In this twisty Italian thriller from 1975, George Hilton plays one of his signature roles.  Hilton is cast as Giorgio Mainardi, a handsome and superficially charming man who is actually a soulless cad.  Giorgio is a womanizer who is unhappily married to Norma (Tere Valazquez).  Giorgio doesn’t love Norma but he does love her money and he’s eager to get his hands on it.

One night, after an argument with Norma, Giorgio goes for a late night drive so that he can call his mistress from an isolated phone booth.  While Giorgio is making the call, he witnesses another man pushing his car into the nearby harbor.  The man, who is simply identified as the Killer (Antoine Saint-John), is a serial rapist and murderer whose latest victim was in the car.  Giorgio approaches the man and the two strike up an unlikely partnership.  Giorgio agrees not to go to the police about what he saw if the Killer agrees to kill Norma for him.

A few days later, while Giorgio is at a party, the Killer drives out to Giorgio and Norma’s house.  He breaks into the house and strangles Norma.  He then places the body in the trunk of his car.  The Killer goes back in the house to make sure that he hasn’t left anything behind.  When he comes back outside, his car is gone.  Realizing that his car has been stolen, with Norma’s body in the trunk, The Killer steals someone else’s car.  Of course, in doing so, he sets off a car alarm and the police are called.  By the time Giorgio returns home, both the Killer and the car are gone but the police are waiting for him with the news that Norma has apparently become the latest victim of Rome’s kidnapping epidemic!

(At the time this movie was made, Italy’s terroristic Red Brigades were regularly kidnapping anyone who was considered to be wealthy.)

The Killer’s car has been stolen by Luca (Alessio Orano) and his girlfriend, Laura (Cristina Galbo), who are driving to the beach.  Of course, what they don’t know is that there’s a dead body in the trunk and that the Killer is tracking their every move.  When they reach the beach, Laura soon finds herself fighting for her life when the Killer manages to track her and Luca down.

The Killer Must Kill Again starts out as a Hitchcock-inspired giallo, with the super-sleazy Giorgio hiring the Killer to kill his wife and apparently assuming that he’ll be able to outsmart anyone who investigates the case.  However, once the Killer starts following Luca and Laura, it becomes a thriller with the Killer stalking the two clueless car thieves.  Fortunately, director Luigi Cozzi is able to pull off the massive shift in tone without the story falling apart.  Cozzi delivers a genuinely suspenseful film, one that will keep you guessing until the final moment.  In much the same way that Brian De Palma was often criticized for his obvious love of Hitchcock, Cozzi has often been unfairly dismissed as just being an disciple of Dario Argento’s.  But, with The Killer Must Kill Again, Cozzi brings his own unique spin to the giallo genre and shows himself to be a much stronger director than he was often given credit for being.

One final note: The Killer Must Kill Again features one of the scariest psycho killers that you’re ever likely to see.  Antoine Saint-John is chilling as the nameless Killer.  Later, he would give another excellent performance when he played the doomed painter in Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond.