Knight Moves (1992)

Chess grandmaster Peter Sanderson (Christopher Lambert), of the tragic genius asshole type, takes part in a chess tournament on a very rainy Canadian island. When a serial killer starts murdering blonde women and doing bad makeup jobs on their corpses, Peter quickly becomes the police’s main suspect, his case certainly not helped by the fact he was (casually, as he explains) sleeping with the first victim and lying to the cops about it.

But then, one of the cops, one Detective Wagner (Daniel Baldwin), is an even greater dick than Peter is, so telling the truth to that guy wouldn’t be anyone’s first impulse. The island’s new chief of police Frank Sedman (Tom Skerritt) is rather more competent, and is not so sure about Peter’s guilt. He’s calling in help in form of psychologist Kathy Sheppard (Diane Lane). As all psychologists in thrillers, Kathy will have her problems keeping away from having sex with the guy she’s supposed to help investigate.

Even once someone claiming to be the killer starts phoning Peter as part of a “game” whose rules the mystery caller doesn’t bother to explain, the cops still don’t quite believe in his innocence, while also involving him in their investigation as if he were their favourite amateur detective. Go figure.

German director Carl Schenkel’s Knight Moves regularly lands on lists of non-European giallos, and it’s not difficult to see why. Some might argue this to be rather more of a post-Silence of the Lambs serial killer thriller, but then, that genre’s DNA is certainly shared with that of the giallo, too – and in the case of the Demme film, that’s hardly by chance.

But let me count the film’s giallo ways: there’s the interest in dubious yet fun psychological trauma motivating the killer in a way which clearly comes down from 70s pop psychology more than those books in which former real FBI profilers lay out how awesome they believe they are; the plot that’s convoluted and delightfully nonsensical, preferring any good excuse to show a highly stylized murder scene to sensible plotting; the Lambert-shaped amateur detective trying to solve the case for reasons of his own (at the beginning, mostly Sheppard needling him) and because the police are either violent bullying idiots with even worse manners than he has (Wagner) or not allowed to do proper police work by the script (Stedman), dragging in the female lead one way or the other; the love for style as the most important kind of substance a movie can have, even when it makes as little sense as the half-flooded hotel foundations the police use as the case’s centre of telephone operations. Really, the only things missing are a dozen or so bottles of J&B’s, a pair of black gloves and more nudity, though the film does have more sex in it than most US or Canadian thrillers not carrying the word “Erotic” in front of the thriller.

This is of course not the kind of thriller anyone expecting logic or a sensible narrative will find terribly satisfying. As with the giallo, it’s best to adapt one’s expectations towards understanding the aesthetic pleasures at the film’s surface, enjoying the ways they entwine with themes and mood, while ignoring any ideas about proper narrative and plain sense one may or may not be cursed with. Schenkel is making this particularly easy, too, for he makes a good case for himself here as a director who might have played in the league of the better giallo second-stringers if he had been born a couple of decades earlier.

If this is the sort of thing you might enjoy, you’ll probably find this one very fun to watch. It also has a hell of a cast, Lambert doing the sort of pretty asshole role typical of the male giallo protagonist better than most anyone else (for better or for worse), Lane putting much more effort in than the character work in the script actually deserves, regularly turning into the actual protagonist of the movie; also looking rather incredible, which is of course par for the course, for Lane and the giallo-alike genre. Baldwin is so punchable he makes Lambert’s character more likeable than that guy deserves through his sheer testosterone dickishness, and Skerritt is Skerritt (that’s not a complaint).

Insert some check mate based joke, here, imaginary reader.

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Drifter (2016): I’m not always a fan of too knowing exploitation movie throwbacks, but Chris von Hoffman’s post-apocalyptic (one assumes) cannibal town trip mostly knows when it’s okay to wink and when to be straight. It’s a very low budget affair, so a prospective viewer should adjust accordingly and cope with a script that sometimes drags a bit, dialogue that isn’t always spot on, and other minor flaws of this kind. On the other hand, the film is much better acted than most films in its bracket, is shot with a lot of style and a great feel for making the most out of the available locations (none of which is one of those damn warehouses), and generally gives the impression of a movie made by people who know what they want and what they are doing. It will probably be not quite a new cult classic for anyone, but I came out of it entertained and with respect for the filmmakers.

Wheelman (2017): Speaking of throwbacks, this Netflix production directed by Jeremy Rush certainly is inspired by crime and car based movies of the 70s, though it does look and feel very much like a slick 2010s production, particularly since Rush opts for the not terribly 70s gimmick of shooting most of the film in the car. That technique could have resulted in strained artiness, but in Rush’s hands, it actually feels like a way to let the audience share the tension of a main character (Frank Grillo still very much in what looks and feels like his unexpected career high to me) completely out of his depth in more than one regard. Plus, the director is playful enough even to have a great moment where the car that audience and character(s) share changes, and knows when to move his camera out of the damn thing, so the story – simple as it may be – doesn’t end up overwhelmed by the way it is told. On the writing side, this is very competent and entertaining genre business, not terribly surprising, but made with too much verve for that to matter terribly much.


Bay Coven (1987): This NBC TV movie about a couple of mostly likeable yuppies – Pamela Sue Martin and Tim Matheson – moving to a strange island community that will turn out to have rather problematic traditions (at least if one values one’s life and one’s sanity), was made in a time when supernatural horror wasn’t really the thing to do on TV anymore. Director Carl Schenkel doesn’t seem to care, though, and tells a merry, American Gothic tale of witchcraft, insanity, and a very peculiar kind of marital trouble most couples won’t encounter in their lifetime with a degree of verve. There are quite few effective spooky moments, as well as some entertainingly silly ones, a proper dramatic climax, and even a director and script (by Tim Kring very early in his career) who realize they are also making a film about female anxieties about alienation from one’s partner, and the secrets and lies in a marriage, and make proper use of the possibilities this offers them.