DIRECTED BY: Adam Brooks, Matthew Kennedy
FEATURING: Paz de la Huerta, Matthew Kennedy, Adam Brooks
PLOT: A revered but mentally unstable film editor, who once lost four of his fingers on the cutting room floor, gets caught up in a classic Italian murder plot; as he struggles to prove his innocence, the bodies pile up in increasingly inventive ways.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The Editor is driven by and dedicated to its famously bizarre source material (the giallo film), but this brand of weirdness is a bit too self-conscious to make the List.
COMMENTS: The issue with the parody genre, especially in recent years, is the huge gaps in quality. For every Airplane there is a Leonard Part 6, for every Naked Gun there is a Meet the Spartans; movies that, instead of being an adoring send up of the source material, come across as facetious efforts to piggyback on the success of current trends. Basically, it is a good idea to tread carefully going into any parody, regardless of whether you are a fan of whatever is being roasted at the time or not.
With The Editor, however, Canadian film collective Astron-6 have thankfully fashioned a stylish, occasionally hilarious and inventive satire that doesn’t simply regurgitate worn out jokes but instead uses the tropes of the giallo genre to produce a unique experience. Astron-6 first burst onto the scene with the Eighties science fiction experiment Manborg, an entertaining but shoddy foray into science fiction. The Editor feels like a much more polished piece of work, while retaining the surreal comedy of its predecessors—a natural progression. Dedication to the visuals and violence separate this film form being just another lame attempt at parody; they have managed to perfectly replicate the colorful vibrancy, recognizable camera movements, and even the overtly unstable dubbing of classic giallo films. Along with a pulsating electronic score, the authenticity is quite the achievement. But is this only going to be recognized by knowledgeable fans of the genre?
Every actor throws himself or herself into their roles (especially the inspector who takes the meaning of “psychosexual” to a new level), and the direction draws some genuinely creepy moments from a script focused heavily on dialogue. There is an element of repetitiveness as the film reaches its conclusion, however, and the comedy begins to be used as a crutch to keep the story afloat, while being too self-aware to keep the viewer interested. Like many of its satirical predecessors, The Editor falls short of greatness because it just doesn’t have a story to tell.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
Told as almost Gothic horror, set in a sufficiently terrifying seaside villa, Amer starts out with an eight or nine year old Ana, running from room to room, trying her best to outsmart both her overbearing mother and the ugly crone of a witch that was her grandfather’s caretaker, while attempting to steal a necklace she must pry out of her ancient grandfather’s cold dead hands. The film takes on a magical feel right away, as an insidious doom overshadows all that is happening around her and her young eyes are assaulted by the evil that lurks around her and (in a scene of frenetic, salacious eroticism) the writhing, sweating bodies of her parents bedroom. The terror, both metaphorical and physical, that will eventually devour Ana, is already beginning to surround this wide-eyed little girl.