Giallo

When a director distances himself from a movie that is never a good sign. And after watching this movie I have to say that he is right to do so if there is truth to this claim. There was a time Dario Argento could do no wrong. So what exactly happened? Maybe we will never find out. But for now I understand very much that this isn't a movie to be proud of. There is not one scene that shows the master's brilliance. It does make me wonder what the movie could have been without the interference of the producers. It also doesn't help that the story is quite weak. There are no twists and turns. Well, maybe a very little one. None concerning the Killer. But the biggest flaw of "Giallo" is the lack of real tension and suspense. Even when the killer is known a giallo movie should provide thrills. Otherwise what would be the point of this movie. (Thinking about it, this movie can be seen as a bad parody about the giallo genre.) Adrian Brody and the beautiful women are the only things that stand out in this below average product. Avoid big time!

Dario Argento's latest "Giallo" is definitely brutal and grim, but regretfully still not a genuine throwback to the old-fashioned years of the Giallo; a sub genre of horror that Argento pretty much co-founded as well. This is one of the first times in his career that Argento didn't write the original screenplay himself, but he easily could have, since the film is chock-full of his usual trademarks, including misogynist torture, macho cop characters and a killer character with a hideous appearance and sick persona. In the city of Turin, a hood-capped killer abducts pretty young girls in his taxi and takes them to his secret liar where he has an operating table and a wide selection of delightful torture devices. When the killer was just a baby, apparently his heroine-addicted prostitute of a mother dropped him off at a nunnery in a plastic bag. I suppose that causes something irreversible damage to the fragile mind of a young boy. He also has a liver disease that makes the color of his skin kind of yellow; hence the title. When he kidnaps the gorgeous young model Celine, her older sister Linda teams up with Inspector Enzo Avolfi, who's actually a pretty introvert and reasonably creepy individual himself. The plot of "Giallo" is ultra-thin and not nearly as imaginative as they used to be, with a truckload of red herrings and more twists than a French mountain road, but there are still multiple moments of gripping suspense. The violence, however, is following the trend of the nowadays torture porn flicks (like "Hostel" and "Saw") and just comes across as repulsive, gratuitous and uncompromising. The sniveling killer pulls teeth and carves up the girls' pretty faces like he's on the set of the umpteenth unnecessary torture porn flick instead of a Dario Argento Giallo homage. The murders in Gialli movies have always been sadistic and gruesome, but at least they were often presented in style. But enough complaints now, as "Giallo" undeniably still is a worthwhile film for Dario Argento fanatics like myself and many others. I'm sick and tired of reading stuff like how the legendary Italian director Dario Argento lost his magical touch and ought to retire! As far as I'm concerned, Argento is still the only one who delivered a genuine Giallo in the post-2000's (with "Sleepless") and his other efforts like "The Third Mother", "Do you like Hitchcock" and the two episodes in Masters of Horror are fantastic entertainment.

If a single trait characterizes Dario Argento's 21st century output, it's its self-referentiality. Always a cine-literate filmmaker, his recent material has verged almost on self-parody. Amid all this, a generation of filmmakers have grown up with his films and been influenced by them, some more profoundly than others. Some, like Tim Burton, have assimilated his visual style into their own. Others have been more flippant in their appropriation of Argentoisms, with Quentin Tarantino lifting the music from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage for use in Death Proof, and Diablo Cody including a conversation debating the merits of Argento relative to H.G. Lewis in Juno. In effect, "Argento" has become something of a buzzword for a certain type of movie brat: a slightly edgy (but not too edgy) name they can mention to show that they're a little off the beaten track (but not too far off).

Oddly enough, Giallo represents something of a hybridization of the director's self-referentiality and the sort of fan idolatry that champions his films for their more superficial elements while ignoring the qualities that truly mark them out. Although the first credit at the end of the film reads "written and directed by Dario Argento", the original script in fact originated from two American fans, Jim Agnew and Sean Keller, with Argento essentially being brought on as a director for hire. This is not the first time this has happened: the two episodes he directed for the largely disappointing Masters of Horror series also originated from other writers, much to their detriment. (If Pelts had been directed by Eli Roth, I doubt it would have been appreciably different.) While Giallo's script is nothing remarkable, the overall execution is handled with considerably more flair than Jenifer or Pelts. This may be because Argento is on familiar stomping ground, with the Italian locations lending an air of natural class. Giallo is far from the bland, anonymous piece of work for hire that many feared it would be. While Frederic Fasano's cinematography lacks the verve of a Tovoli or even a Debie, and Marco Werba's Herrmannesque score alternates between effective and intrusive, there are little Argentoisms throughout, mainly in the lightly humorous moments. Likewise, an early sequence at an opera recalls Argento's 1987 masterpiece of the same name, while the oddly ambiguous final frame is reminiscent of The Cat O' Nine Tails.

That said, Giallo's most direct counterpart is The Card Player, and it's tempting to see them as two sides of the same coin. However, while The Card Player was clinical, high-tech and almost bloodless, Giallo goes in the opposite direction. Its set design hearkens back to the past, from Avolfi's dingy basement office to the foregrounding of Turin's picturesque monuments and buildings. The violence is also ramped up a notch, and it's tempting to view the film as Argento's reaction to the recent spate of so-called "torture porn" movies. The director has made conflicting statements as to his opinion of these films, but the lengthy scenes of Elsa Pataky being menaced and tortured in the killer's grimy underground lair are more reminiscent of Saw or Hostel than anything in Argento's past filmography.

