The Killer Must Kill Again Blu-ray Review

Rustblade Records

Blu-ray Release: November 11, 2025

Video: 2.35:1/1080p/Color

Audio: English and Italian DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono

Subtitles: English

Run Time: 90:29

Director: Luigi Cozzi

A greedy adulterer named Giorgio (George Hilton) strikes a deadly bargain with a professional killer (Antoine Saint-John) to eliminate his wealthy wife, Nora (Tere Velázquez). But the plan unravels when a reckless young couple steals the killer's car, unaware that Nora's corpse lies hidden in the trunk. Their flight takes them to a decaying seaside villa, setting off a tense game of pursuit as the killer closes in. (From Rustblade’s official synopsis)

The idea that all men – not just bloodthirsty psychos – pose a physical danger to women grew as a theme when giallo films hit the height of their popularity during the 1970s. This was probably just the natural escalation of the genre’s dependence on red herrings (you don’t have to write a compelling reason to suspect anyone if your movie already has a dozen scumbags to pin the crime on), rather than a reaction to pushback against its dependence on violence against women. However, some filmmakers were genuinely interested in the gender dynamics of violent murder mysteries. Sergio Martino, for example, constantly blurred the moral line between his male protagonists and their killer counterparts in movies like All the Colors of the Dark (Italian: Tutti i colori del buio, 1972) and Torso (Italian: I Corpi Pesentano Tracce di Violenza Carnale, 1973). 

One of the latter entries in the All Men Are Evil canon was Luigi Cozzi’s The Killer Must Kill Again (Italian: L'assassino è costretto ad uccidere ancora, 1975), a film that doesn’t blur the line between its two main male characters, but presents two unequivocal monsters of differing monstrous qualities. One, played by gaunt, intense character actor Antoine Saint-John, is a psycho-sexual killer, while the other, played by the handsome and typically heroic George Hilton, is a greedy, womanizing sociopath. Cozzi hammers home the theme early on by crosscutting between the violent crimes of one character and the banal amorality of the other. He repeats this trick when our hero (Alessio Orano) – a meathead horndog who won’t take “no” for an answer – has a consensual fling with a random blonde at the same time that his girlfriend (Cristina Galbó) is being brutally raped by the Saint-John’s.

The Killer Must Kill Again’s bleakness and comparative sophistication is unexpected, though not because filmmakers and audiences were losing interest in gender politics or genre subversion by 1975 – Dario Argento’s Deep Red (Italian: Profondo Rosso) was released that same year and introduced screwball romantic comedy to the mix. Rather, it’s unexpected, because of the kind of filmmaker Luigi Cozzi became shortly after. 

Cozzi’s career will always be connected to Dario Argento’s. He helped write Four Flies on Grey Velvet (Italian: 4 mosche di velluto grigio, 1971), was assistant director on Two Evil Eyes (Italian: Due occhi diabolici, 1990) and The Stendhal Syndrome (Italian: La sindrome di Stendhal, 1996), he directed two tribute documentaries – Dario Argento: Master of Horror (1991) and Dario Argento: My Cinema (1999) – and he is the co-owner and acting manager of the Profondo Rosso store. But, in the larger cult movie sphere, he’s better-known for much sillier movies, including Mystery Science Theater 3000’s favorite Star Wars (1977) cash-in, Starcrash (Italian: Scontri stellari oltre la terza dimensione, 1978), the Alien (1979) and Zombie (1979) combo cash-in Contamination (1980), and the wild peplum fantasy throwback Hercules (1983), where he replaced Bruno Mattei during early production.

These were the types of films Cozzi wanted to make – loud, colorful, knowingly silly, and adolescently entertaining pictures with FX ambitions millions of dollars beyond their budgets. In later interviews, Cozzi often expressed disinterest in Italian horror, while extolling the virtues of pulpy, Ray Harryhausen-type fantasy films. He also founded the first Italian sci-fi zine, Futura Fantasia, in 1962 and conducted interviews with ‘60s era filmmakers as an Italian correspondent for Forrest J. Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland. On the other hand, he has referred to his sole romantic drama, The Last Concert (Italian: Dedicato a una stella, 1976), as his masterpiece and The Killer Must Kill Again has a lot more in common with that film than Starcrash or Contamination. Perhaps, under different circumstances, he would’ve made more comparatively sophisticated giallo melodramas.

The Killer Must Kill Again is notable for not copying the Dario Argento formula, which had become the go-to template for gialli following the success of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Italian: L'Uccello dalle piume di cristallo, 1970). Cozzi claims he was asked to make an Argento-esque thriller, balked at the idea*, and went out of his way to subvert the formula. The screenplay, adapted from Giorgio Scerbanenco's novel Al mare con la ragazza (At the beach with the girl, pub: 1965) by Daniele Del Giudice and Cozzi (with dialogue help from Adriano Bolzoni), features some very un-Argento turns, such as immediately revealing the killer’s face and negating both the mystery and the pretext for roving POV shots. In turn, much of the story is told from the villains’ perspectives and the suspense isn’t driven by a snowballing body count.

