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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