mdjedovic

The thriller genre is the streaming world's favourite comfort food, but there really aren't many classical whodunits around anymore. Everything nowadays is based more around suspense, shocking twists, police procedure, or rich people being terrible to each other. However, as a longtime fan of good old-fashioned murder mysteries, I was very much looking forward to "Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue", an unexpectedly old-fashioned take on Agatha Christie's classic "And Then There Were None".

Another reason why I was watering at the mouth about this show is that it's written by Anthony Horowitz. It may be deeply unserious of me, but Horowitz is my favourite living novelist. His genre-redifying, metatextual whodunits always find audaciously novel ways of reusing old formulas with clever yet unobtrusive post-modernist twists. Horowitz is also a brilliant screenwriter, as anyone who's ever seen "Foyle's War" can attest. Here, the Christie connection deepens as Horowitz adapted several of her works for the long-running "Poirot" series. Most importantly for me, he wrote the episode "Yellow Iris", in which he reinvented Christie's very short story as a superbly puzzling, non-linear meta-mystery with a dazzling climax. It remains the only time any screenwriter has ever actually improved on one of Christie's plots.

Now, having seen "Nine Bodies", I do have to concede that it's not one of Horowitz's finest works. It is a fairly straightforward whodunit slasher without any of the writer's trademark boldness or inventiveness. Instead, what I found so delightful about the series was precisely its old-fashioned approach. It doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, it's not loaded with knowing film references or sarcastic winks to the audience. Most enjoyably, it also lacks the irony which is the plague of most modern genre pieces. Here, at last, is a slasher tale told by someone who doesn't worship at the feet of "Scream".

The premise is very much as advertised: nine people survive a plane crash, find themselves stranded in the Mexican jungle, and are picked off one by one by a mysterious killer. The cast of characters is made up entirely of stereotypes: the tough guy, the selfish guy, the mousy girl, the stuffy doctor, the MAGA-loving Americans, etc., etc. After all, it's the way the genre works. I enjoyed that Horowitz didn't feel the need to give us lengthy flashbacks or expositional monologues about the characters' backstories. Let's just focus on the mystery at hand.

The quality of the performances varies, but the protagonists who emerge very quickly are all quite good. Eric McCormack is especially fun to watch as the weasely doctor. Meanwhile, Lydia Wilson and David Ajala are quite likeable and charismatic as this show's versions of Kate and Jack from "Lost". My one constant issue with the performances is the presence of some truly awful American accents from otherwise good British actors. Siobhan McSweeney is probably the biggest offender with her over-the-top Southern draaaaaawl, but Adam Long is no better with his stiff, vaguely trans-Atlantic lilt.

What the show really lacks is strong, stylish direction. This is usually what separates great thrillers from mindless potboilers. Unfortunately, "Nine Bodies" falls squarely in the latter category. The show is directed by two people, Brian O'Malley and Viviane Andereggen, each handling three episodes. While Andereggen clearly does the better job, neither director really infuses the show with any atmosphere or visual flair. The cinematography is disappointingly bland throughout, and the framing frequently makes the show look like a workaday police procedural instead of the moody slasher it should have been.

Back to the script. Horowitz has concocted a deliciously enjoyable variation on "And Then There Were None". I enjoyed trying to outguess the characters, even though I wish there were more clues to the solution. In the end, all the plot threads really do come together in a satisfying manner. Of course, it's all utter hokum, but that's part of the genre's fun. Even with the best Christie or Dickson Carr novels, you have to play by their logic. The plotting's one gaping flaw is the survival of one character (I won't say which) who really has no business being alive at the end. That, I'll admit, made me groan. Also, I knew that Horowitz simply won't be able to resist reusing one of Christie's finest twists, so I did figure out who the killer was before the finale, but that's also par for the course.

Otherwise, I had a lot of fun with "Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue". It's the kind of old-fashioned good fun I miss in this jaded, self-important age of event television. Forgive me, but sometimes I don't really want my thriller to be a dark journey into the drug-addled underworld of contemporary America or a scathing indictment of the capitalist system. There's room for your "Long Bright Rivers" and "Sirens", for sure, but I'm hungry for some convoluted, preposterous, but wildly engaging and cleverly constructed puzzles.

