Valentina (Nieves Navarro) is an Italian fashion model in Milan. A friend of hers, Gio Baldi (Simon Andreu) is a reporter for a gossip newspaper. He convinces her to take an experimental drug called HDS under the guise of it being a medical research experiment that Gio is writing an article about. He also promises that she would remain anonymous. Gio shows up at her apartment with, who he says are a doctor and nurse. She is administered the drug. Gio begins photographing her responses to the drug’s effects.
While she is under the influence of the drug Valentina sees a murder through the window of the building across the alley. The murderer bludgeons a woman to death with a spiked metal glove. Believing it was a hallucination Gio runs his article and pictures reporting on what Valentina says she saw. Now everyone believes she is a drug addict. She gets fired from her agency and is pissed at Gio. Valentina is sure that what she saw was real. The man she recognizes as the killer begins stalking her.
Valentina finds out that another woman was killed the same way six months earlier. Now everyone believes that what she reported was a fantasy of that murder and that she got the information from reading about it in the paper. Valentiana knows that the murderer and the woman killed are different people from the event from six months ago. The police especially are convinced that it was all a drug induced manifestation. There are those, however, that believe she knows more than she is revealing.
Valentina becomes embroiled in a nightmare of murder and betrayal. She is targeted by a drug syndicate and is stalked by, not only the killer, but hired assassins. Even her boyfriend Stefano (Peter Martell) doesn’t believe her. Not knowing who to turn to Valentina is forced to find the truth on her own. But the truth could mean her death.
“Death Walks at Midnight” AKA “La morte accarezza a mezzanotte” was released in 1972 and was directed by Luciano Ercoli. It is an Italian horror mystery giallo and supposedly a comedy. It is the second of Luciano Ercoli's Death Walks movies. The first being “Death Walks on High Heels” 1971. It is also his third film of his to star his wife Nieves Navarro. She actually did several pictures with her husband as director. Navarro used the name Susan Scott in the credits of many of her films, this one included.
There’s a lot going on here and some of it doesn’t necessarily gel all that well. The plot has a lot of facets to it. So many that not everything is summed up at the end, at least to my satisfaction. I also wasn’t sure what the comedy aspects were supposed to be nor did I understand the significance of the dead cat.
There aren’t very many murders but the method of murder and the amount of blood flowing is typical of giallo. The action was hit or miss at first but toward the end it ramped up significantly. There were some twists and turns that at first were confusing and you had to wait until the big reveal to see how everything was tied together. Of course a lot of that had to be explained since there wasn’t enough information given throughout the movie to figure it out for yourself.
I expected a little more but it was still interesting enough to, for the most part, be quite entertaining.