Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

Lucybespro It is a performances centric movie

Kodie Bird True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Billie Morin This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

JustApt In his Death and Compass Jorge Luis Borges mocked Arthur Conan Doyle's brainchild Sherlock Holmes with his pure deduction and in his film Alex Cox goes still farther – he stretches the story to its logical limit turning it into an acerbic black comedy. The scene is some dystopian megalopolis consisting of back alleys and human warrens. And he crams it with Borges' symbols and signs: infinite mazes and deceitful mirrors, he even puts there Borges' hypothetical locus mundi – the mystical aleph. This brilliant movie is rather hard to get into and appreciate fully so it suits best only those who are both Jorge Luis Borges and Alex Cox connoisseurs.

MisterWhiplash I respect Alex Cox the filmmaker, I really do. He's like the kid at school who you think at first is just trying a little too hard to be "different", a literary punk-rocker who has dipped more than his feet into spaghetti westerns and science fiction and fringe-culture and come out into the world ready to take s*** on... but then you see what he can actually do, the talent and raw feverish artistry and moments of true absurd hilarity capable of him, and you are ready to see whatever he has to offer. But there's two sides to his proverbial coin: he can either really hit it out of the park (Repo Man, Sid & Nancy, Walker arguably) or just try just a little too hard and pull way too many pretentious rabbits out of the hat (Straight to Hell). Death and the Compass falls into the latter category, and while I respect its (mostly) original approach to tackling a detective-killer story, it too falls on its face and its weirdness becomes oddly dull.It has a strange enough set-up and already irreverent style to follow: a detective, Erik Lonnrot, is after a killer with a hell-fire voice, Red (something), and it seems that the killer is leaving disturbing clues with his victims: scrawled in blood on the walls are messages that, according to eyewitness Alonso Zunz (Christopher Eccleston looking as if he just walked off Shallow Grave without changing his look) has religious significance in the Kabbalah. We follow Lonnrot on his case, and his methods of going after the perp, which include following at first a triangular and then compass-shaped pattern on the map- this despite the protests of the flabbergasted Commissioner Treviranus (Miguel Sandoval), who also looks back in flash-forwards sitting at a desk and speaking to the audience in garbled but sad descriptions of his former employee and colleague after the fact of the case.Oh, Cox has his moments of creativity and interest, such as a shot where we see the entire scope of the harrowing depths of the police station where Eccleston's character is taken in by handcuffs ("For his own protection" says Lonnrot in case of getting lost in the wrong room) and we're followed in a long tracking shot- maybe the best or just most curious- where we're taken through very dark hallways with very little direction, lost in the maze of turns and oddities among the characters. And it's never something that isn't fascinating to *look* at, with Miguel Garzon's cinematography a morbid delight. But The plot goes through hoola-hoops to keep things so off-beat it might as well be beat-less all-together. The performances, save for a confident Boyle and for Eccleston at the very end, are pretty bad, especially Sandoval who just seems to squirm in his seat reciting the goofy dialog given to him to speak at the audience.While the murder plot itself contains an intention for the audience that this isn't something we've seen before, that it's in a society with a good many rioters and architecture suggesting Alphaville's next decrepit wave, it too fizzle's out very quickly. What's the conflict here? I was never that much engaged with Boyle's own personal mission to find this killer, and only mildly caught up in the few flashes of deranged scenes of the killer (and/or killers) going after people like in the building early on (Cox himself has an amusing cameo). And just when I started to think it was leading up to something spectacular, with Boyle and Eccleston in that big ("not as big as you think") building in the South section of the city, it suddenly gives us a "TWIST" that we know in the back of our minds is coming but hope isn't, and it deflates any of the humdrum mystery it's been leading up to. For all of Cox's uncanny touches as a filmmaker, for all of his opposition to spoon-feeding the audience with a 'conventional' approach, which I do respect, Death and the Compass ultimately cuts one off at the brain-stem; it's masturbatory.

qv1879 In a post world war world, people eek out what living they can. A string of strange murders begin to occur and the local Detective Chief Inspector Lonrot(Peter Boyle) is on the job. He believes the murders are being committed by a gangster called Red Scarlach(Christopher Eccleston). Lonrot uses everything to hand to capture the killer and eventually comes face to face with him.I love Peter Boyle. I've seen him in the X-Files to "While You Were Sleeping", but if anyone was miscast in this role, it was him. "Death and the Compass" is a low budget film that uses spontaneity as it's guide. Director Alex Cox is a "fly by the seats of his pants" director. Thirty to forty years ago, Mr.Boyle may have been cast properly, but watching it I couldn't help but wonder if he was treading water because he wasn't sure where his footing was.Though Mr.Boyle seemed to be treading water, I didn't feel that about the other members of the cast. Maybe it was because the others of the cast were familiar with Cox's type of direction. What ever it was, it gave the movie a "driving on ice" feel. It'll be fine, then the brakes will lock and the car will slide to the side.Don't get me wrong. It wasn't a bad movie. It just needs to be done over.

John Seal This wilfully bizarre adaptation of Borges short story is typical Cox. His strong visual sense is, as usual, undone by the appalling half baked acting of most of the cast. The film is definitely in the surreal tradition of Bunuel's Mexican period, and looks at times like a poor man's take on Lars Von Trier's Elements of Crime. Cox's apparent preference for single takes, jump cuts, and ambient sound recording all work against the film's effectiveness. Worth a look but ultimately disappointing.