In Watch Me When I Kill, his directorial debut, Antonio Bido pulls off a reasonable impression of Dario Argento in full-giallo mode, intentional or not. Seriously, when the murder sequences begin, so does the score, and your mind subconsciously anticipates the kick-in of a Goblin riff that never comes; I was tricked every time, and pleased to be.
When a dancer named Mara (Paola Tedesco, Battle of the Amazons) has the unfortunate timing of needing aspirin just after an elderly pharmacist has been brutally murdered, the killer assumes she may have seen too much and begins targeting her as well. Freaked out by the first attempt on her life, Mara flees her apartment and runs into the arms of old flame Lukas (Corrado Pani, Gambling City), who happens to be a private dick. Armed with curiosity and cheap cigars, he investigates.
Per the rules of the giallo, however, Lukas doesn’t investigate fast enough, meaning the body count rises as he pokes his nose around town. The list of likely suspects narrows so rapidly that the number of pawns Bido has to play with nears zero. When the identity of the culprit comes to light, the motive is weighed down by more serious notes than the subgenre usually calls for; your allegiance to certain characters may be upended by the revelations, but a wham-bam-slam cut to “THE END” could be designed to induce enough whiplash to keep you from overthinking such things. Or it could just be legendary B-movie producer Herman Cohen (Horrors of the Black Museum) cleaving away at the running time because he could.
Nevertheless, Watch Me When I Kill — a minor work, yet engrossing enough — finds Bido (The Bloodstained Shadow) not shying away from bloodletting … or face-ovening. (Get ready to welcome an aversion to meat-based stew!) Graphic as these scenes are, their most chilling aspect lasts for a literal fraction of a second: a subliminal close-up of an indeterminate animal’s eyes. —Rod Lott