1 out of 5

Director: Rob Schmidt

Man, what happened to the Rob Schmidt who classed and gored up ‘Wrong Turn,’ which should’ve been a generic ‘teens-in-backwoods’ horror romp (a lá its sequels) but was instead given character development and good blocking and well-earned creep outs…?  ‘The Alphabet Killer’ is by no means a horrible movie, it’s just completely ineffective, and though I appreciate Schmidt wanting to bring his ‘Wrong Turn’ star Dushku back, she is horribly miscast here and unfortunately her acting style tips her characterization into silly, which I’m sure wasn’t the intention.  At 100 minutes the film still feels like a stretch, Schmidt using long, quiet shot set-ups from the thriller and horror handbook to attempt to generate completely misleading tension, and the script (and its application on the screen) not making any use of the element that should’ve been easily responsible for tension – that our lead character (Dush) is schizophrenic, represented by hallucinations and voices, and thus her observations could be strewn as untrustworthy… but instead, we doll that up to play to Schmidt’s probable Wrong Turn followers and make our character see “spooky” dead girls who do nothing to help or even not help her except look poorly done over in CGI.  What is done well is some of the procedural stuff and the inter-department politics.  It adds a nice grounding and logic to the movie and veers us away from the main plot – detective Megan Paige’s attempts to catch ‘The Alphabet Killer’ serial killer over the course of several years and several emotional breakdowns – as the connections and presentation of ‘clues’ to our killer’s identity are rather jumpy and plot-holey.  I appreciate when a script leaves some obvious connections up to the viewer to fill in instead of wasting dialogue to say them aloud, but by the same token, there’s a line that’s crossed when suddenly it seems like characters are making decisions only because the script says so.  Our eventual reveal is fairly obvious, given conventional film structures, but excusing that – while there is one sort of nice Catch-22 to the logic of things, the otherwise lack of… anything else describing the why’s and how’s of our killer feels like we waited just to have a face tacked on to the bad guy because, again, the script says so.  Lastly, to Dushku – her bobble-headed delivery of lines (and I say that lovingly) worked awesomely in Dollhouse and when she’s playing the “you think I’m an idiot but I’m not” character, but here it really hampers here believability as a seasoned detective and, alas, physical subtleties (tics of the schizophrenic) appear to not be her strong suit – it really looks like she’s trying to affect those mannerisms.  Whoops.  Nothing is horrible about this, just nothing works well enough to make it worth the time.