Passi di morte perduti nel buio

This is the second of only two giallos directed by Maurizio Pradeaux. And this is the better of the two in my opinion. It's mostly better due to the script and the acting. Comic scenarios and sometimes witty, and sometimes stupid, dialogue abound here. The actors have a lot of fun with it! The pace is breezy and bubbly. Leonard Mann (protagonist) and Robert Webber (inspector) come across as the strongest of the group.

There is quite a bit of misogyny here with every female character being written as either an idiot or a criminal.

The gore/special effects are pretty average. The killer has very little creativity and basically kills every victim the same way.

The mystery never completely makes sense to me. But since the movie doesn't take itself too seriously, I cut it some slack. It really does breeze by with all the humor.

Quite ludicrous but bright and breezy enough to be likable this is, wait for it - a comic giallo. I know, obviously, we are on dangerous territory straight away because, what with all the twists and turns and often daft denouements, gialli, are sometimes laughable enough. Yet here we have a particularly complicated one, albeit with simple enough start, Agatha Christie style with six people in a railway carriage, light goes out, one dies, who dunnit? But this is complicated by the fact that one gets involved in blackmail and then maybe another and there are characters chasing characters, we are struggling to keep up only for the characters to start making jokes (sometimes amusing, sometimes not). On the positive side, it looks tremendous, great costumes and furnishings with the girls not afraid to slip off their clothes, the killings are fairly gory and the score keeps things bobbing along as the cast seem to be genuinely enjoying themselves. Just wish I had as much fun watching.

After the murder of a young woman on a train from Istanbul to Athens, five people are questioned by the police, the main suspect being photographer Luciano (Leonard Mann). With the law breathing down his neck, Luciano tries to prove his innocence while the killer continues to rack up the bodies.

Death Steps in the Dark has got a convoluted plot, a killer who wears black gloves and uses an open razor, plenty of attractive young women, bright red gore, gratuitous female nudity, and cool close-ups of the murderer's twitchy eyeball - but it's still not a typical giallo: in addition to the usual genre ingredients, this one also includes quite a lot of comic relief. The tongue-in-cheek humour is incongruous with the nasty slayings - one second we have a graphic shot of a razor slicing through flesh, and moments later there'll be some daft comment from the hero's ditzy Swedish girlfriend Ingrid (played by Vera Krouska - easy on the eye, but oh-so-irritating) or some craziness that involves the police's prime suspect dressing in drag. No matter how hard director Maurizio Pradeaux tries, his mixture of sadistic killing and silly comedy doesn't work

The murders are well-handled by Pradeaux, but the actual story is a mess, so much so that that it is necessary for some lengthy exposition at the end, courtesy of the police inspector (Robert Webber), so that the viewer can make some sort of sense out of what they have just seen. That said, no amount of explanation could make the final scene seem less asinine: Death Steps in the Dark has one of the most ridiculous climaxes ever, so stupid that it almost makes one admire its chutzpah.

4.5/10, rounded up to 5 for IMDb.

Another giallo, but this time we get a delightful mix of murder, great visuals, nudity, and comedy! It's not a comedy per se, but it really does have its tongue in its cheek. If films had tongues. No you shut up.

On a train from Istanbul to Greece, a compartment contains one victim and five suspects. The victim is a young French girl about to be stabbed in the chest with a letter belonging to our first suspect, photographer Leonard Mann. The other suspects are a suspicious looking man, an angry looking woman, a priest, and a dopey Swedish model who is Leonard's girlfriend and who also will be delivering some of the broader humour of the film. There are also two people out in the corridor important to the plot - a young fella and his girlfriend, both of which witness the killer going to the toilet to cut the electricity (please don't think about that or anything else that occurs in the film because you'll get a nose bleed). The killer also drops a pair of gloves, quickly snatched by this duo in order to do some blackmailing later.

The cops think Leonard did it and when there's a strange coincidence involving two separate illegal $10,000, he has to go underground, living in a fishing shack next to a railway line. This is after he dresses in drag for a bit, which may give you an indication of where this film is in tone. The killer gets blackmailed and kills the blackmailer with a straight razor to the neck, but what he/she didn't reckon on was that the blackmailer's girlfriend was having an affair with half the population of Athens, which complicates things greatly.

Character wise, you have a heart-burn suffering cop and his daft sidekick, Leonard and his really daft Swedish sidekick, the remaining suspects (the priest isn't a priest and the angry woman is going through a divorce), the local crime family also being daft as brushes and owning a Minah bird who calls everyone an asshole. The suspicious guy follows everyone around and is basically the red herring and the kidnapper's girlfriend has rather a lot of nude scenes. This weird mix of nudity, gore, great visuals and slapstick really works. We even get a song in the middle of the film and the cinematography is amazing. The stupidity lasts right up until the last second and I'm still not sure if the method used to catch the killer was genius or borderline racist. Who knows? This is a really outstanding entry into the giallo genre. For those who have a sense of humour.

Luciano is a press photographer travelling to a photo shoot on the Istanbul-Athens express with his girlfriend. While passing through a tunnel, his girlfriend is stabbed to death with Luciano's dagger. He is naturally the prime suspect for the murder, but he believes he can solve the case himself and so goes on the run to clear his name. On the face of it a classic giallo theme, but what we have here is a film that is an odd mix of authentic Giallo, black comedy and at times, outrageously bawdy comedy, in the vein of Airplane movies, the killer leaving his fingerprints in $hit might give you an idea of its level. Still though, some of the humour is spot on and never reaches the level of being tiresome, there are also enough gruesome murders and suspense to keep real Giallo enthusiasts intrigued.