73 - Murder Set Pieces

    Murder Set Pieces focuses on an independent photographer who is a serial killer.  There's only a little more plot than that, detailing his relationship with a girl who has a daughter.  The daughter suspects that there's something wrong with him.
    I watched this three days ago, and I've been struggling to think of anything to say about it.  When I first heard of it, I think it showed up on some list of the best horror of the year.  I'm pretty forgiving when it comes to horror, so I put it in my queue.  I was anticipating a horror movie I would have a hard time stomaching.
    But that movie never materialized.  I came out of the movie feeling only mildly confused, and mostly disinterested.  The movie is really tame.  It's much more tame than other R-rated horror movies.  There is a whole lot of blood, but almost all of the serious stuff takes place off-screen.
    There was a strange technical problem, and I'm unsure where the problem lay.  At a certain point, I started noticing that the sound was dropping out.  It was obvious especially during these shots of the photographer driving along.  Then I started to notice it happening elsewhere.  There was a moment of dialogue where the last word of a sentence was removed by this.  I replayed that sequence, and the same drop in sound happened at exactly the same point.  I ejected the disc, checked it out, and it was in pristine condition.  I put it back in, and the same thing happened.  I haven't had any problems like this with any other disc.  I did find one review that referred to something that might be what I heard.  If this was intentional, it's a really bad choice to make viewers think the sound is messed up.

    So the killer goes through his process of bringing strippers and prostitutes back to his place, taking pictures, then eventually killing them.  There's a lot of mixing of sex and murder and photography (although the photography doesn't seem to be too important to him).  These sequences are cut in with strange flashbacks and fantasy sequences that involve the killer (either in past or present) in some surreal sexual or violent settings.
    We get a touch of character development in the killer being a neo-nazi, but not enough development to make it sensible.

    There was a single sequence that I might remember, and that's when the photographer goes to an "adult bookstore" called "Talk of the Town."  The scene plays out a tiny bit like the donut shop in Boogie Nights.

    I never felt scared in this.  There isn't any sense of tension.  There weren't any characters to enjoy.  It mostly just felt boring.