La morte cammina con i tacchi alti (1971)

... aka: Death Stalks on High Heels
... aka: Death Walks on High Heels
... aka: Nuits d'amour et d'épouvante (Nights of Love and Fear)

Directed by:
Luciano Ercoli

In Paris, more than a million dollars worth of diamonds have been stolen and Ernest Rochard, the man suspected of being the safe cracker who helped steal them, has his neck slashed aboard a train headed to Switzerland. The victim's daughter, Nicole (“Susan Scott” / Nieves Navarro), is called in for questioning by the authorities but insists that her father didn't give her anything nor does she have any idea where the diamonds may be. Nicole is a popular cabaret dancer who works at numerous glitzy clubs around the city. During one of her patented acts, she wears bronze make-up, an Afro wig and a diamond thong bikini. Her unemployed and immature boyfriend Michel (Simón Andreu) gets turned on seeing her “all blacked up” and is game for a dressing room quickie in between shows, but he's still sick of her always being so busy and barely ever seeing her, plus jealous of all of the male customers who drool over her. However, until he finds work, she must continue to shake her tits and ass all over Paris as their breadwinner.

After one of her shows (this one with her decked out in a gold ensemble and slathered with glitter), Nicole receives a phone call from someone disguising their voice and threatening “If you don't want to end up like your father, tell me where the diamonds are!" She rushes home only to be greeted by her useless drunk boyfriend tossing a switchblade at her head and complaining about people calling him her gigolo. After he leaves, a blue-eyed man dressed in black and wearing a hood, sneaks in through the window of her apartment, strips her down to her bra and panties and threatens to slice her up. He leaves without physically harming... this time. He promises his next visit will be nastier if she doesn't “remember” where the diamonds are. Problem is, she really has no clue. After finding blue contact lenses in Michel's medicine cabinet, Nicole figures it's time to split town. Thankfully, she's recently gotten acquainted with a frequent presence at her shows, the friendly Dr. Robert Matthews (Frank Wolff), who is so smitten with the beauty he hops from club to club so he doesn't miss a single show. Without hesitation he agrees to bring her back home with him.

Upon arriving in London, Robert wines and dines Nicole and takes her on expensive shopping sprees. The two quickly become lovers and she doesn't even seem to mind that he's still technically married his (rich) wife Vanessa (Claudie Lange) because the two are separated and he promises to divorce her so they can marry. The two eventually run off to a small, quiet village where Robert owns a nice country home. The locals aren't only old fashioned but also incredibly strange and gossipy. Nicole immediately gets bad vibes from many in the area, including weird caretaker / handyman Hallory (Luciano Rossi), voyeuristic boat builder Captain Lenny (George Rigaud) and a priest who talks with a voice box that sounds very similar to the stalker back in Paris. Someone also begins spying on them with binoculars and reporting their bedroom activities back to the rest of the village. Robert is away in London a lot and during one of his trips someone stops by the home and gives something to Nicole that upsets her. She disappears soon after.

Later, while Robert is in the middle of performing an eye operation on blind patient Mr. Smith (José Manuel Martín), someone enters his office and shoots him. He manages to survive the attack but all the witness can really convey to the cops is that he heard a sound similar to that of high heeled shoes. Soon after, some village fishermen find a surprise in their net: Nicole's corpse. That brings up a lot of possible suspects in both her murder and Robert's attempted murder, including many of the townspeople as well as Vanessa, who at one point attempted to pay Nicole 5000 pounds to leave her husband for good. And wouldn't ya know it, Michel has flown there all the way from France and is found hanging out in the village. Drunk, of course. It's up to Scotland Yard Inspector Baxter (Carlo Gentili) and his assistant Bergson (Fabrizio Moresco) to figure out just what's going on.

I really have to hand it to these people for having me, completely losing me and then miraculously not only getting me back by the end but also winning me over. I found myself enjoying the first 30 or so minutes (several silly 70s dance routines certainly helped), not liking where this was going in the middle and finally absolutely loving where they finally went with everything they'd already set up... even the stuff I didn't like watching! You will need to patiently stick with this one through many bumps, detours, dull patches, red herrings and seemingly pointless story elements to experience the full joy of this little roller coaster of a giallo. Thanks to a sharp script by the uber prolific Ernesto Gastaldi and “May” (Mahnahén) Velasco, how this manages to tie together the numerous characters and plot threads is rather ingenious. Not only will it please fans of Italian thrillers, but it also touches base with exploitation fans. There's at least one very gory knife murder and lots of long, lingering shots of the leading lady wearing a fine selection of bikinis, lingerie or sheer clothing (or nothing at all).

Navarro married Ercoli a year after this was made, starred in five of the eight films he directed and remained married to him until his death in 2015. Reportedly, the director bowed out of show business in the late 70s after inheriting a fortune from a relative. Navarro, on the other hand, would make occasional appearances in sleazy films until the early 90s even though she probably didn't have to. Co-star Wolff, a winner of several Best Actor awards while a theater student at UCLA, decided to take Roger Corman's advice and attempt a career in Europe after a lack of success in the States. He ended up becoming a well-known star in Italy; appearing in numerous hit spaghetti westerns and thrillers. In 1971, the same year this was released, he committed suicide in the bathtub of a hotel. I've not seen much of his work thus far, but he gives a devilishly good performance in this one. The score is by Stelvio Cipriani, who did the music for several hundred (!) Euro exploitation films.

Never released theatrically here in the U.S. and completely missing out on the whole 80s and 90s VHS cycle entirely, this wouldn't see the light of day here until the 2006 No Shame DVD release. In the UK, both this and Ercoli's follow-up Death Walks at Midnight (1972), which features many of the same actors as this one, were released in a box set called “Death Walks Twice” by Arrow Video.