And there's the rub: despite being marketed as a return to the genre that made a name for Argento in the 1970s, Giallo... well, isn't actually a giallo. The plot operates more as a cross between a cop thriller and a gore-soaked torture flick, the title referring solely to the killer's jaundiced skin. His face is seen almost from the start and his identity is ultimately not hugely important. Far more interesting is the way in which he and Avolfi are constructed as two sides of the same coin, both pariahs who operate in dark underground lairs and have suffered violent, traumatic pasts. As with much of his past work, Argento seems to be actively encouraging a Jungian reading. At times, this becomes a little too on the nose, with the casting of the killer... well, it's an intriguing choice but ultimately one that will either baffle people or have them slapping their foreheads at its obviousness.

With one notable exception, the cast acquit themselves reasonably well. The elephant in the room is Adrien Brody, who not only receives top billing but also an executive producer credit, performing uncredited script doctoring duties and making key decisions about the score (including nixing Argento's regular collaborator Claudio Simonetti). His role is an odd one, and it's far from the vanity project I expected. Avolfi is not particularly pleasant: he's distant, smarmy and reckless, and an act he committed in the past further blurs the line between him and the killer. Unfortunately, the specifics of this event, revealed around two-third of the way through the film, sent the audience at the screening I attended into fits of hysterics. More problematic in my mind, however, is Brody's performance. He seems to be imitating any number of 40s film noir detectives, but comes across as a mumbling buffoon whose reactions and line delivery always seem to be at odds with what's actually happening. He's not the first Oscar-winning actor to work with Argento, but he IS one of Argento's least convincing protagonists.

Giallo is a decent offering from a director whose work of late has been decidedly patchy. While I'm sure the usual battle lines will be drawn, with fans alternating between branding it a return to form and proclaiming it to be proof that he is a has-been, the truth is somewhere in the middle. No, it's not the next Profondo Rosso, but anyone who expected otherwise would simply be deluding themselves. It's substantially better than either of Argento's Masters of Horror outings, a step up from Mother of Tears, and a superior thriller to Do You Like Hitchcock? It's also more engaging than the overrated Sleepless and about on par with the underrated The Card Player, a film that for me improves with each subsequent viewing. Problems aside, Giallo is surprisingly good fun.

When the man responsible for some of the best giallos ever made directs a movie simply titled Giallo, then I suppose one might reasonably expect him to fully embrace the conventions of the genre (many of which he was instrumental in establishing). Instead, Argento only loosely follows the giallo format, the grimy approach he adopts being more akin to the recent US 'torture porn' trend, a fact that has unsurprisingly caused something of a critical backlash from fans of Italian horror.

But although Giallo clearly doesn't warrant its title, and, devoid of his usual visual flair and labyrinthine storytelling, is far from the director's best work, neither is it totally deserving of the drubbing it has received.

The film moves along briskly enough, switching regularly between crime and police procedure to ensure that boredom never sets in; the hero cop-with-a-dark-past, Enzo Avolfi, is played with conviction by Adrien Brody; Emmanuelle Seigner makes for a decent enough side-kick; the rather lovely Elsa Pataky is required only to look scared and beautiful, but does so convincingly; and the strangely familiar killer is delightfully daft—an ugly, dummy-sucking, bandana-wearing taxi-driver with yellow skin (caused by a dose of Hepatitis C, inherited from his junkie mother) and a hatred of all things beautiful.

Argento also finds time for a few seriously nasty moments, including a graphic hammer to the skull scene, a nasty bit of finger pruning (resulting in plenty of pumping blood), and a wince-inducing moment involving shards of broken glass.

Whilst it is true that Argento's typical sense of style might be lacking on this occasion, there is still enough to enjoy about this film to make it worth a go—after all, even Argento at his worst is better than many other directors at their best.

The high point in the film comes midway in the form of Adrian Brody's childhood flashback: the camera heaves this side and that inside an amber-lit room as though floating in the air while a music box lullaby that brings back memories of Goblin's School at Night theme from Profondo Rosso chimes in the background. Other than that, the movie might as well have been called "Routine Slasher" because there's nothing that recalls the glorious days of the Italian giallo here, no wink or homage or black-gloved killer stalking distraught heroines in kitsch/chic Rome apartments, countryside villas, and medieval architecture and certainly none of the Technicolor phantasmagoria Argento and his peers conjured on celluloid 30 years ago because anyone who has followed Argento's career knows he has been working in dark muted DV canvases for the past 10 years, this absence of style flooded with wooden acting, bad English from non-English speaking actors, and a script the sum of plot contrivance happenstance and logic jumps. Some will argue these have been staples of Argento's career and I will disagree because their place has always been peripheral to a certain grand guignol aesthetic by whose outrageousness, stylistic or otherwise, not only have they been relegated to the margins but they have made perfect "sense" there in the margins as part of Argento's style (or Italian horror film-making in general). If Mother of Tears was a bold step in the direction of Phenomena's schizophrenic conclusion, this is a step backwards to the undistinguished workmanlike nature of Il Cartaio and Ti Piace Hitchcock. Everything here is generic. The score sounds like Batman Returns throwaways (Claudio Simonetti's absence is sorely felt), the villain is a curious mixture of pathetic and creepy, Argento's stylized violence is conspicuously absent. This is a serial killer movie trying to balance between crime procedural and slasher such as one may find in Lionsgate's STD catalogue. If you're looking for the giallo homage the title promises, you'll find it in Sleepless. This is a routine affair not worthy of the master's name or his fans' time and money.