Knight Moves (1992)

Chess grandmaster Peter Sanderson (Christopher Lambert), of the tragic genius asshole type, takes part in a chess tournament on a very rainy Canadian island. When a serial killer starts murdering blonde women and doing bad makeup jobs on their corpses, Peter quickly becomes the police’s main suspect, his case certainly not helped by the fact he was (casually, as he explains) sleeping with the first victim and lying to the cops about it.

But then, one of the cops, one Detective Wagner (Daniel Baldwin), is an even greater dick than Peter is, so telling the truth to that guy wouldn’t be anyone’s first impulse. The island’s new chief of police Frank Sedman (Tom Skerritt) is rather more competent, and is not so sure about Peter’s guilt. He’s calling in help in form of psychologist Kathy Sheppard (Diane Lane). As all psychologists in thrillers, Kathy will have her problems keeping away from having sex with the guy she’s supposed to help investigate.

Even once someone claiming to be the killer starts phoning Peter as part of a “game” whose rules the mystery caller doesn’t bother to explain, the cops still don’t quite believe in his innocence, while also involving him in their investigation as if he were their favourite amateur detective. Go figure.

German director Carl Schenkel’s Knight Moves regularly lands on lists of non-European giallos, and it’s not difficult to see why. Some might argue this to be rather more of a post-Silence of the Lambs serial killer thriller, but then, that genre’s DNA is certainly shared with that of the giallo, too – and in the case of the Demme film, that’s hardly by chance.

But let me count the film’s giallo ways: there’s the interest in dubious yet fun psychological trauma motivating the killer in a way which clearly comes down from 70s pop psychology more than those books in which former real FBI profilers lay out how awesome they believe they are; the plot that’s convoluted and delightfully nonsensical, preferring any good excuse to show a highly stylized murder scene to sensible plotting; the Lambert-shaped amateur detective trying to solve the case for reasons of his own (at the beginning, mostly Sheppard needling him) and because the police are either violent bullying idiots with even worse manners than he has (Wagner) or not allowed to do proper police work by the script (Stedman), dragging in the female lead one way or the other; the love for style as the most important kind of substance a movie can have, even when it makes as little sense as the half-flooded hotel foundations the police use as the case’s centre of telephone operations. Really, the only things missing are a dozen or so bottles of J&B’s, a pair of black gloves and more nudity, though the film does have more sex in it than most US or Canadian thrillers not carrying the word “Erotic” in front of the thriller.

This is of course not the kind of thriller anyone expecting logic or a sensible narrative will find terribly satisfying. As with the giallo, it’s best to adapt one’s expectations towards understanding the aesthetic pleasures at the film’s surface, enjoying the ways they entwine with themes and mood, while ignoring any ideas about proper narrative and plain sense one may or may not be cursed with. Schenkel is making this particularly easy, too, for he makes a good case for himself here as a director who might have played in the league of the better giallo second-stringers if he had been born a couple of decades earlier.

If this is the sort of thing you might enjoy, you’ll probably find this one very fun to watch. It also has a hell of a cast, Lambert doing the sort of pretty asshole role typical of the male giallo protagonist better than most anyone else (for better or for worse), Lane putting much more effort in than the character work in the script actually deserves, regularly turning into the actual protagonist of the movie; also looking rather incredible, which is of course par for the course, for Lane and the giallo-alike genre. Baldwin is so punchable he makes Lambert’s character more likeable than that guy deserves through his sheer testosterone dickishness, and Skerritt is Skerritt (that’s not a complaint).

Insert some check mate based joke, here, imaginary reader.

In short: Resurrection (1999)

Homicide detective John Prudhomme (Christopher Lambert), once a Cajun working in New Orleans (Cajun accents are like French Canadian ones, right?), has been working in Chicago (mostly portrayed by Toronto) for some time now. His pretty abrasive character caused by the usual dead kid trauma leaves the man rather unloved by his peers. Only his long-suffering partner Hollinsworth (Leland Orser) takes to him. Everybody has to agree, though, that John’s a hell of a detective. So it’s not a big surprise that it’s him and Hollinsworth who’ll take the lead on a particularly nasty series of serial killings, the sort of combination of mutilations and murder that’ll leave even more stable men than our protagonist disturbed.

Eventually, it’ll turn out the killer is building his own personal Jesus out of stolen body parts, in hopes of achieving the second coming via serial killing. I’m not sure from which part of the bible he’s taken that idea.

Following the success of their first work together in Highlander, both director Russell Mulcahy and his lead Christopher Lambert did have rather complicated careers, often missing the luck more than the ability to catch lightning in a bottle again. In 1999, they re-teamed for this shameless Seven rip-off that rethinks Fincher’s original as an exploitation movie - ickier and bloodier, and with more cop movie clichés. The story was apparently co-written by Lambert, so we know who to blame here.

