I watched the sequel to this movie, The Photographer: Inside the Dark Room a while back and I genuinely enjoyed it. For whatever reason, it took me a while to circle around and check out the original. I have a feeling that if I saw this one first, I wouldn’t have even bothered with the sequel.
A model comes to a hotel room to pose for a geeky photographer. She gets weirded out when he tries to rub baby oil on her and tries to leave. Up until this point, I was totally with the movie. However, at about the fifteen minute mark, it takes a nosedive and never recovers.
The model mysteriously winds up on a deserted stretch of road. Before long, a couple find themselves on the same road and have a run-in with the photographer. It’s here where things devolve into a series of psych-out sequences. Some play like music videos. Others are overly artsy-fartsy.
Of course, this winds up being one of those “It was All a Dream” deals, and the movie essentially starts over again at around the halfway point. I was already starting to mentally check out by then. Having to unceremoniously shift gears midway through did not help matters.
It feels like this might’ve been one of those cases where the filmmakers made a short and then tried to expand it to feature length. Some of the dreamy, obtuse shit might’ve worked in a short, but when you do it in a feature, your audience just feels like they’re being jerked around. It’s a long time coming when the film eventually tries to win the audience back. It gives us a couple of decent scenes of women in bondage including models wrapped in duct tape, bound with nipple clamps, and encased in shrink wrap. Sadly, just when you think the movie has reclaimed its bearings, it shits the bed again.
I guess I could also complain about the abrupt and unsatisfying ending, but hey, at least it ended.
AKA: The Photographer: Inside the Mind of a Psycho. AKA: The Camera Killer.
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