Rey Ciso, the editor of The Editor, has cut some killer movies: suspense pics such as The Mirror and the Guillotine and The Cat with the Velvet Blade. So dedicated is he to his craft that he continues chopping film despite having only one good hand, having accidentally sliced off the other one’s fingers while working feverishly on a previous project.
The wooden appendage he wears as a replacement is functional enough, but he’s not what he used to be — a shadow of his former self, a “cripple” in the eyes of fellow crew members, an embarrassment to his whorish wife (Paz de la Huerta, Nurse 3D). Now a punch line and a punching bag, Rey (Adam Brooks, the film’s co-director with Matthew Kennedy) finds himself unfairly fingered when the talent begins being slaughtered by a masked killer similar to the villain in the flick on which they’re working. He may take lives, but at least they are lost with impeccable style.
Although it takes its cues from Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, the 1970s-set The Editor is a comedy — another pitch-perfect pastiche from the five guys behind Astron-6, the retro-recreationist kids of the 1980s VHS era. The Canadian filmmaking collective made its name through many hysterical shorts that ape a specific genre to a tonal T, before doing the same at feature length, first with 2011’s Manborg and, later that year, Father’s Day.
As those films respectively send up post-apocalyptic science fiction and the revenge thriller, so does The Editor with its punctured eye on the giallo. As always, the gang nails the elements of its “target”; here, that means music by Goblin’s Claudio Simonetti, Argento’s unmistakable color gels, and even going so far as to dub the entire film so the dialogue and mouth movement are never quite in sync.
In a departure from Astron-6’s prior work, however, The Editor may perplex viewers unaccustomed to the Italian source material. So specific are its references that the movie could be — and likely will be — off-putting to the unfamiliar; it’s the team’s least accessible picture yet. That might be Astron-6’s “fault,” but the loss is all the consumer’s. Yet even for those who can recite the Argento filmography in chronological order and in reverse, The Editor’s ending feels like an irrational rush job, as if Brooks, Kennedy and co-writer Conor Sweeney had no clue how to take their surreal story to a stopping point. I just wish it had concluded as Manborg had: with an uproarious fake trailer for another cleverly executed Astron-6 joint. —Rod Lott