So, my wife wanted to watch a horror movie, and I was like “okay, instead of browsing through literally every possibility, let’s grab something off your Shudder watchlist.” She agreed to that — after all, these are movies she wanted to watch at some point — and let me pick. When I saw Claire Denis’s name[1] on Trouble Every Day, I was consumed by curiosity.

My wife warned me that this was part of the “French New Extremity” movement, so might be intense and disturbing; I warned her that it was Claire Denis, so might be slow and elliptical. Both of us turned out to be fully prescient.

The movie follows two couples. One of them lives in Paris, and as the movie opens, we see the woman go out and seduce a man, have sex with him, and then eat his flesh as she kills him. Her husband is a doctor. The other couple just got married and came to Paris on their honeymoon, and she seems like a nice normal person, whereas he (Vincent Gallo) is a giant asshole who is cruel enough to her that we wonder why they got married.

How are these two couples related? What happens in the movie? Well, I’m not going to spoil it for you, but you won’t be surprised when it turns out that Gallo is hiding some dark secrets, and that shit’s gonna get real dark before it’s all said and done. But it’s going to take its time getting there, and if you hadn’t read the paragraphs I just wrote, you’d spend more of the movie than you might imagine trying to piece together those basic facts about the characters and their relationships that I just gave you.

This isn’t one of Denis’s better-received films, and I don’t think the explanation for that is just anti-horror prejudice. It’s genuinely an only-okay movie. If it’s slow, elliptical arthouse horror that you want, I’d recommend Daughters of Darkness instead — if nothing else, Delphine Seyrig as a regal, seductive vampire is a lot more interesting than Vincent Gallo as a dirtbag.

Anyway, after finishing that up, my wife wanted to watch a more fun, trashy kind of horror, so picked out Lucio Fulci’s The New York Ripper.

So this movie is definitely not slow-paced, but boy is it fucking weird. The premise of the movie is that there’s a killer on the loose, and he… okay, I don’t know how to say this without it sounding insane, but: He talks like Donald Duck. Like, he’ll kill someone and then call the cops and taunt them in a Donald Duck voice. This isn’t some incidental side thing, it’s like one of the main plot drivers of the movie (and is instrumental to eventually letting the cops figure out who the killer is). And it’s not one of those “it sounds silly, but it’s actually very tense and spooky in the movie” kinda things. It sounds silly, and it is silly.

The movie is also horny as hell, even by the standards of Italian tits-out gialli. It’s set in the New York City of 1982, and so we see a live sex show in a Times Square theatre. There’s a boatload of nudity, there’s a couple with a kinky relationship, there’s a scene sexually involving a foot in a diner that would be the weirdest thing in the movie if it weren’t for most of the rest of the movie, etc.

But while all this horny weirdness is going on, it’s also following a cop who is doing an absolutely terrible job of being a cop (e.g., basically blowing off a witness who was the last person to see a victim alive and has important clues because she’s an annoying old lady and he doesn’t like her), a self-important psychology professor who is profiling the killer, and a bunch of other people who I forget how they got into the movie. And we get a whole bunch of twists and misleads, and the weird thing is, the movie is genuinely effective with its misleads, because given how borderline-amateurish the story seems in some ways, it’s never clear whether Fulci is being really clever by setting up a too-obvious false trail of clues, or if he thinks he’s being subtle and doesn’t realize how obvious those clues are.

Neither of these movies is really good as such, but they both fall into the interesting-but-flawed bucket (from very different angles), and if I’m going to watch movies that aren’t especially good, that’s the kind I want.

  1. Whom you will remember as the director of such movies as Beau Travail, High Life, and The Stars at Noon. ↩︎