I should preface my post by telling you, gentle reader, I placed a spoiler warning in the title of this thread. I don’t believe in the spoiler tag. Well, I believe it exists, I don’t believe in using it. It’s against my religion. If I use it and the church elders get wind of it, well, let’s just say I’d be in for some self-administered punishment, not unlike Hawthorne’s Dimmesdale, but I digress.
I finally caught The Crimson Rivers on Starz! this weekend. To summarize the movie, seemingly unrelated cases (one, two murder investigations and the other a near-grave desecration and school break-in) merge into one investigation, more murder victims and the revelation of a town’s dark secret. Suffice it to say, I was looking forward to watching it.
This movie had such potential (it was touted as ‘highly stylized’). The opening credits were magnificent, certainly in my top ten. And then someone spoke. Sigh. It was a French movie and I was all set to read subtitles like in Le Pacte des Loups. Instead they dubbed it into English. It was a little off-putting because I tend to look at peoples’ mouths when they speak and I was looking forward to an hour and a half of people speaking French (the most romantic of the Romance language, in my opinion), but I didn’t give up hope just yet.
The movie, unfortunately, became somewhat predictable. I admit I didn’t know the school was a eugenics ‘farm’ but I did know the girl did it and she obviously had a twin. It was obvious, to me at least, that she was the perpetrator when the second body was discovered in the ice cavern. To top it off, there was a video game-esque fight scene (horribly choreographed, I might add) in the middle of the movie that was so out of place. I wondered if I’d accidentally changed the channel and landed in a Segal flick. It was just too silly for this movie.
The avalanche scene at the end reminded me of Daffy Dumas Duck pitching his movie idea of the Scarlet Pumpernickel to J.L.:
Daffy: “…and then the storm breaks in all it fury!”
J.L.: “Yeah, yeah, then what happens?!”
Daffy: “And then the dam breaks!!”
J.L.: “Yeah, yeah, then what!?!”
Daffy: “And then, and then, and then the avalanche begins!!!”
All in all, it wasn’t the worst movie I’d ever seen, but it was no Se7en.
So, if you saw it, what’d you think?