In this entry, I am reviewing the highly praised Scandinavian thriller "Headhunters". I am also reviewing the old video nasty which, while widely recognised as cheap and trashy, has now received a highly praised remake starring Elijah Wood.
Headhunters (2011)
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Ok here were my first impressions based on the poster:
Wow, there's a guy on the poster wearing a suit and holding a gun! Looks gritty, yet somehow kind of fun at the same time. A bit like "American Psycho"... But sure, it's a gritty Scandinavian film so perhaps it's more serious than that. Could get pretty nasty.
I'd heard the film mentioned in a number of places, but nothing that I'd heard really gave me much of a clue as to what the film was about. And that's where THIS review comes in. If you've wanted to know what this film is about without having to worry about spoilers, that's pretty much my speciality.
Perhaps the biggest problem with describing what "Headhunters" is about (and, as a result, one of the biggest problems with enjoying the film itself), is that it doesn't really seem to be sure what kind of film it wants to be.
We begin seemingly right in the middle of the action, being given careful instructions on how to steal a painting. Cold, calculating and genuinely seeming pretty clever. These seem like they must be a set of rules that will be vital to the rest of the movie. - Except that actually stealing paintings isn't really a vital part of the rest of the film.
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Then we discover that the painting stealing is all to fund the protagonist's highly extravagant lifestyle because he's convinced that his wife would leave him if she ever knew that he did not really make the huge salary to afford it. Still cold and calculating, the protagonist comes off like a bit of an arse, but that's the dark gritty film we were expecting. Unfortunately, the protagonist's vast expenses don't really play much of a part in the film as a whole either.
The protagonist's day job, it turns out, is as a 'headhunter' for businesses. He helps them choose candidates for important roles. A man comes to him for help in switching companies, but the protagonist decides to double cross this man when he believes that this potential candidate for the job is having an affair with his wife. Unfortunately it turns out that this person has a dark background of their own. It seems like he's crossed the wrong person. Suddenly things start going wrong for him and before he knows it, he is essentially being hunted down.
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From this point on, the film becomes a less realistic version of the horror classic "The Hitcher", except that the villain is no Rutger Hauer and as this villain's methods become more and more extreme, the protagonist appears to be indestructible. (I'm not going to spoil what happens, but trust me, it's utterly daft that the protagonist survives.)
Early on in the chase there's a point where the protagonist is forced to hide in a pile of excrement inside a toilet with only a toilet roll tube to breathe with. It's utterly disgusting, but it was admittedly quite a tense scene. Unfortunately the writers clearly thought they needed to up the ante with more and more ridiculousness from that point on.
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The point where I felt completely cheated by the film, however, was where it suddenly decided to go from having a completely unsympathetic anti-hero in a cat-and-mouse chase plot, to making the whole thing some kind of moral tale. Apparently all the protagonist needed to do was learn a lesson and that lesson, of all things, was that he needed to have more confidence.
Seriously? This is a cold and calculating art thief, who steals in order to afford a luxurious lifestyle for himself and his wife, to whom he shows very little respect. And I'm expected to believe that his major issue is that he's not confident enough?
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His major issue remains that he's a complete arse, plain and simple. The events of this film do not make him a hero, or even a relatively sympathetic anti-hero. He remains an arse who, to be quite frank, deserves everything he gets and a whole lot more.
Utter nonsense from start to finish, yet not in the least bit fun. Give it a miss.
D-
Maniac (1980)
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Apparently a remake of this is about to be released starring Elijah Wood. I am inclined to argue, having now seen the original, that this is completely impossible. You cannot remake this. Here's why...
Now first of all, let's just make clear that I don't feel Elijah Wood is somehow incapable of playing a psycho killer. He already played one, in "Sin City", and it was a psycho killer that eats women no less. So that side of things is just fine.
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My problem is that two films about psychos who kill people does not at all imply that one is a remake, sequel, prequel, reboot, or whatever, of the other. There needs to be some wider concept, some kind of a plot, something which makes it clear that the one is somehow connected to the other.
Maniac has NO plot. It's a film where the only thing that happens is murder. One woman (mainly prostitutes) murdered after another by a very dull central character. The whole film is very slowly paced with little in the way of suspense, yet everything that happens is predictable and inevitable.
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I resented being forced to listen to the main character rant throughout the film, not because that can never work, but because it simply was not done in an interesting way. The Tobe Hooper movie "Death Trap" (aka "Eaten Alive") also features a ranting killer maniac, and while admittedly I found it irritating there too, I was able to get past it and enjoy the film. The problem here is that there's not really much respite from the central character's ranting. Very few characters turn up in the film.
There is, however, one good thing about the movie "Maniac". While it might not even remotely work as a film, it does work as a showcase for Tom Savini's incredible talent for gore effects. The gore includes someone's scalp being taken off and even someone's face being ripped apart. Effects have come a long way since then, so considering the era and the low budget I found the effects to be very impressive indeed.
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In the end this is less a film and more an ultra slow-paced showcase for Savini's gore effects. If I was judging it as a showcase for gore effects I might give it a pretty good score (though I'd have to take into account how massively slow the whole thing is), but judging this as a piece of entertainment I cannot rate it at all. There's no plot, the central character has less depth than the DVD the film came on, and the whole thing is (I'm sorry to be repetitive here) PAINFULLY slow.
