Review of The Editor (2014) by The N — 31 Jul 2016

As with any film released under the Monster Pictures label, The Editor sounded like a real cult classic experience.

The Editor is a film with proud ambition. Centred around taking viewers back to the glory days of an Italian film style known as Giallo Cinema, The Editor has a lot of room for clever satirical edge within its style and its narrative. Unfortunately, it quickly becomes misguided due to poor storytelling.

Giallo cinema is a style that viewers should hopefully be familiar with in one form or another. Its a genre which mixes crime, mystery and supernatural elements into an eroticized film style with a distinctive Italian vision. As we learned from Alrugo Entertainment's Italian Spiderman (2007), there is certainly room to explore this style with an effectively satirical edge. Unfortunately, The Editor suggests that it is best left contained far below feature length as the gimmicks do not provide the extensive support that the film needs.

On the surface, The Editor has a very simple premise to it. Being a story about a film editor embroiled in a string of murders, the mystery behind the story should have some intrigue to it. Unfortunately, the feature quickly becomes convoluted as the story insists on jamming way too many characters into the film. There are so many random characters that come with their own stories and subplots even though the film uses them purely for melodramatic effect with no intention on expanding upon them. In the end, most of them are stereotypes, murder victims or generic stock characters. Quite a few of them are used for the purpose of adding nudity to the experience or getting killed, but the effect of this comes from the efforts of the makeup department more than anyone else. As far as characters and story goes, The Editor spends less time playing with its generic conventions and more time jamming too many twists and turns into the story for anyone to keep up with. The Editor should have had a really simple narrative because giallo cinema is not a style of filmmaking aimed at the most intellectual of viewers. I'm certain that there are cult audiences who will neglect the confusing story just for the stylish nature of the film, but given that the story is so bent on cramming new melodramatic twists in at every turn it really weighs down on the experience without making it any better.

Ultimately, The Editor is a film made my amateur filmmakers. It certainly has a lot of passion to it and certifies that Adam Brooks and Matthew Kennedy know what stylish assets makes Giallo cinema such an effective guilty pleasure, but coherent writing lies beyond their ambitions. The Editor wants to be a legitimate Giallo thriller and a parody of one at the same time, but the directors fail to find the correct balance to make it work. Any attempts at actual storytelling in The Editor get in the way of the experience, and the heavy-handed narrative does favours for nobody. If you actually try to keep up with the story in The Editor, you'll find that the structure of the narrative collapses into a collection of aimless sketches. With every segment aimed at satirizing some new part of the Giallo formula, there ends up being too much for anyone to keep track of and so audiences end up bombarded with an endless array of characters who have little lasting value to the actual story.

Giallo is not necessarily the most widely recognized or popular genre, so the satirical intentions of The Editor will appeal predominantly to a very small fan base in the western world. There's surely an audience who will appreciate its cult value, but the convoluted narrative will give no mainstream appeal to the film. Nevertheless, I will admit that the directors have a fine grasp over the visual style of the film. There is a lot of tenacious dedication to getting every part of the imagery just right, and the two directors responsible for The Editor manage to make the stylish focus of the film one which does give them some credibility in face of such ridiculous narrative incoherence. It only does so much to support the film, but The Editor has a very distinctive look to it. The cinematography uses a lot of extremely close-up shots with intense use of focus, as well as some quick zooms for the melodramatically intense moments to the story. The colour scheme is also a key factor in the memorable imagery of the film as it stirs up a surreal atmosphere, one which is both glamourous and grim. There is constantly a sense of shadow over everything which keeps everything feeling grim, and it proves effectively atmospheric.

Plus, in keeping with the exploitation nature of the film's intentions there ends up being a fairly effective quantity of blood and gore in The Editor. With the story surrounding a mysterious collection of murders, The Editor manages to kill off its many characters in a clever variety of ways. And with all these murders comes plenty of violence to support it. The Editor is a proudly violent film which throws blood and gore all over the scene with clear humourous intentions. And to add to that, there is a lot of nudity in the film. But rather than just having female nudity, there is a higher than average quantity of penis in The Editor which puts elements of homoeroticism into the film. It's not too common that male nudity pops up in an exploitation film unless it is for the sake of some moment of genital mutilation, but The Editor takes a more equal approach to exploiting the physical appeal of all their cast members regardless of gender.

The Editor has plenty of blood, gore and nudity to live up to its status as an exploitation film, but with a ridiculously incoherent narrative that takes itself too seriously weighing down on the structure of the film, it ends up unable to find the balance between being a serious Giallo film and a self-parody.