gridoon Review of A Blade in the Dark

A Blade in the Dark (1983)

Dumb but occasionally effective giallo (SPOILERS)

[6/10 · 31 August 2002]

The score is creepy, the direction atmospheric and some of the violence (particularly the hand impaling and the strangulation) is brutal and effective. But all those positive qualities almost don't matter - because the script is so dumb, illogical and coincidence-ridden. Seriously, if you found blood stains on the floor, torn pages from a diary and destroyed tapes in a matter of a few minutes, would you really pretend nothing had happened? If you later found even more blood and, on the same spot, marks that match those of the knives in your house, would you still consider the possibility that "maybe it's just my overactive imagination"? Not to mention the corpse that the hero fails to see, although it's right under his nose, or the infamous "It's not a spider, it's a cockroach" scene (it's a spider). The dubbing is atrocious, too, and the final twist seems directly stolen from a well-known De Palma film (you'll know which). And the amusing thing is that, the twist of THAT De Palma film was stolen from an even more famous Hitchcock film....