The Friday Night Horror Movie: Memoir of a Murderer (2017)

memoir of a murderer

My father has Alzheimer’s. It is early stages yet, so things are mostly okay. He sometimes forgets things that he’s just done, or other little details, but he always knows where he is and who I am. His father had it as well, and I watched Grandpa go through its entire course. It was awful. He often didn’t know who his wife or his children were. He’d forget where he was and what he was doing. He started hoarding money. It is an awful, awful disease.

As it turns out, it can also be a pretty good twist in a South Korean thriller.

Byeong-soo (Sul Kyung-gu) killed his father when he was a teenager. The father was a horrible man who often beat Byeong-soo and his sister. When the cops never came to get him, Byeong-soo began to believe the murder was justified. And then he began thinking maybe other murders would be justified. He became an avenging angel, murdering anyone he felt deserved it.

The years rolled by, and the bodies piled up. But then he had an accident, and it did something to him. Dementia came next, and a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. He often has blackouts, and his memory is not so good. He stopsed killing and becomes a model citizen and loving father.

His daughter, Eun-hee (Kim Seol-hyun), knows nothing of his past. She cares for him and gives him a little microrecorder that he can use to record everything he does in a day. This, she thinks, will help his memory.

One day he gets into a fender bender with a man named Min Tae-joo (Kim Nam-gil). This causes Min Tae-joo’s trunk to pop open. There is something wrapped in plastic inside, and blood is dripping to the road. Min Tae-joo says it is a deer he hit earlier, but Byeong-soo recognizes human blood when he sees it and the cold look in Min Tae-joo’s eyes. This man, he knows, is a killer. More than that, he knows he must be the man who has been killing young women in his province. Three bodies have already shown up.

Ah, but Min Tae-joo also recognizes a killer when he sees one and decides to play a game. He discovers Byeong-soo has a daughter and begins to woo her. He sneaks into his house and reads his journal. Suddenly it is serial killer versus serial killer, except one of them can’t remember who he is half the time.

The film never really manages to rise above that pulp plot. The dementia angle adds some interesting twists. It creates a sort of unreliable narrator. The film is told through Byeong-soo’s point of view, so sometimes we’ll see something happen, and then he’ll question whether or not it was real, thus making us wonder the same thing. But it is also used a few too many times as a plot device. Beyong-soo will come close to killing Min Tae-joo, but then his eye will twitch (the film’s indication that he’s having an episode), and he’ll get away.

It mostly plays his Alzheimer’s as a plot device, as something to add an edge to the proceedings. We get a feel for how it affects Eun-hee, and there is a cop friend of Byeong-soo who reacts with astonishment whenever he either cannot remember him or he actually does. I can’t really complain that the film doesn’t spend a lot of time with the emotionality of dealing with that disease, as I’m not sure if I’d be able to take it. And it isn’t that it’s handled poorly here, but this is definitely not a feel about that disease and its effects on both those who have it and those that must take care of them.

Min Tae-joo is a fairly generic villain. He’s your typical basic cable serial killer. He is a cop in this one, so that’s interesting, except the film doesn’t really delve very deeply into that angle. Sul Kyung-gu is excellent as our anti-hero, and the film remains quite entertaining and thrilling. The final fight scene is well staged, and I mostly dug the entire film. But it’s never anything more than you expect.

31 Days of Horror: Trick ‘r Treat (2007)

trick r treat poster

Time is a flat circle, but I can’t remember where I put my reading glasses. I look at Trick ‘r Treat, and I see that it came out in 2007, but I can’t place that within my own timeline. It is a film I had not previously watched, but I don’t ‘remember it coming out either. I don’t recall people talking about it back then or me having any desire to watch it. The poster with the kid in a scarecrow outfit is familiar, but that’s about it.

In the years since, I’ve seen it around, but something about it gave me the feeling that I wouldn’t like it, so I’ve always ignored it. I was probably living in China when it came out, and I wasn’t paying much attention to what movies were hitting the theater then (because there weren’t any theaters to go to – that I knew of anyhow), so it probably just came and went without me really knowing it existed.

For reasons I can’t begin to understand, the film has been popping up in my feed a lot this year. People have been talking about it and mostly saying good things about it, so against my better judgement, I gave it a watch this afternoon. I should have listened to my internal judges. This movie is not good.

It is a movie that, had I watched it at just the right time in my life, (though I’m not sure when that would have been, probably not 2007, for I was far too into J-horror at that moment, but maybe when I was a teenager had I been a teenager in 2007 or if this film had somehow been released in 1993), I would have loved it. I would have considered it dumb, but fun. Now it just seems dumb.

It is an anthology film, and I have to admit from the start that I don’t generally like anthology films. In the same way I don’t like short films or short stories even, anthologies rarely give their individual stories enough time to really tell their tale or develop their characters. They often rely on gags or tricks at the end to punch you with emotion. This one does better than most, interweaving its stories in interesting ways. It bounces back and forth in time, allowing you to see characters that just died in a previous story once again – like Pulp Fiction, only dumber and with more teenaged killing.

