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Review
by
Brian Lindsey
Film:5
DVD:5
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| The
movie Adrien Brody doesn't want you to see. |
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Not
because it's a bad film (although given much of the criticism
out there, that's a debatable point), but because Brody — and,
it turns out, much of the cast and crew, to include director Dario
Argento — were allegedly never paid for their work. According
to Brody, he was cheated out of his $640,000 acting fee by the
production company. The week of Giallo's
release on R1 DVD (Oct. 19th) Brody's lawyers filed suit to stop
it, but were unsuccessful. (Further legal action is pending.)
It has also been reported that Argento himself has disowned the
film. |
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Which
is kind of a shame, since Giallo
is the Italian horror maestro's best
work of the past few years... Definitely superior to his
previous effort, the embarrassingly silly Mother
of Tears (2007). It's a modest,
economical thriller, part police procedural and part "torture
porn" horror — although never quite enough of either to be
fully satisfying. |
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A
serial killer is stalking the streets of Turin,
Italy: a cab driver targeting beautiful young foreign women. He
kidnaps, tortures, mutilates and eventually murders them, dumping
their bodies at random locations in and around the city. The overkill
nature of the facial mutilations suggest that the perp is destroying
beauty — perhaps in retaliation for his own ugliness. The latest
victim, snatched via booby-trapped cab, is a gorgeous American
model named Celine (Elsa Pataky). Unbeknownst to the killer Celine
was heading back to her apartment to meet older sister Linda,
who has just arrived in Turin for a visit, when she was abducted.
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Worried,
Linda (Emmanuelle Seigner) waits at Celine's flat until morning
but she never shows up. At first the police don't seem receptive
— the girl hasn't been missing long enough — but Linda is directed
to Inspector Enzo Avolfi (Brody), the eccentric, chain-smoking
homicide detective working the case of the murdered foreign women.
He realizes that Celine fits the profile of the killer's preferred
victims to a 'T'. Initially reluctant to help, Avolfi eventually
throws himself into the task of finding Linda's sister before
it's too late. Since the killer toys with his captives for days
before murdering them, there just might be a chance to rescue
her... |
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Based
on
the title alone — not least because it's a Dario Argento film
— many Euro-Cult aficionados will doubtless expect a twisty, shock-filled
whodunit. Well, they're just not going to get that. There is absolutely
no mystery to the plot, no big 'reveal' just before the
end credits roll. The killer's face and identity are fully revealed
halfway through the movie. (The title actually refers to the sickly
yellowish pallor of the killer's skin, caused by a liver condition.)
From that point on it's purely a suspense thriller, as Avolfi
races to discover where Celine is being held before she's slaughtered.
With a director like Argento you can't be exactly sure how things
will turn out, and that's what kept me watching. To his credit
he delivers an ending that avoids the pitfall of cliché. |
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Perhaps
Giallo is Argento's riposte to those
who blasted Mother of Tears
(correctly,
I believe) for its ridiculous, nonsensical excesses. This is arguably
his most restrained theatrical film, both
in terms of story and in the way it's visually told. He eschews
elaborate set-pieces and almost all stylistic panache for a mostly
straightforward approach. Where we'd normally expect him to shock
us with splatter and sadistic mayhem he instead cuts or pans away;
there are really only two instances of R-rated gore in the entire
film. (A woman's face is smashed with a hammer; another has a
finger snipped off.) It's a rare instance of Argento being more
concerned with the characters — in this case the killer and the
detective hunting him — than what those characters are doing and
the things that happen to them. Problem is, the protagonist and
antagonist of Giallo really aren't
all that interesting, and are just as sketchily written as any
of the other heroes and villains in his oeuvre. |
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I'm
not unexpectedly dropping a major spoiler here to reveal that
Adrien Brody plays both Inspector Avolfi and the killer
(using the alias "Byron Deidra" in the credits). As
the latter, he sports prosthetic makeup and a curly, greasy wig.
The two characters aren't supposed to be brothers or related in
any way; Brody merely plays both roles. Sure, this smacks of stunt
casting, but it's obviously the means by which Argento hopes to
reinforce his notion of a quasi-spiritual connection of sorts
between the two. (Avolfi himself is a killer; as a young boy he
witnessed his mother's murder and later knifed her attacker to
death in revenge, getting away with it.) Argento, who co-wrote
the screenplay, seems genuinely fascinated by the notion that,
internally, these men — killer and cop — are just flip sides of
the same dark coin. Whether or not he and Brody are able to motivate
the audience to share that fascination is a different matter altogether. |
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Acting
by the principals isn't anywhere near as bad as I've read in some
reviews. Avolfi is supposed to be brusque and often unlikable;
Brody compensates by hamming it up to some extent beneath the
makeup of the psychotic killer, who is, indeed, quite ugly and
speaks with a weird voice. (Which some folks find unintentionally
funny, although I did not.) Pataky is quite good as the terrified
captive fearing death at any moment (she spends 90% of the film
in the killer's dungeon-like hideout) and French actress Seigner,
while somewhat awkward in her early scenes (likely a language
issue), gets better as the story progresses. Alas the music score
— always a point of interest in an Argento film — is pretty much
a bust, since Marco Werba's compositions are too generically melodramatic
to add anything of value to the proceedings. |
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In
sum, Giallo isn't bad Argento...
It's just sort of 'meh'. Then again, to some folks the worst
thing that could ever be said about one of his films is that it's
forgettable. |
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Released by Maya Home Entertainment (not to be confused with Mya
Communications), the DVD presents Giallo
via a solid
1.85/16x9 transfer with options for either 5.1 Surround or Dolby
2.0 audio tracks (English only; both sound fine). Apart from a
couple of exterior night shots of the cityscape — blacks appear
gray and fuzzy — the movie looks great. There are zero extras,
unfortunately, but I suppose this is to be expected for such a
troubled production. A reel of trailers for other, decidedly dull-looking
Maya releases (which plays automatically when the disc first loads)
doesn't count. 11/02/10 |
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UPDATE
The DVD was pulled from the U.S. market one month after this
review was posted, when a California judge ruled in Brody's
favor. The case was later settled and the disc went back on
sale.
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