Review: The Editor (2014)

Directed by: Adam Brooks, Matthew Kennedy
Starring: Adam Brooks, Matthew Kennedy, Paz de la Huerta
Written by: Adam Brooks, Matthew Kennedy, Conor Sweeney
Music by: Various
Country: United States
Available on: Blu-ray/DVD (Shout Factory)
IMDb

I have mixed feelings about the filmmaking entity known as Astron-6. I appreciate that they dig certain types of movies so much that they heavily emulate them out of love. But sometimes, as was the case with Father’s Day (2011) and (in my head, anyway, since I’ve yet to see it) Manborg (2010), it seems like they’re too enslaved to aping their influences, to the point where the movies end up hollow. But with stuff like The Void (2017) and moreso this year’s Psycho Goreman, when their inspirations inspire them, the films are enduring and stand on their own. The Editor falls in the second camp, thankfully. On its surface, it’s a very funny parody of Italian giallo and horror films, about a film editor suspected of murdering the stars of the film on which he’s working. There’s a black-gloved mysterious killer fond of implements of impalement, a plethora of gratuitous nudity, exaggerated acting, brutal kills, a funky synth score, and even bad ADR. But over the course of the film, it establishes its own interesting mystery, ruthless killer, and striking atmosphere, while actually developing a main character that’s more far robust than any giallo film of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Though the eponymous editor, Rey Ciso, starts out as a caricature of the overly anguished and masculine Italian hero — his masculinity inseparable from his skills as an editor, which are exaggerated to hyperbole and now severely compromised due to an accident in which he lost some fingers — but as you begin to understand more of his motivations and disappointments, he transcends the joke. And while all that is going on, the script stays fresh and hilarious. The humor works so well because, although it does nail its many broad strokes of parody, the way the writers lampoon so many small details of the genre gives away their obvious love. The inhuman way characters have sex, the ludicrous fetishism of misogyny juxtaposed, the jumpy edits, victims shrieking endlessly in the face of their impending death, the pacing, the understated reactions to extreme circumstances — all of these small touches, along with a number of homages to the classics of Lucio Fulci, Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Sergio Martino, and even David Cronenberg of all folks, beautifully illustrate the enduring craft of these films at the same time they satirize them. Another small detail I really loved was that fact that Paz de la Huerta, who’s doing a great impression of her own fucking weird hysteria in Nurse 3D, is the only character who isn’t overdubbed. The Editor is kind of a shockingly great film, given I was expecting a straightforward comedy, that works on different levels.

Overall rating: 8.5 out of 10