Reviews

I recently watched this during TCM's celebration of Warren Oates and I can't say I cared for it. Now according to the trivia, the movie was re-edited to make it easier for the audiences to follow.. and if that is the case, it shows.

Warren Oates plays a security guard bored with his profession, and takes no time to punch himself off the clock. Lucky for him, he has some higher up call upon him to track down a woman and keep an eye on her (and lucky for us, the bad guys of the piece spell out the plot for the audience beforehand).

The movie has two problems: the story itself is still pretty muddled for something so straightforward, and the technical aspects are pretty horrible.

Story wise, all Chandler (Oates) has to do is keep an eye on Katherine (Leslie Caron), which doesn't take much effort at all. Now rather than just being honest with her (I'm being payed to protect you) or finding some clever way of ingratiating himself with her, he just kind of creeps around her until she just breaks down and allows him to tag along. I know I'm supposed to believe she's falling for the lunk, but it's only because the script says so, not because there is any plausibility in it. Add a villain (if you can even call him that) that is only in a third of the movie, as well as some equally ambivalent "good" guys (who really aren't)... and you have a movie where Scatman Crothers has all of 2 scenes that have no importance to the plot, and the wonderful Mitchell Ryan who doesn't have much to do other than be punched around and shot at when required. When you finally reach the end where the "climax" happens, you have to wonder why the bad guys just didn't do what they do at the beginning of the movie, as all of the stuff with Chandler had no pertinence to what they do.

Technically, the movie is a mess. The editing is alright, in that you can basically tell what is happening (as opposed to some of the Avid fart high jinks of Michael Bay), but the editing is terrible when it comes to how the story is crafted. For example: Chandler and one of the government goons is having a conversation at a bar right after Katherine leaves their table to go to the restroom. One of the incompetent mob goons tries to pull Kat out (as the government goon mentions it while seeing it, and Chandler says "she can take care of herself", despite having rescued her from the same guy just 10 minutes earlier in this movie's idea of an "exciting car chase") and she knees him in the groin. While Chandler and the goon are still discussing, Mitchell Ryan finally shows up and leaves with her. Edit to Chandler in bed, and Kat coming in through the door in a silk dress/negligee. Did they sleep together? Where did she come from? Wasn't she with Mitchell? How did she know where he was? Next thing you know she's talking about someone being dead.. takes him to the house where the body "was", as it is no longer there... and I am thinking "What in the hell is going on?" Who is dead and why should I care? Add onto that the most inappropriate 70's horn selected soundtrack that tries to turn the mere act of walking into a dramatic action scene (that teeters on making the scene ludicrous like THE BLUES BROTHERS) and.. well... there is a reason this movie was forgotten.

I don't know.. maybe if you go into this watching it as a parody of hard boiled detective movies you might get a chuckle or two out of it.

For those who have seen more than one giallo on their watch, please save yourself the time. If you must know what the hub-bub is truly about, I will release spoilers later in the review.

To get right to the underlying reason for watching these kinds of films, Mimsy gets naked twice: once briefly in a fairly rapid love making scene (where the camera likes to pan away) and at the very end with the "surprise" twistish ending. The murders don't really happen until the 1:20 mark, and there is no real gore to speak of until the very end, so be prepared for a very LONG wait for anything to happen.

By the way, did I mention that this film is very dull? When I see words like "hypnotic" and "dreamlike" popping up when describing any film, they seem to be code for "drawn out" or "putting me to sleep".

The plot goes something like this:

Mimsy Farmer is a technician at a factory (either producing chemicals or beer, I couldn't tell which), who has frequent nightmares about her childhood and her mother (particularly how she died). In the course of this, she has a meeting with her boyfriend and some friends of his, some of whom appear to be dignitaries from Africa who converse about the dawning of science over witchcraft. As the story progresses, Mimsy's mental health starts to deteriorate as she begins to see a little girl who looks strangely like herself at the same age, as well as her mother in mirrors and the like. By the end of it, she is dressing like her mother and has gone quite mad, killing her boyfriend, the elderly scholar who resided beside her and her mother's former lover. It is revealed that Mimsy interrupted her mother having intercourse with the "lover" (or payee, if you know what I mean) and killed her own mother by pushing her out a window...thus, over time, the guilt (and maybe a little bit of shamanistic help from the aforementioned African dignitaries) pushed her over the edge quite literally.

Yet, while one could consider this to be a proper ending for the main character, it is further revealed that the 3 people she killed are indeed still alive (which I am guessing the entire sequence was "in her head"), and they proceed to take her body to an underground tunnel, where everyone given any screen time in the movie participates in a cannibalistic ritual, with her boyfriend gutting her and the rest lining up to pull out a piece to eat.

Now I can respect the visual aspect of the last shot, which (other than the Mimsy nudity) is the only saving grace of the film. Otherwise (as a friend put it tonight after finishing the film), "that's a pretty convoluted way to get your dinner".

All in all, I was just too bored in the end to care about either twist, as I could see the "Mimsy dying the same way her mother did" ending the moment the method was revealed, and the cannibal ritual stuff was never dealt with very well to the degree that it felt tacked onto the main story.