★★★

Xtro (1982)

... aka: Judas Goat
... aka: X-tro
... aka: Xtro, attacco alla Terra (Xtro, Attack on Earth)
... aka: Xtro – Extraterrestre (Xtro – Extraterrestrial)

Directed by:
Harry Bromley Davenport

Leonard Maltin called it “crudely directed,” “guided by gruesomeness” and “overwrought but dull.” In an episode of At the Movies, Roger Ebert labeled it “one of the most mean-spirited and ugly thrillers I've seen in a long time” and added that it “doesn't even qualify as acceptable trash,” while Gene Siskel simply shrugged it off (“garbage is the operative word”) as if he had better things to do with his time. A critic for Time Out was a little more lenient, saying that it's “incompetent enough to be prime drive-in fodder.” Those and countless other extremely negative reviews from nearly every major critic of the day were what greeted this film upon release. None of that really mattered in the long run though as this did fairly well at the box office and on video. Part of that was due to an effective marketing campaign painting it as the antithesis (“Not all extraterrestrials are friendly!”) of one of 1982's biggest family-friendly hits: E.T.. Being part of a wave of similar sci-fi / horror films from the early 80s hoping to cash in on the success of ALIEN (1979) probably didn't hurt matters either. This production is also noteworthy for being produced by Robert Shaye and his then fledgling New Line Cinema; who handled the U.S. distribution. It was one of only two horror releases (the other being the entertaining 1982 slasher ALONE IN THE DARK) that predated their company-stabilizing hit A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).

Since its theatrical days, this has gone on to amass a minor cult following simply because of how bizarre and ridiculous it is. The director, who'd previously made just one feature (1976's Whispers of Fear, which doesn't appear to have ever been released on home video), claims that he and his crew made this for one reason and one reason only - “to shock people” - and didn't really put much more thought into it than that. He's also the first person to admit that the film “doesn't make much sense.” He is correct. Still, that doesn't mean this isn't still wonderfully entertaining.

While outside playing fetch with the dog, Sam Phillips (Philip Sayer) tosses a stick into the air, there's a sudden explosion of bright light and strong wind and the next thing you know he's gone. Sam's young son Tony (Simon Nash) witnesses the whole incident, but nobody believes him. Instead, wife / mom Rachel (Bernice Stegers) thinks Sam has run off and abandoned them and eventually moves on with her own life. Three years later, the mother and son are out of the country and living in a brownstone in the city. Rachel is now dating a new man, girlie photographer Joe Daniels (Danny Brainin), who lives with them along with French housekeeper / nanny Analise (Maryam d'Abo in her film debut). Tony rejects the potential new father figure in his life, is haunted by recurring nightmares and is convinced his father will come back one day. He's right, of course, but pops isn't quite the same once he does finally show up. The boy also has some kind of bizarre, unexplained psychic connection to his long-missing dad, who communicates with him and makes him wake up one covered in blood (“Daddy sent it!”)

A spaceship swings by Earth long enough to drop off a reptilian alien creature. It immediately kills a couple driving through the country and then breaks into a cottage, attaches its tentacle onto a woman's (Susie Silvey) mouth and then impregnates her. Her stomach immediately swells and she gives birth to a full-grown man right then and there. That man is Sam, of course, or at least a being that looks identical to him. Soon after, Sam hunts down and finds Tony and Rachel and claims he has no idea where he was or what he was doing during those three missing years. Since he doesn't have a place to stay, Rachel is pretty much forced to take him in temporarily, which doesn't sit too well with Joe. While there, Sam exhibits some decidedly strange behavior, including eating snake eggs, and then gives his son a nasty hickey that passes along special supernatural / telekinetic abilities to him in the process. The powers also give him a mean / evil streak.

At first, Tony does simple things, like making a top spin with his mind, but then he creates a dwarf clown (Peter Mandell) with a razor blade yo yo and other deadly playthings. Downstairs tenant Mrs. Goodman (Anna Wing) smashes Tony's pet snake to death with a mallet when it sneaks into her apartment, so he turns his tiny soldier doll into a full-sized plastic assassin and sends it downstairs to stab her death with a bayonet. The young and fertile Analise is up next and they have special plans for her. While they send a toy tank that shoots real bullets and a black panther (!!) out to take care of her boyfriend (David Cardy), the clown bludgeons her with a floppy hammer, Tony breaths into her side and next thing we know she's a cocooned incubator pumping out water balloon alien eggs. An elderly neighbor who swings by to check up on them gets his throat cut with the yo yo and there's also death by piercing sound waves, which make a man's ears start gushing blood. A second, skeletal-looking alien creature shows up toward the end. The original ending was changed later on because the distributor didn't like the first one and were planning to remove it.

Was this plot well thought out? No. Does this make much sense? No, not really. Still, Xtro is an extremely entertaining, nicely-photographed, fairly well-acted and efficient little exploitation movie with fun special effects, lots of gore, some sleaze (including several nude scenes from the stunning D'Abo) and many memorably oddball moments worth checking out. The director also co-wrote it and did the (pretty good) synthesizer score. He later came to America and made Xtro II: The Second Encounter (1990) and Xtro 3: Watch the Skies (1995). There was talk of either a third sequel or a remake of the first but that has yet to happen.

Xtro is one of those movies you couldn't avoid even if you tried. It's been very well-distributed since its initial VHS release back in 1983 and continues to be well-distributed to this day with numerous DVD releases. Still waiting on a Blu-ray, though.

★★1/2