GIALLO IDENTIKIT #014 [DISCOPATH aka DISCOPATHE (2014)]

Jérémie Earp-Lavergne stars as Duane Lewis, the titular “Discopath”. This strange French-Canadian concoction owes as much to the three “Schoolgirls in Peril” Gialli as it does Comedy Gialli like Astron-6’s THE EDITOR. There are also those moments when, depending on the angle of the shot and the look on his face, Earp-Lavergne goes a little Tom Hardy on us.

[This is the thirty-fifth post in a continuing series discussing and analyzing all the Krimis and Gialli I've seen. As with every post on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]

VERSION WATCHED: Australian Blu-ray (uncut) 
My Giallo Rating: ★★★  (out of 5)
Subcategory (if any):
     i. Neo-Giallo
     ii. Comedy / Giallo Hybrid
    iii. Schoolgirls in Peril Giallo
    iv. Gialli Featuring Clergy
In My Giallo Top 50 (Y/N): No   


The blurb on the back of the Blu-ray sets the movie up this way:

“New York City. 1976. Whenever mild-mannered Duane Lewis hears disco music, murderous and manic impulses are unleashed. After falling into a psychotic trance at a disco dance party, Duane escapes the city and reinvents himself as a teacher at an all-girls private school. Wearing special gear to cut out external sounds, he believes he’s put the past behind him, until he’s bombarded with decibels by his disco-loving students, transforming him into a funk-crazed serial killer.”

As a film, it feels very much of a piece with Astron-6’s THE EDITOR (2015), except, unlike that one, it feels like it’s not in on its own joke. Any film whose unexplained, mostly unexplored premise consists of a schizophrenic killer who murders whenever he hears disco music is pretty much begging to be taken as a punchline. Despite its lack of self-awareness (or maybe because of it), I’d argue it’s actually a more successful Neo riff on the Giallo than THE EDITOR. Not the most successful Neo-Giallo I’ve seen (not even close), but middle-of-the-pack and better than I expected.

(Side note: I appreciate what THE EDITOR is trying to do re: parody and homage—going so far as to lift, nearly verbatim, whole sections of classic Italian exploitation, including from many *non*-Giallo films: You get the vicious rape scene from Pasquale Festa Campanile’s HITCH-HIKE [1977], and the demon-through-the-stretch-TV-screen from Lamberto Bava’s DEMONS 2 [1986] [which itself most probably borrowed the scene from VIDEODROME]. But it ends up feeling, to me, like an empty joke [even if it’s a joke told with much genre love] ... And it begs the question: If you fill your movie with scenes lifted, 1:1, from earlier, better films, what are you hoping to accomplish? As a famous filmmaker once said, re: theft in art, it’s not where you steal your ideas from, it’s where you take them. I.e., all art is theft, that’s a given—it’s what you *do* with what you steal that matters.)
 

[AN ANACHRONISTIC 1976]
The opening prologue in NYC feels especially EDITOR-like, as we get anachronistically costumed actors who feel as out of place as possible, in this invented, not remotely believable “1976”. In THE EDITOR, this clear disconnect between unmistakably contemporary actors made up in ’70s costumes and fake porn ’staches is played for laughs—in fact, its hyper-artificiality is the point, like an SNL skit where part of the premise is milking humor from watching current cast members and/or that week’s host mug at the camera while wearing exaggerated ’70s fashions. In DISCOPATH, it threatens to derail any dramatic, thriller impact the movie might build to and was honestly so off-putting that I almost gave up on it for the night. Esp. hard to take in this section are the almost cartoonish Brooklyn(?) accents from the leads, and the jokey, cop-show histrionics of the detectives.

THE PROLOGUE THAT THREATENS TO DERAIL THE REST OF THE MOVIE: The film’s patently artificial, comedy-skit version of 1976, which introduces our protagonist-killer, Duane Lewis, with his back to the camera as he works the hot grill. He’s distracted from his job by three customers who come in with a boombox blaring faux-disco music (customers who remind me a bit of the men in that infamous bar scene from Lucio Fulci’s NEW YORK RIPPER [1982]). Inexplicably, the movie asks us to believe that this is the first time that the adult Duane has heard disco—and that disco is the *only* music that triggers his killing urge ... something that makes even less sense, once we get the flashback to the childhood music trauma that has made Duane the killer he is. 

GIALLO CALLBACKS: Having just rewatched Lamberto Bava’s A BLADE IN THE DARK (1983), itself a film that constantly references the work of both his father Mario and Dario Argento, it’s easy to see DISCOPATH consciously working in the same tradition. When Duane goes into his trance-reveries, we get repeated closeups on speakers and audio equipment—not unlike Bava’s deliberately paced closeups of the audio equipment being used to score the film-within-the-film in BLADE.