In 1987, Dario Argento participated in the creation of a variety show called "Giallo" for Italian television. The series was hosted by Enzo Tortora and had a magazine-style format consisting of interviews, panel discussions, and behind the scenes features on the latest giallo/horror movies. The most interesting part of the show, however, were the short films directed or produced by Argento. One of these was a series of 15-minute whodunnits called "Turno di notte". The other was altogether more bizarre and downright experimental.

"Dario Argento's Nightmares" was the title of a segment consisting of very brief shorts (between 2 and 4 minutes each) supposedly based on Argento's own nightmares. Each short is presaged by an introduction from Argento and his co-host Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni. These intros are far better than the ones Argento did for his previous TV series "Door Into Darkness". 13 years later, he seems much more at ease in front of the camera especially since he's not trying to put on a mysterious, sinister persona. Here he is simply himself - a slightly awkward but pleasant and jokey persona who briefly informs us about the premise of each short.

The shorts themselves are fairly simplistic and are mainly interesting for some striking and memorable imagery. A few of them tell little stories with a Hitchcockian twist but most are downright experimental such as the bizarre and aptly named "Falling Asleep (Addormentarsi)" in which a man is killed by a shadow and turns into a giant mouth which eats his dog. Another wonderfully grotesque short is "Nostalgia Punk" in which a woman drinks a glass of poison and tries to cure herself by quite literally ripping her own guts out. This surprisingly gory little film caused a fair bit of controversy when it first aired on TV but is easily the best and most memorable of all the nightmares.

Equally as controversial is "Loving and Dying (Amare e morire)", a delightfully perverted short in which a woman tries to find her rapist by sleeping with each of the three suspects. The premise is so repugnant and insensitive that I couldn't help but love the sheer audacity of putting this story on TV.

What makes these shorts so fun to watch is the excellent photography harkening back in style to Argento's finest films such as "Suspiria" and "Deep Red". I don't know who the director of photography was on this show but whoever it was absolutely nailed the gorgeous primary colours which dominated Luciano Tovoli's "Suspiria" palette. Look, for example, at the positively beautiful-looking "The Worm (Il verme)" bathed in overwhelming neon blues. This insignificant little 2-minute short looks better than any film Argento has made since 1987.

Other shorts are less interesting such as "Sammy", a starring vehicle for a nine-year-old contest winner, which is the most lacklustre and least imaginative of all the nightmares. Also ineffective is "Night Rituals (Riti notturni)", the segment with perhaps the most complex narrative which is rather awkwardly compressed into the 2-minute format. Argento pretty much narrates the entirety of this segment making it feel more like an audiobook than a visual experience.

Even though Argento in his introductions claims that these shorts are based on his nightmares at least two of them are heavily inspired by other authors. "The Witch (La strega)" is an uncredited adaptation of Ray Bradbury's gruesome short story "The October Game". It's a decent little adaptation but by removing the context of the story (and the father's motivation) Argento robs it of its satirical edge. Meanwhile, the first short "Rear Window" is Argento's homage to Hitchcock in which a teenager sees a murder occurring through his window and rushes out to save the victim. Unfortunately, he is attacked by giant man-eating snakes! This brief but amusing Hitchcock homage is somewhat undone by the protagonist's truly horrible acting. Still, it's an interesting seed for what Argento would later turn into "Do You Like Hitchcock?".

The "series" (if you can call it that) ended with a metatextual short called "The Nightmare of the Person Who Wanted to Star in 'Dario Argento's Nightmares'". In it, a young man selected to star in an episode finds that the experience of working on the show is as nightmarish as the show itself. It's a lot of fun to get a little peek behind the scenes but this short was something of a disappointment. Instead of taking a chance to poke fun at himself, Argento turns this nightmare into an uncomfortably xenophobic little horror short which ends on a predictable and poorly executed twist.

