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THE KILLER IS STILL AMONG US

Hang on to your hat, Dear Reader. This isn't going to be pretty.

Where to start with THE KILLER IS STILL AMONG US? What is the proper approach to take when faced with such a magnitude of failure? I suppose I could lament the sorry state of affairs that was the giallo film in the 1980s but I've already done that bit before. I could also, if I were so inclined, start by giving you a rundown of all the better films this 1986 effort lifts from. But that would put perhaps a bit too fine an underline on just how remarkably shit this film is. Maybe the best way to begin is by giving you a complete - SPOILER ALERT - rundown of the film's plot.

Christiana is a Criminology student at a local university. She has chosen to write her thesis on the infamous Couples Killer that has been gunning down lovers for the past several months. She meets a handsome doctor named Alex and the two, in typical Italian genre fashion, fall madly in love instantaneously. As Christiana digs deeper into the case, she begins to believe that Alex might very well be the killer. She begins receiving threatening phone calls, the people she turns to for help all begin dying and she is becoming more and more aware that someone will stop at nothing to stop her from writing her paper.

OK, that last bit was a bit of an exaggeration. What really happens is... nothing much.

Christiana begins to think that the killer - a man who tracks down couples sitting in parked cars and then shoots them while they're making love - might be a voyeur. And no sooner than you can say "no shit!", she's off hanging around with a bunch of degenerates who spend their time spying on people while they make noisy love in cars. When that turns out to be of absolutely no use to anyone - especially us - she wanders around for half an hour until one of her friends is viciously murdered. Completely out of ideas, she decides to attend a seance. Though the purpose of the seance is to summon the soul of her recently murdered friend in the hopes that she will be able to identify the killer, the psychic instead begins to see a murder taking place - GASP! - at that very moment!

Christiana rushes to the theater where Alex is supposedly watching a Hitchcock film. She wanders through the darkened theater, hopes beginning to crumble, suspicions beginning to be confirmed that Alex really is the murderous madman. And then she finds him. Christiana sits down beside Alex - nevermind contacting the police to let them know someone is being murdered in the woods - and the two watch the film together, happy and content. As the credits begin to roll, a brief statement comes onscreen to inform us that "This film as made as a warning to young people and with the hope that it will be of use to law enforcement to bring these ferocious killers to justice."

Seriously. That's how the film ends.

By now my love for the giallo film should not be in question. I genuinely love the form. I love the arch, convoluted, nonsensical narratives. I love the gaudy fashion. I love the histrionic performances, the melodramatic scores, the splattery asides and implausible explanations. I love it all. The problem is this: this film manages to contain none of what makes a giallo film great. Even Ernesto Gastaldi, perhaps the greatest giallo screenwriter of all time, doesn't seem interested in this mess. His screenplay is devoid of anything even remotely interesting or inventive. It's stuck on auto-pilot, traveling 10 miles an hour down Cliche Avenue.

The only saving grace of this film is that it's unintentionally hilarious. Some of the dialogue seems straight out of another film. Take, for example, the Professor describing the killer's methods. We're told that "his sacrificial way of killing echoes certain ancient Mediterranean and pre-Christian agricultural rituals" even though the killer's "sacrificial way of killing" is simply shooting people to death with a handgun then mutilating their genitalia. Then there's the idea of a psychic being able to summon the spirit of a deceased individual so that they can ID their killer. Now that is hilariously absurd of course, but just think about how many man hours that would save at police stations around the world. Come to think of it, wouldn't that be your first choice? Why bother with all of this running around and digging for clues if you could just pony up some dough to a local psychic?

Read any amount of online reviews for this film and you're likely to hear just how nasty people think it is. It isn't. This isn't NEW YORK RIPPER or GIALLO A VENEZIA. Some of the post-shooting stuff is pretty graphic - a woman has her nipple cut off and her pubic area scalped - but the effects are so poorly done that you're not likely to feel anything close to queasiness. What tends to be left out of most of the reviews I've read is all the stuff I just spelled out for you here. It's tedious, it's dull, it's visually flat and it is painfully contrived. When you add up all the things this film does wrong, you're left with the impression that no one involved in the film actually gave a damn about it.

Just like I don't give a damn about it.

Terrible.