Curtains

Some movies have a troubled production, but you'd never know it. Ghostbusters, Jaws, The Wizard Of Oz, Twilight Zone: The Movie, all of these movies suffered through horrendous ordeals and yet somehow came out the other side as great movies. The average person, with no knowledge of anything about the movie other than what's on the screen, would never know about all the mechanical issues with Bruce the shark on Jaws, or the budget issues and numerous script re-writes that plagued Ghostbusters. The directors spun gold out of straw. It's just as fascinating, though, to see movies where production problems bleed out onto the screen. I say all this as a preamble to reviewing Curtains because the catastrophic production of this movie is way more interesting than the movie itself. If you only had what was on screen to judge Curtains, you'd say it was a boring, if weird, attempt at a slasher movie. The plot is far too convoluted, with a director who convinces his favorite actress to go method for an upcoming movie about a crazy woman by getting herself committed to a mental hospital and then leaves her there to run a bizarre audition boot camp with six other actresses in a remote New England mansion, who are killed off one by one by someone wearing a hideous grandma mask. I love me a good slasher, and I love it when the filmmakers try to inject something more to the story behind the flimsiest of excuses to run through the boobs-chase-murder cycle half a dozen or so times. But go and read that incredibly long set-up for a slasher movie again. And that was me SIMPLIFYING it. I feel like I need a cigarette after writing that, and I don't smoke. Curtains never settles into its a rhythm. It wants to give each of these six actresses a personality. This isn't just teens carousing in the woods and getting picked off by a psychopath in a mask, but Curtains can never convey that properly. Each of the actresses are given very simple sketches of personality traits; one is a hacky stand-up comedian, one is a ballet dancer, one is an ... ice skater? ... but it never tries to make it make sense with the story, or delve any deeper into the characters themselves. The ballet dancer is a ballet dancer so she can be murdered while doing ballet, but not in any specific ballet themed way. The ice skater is an ice skater so she can be murdered after ice skating, not during, and not with anything related to skating. A large doll is present at one murder, so it's used as bait in another, but it never plays a role in the murders again, and we never find out why it needed to be at that second murder anyway. There's all these seeds of ideas that are planted and then immediately salted. The kills are teased with shots of weapons being found or sharpened, or the killer looming ominously in the background, and then the kill is not only bloodless, it's out of frame, or even off-screen, but it's eager to show naked breasts, skin-tight transparent clothing, lingerie, or just sleazy moments like the director sleeping with two of the auditioning actresses under circumstances that could probably be prosecutable. The movie is at constant war with itself on what it wants to be and how it wants to present itself. Is it a whodunit? Yes, but it doesn't really offer any red herrings, and then somehow has the nerve to pull a switcheroo at the end that is solely responsible for this being a 1 1/2 star movie instead of a 2. Is it an upscale slasher movie for adults? In concept, yes, but in execution, it's entirely too lurid and wants to sexualize every woman in the movie (which screams "male teenage audience"), but it never pays off any of the murders with what a slasher is known for, leaving it feeling less mature and more antiseptic. All of this is enough to make this movie a failure of its own accord. But any viewer with a discerning eye can see that this movie feels off, and not by design. The editing is so chaotic and bizarre, it's like dumping a jigsaw puzzle on a table and saying you've completed the puzzle because all the pieces are touching. Characters change moods and motivations wildly from scene to scene. There's one character, played by Michael Wincott (the main bad guy from The Crow); he's introduced at dinner, never explained who he is that I could tell, shown having sex with one of the actresses in a hot tub later, then takes off on a snowmobile a couple scenes later to find the missing ice skater (who is not the actress he had sex with), and then isn't seen for an hour, when he's found dead. And he never speaks a single line. There are no red herrings set up for the killer, and no final girl to speak of either. Everything about this movie is wrong ... ... and it all ties back to the production issues. This movie took TWO YEARS to make. The original co-creators had wildly differing visions for it. The original director wanted to go more mature, almost arthouse, with heavy influence from giallo. The producer wanted a traditional slasher movie. albeit for adult audiences. The original director got about halfway through filming when things came to a head, he quit, the other guy stepped in, and did extensive rewrites and reshoots. Knowing that, it all makes so much more sense. It stops looking like just a poorly made movie and resolves itself into a movie torn between two distinct, disparate, and incongruous visions, haphazardly stitched together to get it over the finish line. It doesn't make it any better to watch -- it's still a trash fire of a movie -- but it makes the movie's chaos and disjointedness make sense. It's still not worth watching, though. Yes, it is fascinating to watch this movie basically punch itself in the face for 90 minutes, so maybe from a riff-on-it-with-friends aspect, it might be okay. But for actual entertainment value, Curtains is a top to bottom, front to back disaster.