The Blonde Connection

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.

This is an early gialli (pre-"Bird with Crystal Plumage")and is thus neither as violent, sexually graphic, or visually stylish as some of the later ones, but it's worth seeing for fans of the giallo genre.

This movie has a lot going for it. The great Fabio Testi plays a deranged artist who can't seem to resist strangling his female partners during sex. The voluptuous Anita Ekberg (the fountain-bather in Fellini's "La Dolce Vita") is an older, married female art dealer who just can't resist Testi's possibly homicidal charms and becomes the potential victim of an elaborate murder plot. The villainous Adolf Celli plays her oft-cuckolded husband, a scary gangster called "The Professor". Even a young Femi Benussi gets into the act in one of her earliest have-naked-sex-and-get-brutally-murdered-minutes-later cameos.

Unfortunately, the lead, American actor Dean Reed, is about as charisma-free as they come. Part of it his character, a private detective who callously uses his faithful fiancée as bait to snare the dangerous, sex-crazed artist. I was hoping something would happen--that she would cheat on him with Testi at the very least, but she is unaccountably loyal to this idiot. Even stranger, the detective at one point befriends a vicious dog belonging to another character, and the dog later rescues him at a crucial point (what is this--"Lassie"?). What either the dog or the girl see in this guy is beyond me.

This one has a hugely complicated plot, so let's see if we can describe it in one sentence!

Fabio Testi is an artist who likes to bed blondes on the side while his wife kind of spies on them but he may also be murdering them, although that's hard to determine as at the time of the first murder two other people are present who may or may not have been involved and at least someone there that night has stolen the victim's really expensive necklace, prompting her husband to hire a Roger Moore lookalike who heads of for the hotel with his fiancé and her dad, only to find that the staff at the hotel are under the thumb of a lady mob boss who is squeezing them for money, which means that they don't want a murder to go public and may be up to no good themselves as they plot to bump off their violent bosses, of which Adolfi Celli may be the most violent.

That's a LOT of PLOT and takes up about an hour or so of running time. It doesn't help that our hero is a Roger Moore clone who doesn't seem to mind pimping out his wife as a potential murder victim (although we do get some tense scenes involving her and Testi). Testi is good as the supposed killer artist and Adolfi Celli is also good as the old gangster who's possibly the cruellest person involved in the story. There's a really wince-inducing part where he squeezes a guy's hand while the guy is holding a glass of whiskey, with gory results.

There's also a kind of lack of style here, although on the other hand there is a 'trash' vibe that will become familiar during the next 300 Italian films I watch. I almost forgot to mention the sub-plot involving the dog that Roger Moore befriends which lends the latter part of the film a kind of 'Lassie' vibe which was kind of funny.

Interest constantly waning during this one. Maybe I'm growing jaded of the giallo. Maybe not. Maybe it's because the kids are off school and won't go to bed, the bastards.

This German Krimi thriller kicks off with the murder of a young woman which leads to a string of further killings and various other shenanigans. Despite a breezy location, a handful of reliable Euro actors and a reasonable general plot idea, this one suffers from poor direction and a fairly incomprehensible story. You'll be forgiven for getting lost in this one after a bit. Like Krimis in general, its fairly stylish while being more restrained than their Italian sister, the giallo. Its not bad but could have been better.

DEATH KNOCKS TWICE is an excellent vehicle for both leading man Dean Reed (in this film he reminds me of a cross between James Franciscus, Tab Hunter, and the pre-burnout Jan-Michael Vincent), who plays a detective out to solve a murder and robbery while stumbling across other corrupt activities, and for leading hunk Fabio Testi, who opens the film with a semi-nude outdoor love scene and seems to play half the film without his shirt on. If Joe Dallesandro had begun his European career at this point, he would have been great in this part, but Testi plays a sulking hunk well too, and here he is a spoiled painter who lives in a wonderful beach-front villa and sleeps with various women who meet untimely ends. The film may tend to introduce too many characters too soon, and the mystery does not seem so mysterious in the initial reels, but somehow the whole thing chugs along and becomes more exciting in its second half, which features an excellent high-speed car chase on a wet winding country road and some exciting stunts from Reed. There is a superb all-star Euro-trash cast, including Adolfo Celi, Anita Ekberg, Werner Peters, Leon Askin, Nadia Tiller, and Ricardo Garrone (the film was co-written by his brother, Sergio), and direction is handled by the reliable German director Harald Philipp, whose credits include some of my favorite films such as MANHATTAN NIGHT OF MURDER with George Nader as Jerry Cotton, and RAMPAGE AT APACHE WELLS, an adaptation of Karl May's novel THE OIL PRINCE, starring Stewart Granger as Old Surehand and Pierre Brice as Winnetou. The feel of the film is halfway between some of the later German crime films of the Edgar Wallace cycle, and some of the earlier proto-giallo films of the mid and late 60s. One wonders if Dean Reed viewed this film as a critique of capitalistic decadence (which it certainly is, although that may be unintended) or just a good leading role to give the Italian period of his acting career a shot in the arm. Either way, he handles himself well, looks great, and has charisma to burn. DEATH KNOCKS TWICE (the title will make sense when you see it) is not a must-see film, but I'm glad I watched it again, and the combination of director and stars make it desirable to the fan of European genre-films. Also, Dean Reed was not that prolific of an actor and some of his films have never circulated in English-language versions (to my knowledge), so anything that can be found is worth watching. My copy was taped off a TV station in Aruba back in the 1980's. A letter-boxed, restored version would certainly be welcome!