AllMovie

Director Alfonso Brescia, best known as "Al Bradly," made mediocre thrillers for over 25 years, but this is among his more watchable efforts. Taking ideas from both Klute and Body Double (which was released in Italy as Murder in a Red Light), the film deals with a model named Starlet (Florence Guerin), who leads a double life. At night, Starlet becomes Sherry, a Times Square prostitute, in order to search for her brother's killer. Her brother was a Marine who had been involved in a game of hot potato with a live hand-grenade on a boat returning from Lebanon. The game had ended tragically when the grenade went off, killing three men and injuring six others, castrating one of them. Now someone is stalking New York and stabbing ex-Marines to death, leaving fake hand-grenades between their legs after castrating them. Hard-boiled policeman Flanigan (David Hess) thinks Starlet is putting herself in too much danger, so he intentionally exposes her double identity, then poses as her to catch the real killer. The major clue is a musical cigarette lighter which plays "Greensleeves," and there are a number of red herrings and a twist involving a homosexual affair, but the real killer is obvious within 10 minutes. Still, any film that involves Florence Guerin nude and David Hess in drag is worth seeing for curiosity value alone.