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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Fritz Lang’s final film, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, marked his return to the pulp series he kicked off with 1922’s Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler. Like his 1933 entry, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, this one is not without some great sequences, but suffers from an overly convoluted plot and slow pacing. It’s well-directed, although not all that well-plotted.

Beginning with an assassination at a stoplight — utilizing a secret weapon that sends thin steel needles through human skulls — Thousand Eyes centers around the Hotel Luxor, where several recent visitors ended up murdered, baffling the local police (including Goldfinger himself, Gert Frobe, who can barely keep his pants up). The hotel rooms are bugged with cameras and have two-way mirrors, setting the course for an intriguing angle of voyeurism that never comes to be.

As with other Mabuse sequels, the good doctor is deceased, so it’s merely his “spirit” doing all the dirty work through other humans. While it sounds really cool, the movie isn’t even a quarter as exciting as its poster. As good as Lang was at what he did (see: Metropolis for the man at the height of his visual powers — and honestly, you must), the Lang-less, low-rent Dr. Mabuse vs. Scotland Yard so far remains my favorite in the German crime-cinema mainstay. The goofier, the better. —Rod Lott

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A pre-giallo obscurity, Death on the Fourposter plops six couples into a bona fide castle for one swingin’ weekend. The place is a “mansion of pleasure” as far as the guys are concerned, but maybe not so much for the ladies: It has only one bathroom.

Co-directed by Jean Josipovici and Ambrogio Molteni, neither prolific, this Italian mystery also saw release as Sexy Party, which although silly-sounding, is absolutely apt. Perhaps the film’s embodiment of the sensual is Serena (Antonella Lualdi from Claude Chabrol’s A Double Tour), who livens up the shindig beyond mere dancing to jazz LPs on the hi-fi when she proposes a rather carnal take on Truth or Dare, such as betting the boys she can seduce them within seconds. If she can — and she knows she will because she’s pretty hot and knows that, too — their girlfriends must submit to the desires of another man there for a few minutes. Gambling has never been so erotically charged.

So, uh, where does the Death come in? Without revealing too much, Serena’s head games give way to a séance; it works, and not everyone lives to see the sunshine. Viewers’ unfamiliarity with the no-star cast works to the distinct advantage of this rough gem, in that conceivably, anyone could make an early exit. The lone exception might be John Drew Barrymore, star of the JD-flavored teenpic High School Confidential and father of Drew, but could you pick him out of a lineup? Not likely, even after exposure here. —Rod Lott

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Blake Edwards’ Pink Panther comedies were just two years old and as many episodes deep when their bumbling-inspector bit was borrowed and slathered onto an Agatha Christie adaptation, of all things: The Alphabet Murders. The comedic approach well suits director Frank Tashlin (The Girl Can’t Help It), although it loses some intended panache by not playing out in color.

After addressing the audience as himself, a miscast but really trying Tony Randall (The Odd Couple) morphs into Clouseauian character as Hercule Poirot, Christie’s iconic detective: bald, Belgian, mustachioed fey — a tut-tut Renaissance man who carries a cane, bowls perfect frames and makes his own “ripping” cigarettes. The famed, finicky sleuth is called upon by the British Secret Service to solve a string of killings where an ABC book was left at the scene. The murderer seems to be working through the alphabet, too, first killing someone with the initials of “AA,” then “BB,” “CC” and so on.

Much to Poirot’s annoyance, the service has assigned one by-the-book Hastings (Robert Morley, Theatre of Blood) to tag along. Poirot spends nearly as much time trying to shake him as he does investigating. Somehow, La Dolce Vita vixen Anita Ekberg figures into the puzzle as Miss Cross, cooing such come-ons as, “Do you want my balloons?” Gulp! (Mind you, she’s holding actual balloons at the time, but still; Tashlin is, after all, the guy who had Jayne Mansfield bounce down a street with a milk jug in each hand, held at breast-level.)

A former cartoon director, Tashlin is in playful form as always, here taking to the camera as if it were a new toy, the limits of which he itched to test. He turns it upside down, aims it at mirrors, mounts it to a roulette dealer’s stick, places it within a bowling alley scoring table. In essence, he’s not afraid of having too much fun or letting the movie call attention to itself. Witness, too, the self-mocking cameo of Margaret Rutherford as Christie’s other classic clue-sniffer, the matronly Miss Marple, whom she played in four films.

As Poirot himself, The Alphabet Murders exercises a well-mannered, dry wit. It hums along to its own score, light on its feet. It’s just too bad it’s not all that funny — more of a passing amusement than anything else. —Rod Lott

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