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Review

Italian director Luigi Cozzi is best known for films for which most filmmakers would probably prefer to not be best known: as the helmer behind threadbare science-fiction rip-offs like Starcrash (1979) and Alien Contamination (1980), as well as sloppy horror projects like Paganini Horror and The Black Cat (both from 1989), Cozzi has been responsible for a sparse oeuvre that must be largely regarded as uninspired and undistinguished (Cozzi has since left the film business to manage the “Profondo Rosso” horror-themed gift store in Rome; he’s often behind the counter — for the record, I’ve met him there and he’s a great guy).

What makes his subsequent career particularly disappointing is that Cozzi’s feature film debut, The Killer Must Kill Again is — sort of astonishingly, given his later work — one of the best giallo suspense thrillers to come out of Italy in the 1970s, a grim and gruesome little shocker with an effectively spare aesthetic sensibility, gorgeous widescreen cinematography, and an admirably merciless willingness to place its likeable characters in unsparingly seedy and sadistic situations.

Cozzi has frequently collaborated with his mentor, Dario Argento, and The Killer... shares many similarities with the early giallo thrillers crafted by Argento, though the plot is generally less labyrinthine than Argento’s complex mysteries: in Cozzi’s film, there’s no whodunit aspect to the plotting since the killer is identified from the onset of the story. A hired killer bumps off a wealthy playboy’s wife, but finds his plans seriously disrupted when he stores the body in the trunk of a car that is shortly thereafter stolen by two joyriding kids (Lisa and the Devil’s Alessio Orano and Let Sleeping Corpses Lie’s lovely Cristina Galbo). The murderer must track down the young couple to retrieve the body and protect his crime, but meanwhile the police are advancing their investigation into the husband who hired the killer’s services.

Needless to say, by the time the murderer does make contact with the grand theft auto-practicing lovers…they are not exactly on his list of favorite people. Cozzi has delivered a superlative giallo with The Killer Must Kill Again: if the film is not quite in the same league as Argento’s early gialli, it must still rank with the best work from the genre’s other practitioners, and – particularly with the wealth of supplementary features provided by Mondo Macabro on this first-ever DVD release — the movie would be an ideal (if somewhat narratively atypical) introduction to this genre for unfamiliar novices.

 -- Travis Crawford