Review: Death Steps in the Dark

Leonard Mann plays a photographer who has boarded a train with his girlfriend (Vera Krouska). When the train goes through a tunnel, Mann, the girlfriend and other passengers in the compartment realise that one of their fellow passengers is a bit murdered. Stabbed to death with a letter opener, in fact. Police inspector Robert Webber is on the case and immediately pegs Mann for the killer as the murder weapon belongs to him.

 

Stunning Greek scenery and blood are all this thin 1977 giallo from director Maurizio Pradeaux (“Death Carries a Cane” with Simon Andreu) has going for it. It’s nowhere near enough for me. The plot and characters are of little interest, and lead actor Leonard Mann isn’t much fun to have around either. Fellow American Robert Webber is a bit more interesting but his role is stock. It’s all very stock-standard giallo, and not even especially stylish. The whole thing has been padded out with nonsense like a 5 minute scene in a club, including a musical performance. How much of that 5 minutes is related to the plot? About 60 seconds. The idiotic inserts of comedy and endless extreme close-ups of eyeballs add nothing except confusion in regards to the latter. At times the close-ups get in the way of actually understanding the geography of a scene. The director makes the cardinal sin of botching a potentially lovely Sapphic scene with extreme close-ups and then the dreaded coitus interruptus. Neither is good for eroticism.

 

Unremarkable giallo film is fairly bloody but also fairly bloody boring. Only for the giallo fan who has to see every giallo ever made. The clichéd screenplay is by Arpad DeRiso (“Death Carries a Cane”, Jess Franco’s boring “Marquis de Sade: Justine”) and the director.

 

Rating: C-

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