Trying to review The Editor is an almost impossible task, as the film was made to look just a little bit…off.

Think out-of-synch dialogue, gratuitous shower scenes, and copious amounts of nudity, male and female, and lines which are such non sequiturs, which would be spoiled by printing them, or an appearance by Udo Kier, or a parade of bad mustaches worn by the writer-directors Adam Brooks and Matthew Kennedy of Astron-6, and some pretty awful-looking and still gruesome special effects, it is clear that The Editor almost seems to flaunt an ability to defy criticism.

And yet, it somehow works, in spite of many of its audience members having only a cursory knowledge, if any, of the term giallo film.

Like last year’s The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears, The Editor seems to be a straight-face send-up of the genre, a wink backwards, but offering its own rhythm, and drawing people in if they can get used to the silliness, and often ridiculousness of the action, (a scene with a character ripping off a woman’s face, thinking that it is a mask, and then smoothing it back so that it was never displaced is only one such example).

But while The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears alienated a large portion of its audience with its attempt at parodying, becoming almost inaccessible in the process, The Editor will reward its unfamiliar audience with clever tropes, even if it mocks them to a degree with a twist of an ending that does not provide adequate closure, pulling back to reveal that its audience has fallen for its greatest and funniest trick.

[star v=35]