"Dario Argento's Nightmares" is the most obscure of all of maestro's works but is well worth seeking out for any Argento fan. These shorts are brief and often quite rudimentary but they are executed with such unexpected gusto and imagination! The photography is beautiful, the effects gnarly and entertaining, and some of the stories are so bizarre and perverted that you just have to see them to believe them.

Yukito Ayatsuji's "The Decagon House Murders" is one of the defining novels of the so-called shin honkaku school of mystery writing. An intricately constructed closed-circle murder mystery, it is full of references to classic mystery writers, their most famous novels, and favourite cliches of the genre. The plot itself is in fact a sort of a modern riff on Agatha Christie's masterpiece "And Then There Were None" which the characters themselves figure out fairly quickly. The novel was published in 1987 but has never been adapted for the screen before. The reason for this glaring omission is due to the novel's big twist which has until now been deemed as unfilmable.

Now, 37 years later, comes a television mini-series based on the novel which has seemingly come up with a way to film the unfilmable. I wouldn't dare spoil a single line of Ayatsuji's brilliant novel so I'll tread carefully and merely say that the solution the authors of this series have come up with is probably the only one possible. It's far from perfect, it's a little silly, and it makes Ayatsuji's masterful twist much easier to figure out than it is in the novel but I'm just happy someone has finally dared to film the dreaded Decagon House.

The plot follows two parallel mysteries. The first, paraphrasing Christie's novel, sees seven members of the Kyoto Mystery Club visiting a secluded island where a quadruple murder took place just a year before. Of course, before long, the members start getting killed one by one. The second mystery revolves around that very quadruple murder and is investigated by an eager student named Conan (not that one!) and a mysterious amateur sleuth named Shimada.

Much like the novel, even though the two mysteries eventually intersect, the series keeps them separate for most of the runtime. In that spirit, I'll review each in turn.

When I first read the novel, my favourite chapters were the ones set on the island. In the series, the situation is reversed. I'm sorry to say that the island portion of the series is something of a disappointment. For one, the titular Decagon House is nowhere near as scary, hypnotic, and discombobulating as the one described in the novel. The production design makes what should have been a sinister, dilapidated house look like a cosy, aesthetically pleasing sitcom set.

Similarly, the show just doesn't have the horror atmosphere needed to make these scenes work in the way Ayatsuji intended them to. Even though Akira Uchikata's direction is pacy and stylish, it lacks the mood and the suspense of the far superior novel.

I also didn't like the portrayal of the characters on the island. They have unfortunately succumbed to the relatively recent trend on Japanese television of making every single person on screen dress and behave like an anime character. Furthermore, every single young actor in this drama looks like a model instead of a mystery-loving nerd they should be. Especially annoying are the performances from Ayumu Mochizuki who seems physically incapable of keeping still and Yuki Imai whose character is too cartoonish to appear in an episode of "One Piece".

The scenes set on the mainland are thankfully much better. Especially good is the performance of Munetaka Aoki who is simply perfect as the charming oddball Shimada. His chemistry with Tomoya Oku who plays Conan is excellent and their goofy adventures are actually livelier and more entertaining than they were in the novel. I hope that if they decide to adapt any more of Ayatsuji's novels, they keep these two characters as recurring detectives.

And yet, even though it's far from perfect, this mini-series is a valiant attempt to tackle an unfilmable novel. The big twist does not work as well as it did in the novel but I doubt anyone could come up with a better way to film it. The performances are over-the-top but the story is still as engrossing and fiendishly complicated as ever.

More than anything else, I have to commend the adaptation by Kaori Fujii, Madoka Hayano and Hiroyuki Yatsu. They succeed in turning the talky, exposition-heavy novel into a well-paced, dynamic, and consistently entertaining mini-series without altering the plot in the least. This is an extremely faithful adaptation of the Ayatsuji novel and it is a delightful surprise that it works as well as it does on screen.

In the end, I did enjoy this adaptation but I cannot stress enough that if you are a fan of mystery fiction you absolutely should read the novel first.