The Editor

As the other reviews have stated this was a tongue and cheek spoof on some older horror genre films. It was well done, and once the movie started the whole theater (Ryerson during TIFF) was in stitches. The acting was on point, the lighting was perfect and the script was right in live with what you would expect. And the effects. What can I say about the effects. they did the job and then some.

I really felt like I was watching a movie from the good old days of horror just like I used to watch on Sci Fi theater, and Creature Features on Saturday afternoons.

I am pretty sure that if you watch this while having a few drinks and with a couple of friends you guys will have a hoot.

How the sensibilities have changed. Maybe if you watch or have watched Giallo movies or movies from that era and you saw violence against women you cringed. For mostly good reasons that is, it means you are decent. Why does this movie go back that route/road though? Because it pays homage to those movies and in more than one way spoofs that behaviour.

So before you get yourself in a rage think about the context and what the movie is trying to tell us. Same goes for the blood and the nudity overall. Not to mention the spiritual nature of it all. It is far out as some might call it. And I have to admit I wasn't sure at first what the ending was trying to tell me. Then again many Giallo movies did not make sense. So in that regard this is quite coherent. If you don't mind the things I mentioned and want to either take a trip in memory lane or just experience (with a winking and knowing eye of course) whatever that specific era was trying to tell us ... here you go

If you never have seen those old school Italian horrors called Giallo then you will never understand this flick. The way the sound was created (overdubbed?), the score, the editing, the lighting it all referred to the seventies galore of the Italian genre.

The story itself is what it should make funny, sometimes it was sometimes it didn't work at all. But overall this flick delivers on gore. The effects are top-notch. But again, it's the story that tears it a bit down. You can refer to those classics but don't exaggerate. After half an hour you have seen it all on that part. So if you aren't into Giallo's then this isn't going to be your thing, for the geeks they will search to all those references made towards the classics, I did, and get lost of the story somehow and that isn't good news. But it contains what makes a good Giallo, the glove, the POV from the knife, the eye stabbing and of course a lot of gratuitous nudity.

But the story guys....

Gore 1,5/5 Nudity 2,5/5 Effects 4/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 0,5/5

Dear lord this movie had me howling. It's one of the finest examples of deadpan spoofery since 1980's "Airplane!" or if you're really up on your cinematic satires, it's a lot like 1978's "Movie Movie" with George C. Scott.

What makes this film thoroughly enjoyable is that it's not just pure silly absurdism; there's actually some brilliant substance there. The visual gags are very subtle, the script is so witty that you might miss half of them, and of course the big selling point is that this 2014 flick is a meticulous, hilarious time machine back to 1970s cheese. It's authentic right down to the mens' mutton chop sideburns, leg warmers for the ladies, the alpha male's penchant for randomly slapping women, and of course gratuitous nudity with a capital g-string (the nudity starts out mostly in context, but by the end of the flick, I'm not exaggerating, there are people randomly taking off their clothes and walking around naked in the background). If you grew up watching all those bad 70s crime dramas & horrible horror flicks, then you'll be guaranteed a good in-joke and belly laugh every 5 minutes for this entire 95 min ride.

The plot, as you might have guessed, is about a fingerless, downtrodden film editor "Rey" who becomes the focus of a cavalcade of campy murders on the set of a film he's editing. Enter the unhinged detective "Porfiry" who is something like Starsky, Hutch, Dirty Harry and Peewee Herman rolled into one. Choice lines include

"Where were you the night of the murder?"

"I went home. And shaved my p***"

(Porfiry lifts up woman's skirt, hold shot for 5 seconds)

"Your story checks out."

If this sort of irreverent, tongue-in-cheek humor tickles your funny bone, then I guarantee you'll be a dancing skeleton by the time the film ends. I don't even know what that means. But suffice it to say that "The Editor" is a lot of fun.

Now a word about the "brilliant substance" I mentioned earlier. The film actually explores some very thought-provoking, poetic thoughts. As the film progresses, Rey the editor begins to lose the distinction between reality and the trashy horror flick he's editing. Lots of great surreal visuals accentuate this mindbending transformation, and for those of us trying to keep score, "The Editor" becomes a movie within a movie within a delirium. There are a few subtle cues as to which plane of existence we're in (such as fake movie blood being bright red while real world blood is a darker more realistic hue), but the crisscrossing flashbacks, delusions, hallucinations and bizarre murders can be very disorienting, in an awesome way. None of it is random. I'm convinced that if you watch this film a 2nd or 3rd time, as I'm about to do, you'll see that beneath the wackiness is a really solid story about that place where reality and delusion intersect. "It's like Plato's Cave" says our hero. "I haven't seen that movie," responds the sidekick. Great stuff!

This only makes sense if you are a fan of Italian "giallo" movies (Argento, Fulci, Bava etc.) If you have watched a lot of these then you will immediately feel familiar with the visual style, the soundtrack, the acting, the bad dialogue overdubs, the often wooden acting. Production-wise, this is a faithful recreation of the originals, and generally competently executed.

The problem is that it somewhat stops there. It wants to be both a homage and a prohibited-by-IMDb-term-for-urine-take at the same time, but for me failed at both. There are plenty of good scenes, but the number of direct quotes and allusions to old movies means that it is stylistically to uneven to fully enjoy as a homage, and the jokes mostly fell flat for me.

My advice: Give this a try if you're a giallo fan, but have one of the originals ready in case the joke runs out halfway for you. Otherwise: Stay well away - this will be completely incomprehensible to you.