You know, a little while ago, I was feeling like I could go for a giallo, so I must say our Head Vampire’s announcing that he was sending me one (Mondo Macabro’s new DVD of Luigi Cozzi’s The Killer Must Kill Again, to be precise) inspired in me just a slight suspicion of telepathy. Nevertheless, I was quite excited about viewing this film that came billed as a “Lost Giallo Classic,” so you can imagine it wasn’t long after its arrival that I was popping it in my DVD player to take a peek. What I found was a little surprising, in that it didn’t really fit the mould of a giallo as I tend to think of them (i.e. a mystery with multiple violent set-piece murders); however, Killer Must Kill Again is nevertheless quite satisfying on its own terms and is made only better by an absolutely fantastic DVD presentation courtesy of Mondo Macabro.

The plot of Killer is deceptively simple. A businessman (George Hilton), upset with his wife for closing his access to her bank account due to his profligate spending, hires a creepy killer (Michel Antoine) to murder her while he’s out at a party with friends. Everything goes according to plan, and the killer strangles the woman before stuffing her into the trunk of his car. While he is returning to the house to clean up the crime scene, however, a young couple steals his car and drives off, completely unaware of the body in the trunk. With the killer close behind them, the couple heads to the beach before breaking into a nearby summer cottage for some romantic fun. Little do they know, of course, that the killer is hot on their trail and willing to go to great lengths to retrieve his victim’s body...

As the description (and screenshots) may indicate, there’s nary a black glove or mask to be found during these proceedings, and the killer’s identity is clear from the opening frame. What Cozzi is up to with Killer is creating a suspenseful cat-and-mouse chase and trying to sustain it for the entire movie. How does he do? I’ve got to profess, pretty well.

Most of Killer’s suspense comes from subverting audience expectations and from Cozzi’s extending his suspense scenes as long as he possibly can. A prime example of this comes early in the film, when the killer is carrying out his assignment. Cozzi starts his scene with the businessman’s wife walking down a deserted street in the dark as the killer slowly stalks her (a nice homage to Cat People). After the woman finally rushes into her house, the killer rings her door-buzzer and tells her he’s a friend of her husband’s who’d like to wait for him until he got back. The woman, happy for company, lets him in, where he keeps asking for things: water, Aspirin, etc. She repeatedly walks out of the room to get him these things, and each time she re-enters, he has moved. Eventually, of course, he finally does strangle her, though not before Cozzi has similarly wrung every bit of suspense from this situation. He achieves this not only by including the preliminary “chase” scene, but also by subverting expectations that when the wife returns from fetching something, the killer will have disappeared—Cozzi simply places him in a different spot each time. In making the woman’s letting the killer into her own home the key to her undoing, as well, Cozzi also injects a tragic (and realistic) irony into the situation, which he further emphasizes by inter-cutting between the wife’s strangling and the husband’s revelry at the party he’s attending.

All of these techniques Cozzi continues to employ throughout the movie. For instance, much of the film concerns the killer pursuing the two joy riders in the stolen car, so in a sense, the movie itself is one long chase scene. (Some might consider the following sentence a spoiler, since it takes place about an hour into the film. It wouldn’t have ruined my enjoyment, but if you’re finicky, skip it.) The use of cross-cutting is probably Cozzi’s most inspired directoral decision, however, the greatest example being when he cuts between the girl car-thief being raped by the killer and her boyfriend cheating on her with another woman; understandably, the contrast between the situations is brutally ironic and terribly tragic, resulting in some very effective manipulation of the audience’s emotions.

However, like almost all gialli, Killer does carry with it some flaws, most of them logical. For one thing, while the killer’s following the trail of the two car thieves is vaguely rationalized, he nevertheless seems at least slightly telepathic in his ability to keep up with them, judging by the amount of time between when they will arrive somewhere and when he does. Similarly, the various places the killer will stop always luckily have a lead from him as to the direction the two kids took; however, it seems doubtful that the killer would be able to anticipate some of their moves and that they would give such revealing information about where they were headed to people like a tollbooth operator, especially considering they’ve just stolen a car. However, I guess logical fallacies are to be expected in gialli (that is, with respect to characters’ actions, not the logic behind the mystery of the murderer, not that this film has such a mystery), so these minor quibbles can be forgiven.

As for Mondo Macabro’s presentation of this film, however, no forgiveness is required. Considering the age and low-budget nature of Killer, the film’s transfer is excellent, bearing nice colors—particularly in houses, which are decorated with that stylish 70s avant-garde decor so common in gialli—and very little print damage. The film is presented in its original scope ratio with anamorphic enhancement, to top all this off, and comes with the option of an Italian and an English-dubbed track, along with English subtitles. Being a lingual purist, I opted for the Italian track, and a cursory skip-around on the rather listless English track reveals that I probably made the better choice.

As for extras, Mondo Macabro has gone all out for this package. Starting small, the requisite theatrical trailer is here (under the title The Dark is Death’s Friend), along with a photo gallery of poster art, lobby cards, etc.; biographies and filmographies for Cozzi and the film’s principle actors; and another well-written and surprisingly interesting Mondo Macabro essay about the making of the film. MM’s new promo reel is also included, and it shows off a lot of very tantalizing product.

Moving on, we get not one but three documentaries to go along with this. The first, on gialli, has been ported over from MM UK’s Death Walks at Midnight disk and provides an informative overview of this genre that can also serve as a fun refresher for those who are already well-acquainted with it. Next up is “The Road to The Killer,” in which Cozzi, in his and Argento’s Profondo Rosso shop in Italy, reminisces about how the movie came to be. Finally, “Initials D.A.” has Cozzi talking about his tutelage under Italian horror maestro Dario Argento. All of these interviews, which are interesting, informative and well-edited, rival, in my opinion, those on Blue Underground’s disks, and prove a very welcome addition here. After these three pieces, the film’s original Italian title sequence as The Spider, looking like it was pulled off a video source, is also presented, and is notable for containing some neat time-lapse photography of a spider weaving its web.

Not enough, you say? Well then there’s more! The disk is finished off with an English-language feature commentary with director Luigi Cozzi and MM’s Tombs, who asks generally insightful questions and elicits a lot of interesting information from Cozzi. While, toward the end, the talk gets just a tad self-congratulatory, the commentary nevertheless makes an interesting listen and will definitely give an Italian exploitation fan a good time.

So, all in all, there’s really little more to say about Killer. While it may not be quite what you’re lead to expect (I really wouldn’t call it a giallo based on the definition given in its own disk’s documentary), it’s nevertheless a solid little thriller that focuses more on atmosphere and suspense than outlandish gore and sleaze (not that they aren’t welcome the few times they appear). If you’re in the mood for a taught little thriller with some of that oh-so-unique 70s Italian style, give Killer a try, ‘cause Mondo Macabro’s DVD is definitely the way to go about it.

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