The Card Player

As the internet rose in strength, probably beyond anyone’s expectations, Dario Argento felt it a pertinent time to take his brand of horror to the new internet age. The Card Player is his answer, a sort of twisted and realistically graphic serial killer thriller the likes of which Argento had not covered before, seemingly taking a nod and a wink from British television thrillers Messiah and Prime Suspect, the latter taking one of the shows stars.

In Rome a unique brand of killer has shown his hand, a gambler in his heart the Card Player has set himself up an internet gambling website where only he can play, well with the addition of one other. Contacting the police with his horror poker site, the Card Player introduces to them a British tourist holidaying in Italy’s capital. Here’s the deal, the police must play the Card Player at poker, for each round they lose he will dismember his hostage slightly, if they fail to win three hands of the game then she will surely day. With the game starting immediately and a distinct lack of poker knowledge, the kidnap victim is brutally murdered on webcam for all to see. For police woman Anna (Stefania Rocca) it’s a race against time knowing that the Card Player is scouring the streets looking for his next victim. Teaming up with Irish police officer John Brennan (Liam Cunningham), it’s an unlikely match but as hours and days go by it’s apparent that both have skeleton’s in their closets and more in common with each other than they realise, let alone the killer.

Always ahead of the game Argento took advantage of the rising poker gaming interest online for the movie, in fact it is only four years on now in 2008 that Argento’s prophecy has come true, with more and more interest in the game than ever before, new poker websites open each and every day as the worlds burgeoning poker playing population stagger to their computers in order to achieve the next big win. In an interesting twist of fate, after The Card Player was released in Italy their online poker playing population increased fourfold pretty much overnight, were they looking for their own piece of Argento horror?

For most of Argento’s movies of the 90’s he cast his daughter Asia in pivotal roles, however she is tragically missing here, her success in Vin Diesel movie XXX found her catapulted into a variety of big budget American movies all around the same time. Stephania Rocca is an unusually older looking signing for the leading lady here, and to be honest with you as a usually second fiddle actress I find her hard to accept here in the leading role, instead you have to focus on Liam Cunningham to lead the movie forward, because in fairness Rocca at that time did not have the range to pull off the role convincingly, this being said I guess the big thing with Argento movies is that due to dubbing of the dialogue most people encountering an Argento movie generally think the acting is of poor quality anyway, my advice to those people is to watch an Argento movie in its native tongue with subtitles that reflect your language, believe me you will see things far differently.

The Card Player is as I said earlier far more realistically grizzly, in previous Argento movies the gore is delivered with a certain amount of good but stodgy special effects, you see it it freaks you out but you know that it’s not real. With this offering however things are far more graphic, and real; Argento I suspect spend considerable time looking at bodies of the dead and puts this into the movie, with the exception of the teeth (strangely movies seem incapable of getting teeth of the dead correct), the bodies in this movie are scarily realistic. While Argento steers clear of his usual decapitation hallmarks, his gross out factor takes place when the bodies hit the morgue, and its time for further examination.

The speed of the movie is pretty fast, movie seamlessly from a graphic scene to a bizarre one the next, he blends his humour more subtly than ever before. In one specific scene while going to examine the body of the first victim at the morgue, the attendant first dances for our crime investigators, before singing them out as they exit. In between his unusual performance, Cunningham’s character probes at the dead body pulling assorted nastiness out of it.

I’m not as impressed with The Card Player as I was with his surrounding movies Sleepless (AKA Non Ho Sonno) and Do You Like Hitchcock? Because despite the great effort put into the movie Rocca does not have the convincing depth as a leading lady, I personally found her quite annoying and while I’m sure she could out act me, there is something that prevents you from gelling well with her. But in the overall scheme of things this is not a bad addition to Argento’s movies, and if you happen to like the aforementioned Messiah series and Prime Suspect then you are sure to enjoy this.