Giallo (2009)

Featured Audience Ratings

• Lee ?

  
  Dario Argento's latest offering has been absolutely torn to shreds by fans and critics so I wasn't expecting much from this at all but I ended up enjoying it a lot more than others seemed to. The story is fairly straightforward which has a New York FBI agent based in Turino… More
  Dario Argento's latest offering has been absolutely torn to shreds by fans and critics so I wasn't expecting much from this at all but I ended up enjoying it a lot more than others seemed to. The story is fairly straightforward which has a New York FBI agent based in Turino on the trail of a killer who has bern kidnapping and murdering pretty foreign women. It's a pretty violent film with a real vicious streak to it so it racks up a decent amount of bloody content. The film has a good pace and is never boring and always on the move. You can't help but laugh at the killer though with his strong resemblance to John Rambo lol! The films ending was a little anti-climactic unfortunately, it could have gone out with a bit more of a bang or a plot twist. I found this one better than Argento's previous two films, especially The Card Player. It's not great but it still has entertainment value.

• ♥˩ƳИИ &

  
  Cast: Adrien Brody, Elsa Pataky, Emmanuelle Seigner, Bryon Deidra, Robert Miano, Luis Molteni, Taiyo Yamanouchi Director: Dario Argento Summary: Adrien Brody stars as Insp. Enzo Avolfi, who trails a sadistic serial killer in this thriller from Italian horror master Dario… More
  Cast: Adrien Brody, Elsa Pataky, Emmanuelle Seigner, Bryon Deidra, Robert Miano, Luis Molteni, Taiyo Yamanouchi Director: Dario Argento Summary: Adrien Brody stars as Insp. Enzo Avolfi, who trails a sadistic serial killer in this thriller from Italian horror master Dario Argento. As the mutilated bodies of beautiful women litter Milan, Avolfi races to find the latest abductee. When Linda (Emmanuelle Seigner) reports her fashion model sister Celine (Elsa Pataky) missing, Avolfi knows the death clock ticks. Now he must step into madness to stop the psychopath (Bryon Deidra). My Thoughts: "Wow, this was kinda, no it was, bad. No thrill, no scare, not even a decent killer. The music was bad too. A bit dramatic when it wasn't needed. The acting...well it just wasn't great either and I was so surprised that Adrien Brody could read this script and come to the conclusion that it was worth his talent. I can just assume he needed the money cause this has to be the worse film I have seen him in. This was a big miss in every way."

• Cassandra M

  
  Even the worst Dario Argento films have managed to at least get DVD releases in the past decade or so, so the fact that Giallo was filmed two years ago and is still unreleased in most of the world aside from a handful of badly received festival screenings where it was laughed off the… More
  Even the worst Dario Argento films have managed to at least get DVD releases in the past decade or so, so the fact that Giallo was filmed two years ago and is still unreleased in most of the world aside from a handful of badly received festival screenings where it was laughed off the screen doesn't exactly fill you with confidence. It may not be the director's favorite film by a long shot - despite the misleading 'written and directed by' credit, he was simply a director for hire with the script written by the separately credited Jim Agnew and Sean Keller with the producers apparently no longer returning his phone calls - but it's fair to say that it's a long way from being his worst, thankfully never descending to the depths of Phantom of the Opera or the lacklustre The Card Player. Unfortunately it's also not especially good. The story is serviceable enough, with model Elsa Pataky abducted by a deformed serial killer who likes to take his time destroying beautiful things and her frantic sister (a haggard Emmanuelle Seigner) teaming up with Adrian Brody's broody Italian-American cop to find her while there's still enough of her to find. Despite the set-up, it avoids going the Eli Roth torture porn route, but there are few of Argento's signature flourishes. Not only are the gloves literally off but the film's one 'big' death scene is nothing to write home about: just a simple fall from a tall building. Worse, a couple of minor twists aside, the plot just plods along with not much happening until the last half hour before a last scene that feels like it was tacked on not so much to give the film a happy ending but because what you suspect was the original ending didn't pack enough of a punch. While it's generally better executed, there are fewer ideas to play with than his less than impressive Mother of Tears, and what there are are fairly familiar cop movie clichés. True, Adrien Brody's lone cop does have a rather neat backstory explaining why he has a talent for tracking down predatory killers, but the early hints of having a damaging Will Graham-like empathy with his killer come to nothing despite Brody playing both hunters because they're such wildly different performances linked only by silly voices (a grizzled Jack Nicholson-Mickey Rourke hybrid for the cop and an Italian Quasimodo for the killer). It's probably the killer's voice that provided the lion's share of the laughs to those derisive festival audiences, but Brody Methodically overdoes the tortured doleful looks as the cop, at times looking like the Eighth Dwarf, Goatee, after Snow White bit the apple. On the plus side, thanks to Frederic Fasano's cinematography it's the best-looking Argento film in years. It's not a return to the extreme and vivid colors of the Suspiria years but it's a welcome move away from the pallid and lifeless look of many of his latter movies to something with a bit more warmth to its color scheme and a good eye for the Turin locations. But overall, despite all the Argento touchstones the writers incorporated in the screenplay, it's a rather soft by-the-numbers effort that could have been made by almost any capable director whose heart wasn't quite in it but still tried to make the best of what he had to work with. You won't have trouble making it through to the end, but you won't have trouble sleeping after seeing it either.

