In short: Mask of Murder (1988)

Original title: Invastigator

Warning: spoilers ahead, but can you really spoil something this tediously obvious?

A small town in Canada (Sweden). A serial killer with a pillow mask goes around murdering women. On a nightly raid, copper McLaine (Rod Taylor) and his partner Ray (Sam Cook) shoot down a very good suspect whom the audience can indeed identify as the killer, or really, in McLaine’s case, shoot the man when he’s already down. During the course of the firefight, their boss, Chief Superintendent Rich (Christopher Lee) is badly wounded, because Christopher Lee isn’t cheap.

Strangely enough, the murders resume shortly thereafter. Is it a copycat killer? Or has McLaine found out that Ray and his wife (Valerie Perrine) are having an affair and plans a long and boring revenge there’s no possible way for him to get away with?

I’ve liked quite a few films Swedish filmmaker Arne Mattsson made in the 50s and 60s, but this, my first excursion into the handful of entries that make up his filmography during the 80s, is a dire attempt at a return to filmmaking after half a decade’s absence. It aims at mixing elements of the giallo (which makes sense, seeing how Mattsson made films you can see as related to the Italian style decades earlier), the police procedural, and the thriller (non-thrilling division). Alas, the script is flaccid, limping from one badly written scene to the next, with no sense of drama or tension. The supposed surprises feel phoned in, and even a half-awake viewer will see them coming from miles away while the film seems to prefer twiddling its thumbs to causing any excitement in its audience.

The acting, even from the old pros in the cast, is terrible throughout. Most of the cast seem to be sleepwalking – Taylor is particularly bad – and the film is full of painfully dull line readings. Even worse, it is also full of flubbed lines that never should have made it into a finished movie but are left for the audience to gawk at.

But then, Mattsson’s direction feels amateurish more often than not, as well. It is full of bad framing and terrible visual choices, with nothing on screen that would suggest a director with decades of experience in serious popular filmmaking.