Due to it being mentioned by some Brad Dourif fans on tumblr, a couple of days ago I watched Murder Blues AKA Dead Certain, recently posted in eight parts on Youtube. The plot, as it plays out, involves John Rees (Francesco Quinn), a detective investigating a string of murders that seem to be related to the years-earlier murder of his ex-girlfriend, apparently by her fiance John Barnes (Dourif).
Barnes can't be the present-day killer, because the murders keep happening even though he's locked up. This casts doubt on whether he really committed the original murder, or whether he's a wronged man. OTOH, he keeps dropping hints that he knows what's really going one.
The few blurbs I could find about this movie claim the two must team up to solve the case, but in fact Dourif spends pretty much all his scenes taunting the detective from his cell and being considerably less helpful than, say, Hannibal Lecter would have been under the circumstances; but then he does have a personal grudge against the detective.
It's not an especially good script -- a mysterious religious sect serves its purpose as a clue, but is never fully explored; a victim's body is found by the milkman (in 1990?!). It also seems unlikely a police detective would be allowed on a case with such a personal connection, but admittedly a lot of movies handwave similar situations. There's a twist ending I called about five minutes in, but I have to admire them for playing it so coldly and matter-of-fact.
Dourif and Quinn do their best, and deliver bravura performances, even if the script mostly just has them swear at each other. The filmmakers try so hard to be "gritty" it's almost parodic (in one scene, the detective pulls his young son out of school for the day to take him to a strip joint and discuss murder cases with him -- and he wonders why his ex-wife doesn't want him to have visiting rights) but make no attempt to hide the Toronto locations. The sheer weirdness helps excuse a lot of the flaws by letting you pretend they're part of a deliberately dreamlike atmosphere. Dourif spends his scenes locked in a cell with a weird circular window in the bars, that makes them look more like some kind of heavy-duty ornamental fretwork than a prison; his face is always at least partly obscured or in shadow. There's some suggestion that the killer is filming everything -- a lot of scenes are grainy POV video. Meanwhile every tv we see seems to be receiving nothing but static.
Detective Rees' apartment is usually lit only by streetlamps outside, through a spinning fan in the window. Whenever he shoots up heroin or sleeps with a hooker (which is frequently), the scene is eerily strobed. Usually he gets rudely awakened in the next scene by a phonecall from the murderer telling him he's killed again. A couple of lines of dialogue seem to hint at a supernatural explanation, or maybe that was just me -- at any rate they're never explained either.
VERDICT -- If you like nonsensical but stylish neo-noir, with periodic doses of Dourif being all angry/sad; or if you're from Toronto and like gleefully spotting familiar locations, it's probably worth a couple of hours of your time. http://youtu.be/OQ4z2ekslJg
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