Even with the inclusion of several red herrings and an implausible motive, I still managed to guess the identity of the murderer in Lamberto Bava's The Midnight Killer way before the end of the movie. Maybe I've just seen too many giallos and have come to expect the unexpected, but I figure that the reality is that this just isn't a great example of the genre.
Nicola, a policeman who discovers his wife is having an affair, is suspected of murder after his adulterous spouse turns up dead in her shower, having been stabbed with an icepick. After another victim turns up, killed with the same weapon, things do not look good for the poor copper, and he goes to his colleague Anna, a criminologist, for help. Anna believes Nicola to be innocent and suspects that the man really responsible is in fact Franco Tribbo, a murderer who supposedly died in a fire several years before...
Despite some great cinematography, a fabulous pulsing score courtesy of Claudio Simonetti, and an attractive selection of young women destined to die nasty deaths, The Midnight Killer still manages to be something of a disappointment. For a giallo, the death scenes are relatively free of gore, the story is not nearly as complex or as clever as it might be, and there is a distinct lack of nudity.
Worst of all, the film attempts (very poorly) to cheat its audience: at the end of the movie, the killer is revealed to be wearing a rubber mask in order to hide their true identitydespite the fact that their face is visible earlier on in the film and is clearly flesh and blood, even scowling and grimacing during one frenzied attack.
The Midnight Killer is a decidedly average effort that will be of little interest to anyone but the most ardent fan of Italian horror cinema.
Nicola, a policeman who discovers his wife is having an affair, is suspected of murder after his adulterous spouse turns up dead in her shower, having been stabbed with an icepick. After another victim turns up, killed with the same weapon, things do not look good for the poor copper, and he goes to his colleague Anna, a criminologist, for help. Anna believes Nicola to be innocent and suspects that the man really responsible is in fact Franco Tribbo, a murderer who supposedly died in a fire several years before...
Despite some great cinematography, a fabulous pulsing score courtesy of Claudio Simonetti, and an attractive selection of young women destined to die nasty deaths, The Midnight Killer still manages to be something of a disappointment. For a giallo, the death scenes are relatively free of gore, the story is not nearly as complex or as clever as it might be, and there is a distinct lack of nudity.
Worst of all, the film attempts (very poorly) to cheat its audience: at the end of the movie, the killer is revealed to be wearing a rubber mask in order to hide their true identitydespite the fact that their face is visible earlier on in the film and is clearly flesh and blood, even scowling and grimacing during one frenzied attack.
The Midnight Killer is a decidedly average effort that will be of little interest to anyone but the most ardent fan of Italian horror cinema.