One from the 14-film Sherlock Holmes franchise’s middle, The Scarlet Claw is the most overtly supernatural of the bunch, but we all know Holmes (Basil Rathbone) isn’t a believer in such things. The same can’t be said for Lord Penrose (Paul Cavanagh, 1953’s House of Wax), whose wife becomes the latest victim of a rumored marsh monster that has the village of La Mort Rouge gripped in fear.

Just like the following year’s Pursuit to Algiers, this flick stands at more of a B level than the earlier pictures, yet at 74 minutes, it’s so quick, it can’t help but be fun. As with all of them, it’s difficult not to want to watch at least two in a row.

Rathbone makes an excellent Holmes, so much so that we tend to picture him when he think of the character. He enjoys a natural rapport with Nigel Bruce, too, although this Watson of the screen isn’t Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Watson of the page; here, the doctor is reduced to a bumbling, occasionally pigheaded sidekick, rather than the detective’s equal. That’s not really a complaint, but an observation.

But here’s one complaint: Typical of the studio pictures of their era, these films are prone to musical numbers in which a character sings an entire song — or several — apparently because audiences liked that sort of thing. —Rod Lott

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Too bad 1959’s The Hound of the Baskervilles marked Peter Cushing’s one and only time to play Sherlock Holmes on the big screen, because he does a great job at it. And too bad Hound is the only Holmes adaptation undertaken by Hammer Films, because this had franchise potential written all over it.

After a 10-minute prologue that doesn’t even involve Holmes or Dr. Watson, detailing the curse of the well-to-do Baskerville family, the movie gets going with the plot, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle originally presented it: With Sir Charles Baskerville dead of fright, his nephew, Henry (Christopher Lee), inherits his estate on the moors, and Holmes and Watson (André Morell, The Mummy’s Shroud) suspect he may suffer the same fate as his uncle.

They have good reason to suspect as much, because out of his boot pops a big ol’ tarantula that immediately starts making its way toward a frozen-in-shock Henry’s face. Watson accompanies Henry to Baskerville Hall, where the sounds of the hound — a beast rumored to have killed many a man over the decades — pervade the night sky.

Not a believer in the supernatural, Holmes aims to get to the bottom of it, and naturally, he does. Only this time, Doyle’s story comes infused with spiders, scorpions, sacrifices and a suspenseful third-act descent into a dangerous mine shaft. Although the film by Hammer regular Terence Fisher (Horror of Dracula) is overly talky at times, it’s well-made in that unmistakable Hammer tradition, brimming with color and Gothic atmosphere, even on obvious sets. —Rod Lott

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Fashion model Valentina (Nieves Navarro, aka Susan Scott, The Big Gundown) agrees to be the guinea pig in a toxicology professor’s test of HDS, an experimental hallucinogen he’s developed. Scandal-sheet journalist Gio (Simón Andreu, The Blood Spattered Bride) documents her resulting trip, during which fits of uncontrollable laughter give way to visions of a young woman being brutally murdered by a man with an armored glove bearing four metal spikes.

Still shaken after the experience, Valentina soon learns that a woman actually died that way six months prior, in the office building directly across from her apartment. Not only that, but Valentina believes she’s become a target herself, as she comes face-to-face with the killer direct from her drug-fueled state — you know, that mutton-chopped dude with the groovy shades that practically qualify as Terminator goggles. Or has she? Perhaps, it’s suggested, the lingering aftereffects of HDS are to blame? It’s a not a spoiler to say the game of pursuer and pursued is not all in Valentina’s glamorous little head.

From there, director Luciano Ercoli (The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion) introduces us to so many loons, it’s too bad Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda weren’t on hand to imitate them. Working from a story by Django helmer Sergio Corbucci and demonstrating a keen eye for geometry in his frame compositions — aided tremendously by the swank ’60s surroundings — Ercoli pulls off a couple of sequences that Brian De Palma had to have absorbed before trying his hand at the same thing. With one hell of a heroine in Navarro, Death Walks at Midnight is a stylish and at times rather gruesome giallo that wrings pleasure up until its denouement, delivered in an info dump so rushed, it not only doesn’t give you time to make sense of it, but raises even more questions.

Ercoli redeems himself with the final scene, an action-packed fight atop the rooftops with at least one twisted idea for dispatching a giggling henchman. Also, let the record show that despite the title, death actually walks in broad daylight. —Rod Lott

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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

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There must be something to the story of The Loft to justify three screen versions: the 2008 Belgian original, followed by a Dutch remake two years later, and now an all-American take, because this country is the land of the free, home of the brave and ground zero for the lecherous. Whatever that “it” is that merits cinematic Xeroxing is not present in this ol’ Hollywood try, despite importing the first film’s director, Erik Van Looy.

Its icky premise: At the behest of bad-boy architect Vincent (Karl Urban, Dredd), his four best buds — all married — join him in sharing a swanky, high-rise apartment where they may philander to their dicks’ content. One dubs it a “fuck pad,” which is a dead-on description and would make for a better title. Their cheating ways come to a halt when Luke (Wentworth Miller, TV’s Prison Break) enters to find a lifeless woman’s body — nude, bloodied and handcuffed to the bed.

If not for all the flashbacks, The Loft practically could pass for a stage play, as the bros reassemble at Chez Syphilis to argue at length over which one of them snapped and stabbed her. (They seem less concerned with the why.) Was it the stray-reluctant Chris (James Marsden, X-Men: Days of Future Past)? Perhaps his cokehead, hothead half-sib, Phil (Matthias Schoenaerts, Bullhead)? Or maybe the ever-sloshed, overweight Marty (Eric Stonestreet, TV’s Modern Family)?

To the movie’s credit, the answer is not immediately apparent, because Van Looy and screenwriter Wesley Strick (1991’s Cape Fear) have packed their Loft with more twists than Chubby Checker’s discography. Of course, that also means the mystery-thriller of rampant infidelity hits new heights of preposterousness, making it fun for the viewer to watch credibility dig its own grave. Even when it’s bad, the movie looks good; Van Looy has shot it to resemble virtually every dark-hued, full-page fashion ad in the September issue of Vogue. All you’re missing are the tipped-in subscription cards, because if you concentrate hard enough, you’ll swear you can smell the perfume strips. —Rod Lott

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