TOO MUCH FAUX: Whereas the grit and sleaze of NYC streets as shown in, say, Fulci’s NEW YORK RIPPER (the live sex show, the subway chase scene, the ferry ride, etc.) or William Lustig’s MANIAC (1980) root those films in an authentic moment in cinematic time and place, the digital gloss and limited production values of this not-so-well-conjured 1976 just tend to distract.

After Duane gets expelled from the diner for trancing out to the disco music (and letting the grill flame over), he walks the city streets in an angry daze, in a scene that made me think both of those early sidewalk scenes with Thana in Abel Ferrera’s MS. 45 (1981) and Betty wandering the streets, dazed, traumatized, lost in Argento’s OPERA (1987). If the prologue could’ve kept up this vibe, briefly introduced, this quintessential throwback grit of a certain-era NYC—with a sweaty, disgruntled Tom Hardy lookalike stalking the streets—then the notion of “Comedy Giallo” wouldn't really be in play.

Instead Duane stumbles into a local skate park, where he runs into a girl he used to know in high school, Valerie (one of several characters in this section who suffer from the wonkiest of NYC accents). The Brooklyn(?) accents of the two leads are so atrocious as to seem deliberately comic—but, unlike THE EDITOR, the delivery and drama feel like they’re being played straight. This clash of tones—which basically cancels out what would otherwise be effective or memorable in the scene (and forces you to question just how seriously you’re supposed to be taking it)—is one of the worst instances of the film being tone-deaf to its sources … and gives you the sinking feeling that the filmmakers just don’t have a handle on what they’re trying to make. (It’s also the reason, I think, why so many people have logged negative reactions to the movie as a homage to the Giallo that exists in the same world as Argento and De Palma.)

Improbably, despite the fact that Duane exudes total, social awkwardness, Valerie insists on taking him home and, later, to the disco. This first murder set-piece in the disco is the strongest Giallo thumbprint in the movie, and is perhaps the most overtly stylish of any that the film offers. 

The club’s dance floor is made up of elevated glass panels that are built on top of the warehouse’s actual floor. Because of this, there’s a crawlspace between that glass and the floor, full of pulsating lights and electrical cords. Through a dreamy, wandering series of shots, Valerie ends up chased into this in-between space by Duane, who has had his mania triggered after he fondles a set of thumping speakers in the club. The stalk-and-slash scenario, which ends with her decapitated head staring lifelessly up at those who are dancing above her (oblivious to the murder that’s just taken place beneath their feet) is one of the most arresting we get. And it does much to cancel out that jokey, uneven tone that’s been the norm in the movie so far. 

Note also how the panels of the glass dance floor, through which we see Valerie’s staring, lifeless head, echo the look of the disco ball that dominates the opening credits.

Two other details that are important to note about this set-piece (esp. in relation to the dream-logic structure of the best Gialli) are as follows:

1. The image of Valerie’s lifeless, decapitated face immediately brings to mind the decapitated head that’s left spewing on the bed in the trauma flashback that is key to understanding Romano Scavolini’s sleaze-and-grit Giallo-slasher, NIGHTMARES IN A DAMAGED BRAIN (1981). (Also, any number of the decapitation murders in Argento’s TRAUMA [1993] ... or the obsession with bodily disfigurement in other Neo-Gialli, including Alex Infascelli’s ALMOST BLUE [2001] and Eros Puglielli’s EYES OF CRYSTAL [2004].)

2. It’s clear that the various shots—exterior and interior—of the elevated, glass dance floor don’t match from scene to scene. The exterior shots, where you get the best sense of the floor’s actual dimensions—seen when the broadly played cop characters are investigating—make it clear that it’s not the same floor as the one used when the murder is being shot from inside, or beneath, the glass. The most obvious reason for this is a practical one—there’s a minimum amount of space needed to fit the cameras and actors under the floor during the murder, which required this portion of the set to be expanded for those shots. A far more interesting read of the scene is the way it relates to a whole series of Italian genre films that deliberately alter and deform the spatial relationships in their sets. 

The example that always jumps out at me is the dress portion of the first dream sequence in Michele Soavi’s flawless film, THE SECT (1991). Here, the female lead of the film has a nightmarish, myth-choked wet dream where she is either assaulted (or made love to) by a faceless St. Sebastian stand-in. When he approaches her—she is on her back, in a grassy field—her dress swells and he crawls under, *into*, the dress like it’s suddenly the size of a tent. The same space is radically different in size, depending on whether it’s shot from the interior or exterior.

