31 Days of Horror – October 8th – “Giallo”

Famed Italian horror director Dario Argento has been in the news a lot lately.  His most popular film, 1977′s Suspiria, is getting the big budget Hollywood remake treatment courtesy of Pineapple Express director David Gordon Green.  That’s slated for a 2010 release.  Perhaps even more exciting to Argento fans, his newest movie, Giallo, starring Oscar winner Adrien Brody, came out this year as well.

So I watched Giallo.  Let’s nobody get their hopes way up about that second part.

It turns out Giallo is little more than a very cliché cop vs. serial killer story.  This plot line is so tired, I was nodding off just a few minutes in.  We’re told through exposition that Inspector Enzo Avolfi (Brody) understands the bad guys and gets all the serial killer type cases.  (He doesn’t demonstrate this skill much in his actions, though it’s apparently important enough that the themes and the final scenes hinge on the notion.)  He hunts a killer credited simply as Yellow (played by Adrien Brody with heaps of makeup) that likes to smash beautiful girls’ faces with tools.  Linda (Emmanuele Seigner) is the sister of the girl currently on the receiving end of Yellow’s torture tools.  She meets up with Enzo and tries to help him crack the case before her sister’s head gets cracked like an egg.

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 92 minutes

Directed by: Dario Argento

Written by: Dario Argento, Jim Agnew

Starring: Adrien Brody, Emmanuelle Seigner

There is no atmosphere here, no sense of a real world populated by real people dealing with the dread this kind of scenario would produce – in fact, there are literally almost no characters at all aside from the cop, killer, victim and sister.  Huge chunks of back story are explained through awkwardly inserted flashbacks of both the cop and killer’s childhood traumas.  Sounds more like Dr. Phil than Dario Argento.  All telling and no showing makes TV Casualties sleepy.

Further on the lack of atmosphere – every word of dialogue is about the murders.  There is virtually no characterization.  There is nothing said with style.  No signs of anything these characters care about or think about, and thus, no real reason to care about them.

Fine.  So it’s a shitty plot with shitty dialogue.  Can Oscar caliber acting salvage that somewhat?  Brody hams it up in the double role.  He overacts with twitches and funny faces as the murderer and tries to pull off a constantly smoking, gravelly voiced noir detective that comes off as silly part of the time.  Emmanuele Seigner plays her role with the charisma of a dead dog.

As I alluded to somewhat earlier, the final scenes go through the motions as though the filmmakers are saying something important about Inspector Enzo.  As though this piece of shit could deliver something meaningful.