But seriously, while the moments when the film is trying to ape Seven but with less intelligence and style can become a bit much, this is actually one of the more watchable Seven-alikes. In part, that’s thanks to Mulcahy, who may be quite a few years away from his stylish prime, but still knows how to keep a film flowing very nicely indeed. And while the film is certainly rather stupid, it’s not one that ever pretends to be terribly intelligent; rather it is using its clichés honestly, simply trying to provide an audience with a good time full of mutilated bodies and Lambert staring hauntedly in the distance. Works for me.

From time to time, the film does provide something more: scenes like the discovery of the killer’s nearly finished rotting Jesus are milked for as much gross-out as you can get away with while still keeping an R-rating (there’s a rumoured harder cut, but nobody outside of the filmmakers seems to have seen it), and the climax contains a bit of baby juggling you really got to see to believe. Plus, does Seven have a pretty peculiar cameo of David Cronenberg as the hero’s priest?

North Star (1996)

Nome, Alaska, 1899. When evil mining magnate Sean McLennon (James Caan) isn’t quoting Shakespeare, badly, or babbling the sort of “keep America pure” rhetoric one expects to culminate in him wanting to build a wall around Alaska, he’s doing his best to acquire a monopoly in the local mining business. In a couple of weeks he’s going to dispossess all foreign-born small claim owners, but before that he’s already letting his henchmen Reno (Burt Young) and Smiley (Morten Faldaas) loose to just murder anyone who doesn’t want to sell their claims to him.

One of his prospective victims is half Native American Hudson Saanteek (Christopher “totally Indian” Lambert). In what must have felt like a clever move at the time, Hudson has staked a claim on the holy land of his tribe to keep it out of the hands of prospectors. Alas, this only leads to his grandfather getting shot during his dying ceremony, and Hudson being left for dead by McLennon’s not terribly competent people when they try to murder him.

Hudson’s not going to let this sort of things slide, obviously, but his plan to get to Nome and – one presumes – either unmask McLennon’s evil plans or kill him (the film ain’t telling) somehow ends with him kidnapping McLennon’s girlfriend Sarah (Catherine McCormack) whose main job seems to be to read McLennon to sleep with the works of the Bard. McLennon gets together a small posse, and hunt through the icy wilderness ensues.

The 1990s were, apart from a few exceptions, a very bad decade for the Western, so a British, French, Italian, and Norwegian co-production shot in that snowy twin country of Alaska we know as Norway, directed by a Norwegian with a French actor pretending to be Native American in the lead may even sound like a proposal strange enough to add something to a genre nobody in the 90s had much time for. Particularly when the film in question is directed by Nils Gaup, whose brilliant Pathfinder – not to be confused with the horrid remake that isn’t one – amply demonstrates a sensibility that should work rather well with Western tropes, and most certainly with scenes of people chasing each other through the snow.

Unfortunately, the actual film we got is a complete mess, apparently written by six people, none of whom seems to have had any idea what kind of film they actually wanted to make. So characterisation and motivations shift and twist from scene to scene. One minute, McLennon is a walking-talking criticism of capitalism and racism, the next he’s portrayed as a man with a genuine mental illness, the next he’s a moustache-twirling villain who seems to believe Macbeth is his play’s hero (the last bit played with clear relish by Caan in full scenery-chewing mode); characters are introduced only to then do nothing but hang around in the background of some scenes; Hudson never does anything that makes even a lick of sense; the happy end (“yay, martial law!”, the film cheers) borders on the absurd, and so on and so forth.

Not surprisingly, the pacing is completely off too, with nary a scene that isn’t either too long or too short for what one assumes it is trying to achieve in the plot, if it is trying to achieve anything at all. Things just happen without any palpable thought given to whys and wherefores, as if three or four very different drafts of this thing had just been mashed together by a random intern. It’s rather puzzling, too, for while Norway was probably a cheaper place to shoot in than Alaska, the film clearly wasn’t a seat-of-your-pants production but something made by actual professionals on what must have been a decent budget. It rather feels like a Dino DeLaurentiis production, but Dino was, for once, innocent.

The acting’s all over the place too, which isn’t much of a surprise given the variable characterisation of everyone and everything here. While Caan’s decision to go all out is certainly amusing, it doesn’t help make the film any more coherent either, and though I certainly like Lambert and his minimalist approach to acting, he’s really not the kind of actor able to conjure up an engaging performance out of nothing, which is all the script provides. Young and McCormack are totally wasted here, too.

Particularly puzzling is how little the film shows of Gaup’s talents at snow-bound action; even when it comes to scenes of dog-sleds chasing each other through the ice and snow, the pacing and rhythm of the film is so off, things feel as gripping and dramatic as somebody reading stock market prices aloud.


I have no idea what happened with this production, but the end result is utterly dreadful.