(This same principle is used in the sequences that involve the kidnap victims being kept in sacks, in Sion Sono’s SUICIDE CLUB. There, when the sack is shot from the outside, it appears to be only large enough to hold the person thrashing about inside. But when it’s shot from the inside, the interior of the sack becomes nightmarishly [also: impossibly] large—large enough for the victim’s kidnapper to walk into the bag and attack her ... even something as straightforward as the size of the old ductworks in OPERA—probably only built that large to allow two actors and a trailing crew and camera to film them in the enclosed space—comes to mind.) 

As far as the rest of the prologue, we again get the sense that the filmmakers don’t quite have a handle on the material. The prologue itself, not much more than 15 or 20 minutes of the film, includes not one, but two additional flashbacks that feel awkwardly sandwiched in. The disco murder itself is postponed and told in the first flashback, after Duane has already hopped a plane to Montreal in the hopes of escaping arrest for Valerie’s killing. It’s a delay that adds nothing to the momentum or tension of the film, esp. because, as soon as that flashback ends, we’re immediately plunged into *another* one: the musical trauma that Duane suffered as a child.

While listening to music with his dad, his father’s complicated hi-fi system somehow shorts out and electrocutes him before his son’s eyes. The flashback, which includes a staring, dumbfounded child witnessing the death of an adult that he doesn’t understand, seems like an obvious (and not very successful) rework of the stock, “originary trauma” that so many Gialli trade in. Something like the flashback to a childhood Carlo that is at the back of all the murders in Argento’s DEEP RED (1975). Here it feels cheaply realized and far too rushed to amount to anything useful. It also again foregrounds how silly and undeveloped the movie’s premise is: 

The musician father isn’t listening to disco in the flashback, which forces us to ask: “If the soundtrack to his father’s death *wasn’t* disco, then why is it only disco that now triggers Duane to murder? And, why hasn’t he been killing repeatedly, since his childhood, every time he heard music?” We’re supposed to believe that he spent the rest of his childhood without ever being exposed to any music of any kind?

The answer seems to be that such internal logic isn’t important, so long as the film can be titled and sold on the camp back of “disco”. But things feel so haphazard and gimmicky in this regard that we never feel like we get the payoff that’s promised by such a concept. So it’s disappointing in the sense that it feels like a gimmick. And it’s disappointing because the promise of the gimmick—what we’re sold by the title and synopsis—never really materializes, not in any satisfying way at least. 

… I would also probably admit that, going in with exceedingly low expectations, I may be giving the movie more credit than it deserves. The best thing I can say is that it hints at the dream-logic uncanniness that the best Gialli are awash in. And it gets more watchable after that wonky prologue is done. (Also the main theme, which goes GREEN HORNET by way of KILL BILL, is pretty all right with me.) And, at least part of the time, it doesn’t make ironic, winking apologies for the references it wants to indulge in (a strategy in “horror comedy” that almost always feels like a cop out to me).

[AN EQUALLY ANACHRONISTIC 1980]
The movie’s execution gets considerably more consistent when the action moves to Canada (and the dialogue switches to French). Duane from the prologue poses not as a teacher (as the Blu-ray case says), but as a “deaf and dumb” handyman at an all-girls Catholic boarding school. His “special gear to cut out external sounds” is nothing more than a faux-hearing aid, one that muffles the outside world and shields him from the music that will trigger his urge to kill again.

The girls school is rife with a more-than-implied leery atmosphere—with moments that emphasize (like any ’70s exploitation would have) lesbian love affairs, sexualized jokes used to bully less-popular girls, and a flat-out, flippant disdain for the tenets of Catholicism—and fixes the film firmly in the “Schoolgirls in Peril” subgenre of Gialli.

Institutional bullying among the cliquey students in the girls school ...

The callbacks are so many that they seem like a deliberate riff on those films (the most famous Giallo examples being WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE?, WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS?, and RINGS OF FEAR [aka, ENIGMA ROSSO]). The derision aimed at the Catholic ideology of the school, e.g., is played both for laughs—in that the chief priest character is, at the start, shown to be a smug, self-serving buffoon—and for a genuine angst, in that the headmistress of the school seems genuinely disturbed by her students’ lack of faith.

Father Antoine, who is introduced as a mostly absent overseer of the school, reads as a kind of clucking, finger-wagging, white-bread-and-delusional authority figure. He tours the school with the current headmistress—who herself is having a clandestine affair with one of the school’s female teachers—and makes empty remarks about how wonderfully successful the school is in carrying out God’s mission. She counters by telling him that the “girls today” are disinterested in anything even remotely religious, and that the school is totally ineffective in handling their disbelief. 