Despite being based on a novel, there are significant references to Hitchcock throughout, specifically Psycho (the killer hides a body in a VW bug and attempts to sink the vehicle in the bay), Strangers on a Train (the antagonists strike a mutually destructive bargain), and Dial M for Murder (the initial set-up is nearly identical). Gialli was built off of homage to Hitchcock, but directly citing plot points and set-pieces from three separate films is pretty remarkable, even for Cozzi, who, as we’ve already noted, is known for making derivative films. Fortunately, Cozzi is incorporating these elements into his film, rather than simply regurgitating familiar sequences and ideas.

Parallels can also be drawn to an episode of Argento’s Door into Darkness (Italian: La porta sul buio, 1973) TV series, The Neighbor (Italian: Il vicino di casa), which Cozzi himself directed. These similarities are substantial enough for some to speculate that The Killer Must Kill Again might have been an attempt to expand the episode with a longer runtime and a bigger budget, minus television censorship limitations. 

* I had long assumed that the title, The Killer Must Kill Again, was a reference to dialogue from Deep Red (“You have killed…and you will kill again”), but Argento’s film was released a solid three months after Cozzi’s.

Bibliography:

• Giallo & Thrilling All'Italiana – 1931-1983 by Antonio Bruschini and Stefano Piselli (Glittering Images, 2010)

• Italian Giallo in Film and Television: A Critical History by Roberto Curti (McFarland, 2022)

• Spaghetti Nightmares: Italian Fantasy-Horrors As Seen Through the Eyes of Their Protagonists by Luca Palmerini & Gaetano Mistretta (Fantasma Books, 1996)

Video

I can’t find any evidence that The Killer Must Kill Again was ever released on stateside VHS, which isn’t surprising, since it was reportedly a bit of a flop. The film made its US debut with Mondo Macabro’s 2005 anamorphic DVD, which is now OOP and pretty expensive on the secondary market. This long-awaited Blu-ray debut comes from Italian record company Rustblade, who has only released a handful Blu-ray discs in North America so far. Unfortunately, after all of that waiting, this is a disappointing transfer. 

Rustblade’s advertising refers to their releases as a “complete and restored” edition. I believe ‘complete’ is in reference to it being uncensored, but there’s no further description of the transfer itself. With nothing else to go on, I’m left to assume that they’ve taken an older scan – possibly even a standard definition scan – and tried to pretty it up with way, way too much digital noise reduction. Textures have been smoothed into a waxy mess, all textures (including film grain) has been erased, and the edges have been oversharpened, creating blobby haloes and major chromatic aberration. It’s possible that these are signs of AI tampering, but I’m not yet familiar enough with the difference between that technology and ‘classic’ DNR-ification to make that call.

I hope that, someday, a different company with the resources, the will, and the time can put together a worthy Blu-ray or 4K UHD collection. Until then, unless you have the old OOP DVD, this is really your only chance to watch one of the best Italian thrillers of its era.

Audio

The Killer Must Kill Again is presented with original Italian and English dubs, both in uncompressed DTS-HD Master Audio mono sound (Italian is 1.0, English is 2.0). As per usual, these types of films (and most Italian films in general) were all shot without sync’d, on-set sound and starred an international cast of actors speaking their native languages. There is no official language track. That said, the English track has on-and-off delay problems, so I’d stick with the Italian one. Both are pretty muffled and quiet for uncompressed tracks as well, which is bad news for composer Nando De Luca’s eerie score.

Another aspect of note is that the copyright warning and descriptive menu texts are all in Italian. You’ll also have to manually turn on the English subtitles for all of the extra features. This isn’t a major problem, but is indicative of a lack of quality control. I suppose that one advantage to being an Italian-produced disc is that the subtitles aren’t dubtitles.

Extras

• Interview with director Luigi Cozzi (31:37, HD) – In this interview, which is similar to others he has given for books and documentaries, the director discusses his career, his relationship with Argento, the genesis of Killer Must Kill Again, adapting Scerbanenco's novel (he’s not a big fan of it, it turns out), bucking the Argento model, casting (the fact that the film was a French co-production ended up interfering with the process), and censorship.

• Analysis by Federico Frusciante (14:07, HD) – The prolific YouTube critic breaks down Cozzi’s career.

• Locations featurette (6:54, HD) – Giallo Italliano Facebook founder Alessandro Zito walks us through some of the film’s locations as they exist today.

• Theatrical trailer (under The Dark is Death’s Best Friend alternate title)

The images on this page are taken from the BDs and sized for the page. Larger versions can be viewed by clicking the images. Note that there will be some JPG compression.