Hallowatch 2026 No. 22: Il Cartaio / The Card Player (2004)
Synopsis; spoilers follow
I did not intend to include any "so bad it's good" films beyond Evil Bong in my Hallowatch. 11-11-11, I expected to be novel in its own bizarre way; I was unaware of the James Wan connection on The Nun; and Proxy, like an idiot, I thought it might be good on its own merits.
None of them were as galaxy-brained-bad as this.
This was Really Somethin'. This is shot like an episode of CSI. The video poker — truly the easiest game in the world to rig, or at least stack the deck — is all taken at face value. The way it cuts around stunts and death. It's all just, so impressively bad and stupid and transparent in a way that breaks any sort of fiction-illusion at every turn. This felt like what Longlegs was aspiring to be, which, shit, I guess makes me retrospectively like Longlegs? A deranged thought.
The way video_poker_and_webcam.exe is so slow and clunky, it's like the movie is daring us to laugh at it. It's on-face ridiculous. The impression of a grabby italian lothario that extremely-irish Liam Cunningham does prior to passing out had me cackling. The "is that a face in the bushes in the reflection of my ashtray? better get a MAGNIFYING GLASS to double check" scene. That there's 25 police officers and most of them are there to fart around and kibbutz as other people play video poker. Everything about this movie is precision-machine-designed to be giggled at while stoned. This movie is powerfully stupid, like Rocket-Man (1997) [derogatory].
I thought Dario Argento was supposed to be good at making movies (note: since writing this, I have come to understand he seems to have unlearned how to make a movie sometime in the mid-1980s). I thought giallo films were supposed to be good to look at. This was a rude introduction to his work and giallos more generally. The kills were basically all off-screen/no effects/a sound of a scuffle and then a cut to a corpse. Even at its most operatic and "feeling" rather than "following" or "thinking", the goals of this movie are undermined by the fact that it looks like a network multicamera cop procedural.
Rewatch? You'd need to pay me.
Sequel? Go to hell.
Remake? Without significant rework, no. ■
