Horror has seen its fair share of parodies, but none have gone so deep and played to such a specific audience as The Editor. Consistently funny from its blood-soaked opening to its bizarre end, the film is definitely guided by horror fans – in this case Adam Brooks and Matthew Kennedy (two parts of the filmmaking collective known as Astron-6) – and is for horror fans, particularly those who love the vivid, sometimes surreal world, of Italian giallo cinema. Concurrently, The Editor simply a good giallo throwback, hitting all of the right beats where so many have contemporary attempts have failed.
Does it get a bit too in-jokey? Maybe it will shut out some folks who might not get the purposely weird dubbing on some characters or the deliberate jabs at the misogyny or Paz de la Huerta’s acting (okay, maybe no one gets her approach to acting – it makes me a smile nonetheless), but I feel that perhaps its “inside” nature makes it all the more intimate to the die-hard horror nuts. Finally, we have a parody that we can embrace that’s not the tripe that passes for horror humor in Scary Movie or A Haunted House. Further, The Editor doesn’t hold back riddled with gore, nudity and all sorts of zaniness so what the hell is there not to love?
Brooks – yes, he directs and stars – plays Rey Ciso, a film editor who lost his fingers in an accident (while he was having a mental meltdown). He now wears prosthetic fingers made out of wood and struggles with the fact that he might not be as skillful an editor as he once was. While working on a new horror film, Ciso is thrust into a murder mystery. A killer – who speaks in raspy whispers – is knocking off people on the production and cutting off their fingers. An investigator positions Ciso as the prime suspect and from there, The Editor spirals in wild directions, shifting back and forth between Ciso and the investigator until shocking revelations occur in the third act.
De la Huerta plays Ciso’s wife, a former starlet who tires of his obsession with work, Laurence Harvey has a great turn as a priest (or, “wizard’) and Udo Kier drops in for a cameo. There are a lot of great gags here, too, that I don’t want to give away. But to put things in perspective in terms of how “out there” The Editor goes: There’s a moment where a young woman sees something so terrifying it makes her go blind. Later, she gets herself a seeing eye dog…that’s a German Shepherd. If that reference goes over your head, maybe the film isn’t for you.
Then again, like I said, The Editor holds up rather well as a giallo all on its own. It just comes with a lot of random, weird shit – sometimes out of nowhere. Occasionally it threatens to buckle under the weight of the running time, but there’s enough material here to keep the laughs going. And kudos to Astron-6 for their best-looking film to date. This is a handsomely produced film and an ambitious one at that.