U+
(Cross-posted to Halloween Candy)
Headhunters (2011)
Ok here were my first impressions based on the poster:
Wow, there's a guy on the poster wearing a suit and holding a gun! Looks gritty, yet somehow kind of fun at the same time. A bit like "American Psycho"... But sure, it's a gritty Scandinavian film so perhaps it's more serious than that. Could get pretty nasty.
I'd heard the film mentioned in a number of places, but nothing that I'd heard really gave me much of a clue as to what the film was about. And that's where THIS review comes in. If you've wanted to know what this film is about without having to worry about spoilers, that's pretty much my speciality.
Perhaps the biggest problem with describing what "Headhunters" is about (and, as a result, one of the biggest problems with enjoying the film itself), is that it doesn't really seem to be sure what kind of film it wants to be.
We begin seemingly right in the middle of the action, being given careful instructions on how to steal a painting. Cold, calculating and genuinely seeming pretty clever. These seem like they must be a set of rules that will be vital to the rest of the movie. - Except that actually stealing paintings isn't really a vital part of the rest of the film.
Then we discover that the painting stealing is all to fund the protagonist's highly extravagant lifestyle because he's convinced that his wife would leave him if she ever knew that he did not really make the huge salary to afford it. Still cold and calculating, the protagonist comes off like a bit of an arse, but that's the dark gritty film we were expecting. Unfortunately, the protagonist's vast expenses don't really play much of a part in the film as a whole either.
The protagonist's day job, it turns out, is as a 'headhunter' for businesses. He helps them choose candidates for important roles. A man comes to him for help in switching companies, but the protagonist decides to double cross this man when he believes that this potential candidate for the job is having an affair with his wife. Unfortunately it turns out that this person has a dark background of their own. It seems like he's crossed the wrong person. Suddenly things start going wrong for him and before he knows it, he is essentially being hunted down.
From this point on, the film becomes a less realistic version of the horror classic "The Hitcher", except that the villain is no Rutger Hauer and as this villain's methods become more and more extreme, the protagonist appears to be indestructible. (I'm not going to spoil what happens, but trust me, it's utterly daft that the protagonist survives.)
Early on in the chase there's a point where the protagonist is forced to hide in a pile of excrement inside a toilet with only a toilet roll tube to breathe with. It's utterly disgusting, but it was admittedly quite a tense scene. Unfortunately the writers clearly thought they needed to up the ante with more and more ridiculousness from that point on.
The point where I felt completely cheated by the film, however, was where it suddenly decided to go from having a completely unsympathetic anti-hero in a cat-and-mouse chase plot, to making the whole thing some kind of moral tale. Apparently all the protagonist needed to do was learn a lesson and that lesson, of all things, was that he needed to have more confidence.
Seriously? This is a cold and calculating art thief, who steals in order to afford a luxurious lifestyle for himself and his wife, to whom he shows very little respect. And I'm expected to believe that his major issue is that he's not confident enough?
His major issue remains that he's a complete arse, plain and simple. The events of this film do not make him a hero, or even a relatively sympathetic anti-hero. He remains an arse who, to be quite frank, deserves everything he gets and a whole lot more.
Utter nonsense from start to finish, yet not in the least bit fun. Give it a miss.
D-
Maniac (1980)
Apparently a remake of this is about to be released starring Elijah Wood. I am inclined to argue, having now seen the original, that this is completely impossible. You cannot remake this. Here's why...
Now first of all, let's just make clear that I don't feel Elijah Wood is somehow incapable of playing a psycho killer. He already played one, in "Sin City", and it was a psycho killer that eats women no less. So that side of things is just fine.
My problem is that two films about psychos who kill people does not at all imply that one is a remake, sequel, prequel, reboot, or whatever, of the other. There needs to be some wider concept, some kind of a plot, something which makes it clear that the one is somehow connected to the other.
Maniac has NO plot. It's a film where the only thing that happens is murder. One woman (mainly prostitutes) murdered after another by a very dull central character. The whole film is very slowly paced with little in the way of suspense, yet everything that happens is predictable and inevitable.
I resented being forced to listen to the main character rant throughout the film, not because that can never work, but because it simply was not done in an interesting way. The Tobe Hooper movie "Death Trap" (aka "Eaten Alive") also features a ranting killer maniac, and while admittedly I found it irritating there too, I was able to get past it and enjoy the film. The problem here is that there's not really much respite from the central character's ranting. Very few characters turn up in the film.
There is, however, one good thing about the movie "Maniac". While it might not even remotely work as a film, it does work as a showcase for Tom Savini's incredible talent for gore effects. The gore includes someone's scalp being taken off and even someone's face being ripped apart. Effects have come a long way since then, so considering the era and the low budget I found the effects to be very impressive indeed.
In the end this is less a film and more an ultra slow-paced showcase for Savini's gore effects. If I was judging it as a showcase for gore effects I might give it a pretty good score (though I'd have to take into account how massively slow the whole thing is), but judging this as a piece of entertainment I cannot rate it at all. There's no plot, the central character has less depth than the DVD the film came on, and the whole thing is (I'm sorry to be repetitive here) PAINFULLY slow.
U+
(Cross-posted to Halloween Candy)