Later, at the funeral for two of the murdered students, he becomes unhinged during his eulogy, not just fire-and-brimstone conservative, but possibly blasphemous in his remarks about the existence of evil. He has suddenly cracked in the face of the tragedy that’s materialized in his hallowed / not-so-hallowed school, and recalls for a moment the kind of murderous heresy practiced by so many priest killers in classic Gialli (DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING [1972], WHO SAW HER DIE? [1972], etc.). 

... and widespread hypocrisy when it comes to the institution’s beliefs ...

Also, after Duane is driven to murder two of the students (and he finally begins his last, desperate devolution into total psycho), the staging of the bedroom where the murder takes place reminds me quite a bit of the girls’ bedroom in the aforementioned ENIGMA ROSSO. 

Another EDITOR-like (and very modern) touch: The film’s tendency to set, side-by-side, extreme gore and broadly played comedy

Another element that makes me lean more toward classifying this as a Neo-Giallo (than, for instance, a slasher) is in the startling resemblance that François Aubin, as the lead French-Canadian detective, shares with a Eurocrime-era Tomás Milián—that period of time in Milián’s career when he wouldn’t allow himself to be onscreen without some sort of hair piece or wig (wigs that became increasingly ridiculous as the years went on). When his performances came prepackaged with arch, weird tics and embellishments—sometimes played tragic, sometimes played comic. 

I have no idea if the shaggy gray hair and beard, the aggressively smoked chain of cigarettes, the boorish, lazy demeanor is true to Aubin as an actor (haven’t seen him in anything else), but it feels very much like he’s doing his version of vintage Milián. His character’s total disregard for solving the case betrays a sense that he’s more interested in mugging and chomping on cigarettes than he is in being a proper cop—more interested in recreating one of those stock Italian genre personas than being a functioning part of the plot.

The ending, which culminates in death-by-parking-garage, feels both like the most silly part of the movie—with Duane dressing as a bug-eyed nun at the start, in order to storm the funeral procession of his victims—and the most mysterious. 

The mysterious part comes after he plunges to his death from the top floor of the garage. His body is pulverized by the impact with the pavement (he looks riddled with bullets, though none have managed to hit him), and we get the sense the credits are coming. When they do, we get a strange, non sequitur shot that finds Duane, inexplicably alive again, starting up a window-washer’s rig. The rig descends the side of an unidentified building as the credits climb the screen. Duane stares menacingly at the camera. Until this image of him disappears. I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean, but it’s a moment of almost-delirious style that I wish the movie could’ve been more awash in …

Leonard Jacobs
December, 2015

ps. I'm hoping to beef up my Neo-Giallo reviews in the short term. Other Neo-Gialli I've covered in depth on this site include SONNO PROFONDO (2013) and YELLOW (2012).

[SHOW NOTES]

VERSION WATCHED: Australian Blu-ray | LANGUAGE: English / French (English subtitles included) | DIRECTOR: Renaud Gauthier | WRITER(S): Renaud Gauthier | MUSIC: Bruce Cameron | CINEMATOGRAPHER: John Londono | CAST: Jérémie Earp-Lavergne (Duane Lewis); Sandrine Bisson (Francine Léveillée); Ivan Freud (Paul Stevens); Ingrid Falaise (Sister Mirielle Gervais); Katherine Cleland (Valerie Lombardo); Mathieu Lepage (Chartrand); François Aubin (Inspector Sirois); Pierre Lenoir (Father Antoine); Catherine Antaki (Caroline Valois); Sibylle Gauthier (Mélanie Champagne); Christian Paul (Detective Willis); Chelsea Eaton-Lussier (Monica); Nancy Blais (Michelle Prud'homme); Benoit St-Hilaire (Pierre St-Aubin); Nicolas Laliberté (Young Duane Lewis); Jane-Anne Cormier (Counter Stewardess); Marie-Claire Lalonde (Michelle's Mother); Renaud Gauthier (Jack Lewis); Davyd Tousignant (Sylvain Duplessis); Salvador Valdez (Martin Lopez); Monika Bagárová (Waitress); Billy Thanos (Chef); Allessandra Rigano (Discomania Dancer); Jason Richardson (Policeman NYC); Luca Asselin (Investigator MTL); Benjamin Lussier (Policeman MTL); Mathieu Grimard (Policeman MTL); Vincent Wilson (Policeman MTL); Anthony Travaglini (Policeman MTL); Rémy Couture (Policeman MTL); Amelie Paul (Plane Stewardess); Yola Van Leeuwenkamp (Plane Stewardess); Louis-Philippe Sporns (Seventh Heaven Doorman); René Durocel (Taxi Driver); Simon Lacroix (Priest); Francesca Gosselin (Mélanie's Mother); Guy Blanchard (Mélanie's Father); Thibault Bensa (Morgue Attendant)