• Chris G

  
  Giallo has to be one of the dumbest thrillers I've witnessed in a long time. It's a meandering piece of drivel filled with the typical cliches and twists that have filled the genre for the last fifty years, culminating in a climax that is not fulfilling and brings the film… More
  Giallo has to be one of the dumbest thrillers I've witnessed in a long time. It's a meandering piece of drivel filled with the typical cliches and twists that have filled the genre for the last fifty years, culminating in a climax that is not fulfilling and brings the film screeching to a halt you'll glad to achieve after the 90 minutes of claptrap. The film is about an ugly yellow killer, killing models while being pursued by a cop from New York (Adrian Brody). Add in some gore and a crappy script and you get the idea. I can't say much more about it other than it sucks. Cheers.

• A.D. V

  
  And continuing Argento's downward trend...

• Eric S

  
  Always good to see something new from the brilliant Dario Argento. Giallo is a film dealing with a brutal killer that tortures and ultimately kills his victims in unspeakable ways. It centers upon an American woman(Emmanuelle Seigner) in Milan who teams up with a top notch Italian… More
  Always good to see something new from the brilliant Dario Argento. Giallo is a film dealing with a brutal killer that tortures and ultimately kills his victims in unspeakable ways. It centers upon an American woman(Emmanuelle Seigner) in Milan who teams up with a top notch Italian detective(Adrien Brody) to track down her sister who has vanished. The suspense created with the fine cinematography, music,bloodshed, etc. helps define the stark madness of an outcast who turns his hatred of himself on the beautiful. Giallo means yellow(cowardly) in Italian which is so well defined with the happenings in this film.

• Drew S

  
  A pretty profound disappointment, this is a generally unimaginative giallo, reading more like torture porn than an homage to the form that inspired it. harrycaul makes a great point about its loaded title; a movie directed by Dario Argento, starring Adrien Brody, and called… More
  A pretty profound disappointment, this is a generally unimaginative giallo, reading more like torture porn than an homage to the form that inspired it. harrycaul makes a great point about its loaded title; a movie directed by Dario Argento, starring Adrien Brody, and called "GIALLO" in enormous yellow letters promises emptily to be some revelatory throwback thriller. Instead, what we have here is a lazily plotted, lazily shot movie that really seems to lack for inspiration. There are a couple of interesting narrative conceits toward the end of the film, like a creative mutual choke-hold that the villain and the heroine have each other in and a jarring final clash between her and Brody, but really, there isn't much here that we haven't seen before. The performances are half-decent, but I'm not a big fan of Emmanuelle Sagnier. Her face seems frozen. Brody is clearly invested, but the movie never offers a reason to care about the character. The parallel between his past tragedies and his current obsessions, additionally, doesn't really mesh. And, uh, the guy playing the killer is pretty ridiculous and not scary in the slightest. Argento seems content to let these discordant pieces of the film fall into place and form a final product, rather than helping them to work in unison. There isn't much that compels Giallo from scene to scene, not the least of which is its rather minimal sense of urgency (and there should be some definite urgency here). I still enjoyed the movie on a basic level, but it could have been so much more, both within and outside of its pedigree. If you want to be a really fancy film nerd, you could posit this as a pseudo-biography of Argento himself. As someone who's spent his career leveling himself against accusations of misogyny, the "destroying something beautiful" aspect of the film could easily be slapped on him. Apparently he suffered jaundice as a child too. Pretty uncomfortable to think about, but interesting nonetheless.

• Brian D

  
  O M G what a piece of shit!!!!! I am sorry but Dario Argento is one of the wrost directors ever and rides the wagon with Uwe Boll. But at least boll is fun to watch! I have not seen any argento film that i liked but this is surly the worst of all. And adrien Brody W T F was he doing… More
  O M G what a piece of shit!!!!! I am sorry but Dario Argento is one of the wrost directors ever and rides the wagon with Uwe Boll. But at least boll is fun to watch! I have not seen any argento film that i liked but this is surly the worst of all. And adrien Brody W T F was he doing starring and producing in this.The two leads just stand there looking wooded and not intrested at all. The plot is flat and boring.Just stay away from this........you have been warned...

• Carlos M

  
  Argento's new giallo never goes beyond conventional, since the actors are all inexpressive here, the plot is only ordinary, and he never displays the directing skills that made him such a respected cult filmmaker.

