The Editor

Adam Brooks, Matthew Kennedy and Conor Sweeney are known for their work with Winnipeg-based film collective Astron-6, where they evolved from short-film genre send-ups (Lazer Ghosts 2: Return to Laser Cove, Cool Guys) to the ambitious micro-budget features Manborg and Father's Day. With The Editor, they up their game to skewer the Italian horror subgenre known as giallo, which was perfected in the seventies and eighties by directors like Mario Bava, Dario Argento, and Lucio Fulci.

Once a revered master, film editor Rey Ciso (Brooks, doing his best Franco Nero) lost four fingers on his right hand due to his arrogance. Now equipped with a clumsy wooden prosthetic, he's been reduced to slaving like a dog in the cinematic sweatshops of 1970s Italy. When actors from the film he's editing are brutally murdered, Rey is the prime suspect. With a persistent detective (Kennedy) hot on his trail and a handsome, knife-wielding actor (Sweeney) always nearby, Rey must fight to clear his name.

Imitating giallo's inimitable tone and texture through dramatic zooms, off-kilter dubbing and, of course, heavy-handed psycho-sexual eroticism, writer-director duo Brooks and Kennedy have maximized their modest budget to mix a heady cocktail that's equal parts loving tribute and outrageous parody.

Bolstered by turns from cult faves Udo Kier, American Mary's Tristan Risk, and Paz de la Huerta (the high-camp Joan Crawford of twenty-first-century horror cinema), The Editor is a riddle wrapped in an enigma, baked into a lasagna, with enough Timbits on the side to delight any midnight-movie devotee. Get ready for straight razors, aerobic dancers, wide lapels, axes, weird sex, tarantulas, and, of course, splices galore.

COLIN GEDDES