Curse of the Zodiac (2007)
I would rather cure a constipated elephant with my bare hands - without gloves - than watch Curse of the Zodiac again. Think I’m being hyperbolic? Everyone understands what an elephant is. Everyone knows how unpleasant of an experience it would be to reach inside its butt and fiddle around until the feces run freely. No one can truly understand what an overbearing, depressing, blood-boiling and draining experience watching this movie is. When the credits on this abomination finished rolling, I desired nothing more than to track down the director, the people who green-lit this project and the studio executives who thought it was good enough to release so I could strangle them with their own intestines. This is the worst movie I've ever seen.
You’re wondering what this movie from hack director Ulli Lommel is about. You’re out of luck because there's no plot. Things happen during the 81-minute running time, but that doesn't mean there's a story. We have three characters. The first is the titular Zodiac killer (Jack Quinn). He kills women and narrates the movie. If there’s anything resembling a protagonist, it’s a 20-something woman who has visions of the “Z-Man” as he stalks and murders women. These two randomly interact with a reporter, who does little but answer the phone and look disturbed as Zodiac taunts him.
There isn’t a single thing that is good, or even decent about Curse of the Zodiac. NOTHING. The acting redefines the word atrocious. Characters flub their lines, miss cues, and are never convincing even when lying dead. It appears as though there were no second takes, ever. If you can read this sentence and say it out loud, you could've been cast in this film. The dialogue is some of the most dreadful ever committed to the page. We get such linguistic vomit as “Don’t look at the gun I show in your ass” and “Playing piano is like life. You make mistakes in life.” If this weren't bad enough, there is an extreme overabundance and over-reliance on foul language. Goodfellas is notorious for having about 300 uses of “fuck” and its derivatives. It lasts 146 minutes so we have about two a minute. I counted the uses of any 3, 4 and 11-letter swears, along with everything in between and I got a whopping 147, including 45 instances of “fat fuck” (the nickname Zodiac gives to the reporter). Goodfellas still wins but this movie gets pretty close. It’s an astonishingly lazily written script, delivered by a bunch of robots masquerading as human actors and there’s not even a story to keep you entertained.
Not only is this movie less frightening or unsettling than the worst episode of Goosebumps you’ve ever seen, but it’s also boring. There's nothing to look forward to except the end of the end credits or your death, whichever comes first. I can’t even fathom someone making a movie this painful unintentionally. It uses stock screams when women are being murdered, has bad grammar in the screens of text, has sequences where the sound cuts in and out and gore that looks about as convincing as strawberry jam drizzled onto a CPR torso. Don’t even get me started on the editing and “special effects”. The camera shakes uncontrollably and images are constantly being mirrored, flipped upside down, tinted or otherwise modified through filters. It’s as if editor Bertrand Paré (which I assume is either a pseudonym of Lommel's or someone determined to destroy his career) decided to use every single editing tool in the free software they had.
This movie isn’t only infuriating, it's disheartening. The only reason Curse of the Zodiac is available to watch is because Lommel has connections with Lionsgate. Someone saw this and thought “It’s about as appealing as a bucket of crawling centipedes, but we’ll make money off of it if we give it a semi-decent DVD cover”. This knowledge is enough to make me want to go on an ax-wielding rampage. If you’re associated with the production and release, watch your back, I’m coming for you. (On DVD, January 28, 2015)