• Stephen M

  
  Just as the term <i>film noir</i> was coined by the French to describe the cinematic equivalent of their black-jacketed hardboiled crime literature, the <i>giallo</i>, the Italian slasher movie, derives its name from the series of lurid, yellow paperbacks that… More
  Just as the term <i>film noir</i> was coined by the French to describe the cinematic equivalent of their black-jacketed hardboiled crime literature, the <i>giallo</i>, the Italian slasher movie, derives its name from the series of lurid, yellow paperbacks that directly inspired the films. By boldly naming his movie after the genre that has sustained him for the past forty years - the genre which he has done more than anybody else to popularise and of which he was once the undisputed master - you'd be forgiven for thinking that Dario Argento has something important to say here. A definitive statement? The culmination of a lifetime's work? Dare we even whisper it, a return to form?!?! Alas, nothing could be further from the truth. I won't give anything away because, quite frankly, this utterly dreadful film is short of surprises, even lame ones; let's just say I was reading too much into the origin of that title. Aside from the increasingly unpleasant level of misogyny on display, Argento's recent work has been characterised by a preference for realistic backdrops. To say that Argento and realism go together like oil and water would be an understatement; realism is the salt to his slug! Even the best of Argento is too silly to bear close scrutiny but it gets by on bravura style coupled with a certain dreamlike logic; shine the harsh, natural light of day into his world and it just falls apart, becomes ridiculous. Argento is also one of those directors whose films rarely reach a satisfactory conclusion; they either end too abruptly or contain a final twist they'd have been better off without, <i>Opera</i> being a good example of the latter. As with <i>Sleepless</i>, the credits of <i>Giallo</i> begin to roll before the movie seems to have finished, as if the director reached an arbitrary point, got bored (what took him so long???) and called a wrap. Anyway, I've now come to the conclusion that Dario Argento should be forcibly restrained from making any more movies. Oh, just in case you can't see through terrible acting and worse make-up, here's an anagram for your two year old child to solve: Byron Deidra

• Deb S

  
  In the city of Turino, a hood-capped killer with a hideous appearance and sick persona abducts sexy and beautiful women who happens to hail his taxi. He then takes them to his secret liar where he has an operating table and a wide selection of delightful torture devices where he… More
  In the city of Turino, a hood-capped killer with a hideous appearance and sick persona abducts sexy and beautiful women who happens to hail his taxi. He then takes them to his secret liar where he has an operating table and a wide selection of delightful torture devices where he performs all kinds of horrors to his victims in order to destroy their beauty. When he kidnaps the gorgeous young model Celine (Elsa Pataky), her older sister Linda (Emmanuelle Seigner) teams up with Inspector Enzo Avolfi (Adrien Brody, who's a reasonably creepy individual himself and a man with a past to find her while there's still enough of her to find.

• Sylvester K

  
  One of Argento's worst, it was not violent or graphic. The storyline is too predictable also the acting was horrible, Gosh Dario is getting old

• Doctor S

  
  If the name Dario Argento means anything to you, don't be fooled - there is nothing in <i>Giallo</i> to distinguish it from any other second-rate serial killer drudgery. Weak plot, lame killer, only a couple brief acts of gruesome violence (if that's your thing)… More
  If the name Dario Argento means anything to you, don't be fooled - there is nothing in <i>Giallo</i> to distinguish it from any other second-rate serial killer drudgery. Weak plot, lame killer, only a couple brief acts of gruesome violence (if that's your thing) have any chance to leave an impression. What you really get is 90 minutes of Brody smoking, Seigner pleading, and Pataky screaming to test your patience.<br/><br/>I counted at least eight producers, three executive producers, and two associate producers in the credits, a telling indicator that <i>nobody</i> had much confidence this would turn out for the good.

• John M

  
  ¨Giallo¨ is a decent offering from the italian director, that isn't actually a giallo(it is a torture porn flix). It has some raw and bloody scene, as well as, close up of them, as ussual in Argento´s movies. The acting is decent, there is a little tension and the visuals are… More
  ¨Giallo¨ is a decent offering from the italian director, that isn't actually a giallo(it is a torture porn flix). It has some raw and bloody scene, as well as, close up of them, as ussual in Argento´s movies. The acting is decent, there is a little tension and the visuals are bland. Not really a great come back Argento but still entertaining..

• Christopher B

  
  Oh my. A film that could irrevocably destroy everyone's career that was involved with it. Deservedly so. Barely so bad it's good, it's more "so bad it's astonishing". Scenes stay in wide shots as actors pause, waiting for their cue, ludicrous plot… More
  Oh my. A film that could irrevocably destroy everyone's career that was involved with it. Deservedly so. Barely so bad it's good, it's more "so bad it's astonishing". Scenes stay in wide shots as actors pause, waiting for their cue, ludicrous plot devices are used and logic is continuously thrown to the wind. Brody sucks horribly as both the determined detective and the killer Yellow, who looks like a cross between Splitting Image puppets of Rambo and Woody Allen. Whoever the lead gal was (I can't be bothered to look up her name) was even worse, but unlike a lot of films where the rule is, "If there is a worse actor in the scene everyone else can get away with poor acting" it seems Argento was holding a competition on who could give the worst performance. In that case, everyone's a winner. Just terrible, and I'm not an Argento fan, but I can see where fans would forgive his bad writing and characters because of his style, but now it's just plain garbage. Embarrassing.

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