Yellow on yellow done by the master of yellow

Giallo (2009)

Giallo is Italian for yellow, but it's also a genre of horror film which characteristics are stylish camerawork with unusual music and extremely long murder sequences with sometimes slow motion footage. Dario Argento is, or at least was, the master of giallo's, his earlier works are true definite genre classics. So when he gets to direct a script that sounds like a homage to all of the giallo classics with a fairly large budget and a very solid actor, Adrien Brody, starring it, every giallo fan should be jumping with joy. Well unfortunately the main emotion among the fans was probably fear of what the outcome will be. At least it was for me as for the last 20 years Argento has made a mixed range of movies mostly from bad ones to the absolute garbage. Seemed like the master had lost his touch, or maybe it was just that he wanted to try to do some conventional horror with quite bad results. Surely he can still return to his level of brilliance where he was with the genre he helped to define. Unfortunately not. First of all what was good in this movie. Adrien Brody does a solid job with the dual part he has and is the carrying force of the movie when everything else fails. The rest of the cast isn't anything special, but do a fairly ok job none the less. The script is a bit too corny at parts, but still in the company of it's kind, it's not bad at all. Sure the idea of a man with a liver disease that turns his skin yellow running around in a taxi killing young women in a movie like a giallo is a bit over the top in "yellow". But then again it has all the right ingredients in there so it didn't bother much. What really did bother was that Argento is completely lost in the world he himself helped to create. Apart from the name of the movie, and of course the color of the killer, there's not much giallo in this one. The visual style is very straight forward, being even quite documentary like at parts and that's definitely not what giallo's are all about. The music is like a stock horror movie music, another thing that's definitely not from the world of giallo's. The murder sequences are somewhat typical, but without the visual and audio style they lose all their effect and just become numbing. At the beginning there were a few shots that made me believe there is hope for the movie, but it crashes and burns soon after. As a conventional horror movie this is decent, a bit below average but not a horrible effort as Adrien Brody and some good parts of the script manage to hold it together when things go wrong. But as a giallo, it's unfortunately the worst giallo ever made and thus one point. I really beg that Dario Argento would just retire from film making and let his legacy live it's own life. I mean I absolutely love the older Argento movies and really adore his style in them, but his new movies are just pissing on the old ones and while doing that also on me as a fan of them.
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