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directed by Nick Simon
by Bill Chambers Written by the son of Norman Bates and directed by a protégé of the late Wes Craven, The Girl in the Photographs is an illusorily-pedigreed resurrection of the slasher genre featuring scattered compositional glories courtesy of legendary DP Dean Cundey, returning to horror for the first time since, what, Psycho II? The picture opens with its Janet Leigh (horror muse Katharine Isabelle)–literally named Janet–being abducted from her home by a pair of masked fiends (one's a harlequin, the other a Trash Humper) who eventually leave a photo of her corpse on the bulletin board of a Piggly Wiggly-type store in the real but barely-capitalized-on town of Spearfish, South Dakota, which according to this film has a police force so lame that aspiring murderers might consider moving there. Cute if morose checkout girl Colleen (Claudia Lee) finds the pic and recognizes in it an American Apparel homage (they don't call it American Apparel, though–this is the kind of movie where THE NEW YORKER becomes "The Manhattan," i.e., a cheap one), leading somehow to the intervention of a would-be Terry Richardson (Kal Penn, first unrecognizable, then insufferable) and his travelling band of dead-eyed models. The identity of the young villains (played by Luke Baines and Corey Schmitt) isn't a mystery–their motive, arguably less so. They are dime-store boogeymen who keep most of their victims caged, feeding them cans of generic cat food purchased right under Colleen's nose. The Girl in the Photographs appears to have a bee in its bonnet about the ease and ubiquity of photography in contemporary society, since it's all but created yin yang sociopaths in the killers and Penn's Peter Hemmings; but the usual hypocrisies of exploitation get in the way. The final third is a downmarket Scream (it even seems to be shot in the Scream 4 house), squandering Cundey on an imitation of a film that heavily bore his influence while denying him the technical and collaborative resources to get out from beneath his own shadow. Programme: Midnight Madness
