High Heels, and other than sharing most of the same cast and the same writer — Ernesto Castaldi — the two films are not connected. Castaldi, whose last writing credit was 1998, has over 120 scripts to his name from all genres including My Name Is Nobody, a couple of Sartana films, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, Torso, and one of the best titles in the history of cinema, Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key.

Luciano Ercoli, married to Death Walks at Midnight star Nieves Navarro, only directed eight films in his career — four of which were scripted by Castaldi, and typically with the proclivity of featuring tough, independent females which were a staple of Italian fumetti comics — and retired from the business after receiving a large inheritance. As well, Ercoli may have been behind the wheel in their collaborations, but Castaldi was the backseat driver, so clearly Ercoli was only in it for the living.



Nieves Navarro also starred in the famous weird-beard Satan worshipping giallo All the Colors of the Dark released the same year — also co-written by Castaldi — and continued acting well into the 80s often under the pseudonym Susan Scott.

Simón Andreu is still in the game mostly doing Spanish TV shows, but U.S. audiences might recognize him from Die Another Day, Chronicles of Narnia, and Bridget Jones Diary: The Edge of Reason.

After being shot down by the cops a few times as she continues to pursue the visions of a hallucinogenic fever dream, Valentina seeks comfort with lover and artist Stefano (Peter Martell) who’s babysitting his Japanese neighbor’s children — just more to distract you from what’s going on, so don’t sweat it — and agrees to help him with some photos for a commission piece, in a cemetery of course. While she’s measuring tombstones with gay pal Pino (Elio Vello), Valentina bumps into Verushka, and clearly having not learned her lesson the last time she hopped in a car with Verushka, Valentina takes off with her again as she promises to reveal the truth of the woman in Valentina’s vision and the film’s fashionable, coiffed killer.



In the final act a couple of cartel hitmen show up, one being a Puerto Rican who doesn’t do a whole lot and the other a German who is giallo personified, sporting a yellow vest, black leather gloves, and a diabolical quiver of throwing knives, and whose crazy Joker laugh is the maniacal icing on this layer cake of insanity. And just when we’ve had enough, and there’s nothing left to continue to not make sense, the killer reveals himself to Valentina and puts a nice bow on the elaborate goings-on of the past six months leading up to the Valentina’s murderous premonition, all in just a couple of minutes. And the final few minutes of the film satisfyingly culminates in some of the rowdiest, roughest rooftop fisticuffs that I’ve seen in a film.

We never really get to know these characters beyond the surface, and mainly because the volley of plot thrown at us is relentless, but it’s fine because what little we do know about them is about all we need to know about them. The excessive, elaborate plot tries but never gets in the way of the story, and it may be confusing and convoluted as hell, but it’s never frustrating. Ercoli and Castaldi keep us entertained the entire time, and yes, in the end, lest the mechanics of Valentina’s hallucinogenic drug be explained, it all makes sense. This movie demands your attention but knows you have no choice but to let it wash over you, and while process of elimination may reveal the killer, even the keenest armchair detective will have trouble keeping up with Death’s whip-crack hustle at Midnight.

Four stars.

(Blu-ray release on Arrow Video.)