I was first alerted to this film some years ago when watching Bravo's "One Hundred Scariest Movie Moments" with my wife. We're both movie fanatics, so we watched the list and made a check list. Not having seen it prior to the list, and striking out at our local video store (Hollywood Video, rest in peace), I hadn't given the movie another thought until last week, when I noticed it on Amazon Prime (a solid investment). So, I watched it.
I wish I could get those two hours back.
I was reading recently about how the website "AV Club" rates movies. Following in the tradition of the "Gentlemen's C" (the lowest passible grade imaginable, reserved for well to do slackers), the "AV Club" utilizes what it refers to as the "Gentleman's F". This is not something dirty or taboo, but is, instead, a grade of 'D-' ascribed to films which are awful, but awful in a standard, cookie cutter way, that display blatantly the Hollywood assembly line they fell off of. This grade is usually reserved for the films of Nora Ephron and Nicolas Sparks and Michael Bay. They do this to distinguish between these films and those failures which are truly deserving of the worst grade imaginable; great horrible implosions, overachieving underachievers, films which explore new frontiers of failure, that fail in a way that no film has failed before. Movies like "Gigli", "I Know Who Killed Me", and the collected works of Ed Wood and M. Night Shyamalan, and the remakes of Tim Burton would all fall nicely (to use the term loosely) into this category.
I've been asked time and again what I think the worst film ever made was, and I always reply "Lost Souls" (2000), but I've recently seen a film which will, now and forever remain a close second (and I've watched "I Know Who Killed Me").
"Don't Look Back" is the story of a couple, played by Donald Sutherland ("Invasion of the Bodysnatchers") and Julie Christie ("Doctor Zhivago"), whose young daughter drowns accidently, which the father somehow supposedly senses happening. After some unacknowledged period of time, the couple puts their surviving son into private school and moves to Venice, where the husband is working to restore a deteriorating church, and a killer is terrorising the populace. The story plays as though it were trying to be a John Irving story (“Cider House Rules”, “Hotel New Hampshire”, “The World According To Garp”); the couple are going through the motions of their marriage but are still mourning their daughter’s death and are thoroughly forlorn. Things change for them when the wife meets a pair of elderly sisters, one of whom is both blind and psychic. The psychic tells the wife of her dead daughter’s wishes.
I do not know how to begin to describe how bad this film is.
First off, the story is a discombobulated mess of cliches and stock plot devices, strewn together by blind luck and bad timing. The idea of someone sensing when family member is in trouble or dying is an urban legend, an old wives tale as old as time, as is the idea of the blind psychic communing with that same relative. There are numerous other films which also present either of these ideas, and do so in more imaginative ways. And then there’s the element of the killer . . .
The Russian playwright Anton Chekhov once wrote, “If there is a gun over a fireplace in the first act, it should be fired in the second act.” This anecdote coined the phrase “Chekhov’s Gun”, which has come to refer to a plot device which introduces an element into the story, many times innocuously or subtly, that is generally ignored through the rest of the story, until it is used or referenced again in another, usually unrelated or otherwise disconnected context. The most famous cases of this are the gadgets in the “Bond” movies or the clues in detective stories. In the movie “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” (2005), Robert Downey Jr, as narrator, even lampoons this idea immediately after the scene that introduces the “Chekhov’s Gun” for that movie:
“Okay, I’m apologize, that is a terrible scene. It’s like, ‘Why was that in the movie? Gee, do you think maybe it’ll come back later? Maybe?!’ I hate that, a tv’s on, talking about the new power plant. Hmm, wonder where the climax will happen. Or that shot of the cook in ‘Hunt for Red October’. So, anyway.”
Ahh, palate cleanser.
Anyway, by the time the end comes and the killer is revealed and eighty-sixes Donald Sutherland, we’ve heard about it enough times that there’s no other way it could have ended. All the twists and turns are so cliche, it’s like watching a single, short row of dominos falling in slow motion at a weird angle; you know exactly what will happen, and all you can do is watch it happen, wait for it to end, and wonder how the hell someone can get away with calling it art.
Well, this is what happens when you tell cinematographers that they get to be directors.
This movie might have been somewhere, anywhere, closer to mediocre than it is if someone had actually taken time to direct it, instead of just telling the actors to memorize their lines, do their scenes, and let someone shoot it. The actors play like the robots in Douglas Adams’ book, ‘So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish’; they have two emotions: happy and bored. Any mourning or sadness or anger or fear that they are supposed to be experiencing only plays as bored, any joy or pleasure or excitement just plays with simple, dopey smiles, like they’re stoned. Meanwhile, the scenes look as though they were shot by a cameraman wearing moon boots, and cut together through the judicious use of the most unwieldy chainsaw and hatchett imaginable. If someone was high enough, they might be able to call some of the shots artful, but to those of us who aren’t, it’s really just dressed up that way.
Speaking of dressed, the scariest thing about this movie is the ten minutes of screentime given to Donald Sutherland’s ass. Honestly, ten minutes. The tenth of a second that it’s shown in “Animal House” is more than enough, and not funny. To do so for ten minutes is sadistic in a way that should draw the attention of the Hague.
Honestly, Donald Sutherland’s ass has now given me worse nightmares than the NASA guys with no faces in E.T.
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