Sleazy journalist Gio Baldi (Simón Andreu) persuades model Valentina (played by Ercoli’s wife Nieves Navarro although she’s billed here as Susan Scott) to sample a new hallucinogenic drug, HDS. He tells her it’s a legitimate scientific experiment. She should never have believed him. He works for a trashy scandal magazine. During her drug trip Valentina sees a vision of a woman being murdered by a man with a spiked steel glove (an interesting twist on the black glove giallo cliché).
She’s pretty disturbed and she’s even more disturbed when she finds out that there was a real murder that happened exactly this way six months earlier.
So we have some giallo paranoia and that paranoia builds when Valentina thinks she sees the murderer. In fact she thinks the murderer tried to kill her.
Valentina tries to persuade her boyfriend Stefano (Peter Martell) that she’s in danger. He assumes that the drug has made her flip out.
Inspector Serino (Carlo Gentili) is however rather interested, although sceptical.
The problem for Valentina is that neither the killer not the victim in her vision look like the killer and victim in the actual murder case. Maybe it really was just a drug vision. But she doesn’t think so. She thinks she knows something about a real murder but she doesn’t know what it is that she knows, or what the killing might have been about.
She is pretty sure she’s being followed.
And she keeps seeing the killer from her drug experience.
No-one really believes Valentina, except perhaps for Verushka. Verushka’s sister was the murder victim in the case six months earlier.
There are the usual giallo plot twists. Valentina is in extreme danger but nobody will help her because nobody believes her. There are various odd characters flitting in and out of the action. There’s a weird guy who wants to warn Valentina about something. There’s a middle-aged professor. There are two very creepy hoods. Valentina visits a lunatic asylum. She sees the killer everywhere she goes. To make things worse she is aware that she was under the influence of drugs when she saw, or thought she saw, the killing. She can’t be absolutely certain about what she witnessed. And of course the viewer can’t be sure if she saw a murder of if the drugs just twisted her mind.
The Milan setting is used very well. There’s a lot of glamour. And there’s quite a bit of blood.
The name Valentina will remind some viewers of the comic-book character created by the great Guido Crepax.
You won’t find spectacular visual set-pieces in this movie. As a director Ercoli is a craftsman rather than an artist. He lacks the flair of a Bava or an Argento. But he’s a skilled craftsman and he understands pacing and he knows how to achieve the right overall look.
The movie’s biggest asset is Ernesto Gastaldi’s excellent script. Gastaldi wrote lots of giallos, including lots of the very best giallos (in fact he was one of the most notable writers in Italian genre movies in general). There are three credited writers on the film but in fact the script was entirely Gastaldi’s work. He knows the genre. He knows what works and what doesn’t. You’re never quite sure which characters are going to be significant.
Simón Andreu and Peter Martell are very good and the supporting cast is fine with several delightfully over-the-top performances to add some colour.
Nieves Navarro makes an excellent heroine - she’s sometimes naïve, sometimes smart, she never entirely gives way to panic and she adds just a touch of ambiguity. You have seven or eight characters at least in this movie who could potentially be murderers and there’s always that slight doubt about Valentina’s sanity.
Luciano Ercoli directed only a handful of movies, including three giallos - this one plus Death Walks in High Heels (1971) and The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion (1970).
The Arrow Blu-Ray provides a very nice transfer. It includes quite a few extras, the highlight being the audio commentary by Tim Lucas which is excellent (as his commentaries always are). Both English and Italian language options are available. This being an Italian movie there is of course no original version of the soundtrack. Both the Italian and English tracks were post-dubbed. So it doesn’t matter which one you choose.
Death Walks at Midnight might not be a great giallo but it’s a solid entertaining effort, more plot-driven than most giallos. Highly recommended.
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