Kaos' way behind movie reviews

[Kaos]

The Calendar Killer

German film. But there's one guy in it you'd recognize if you're a fan of Better Call Saul - the sappy, wife-missing German engineer Werner Zeigler, who was the lead architect/designer of what eventually became Walter and Gus' laundry/meth lab. Too bad he doesn't have much to do here.

The film is a unnecessarily confusing in parts, opening rabbit hole doors to where you question whether the 'final girl' actually sees or experiences the things she claims to see/experience. That's only one of the main issues here. The film tries to juggle at least five or six different story arcs and at the end, it drops the ball on nearly all of them.

The arcs:
1. Jules' (a guy) life as a helpline operator, dealing with his own personal loss
2. Jules' tangled relationship with his father
3. Klara's mental lapses and possible delusions, which at one point had her committed
4. Klara's possibly abusive relationship with her politically powerful husband
5. Klara's interaction with Jules when she becomes the target of the "Calendar Killer."
6. The Calendar Killer's strange "kill somebody else or I'll kill you" modus operandi

All of these are interwoven but each is given what essentially amounts to superficial treatment. Had the film taken only the Calendar Killer aspect and built its foundation there, it might have been pretty decent.  Or if it had focused entirely on Klara's struggles with her husband and the effort to escape his perverted (maybe?) abuse, it might have succeeded. Instead you only get a little taste of each of the flavors.

One thing to be clear on: This is not a Christmas movie despite the insertion of at least one Christmas carol, the presence of Christmas trees, the appearance of a live Santa, and the use of a bejeweled Santa Claus lapel pin. All of those things are merely incidental to the story (muddled mess that it is) and not central to the events.

Maybe I'll start rating films as Pass or Play since this is kind of a sports board?  Or Punt or Play?  Unless you're into confusing German films, this is a Punt.

[Kaos]

Speak No Evil

I've never wanted the protagonists to die in a grisly, horrible way more than I did the frosty, insufferable, self-involved, hypocritical c*** at the heart of this film.  I don't know who she is or what else she's been in, but I despised the lantern-jawed, slack ass McKenzie Davis. I had a nearly equal measure of hate for her mewling wimpy cuck of a husband.

I guess we were supposed to root for their escape from an unraveling McAvoy and his wife. I just wanted all of them - Jug Head B****, Sniveling Hubby, Snarling McAvoy, Kinda Sexy McAvoy wife --  all of them except the girl who played the daughter and maybe the kid playing the son,  to perish in some kind of creative gruesome way.  But the c*** first. Good lord I hated her character. I wish 15 minutes of the film had been her being set on fire and stuffed in a fireplace. Grab me a hot cocoa and watch it like the Christmas Yule Log until it was nothing but ash. Loathed every single second that no-tit fish face was on the screen.

ANYWAY... I hated her.

The movie opens with the c***'s family meeting McAvoy's at a resort in Italy. They vacay-bond and decide to go visit the McAvoy's in rural England for a long weekend away. Well... it turns out McAvoy and his fam isn't exactly what they seemed to be. They're trying to get the family thing right, but sometimes that means they have to hit the reset button in some cruel and violent ways.

McAvoy is pretty good. He handles the slowly unspooling menace with the right touch of barely restrained rage and fury - until he doesn't. I was thinking he'd make a really good werewolf during this, actually.

The setting was good, the crazy insertion of some musical choices was interesting. The tension the film created was solid - except I kept finding myself wanting needle dick and his square-headed b**** wife to fall off a roof, get impaled on a fence, eaten by a goat, something... It's bad when you want the psycho killer to get away with it.

Dickless and the stick-figure c*** were obviously a problem, but the biggest problem this film had was the languid pace at which McAvoy's psychotic turn rolled out. It took a long time.  Like more than 3/4 of the film. The rest of it was just occasional nibbles of "something might not be right around here..."  When he broke bad, though, he broke bad with the appropriate level of creepy menace. He's a good actor and makes almost anything he's in worth at least one watch. (If you haven't seen him in Last King of Scotland, atone and watch that one now. Great performance).

It wasn't a bad movie, and I won't punt/pass on it.  But I won't ever watch it again because I want the uptight hoor wife to fall off a cliff and be shattered on the rocks below 11.2 seconds into the film.  I don't ever want to see or hear her again.