What’s weird is that kid on the cover with the burlap sack on his head, looking like a scarecrow; he feels like our guide, our cryptkeeper to these stories, but he’s not really. Except for the final story, he doesn’t really do anything. At some point during each story, usually at the end, we’ll see him just kind of standing there. At one point I thought he might be a demon, possessing others to do his evil deeds.

Actually, according to Wikipedia, that kid is named Sam, and he is a demon who punishes people for breaking the “rules” of Halloween. I’m not entirely sure what the rules are or how they all broke them. They certainly aren’t explained in any clear way through the film.

But whatever, it doesn’t matter. This is a film that clearly hasn’t spent a lot of time thinking things through or taking itself too seriously. It is a film where a horror hound could take his not fond of scary movies date and still get to make out afterward. It is a film practically designed to watch with a bunch of friends. It has enough violence, jump scares, and just a little bit of gore to satisfy horror hounds, while not making those who are a little more squeamish run away.

Like I said, it is a film that I really would have liked earlier in my life. If you can turn your brain off and not think too hard about it, there is fun to be had in it. I just couldn’t do that. Within fifteen minutes I was annoyed.

None of the stories are bad. There are some fun kills and some fun allusions to other horror films (I caught nods to Halloween Parts 1 & 2 and A Nightmare on Elm Street 2). But it just didn’t really do it for me. I started to break down all the parts that got on my nerves, the plot points that didn’t make sense, etc., but this is already long. I will say the one segment I did enjoy was the last one with Brian Cox as a crotchety old man, and that was mainly because Brian Cox is awesome.

So, yeah, this was definitely a not for me at this stage of my life kind of film.

Bring Out the Perverts: The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970)

cover

Dario Argento’s debut film was not the first Giallo ever made (Mario Bava’s 1963 film The Girl Who Knew Too Much usually gets that honor, followed by another Bava film Blood and Black Lace from 1964 – both of which I’ll be writing about later). Nor did it create any of the hallmarks usually associated with the genre (black-gloved killers, bold use of color and camera angles, psycho-sexual motives, etc). I wouldn’t even say he perfected it (at least not with this film). Still, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage was exceedingly successful, helping to popularize the genre and influencing a decade’s worth of Italian horror films.

It is a bit like how John Carpenter’s Halloween didn’t invent the slasher (a genre greatly influenced by the Giallo) but it popularized it to the degree that without it 1980s horror would look extraordinarily different.

The thing to remember about Giallo is that they are all essentially murder mysteries. Someone is killed (usually female, usually graphically), and someone else (usually not a cop) tries to solve the crime. They fall into the horror category because the violence is often stylized, brutal, and blood-soaked, and the killer often pops out of nowhere leading to jump scares. But at their heart, they are no different from other crime stories.

The genre in general, and Argento in specific never seem to care that much about the details of the crime or its solution. If, upon examination, some part of the story doesn’t make logical sense, that’s okay. What matters is the style and the execution (of the story, not the victims, although the kills are an important part of the genre.)

So it is with The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. Some of the plot points are a little goofy and the final solution is a bit ham-fisted, but I never care no matter how many times I watch it.

Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante) is an American writer vacationing in Rome. While walking home one evening he sees what appears to be a woman attacked by a man wearing a black trench coat, black gloves, and a black fedora. The woman is stabbed and the man runs away through a back door.

Sam tries to help but finds himself stuck between two sliding doors. He stands there helpless, watching this woman bleed out. Eventually, he manages to flag down a passerby who calls the police. The woman lives.

The police think the assailant has also killed three other women in the city within the last few weeks. Sam is haunted by what he saw. He thinks about that scene over and over again. He can’t even make love to his girlfriend without thinking about it. He’s convinced he missed some vital detail. Perhaps he saw the man’s face and can’t remember it. Or maybe there is some other clue he’s not seeing.

The film keeps flashing back to that moment as well. We see the attack from slightly different angles. In slow motion. It zooms in. As an audience, we examine the scene, looking for some vital clue. All cinema is voyeurism, but Argento makes it explicit. We are a part of this movie.

In another scene, the killer will look at his potential victim. He’ll snap photographs of her. The movie camera will look through the photographer’s lens. Voyeurism upon voyeurism.

The film opens with the killer in his black coat, donning his black gloves typing at a typewriter. Anecdotally I know that it was Dario Argento himself wearing those gloves, being seen creating words on a typewriter. In this moment the creator of the film portrays the killer creating something. Creation is art and art is violence.

Sam begins his own investigation into the crime. He visits an antique shop where one of the victims worked. The last thing she sold was a strange painting of a girl getting stabbed in the snow. More art. More violence. He visits the artist and finds that his painting is based on a real incident that happened several years before.

Meanwhile, the killer makes a few attempts on Sam’s life. In one stunning scene, he’ll attack his girlfriend in her apartment. The killer makes threatening phone calls. All the while Sam and the police get closer to him.

The ending is a bit of a letdown. It reminded me a little of Pscyho which is also a fantastic film right up until the end.

The Bird With the Crystal Plumage isn’t my favorite Giallo, it isn’t even my favorite Argento film but it is a stunning debut and helped crystalize what the genre was about, and certainly influenced nearly every Giallo that came after.

I previously reviewed this film for Cinema Sentries.