At the start of this slightly tongue-in-cheek but routine Italy-Monaco co-production, Francisco Villaverde (Fabio Testi) romances a young woman on a beach. After smooching a bit and gamboling fully clothed in the ocean, they end up under a pier. During a sandy tryst, Fabio appears to throttle her as two witnesses look on. He runs off in a panic, and someone makes off with a diamond necklace around her neck.
Enter Bob Martin (Dean Reed), a private investigator whose boss is played by Leon Askin (the Nazi general in the Hogan's Heroes TV series, here dubbed with a New York accent). Martin spends the rest of the movie looking for the necklace, and in the process uncovers a serial killer.
All indications are that Villaverde, a wealthy artist, is insane, so Martin sends his fiancée to help capture him. How? He convinces her to seduce and drive Villaverde into a state of murderous excitement. Nice guy. Villaverde is married to the perfect killer's wife. "Is that blood?" she asks, pointing to his shirt the day he commits murder. No, he says, it's a strawberry stain. She buys it.
Meanwhile, the local hotel manager and his lieutenant are desperately looking around for a spare $10,000 to pay off a gangster (Adolfo Celi). Martin starts investigating them when it appears that Villaverde is not the killer. After much snooping around and a few karate fights in dark rooms, Martin realizes the real killers work for the hotel. He is aided by the manager's dog, a smart German Shepherd named Fritz that can open doors and chases a car several miles.
In spite of the strong whodunit story, DEATH KNOCKS TWICE morphs into a cheesy spy thriller at the halfway point. It is probably is only James Bond-slash-giallo movie. A brief Anita Ekberg nude scene is missing from other video versions.
Dean Reed, a former U. S. country-and-western singer, is too boyish to pull off his mock-cool act, and with his blonde locks comes off looking like a sadistic Beach Boy. Reed's real life was a lot more interesting. After recording a hit record, "A Summer Romance," in 1959, Reed went to Mexico and then Argentina. He emerged in Europe in the 1960s as a left-wing radical, which was in vogue at the time. In Moscow, he introduced Russians to country-and-western music. Reed drifted into acting, eventually appearing in forgotten German and Italian potboilers, mostly westerns. In 1986, Reed was found dead -- reportedly by accident -- in a lake near his home in East Berlin.
