You're better off dead when this killer goes berserk in the Argento-indebted giallo WATCH ME WHEN I KILL, on Blu-ray from Synapse Films.

On the way to her job, cabaret dancer Mara (Paola Tedesco, SILENT ACTION) stops at the pharmacy of Dr. Dezzan (Giovanni Vannini) to get an aspirin but is refused admittance by a shadowy figure moments before the doctor's body is discovered with his throat cut. Mara thinks nothing to it until she has a close encounter with a shadowy assailant in her apartment and starts to believe that the killer thinks she can identify him. She packs her bags and moves in with boyfriend Lukas (Corrado Pani, ¡MÁTALO!), a sound recording engineer who has just been approached by loan shark neighbor Bozzi (Fernando Cerulli, DEATH SMILES AT MURDER) who has been receiving threatening phone calls in which he only hears a "cacophony of sounds" that they are unable to fully decipher. When his mistress Esmeralda (Bianca Toccafondi, GRADIVA) is brutally murdered after also receiving threatening calls and letters, Bozzi believes he is the intended next victim when Mara is attacked while driving his car. Bozzi is evasive about the nature of the threat, but Lukas and Mara discover that Dezzan, Bozzi, and Esmeralda had served on the same jury in the trial of murderer Ferrante (Franco Citti, ACCATONE) who had recently escaped from prison, and the presiding judge (Giuseppe Addobbati, NIGHTMARE CASTLE) may be another future victim. Lukas, however, comes to believe that the killer is taking advantage of Ferrante's escape and that there must be something else that links the three. Lukas delves deeper into the shared pasts of Bozzi and the two victims while Mara realizes that someone is indeed trying to silence her before she can put a face to the voice of the killer.

With an Italian title like THE CAT WITH JADE EYES – and its English export title THE CAT'S VICTIMS – it is not hard to intuit that WATCH ME WHEN I KILL is indebted to Dario Argento, but the source of inspiration is less the animal trilogy than DEEP RED in its stylistic execution, its murders (particularly a scalding death) and the Goblin-esque scoring of Trans-Europa-Express which also incorporates some SUSPIRIA-esque sighs and moans (although director Antonio Bido's subsequent THE BLOODSTAINED SHADOW have a score actually performed by Goblin although composed by Stelvio Cipriani). While the use of less visually striking provincial settings than one finds in an Argento film – that is, until the Padua setting of the third act which has the feel of the rural otherness of a Pupi Avati horror film – the cinematography of Mario Vulpiani (CASTLE FREAK) and editing of Maurizio Tedesco (SPECTERS) also take their cues from the master. The film's backstory is novel for the genre but the main problem with the film is not its indebtedness but the lack of interesting principal characters apart from Cerulli's seedy loan shark and Citti's escaped criminal. Tedesco's heroine echoes the Argento protagonist who stumbles onto a murder and sees or hears something of importance, but she soon becomes the equivalent of DEEP RED's flighty journalist character doing very little while Pani's sound engineer takes on the investigative heavy lifting; and his initial motivation is his neighbor coming to him about the threatening phone calls since he does not really take his girlfriend's claim that someone is trying to kill her seriously until much later in the film when the murder of one of her acquaintances reminds us that she may hold the key to the killer's identity. Paolo Malco (NEW YORK RIPPER) and Roberto Antonelli (SMILING MANIACS) hang around the periphery as a writer and producer trying to convince Mara to take a film role, but the their red herring-ness is so contrived as to be suspect. Ultimately, WATCH ME WHEN I KILL is not a bad giallo, but its commercial indebtedness to the genre's master robs its director of much opportunity to establish his own identity as a filmmaker.

Released theatrically by Herman Cohen's Cobra Media in a version that was uncut apart from a replaced and shortened title sequence and lopping off of the end credits, WATCH ME WHEN I KILL was released on VHS by HBO Home Video in an ugly, grainy transfer typical of the prints of Cobra releases, and VCI's non-anamorphic and anamorphic letterboxed reissue – along with their DVD of the Cobra-released Thai horror film CROCODILE – were further confirmation of the ugliness of the American prints. Redemption's letterboxed UK VHS of the export version THE CAT'S VICTIMS was a better choice until German label X-rated's non-anamorphic letterboxed DVD transfer that looked marginally better than the American competition but inferior to the subsequent Italian DVD release until that became the source of Shameless Screen Entertainment's UK DVD edition. A 4K scan of the original camera negative made its debut in German as a Blu-ray mediabook from X-Rated with English subtitles but no dub track, followed by 88 Films' UK Region B-locked edition which included English and Italian options and English subtitles.

Synapse's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray comes from the same 4K scan but features new color correction work by Synapse, and it is a massive improvement over what has come before stateside or abroad. The color process employed and its degradation explains the earlier poorer image quality transfers, but the 4K restoration looks better than one could have expected of the film. Skin tones are a bit warmer than they seem like they should be (although this is more likely the film stock than the color correction) but the reds of gel lighting are no longer noisy and the night scenes are a cool blue rather than a grainy gray, and the day exteriors also reveal more vivid colors than the older transfers where they just looked flatter and had the viewer yearning for the story to move back inside. The onscreen title is THE CAT'S VICTIMS and the opening titles are in English while the end credits are in Italian. English and Italian dubs are provided in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono in better condition than before – one of the more soulful music tracks that I previously though was only heard over the end credits of the Italian and export versions is actually mixed lower on the soundtrack in an earlier scene as well – and both English SDH subtitles and English subtitles for the Italian track are included, as is an isolated music-only track in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono.

Ported over from the U.K. Blu-ray is "In Defense of WATCH ME WHEN I KILL" (10:55), interview with academic Mikel Koven, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, University of Worcester, who does offer up a defense for why he likes the film, arguing that the story is actually well-told and that it does indeed provide the audience with clues to solve the mystery before the final reveals, but also that the motivation for the killings is a nice change from the usual psychosexual ones of the Argento films. New to the Synapse release is an audio commentary by film historian Nathaniel Thompson who provides a bit of a primer on the giallo genre, background on the cast, Bido, and the session musicians who made up Trans-Europa-Express, the film's Argento borrowings, and makes the claim that the film was one of the first Italian films along with Mario Bava's SHOCK to be mixed in two-channel stereophonic sound but that the stereo magnetic elements for both are lost and only the mono ones remain (both films and their Goblin-esque scores do seem to have plenty of opportunities to exploit stereo sound so it really is unfortunate that we never got to hear them in this format even though neither of their American distributors would have likely sprung for stereo prints).