In the paranoid thriller Demaphoria, an amnesiac is trying to re-discover his identity and learns that he has been involved in some pretty shady and dangerous business. It’s a familiar but promising set-up. Unfortunately director Ross Clarke, who adapted the screenplay from the Craig Clevenger novel, drives this movie version right into the ground.
To start with, the beginning of the film looked so slick and superficial that I thought it was a commercial until I saw Ron Perlman, who I knew was in the film (but not for long enough). There is so much quick-cutting in Dermaphoria that I started counting the seconds between them – and I only came up with three shots that lasted over three seconds in the first eight minutes of the film. This is a bad sign – if you’re timing the duration of the cuts, you’re not engaged in the story.
Things brightened up once actor Walton Goggins (Justified) showed up. But then I realized that he was just playing Boyd Crowder while dressed as John Waters (bow tie and pencil thin mustache). And the role of his idiot henchman (Lucius Falick) was the worst screen acting I’ve seen in at least a year.
It takes a lot to keep me from sticking around to see the ending of a thriller set in New Orleans with actors that I enjoy (Perlman, Goggins), but I had to walk out.