D



Seriously, Argento, what the fuck? What has happened to your talent? I know Francis Ford Coppola gets (mostly rightfully) bashed nowadays for the films he churns out, but at least he's staying quite low-key and doing some artsy projects. Dario Argento has brought us the second sequel (in spirit) to Suspiria a few years ago, one of his greatest works - and, surprise surprise, it sucked. Now with Giallo he wanted to honor the genre he put his mark on the most...and once again he fails miserably.

The plot deals with a disfigured (and funnily talking) serial killer who kidnaps beautiful female tourists in Italy and then cuts them up slowly. The sister of one of the kidnapped goes to a hard-nosed (heh) detective, played by Adrien Brody and asks him for help...whole he is leading his personal vendetta against the killer. So far so good. Only that the film is never able to muster any suspense or originality. The killer is a joke, literally. Most scenes he's in the audience was laughing...and I'm not sure it was intended. Seeing Adrien Brody trying to look edgy, cool and pulpy like he's from some noir flick makes me want to force him to give his Oscar back. I figured that having Brody in the lead would at least make it somewhat better than last year's Mother of Tears, but clearly I was wrong. Brody's monologue in the second half of the film about how he came to this job made me laugh hard. Sure, the screenplay is crap, but Brody's delivery hardly makes it better. Well, maybe he was in on the joke anyway.

And then there's a pretty pointless and stupid ending that is neither a twist nor a satisfying conclusion. It's just nothing... However, the worst sin that the film commits is that it's not even a real giallo flick and it doesn't even deliver much in the blood 'n gore department. The only reason why I haven't given this excruciatingly bad film an even worse grade is because of the few great unintentional laughs it has given to me.

I stll wish they would release this picture here.

But you really aren't missing much. There's even better unintentional comedy out there.