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!

"Death Walks at Midnight" stars Nieves Navarro as fashion model Valentina,who experiments with a new hallucinogenic drug to help newspaper writer Gio with a story.Immediately,Valentina is overcome by a vision of a generously coiffed killer in dark glasses plunging a spiked metal glove into the face of a woman in the vacant apartment across the street.After coming to her senses,she demands to know if whole thing was simply imagined,or if the drug somehow set a repressed memory free.When Gio publishes his story,Valentina finds out that the murder did occur,and she must solve the killer's identity herself."Death Walks at Midnight" is fairly conventional giallo co-written by Sergio Corbucci of "Django" fame.It's not as sleazy as some of its contemporaries,but there are some stylish and sadistic flashback murder scenes.Give this tense thriller a look.7 out of 10.

Valentina(Nieves Navarro or Susan Scott as she is billed) is a fashion model who agrees to take an hallucinogenic drug for a medical experiment. The experiment is being recorded by Valentina's journalist friend for an article he is going to write,but under the influence of the drug Valentina somehow gets some extra sensory vision of a savage murder of a girl by a middle-aged man who kills her with a spiked metal glove. Valentina only participated on condition that her identity is kept secret but the journalist publishes the whole story and now Valentina's life is in danger from the killer.Valentina is then plagued by the killer every where she goes but unfortunately for her nobody else sees the killer.This trend continues as the body count rises the corpses that she sees disappear before the police get there and so nobody believes her fantastic story. One reason the police don't believe Valentina is that there was such a killing but the killer was caught and has been in a mental institution for six months and fob her off as a nut.Valentina goes to check out the killer but when she gets there the killer is not the man in her vision.Is she going mad ?Is she still feeling the effects of the drugs? is she being set up? Beautifully shot with a nice but sparsely used score this Giallo is a huge disappointment, from the offset we are lead to believe this might just be a classic of the genre with the opening kill, but this film dies a death after its opening gambit.The beautiful Navarro and Simón Andreu have a little chemistry but its not enough to save the film from being quite dull and unimaginative, there are no spectacular kills or set pieces to excite us and the distinct lack of suspense puts the final nail in this baby's coffin, added to that a propensity for silly comic characters in silly situations is just plain annoying.The sound on the Mondo Macabro DVD is also patchy and quite tinny and with a lot of hiss at times which is infuriating.I do hope the No Shame release next year is better.For Giallo completists only.