Census Bloodbath: Sharp Objects

Note: Technically, this Dutch-language movie came with subtitles. However, the subtitles were in French. Weirdly, this did help quite a bit, despite my incredibly limited French. But still, take my review with a huge grain of salt.

Year:
1982
Director:
Guy Lee Thys
Cast:
Leslie de Gruyter, Rosemarie Bergmans, Christian Baggen
Run Time:
1 hour 14 minutes

Plot: In The Pencil Murders (originally De potloodmoorden), inspector Rick Van Houtte (Leslie de Gruyter), along with his photographer friend Leslie Werkers (Christian Baggen) is trying to track down a serial killer who murders people by shoving pencils into their noses. His work leads him to neglect his beautiful wife, Marilène (Rosemarie Bergmans), who isn't too happy about that.

Analysis: The Pencil Murders is unique in multiple ways. The first is obviously the killer's M.O. Jason Voorhees found a glittering multitude of ways to dispatch his victims, but he never quite reached the point of shoving pencils into people's noses. The other major way is that it's a Belgian giallo movie. While Belgium will pop up in Census Bloodbath from time to time with titles like The Antwerp Killer and Lucker the Necrophagus, they really didn't hop on the slasher train all that often. 

If this is the best they can do, it makes sense why they never really bothered. While The Pencil Murders isn't quite a bad movie, it is an austere and boring one. Weirdly, as far as I could tell, the tone of this movie is entirely serious in spite of its over-the-top premise. Unfortunately, it does not pay to be serious about making a cop-forward slasher, because those tend to land among the worst of the subgenre. After all, hard-boiled investigations fly in the face of what slasher movies are supposed to be about (boobs and blood).

The cop stuff here is particularly uninteresting, which is a bummer, because the slasher stuff is even worse. Despite the fact that the pencil kill concept is intriguing, the whole thing is ruined by a parsimoniously small body count and an unfortunate habit of staging kills offscreen. We do get a look at all of the bodies post-murder, but the onscreen gore isn't well-executed enough that you can parse much of the imagery, in spite of being explicitly told what the killer has done.

The Pencil Murders is also entirely bland as an aesthetic object. There are nighttime scenes that attempt to have some measure of style (a splash of color here, a silhouette there), but they're too dark to accomplish any goal beyond just throwing a bunch of mud onscreen. But bland is still better than bad, so if I had to rewatch a Belgian slasher movie, I'd pick this over The Antwerp Killer. Really though, I'd just as soon watch paint drying, so that's hardly high praise.

Killer: Leslie Werkers (Christian Baggen)

Final Girl: Rick Van Houtte (Leslie de Gruyter)

Best Kill: Unfortunately, the best death is the one doled out to one of the Black men who is unjustly accused of being the killer. The fact that the only prolonged, onscreen death belongs to a Black character is... not great. But it's a pretty chilling scene, involving him being drowned in the bath as the killer attempts to get the pencil close enough to his face to jam it in.

Sign of the Times: Goldfinger is name-dropped and there's an Onibaba poster in the background. Both of these things are signs of entirely different times than the 1980s, but they're all I got.

Scariest Moment: The killer sneaks into a woman's home and steals a pencil from her kid's arts & crafts table.

Weirdest Moment: Marilène's young lover appears to have a gnarly sunburn during their sex scene.

Champion Dialogue: N/A

Body Count: 4

1. Fashion Model is pencil-murdered.
2. Young Mother is pencil-murdered.
3. Black Suspect is pencil-murdered.
4. Leslie Werkers is shot by Rick.

TL;DR: The Pencil Murders wastes a great M.O. on a bland giallo riff.

Rating: 4/10