Murder à la Mod

[lordofdance]

I just watched this early Brian De Palma movie and it is seriously odd. Maybe 40% of it is odd in an entertaining/interesting sort of way, while the rest of it is odd in a "What the hell is stupid shit in here for?" sort of way. The narrative is set up kind of like Pulp Fiction/Elephant and some other movie that I can't think of off the top of my head. It bounces around a lot and keeps shifting character perspectives, so it requires a decent amount of concentration to figure out what's going on. It's a murder mystery, but very experimental in its approach.

Maybe it's just me, but what really ruins the movie is the Otto character. This guy is a jibbering idiot and he's always darting around in quick motion. I tried to find some artistic purpose for including such an obnoxious character, but I couldn't. I don't know what De Palma was thinking. I enjoyed everything but the Otto parts, but he gets a disheartening amount of screentime.

The ending is kind of creepy, though.

Grossness **
Cruelty **1/2
Overall Disturbing Content **
Nudity *1/2
Film Quality ** (Without Otto, ***)

[criterionmaster]

I was wondering about this movie actually, when I was doing that seriously insanely long post in the Something Weird thread I came across this DVD. Did you happen to see it on this DVD?



I enjoy De Palma films, but don't think he is a master. Based on your review I would guess it isn't worth checking out, then? Also, if you got that DVD, did you watch the other film? If that happened to be super good somehow, then I might just rent this DVD.

[lordofdance]

Yeah, I own the Something Weird DVD. I just picked it up a few days ago. It's hard to say if you'll like it or not. It is very interesting stylistically, I just hated the Otto character. I'm really mixed on my feelings about it.

I haven't watched the other movie yet. I'll try to check it out soon and let you know my thoughts. If you want to know about any of the other Something Weird DVDs, I own almost all of them. I've been trying to watch them all, but it's not always an enjoyable experience. There have a few that really sucked, even with the nudity and violence.

[criterionmaster]

Yeah, I will probably watch it someday, just because I want to see all the SW DVD's.

That is fucking insane dude, there are so many of them. I will ask here, but can you answer in the Something Weird thread, how is Night of the Bloody Apes (I can't remember if that is the exact title haha), it is coming up on my queue? I will ask questions about more films in that thread sometimes too.