The Card Player (2004)

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Product Description
Director Dario Argento returns with this vicious thriller about a serial killer who taunts police with online video poker. But for every round the cops lose, a kidnapped young girl is mutilated live via webcam. Italian detective (Stefania Rocca) and Iri

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Shot in Turin, the center of silent-era Italian cinema, Dario Argento's Do You Like Hitchcock? is half a tribute to German Expressionist horror, namely The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, and The Golem, and half an homage to Argento's hero, Alfred Hitchcock. As the first feature in the Masters of Horror series made for Italian channel RAI, however, the film suffers from a made-for-TV stiffness, despite DP Federico Fasano's (Scarlet Diva) Hitchcock-ian shots, beautiful use of red and blue lighting, and Pino Donaggio's suspenseful score. Do You Like Hitchcock's? plot references several Hitchcock films, most directly Rear Window. Film student Giulio (Elio Germano) notices two girls, Federica (Chiara Conti) and Sasha (Elisabetha Rocchetti), haggling over a Hitchcock video in his local video store, then spies on them after learning that Sasha lives in the apartment across from his. Upon witnessing, through binoculars, the murder of Sasha's mother and dedicating himself to the case, Giulio?s snooping endangers his life, much to the chagrin of his girlfriend Arianna (Cristina Brondo). Giallo often lacks original story, but Dario Argento has famously elevated his films' erotica and stylized violence by creating characters crippled by Freudian neuroses. Relatively speaking, Giulio, the film student with a runaway imagination, isn't as compelling as Argento?s typically complex femme fatales. Do You Like Hitchcock? includes a female criminal, to make it more classically Argento-esque. But if anything, the film begs an interesting question: mustn't the victim's sex appeal in good Giallo also be fetishized? --Trinie Dalton

Actors: Stefania Rocca, Liam Cunningham, Silvio Muccino, Adalberto Maria Merli, Claudio Santamaria
Directors: Dario Argento
Writers: Dario Argento, Franco Ferrini, Jay Benedict, Phoebe Scholfield
Producers: Dario Argento, Claudio Argento

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