The best thing I can say about ANAMORPH is that William Dafoe is great.  Outside of that it’s mostly just a set up for disappointment.  The movie starts out with a pretty interesting set up about a serial killer named “Uncle Eddie”.  Dafoe plays a police detective that is investigating his murders.  It looks like the case it wrapped up but fast forward five years and suddenly killings start to happen in the same style as Uncle Eddie.  Are they dealing with a copy cat or did they finger the wrong guy for the Uncle Eddie killings five years ago?

There are a lot of familiar faces in ANAMOPRH.  Scott Speedman plays a young detective that is hoping to get a chance to break a big case.  Clea Duvall plays a former prostitute that was a friend of the “last” Uncle Eddie victim five years ago.  And if you blink you’ll miss the appearance of former WWE Champion and current TNA Wrestler Mick Foley as an antique dealer.

Some of the cool concepts of the movie are that the killer has a great style about him.  ANAMORPHISIS is a style of art where two distinct images looked at from a different perspective make a new image.  In one of the slayings in the film the victim is cut up into numerous pieces and hung from the ceiling.  When viewed from a certain spot in the room the pieces create the image of a bird.  Dafoe does a great job as Stan.  We’re never offered his last name.  He has a very eccentric and OCD way about him.  He loves furniture (chairs really) and has a chair dealer constantly looking for pieces for him.  It brings a lot to the character.

Now the big disappointments about the film are that we are constantly told that Stan feels disappointment about not stopping the killer before he got the prostitute mentioned above.  They seem to implicate that they knew each other and were friends but they don’t mention how.  There is no back story given only him looking sad at the crime scenes of her death during flashbacks.  I read on the IMDB page that she was an undercover cop but there is no place in the movie that I remember it being stated or implied that she was an undercover cop.  The main question of the movie is if the new killer is a copy cat killer or did they implicate the wrong guy five years earlier?  No answer for that by the end of the movie.  The killer seems to know Stan which would lead one to believe it’s the original killer starting their game back up again but again there is never any resolution.  Scott Speedman doesn’t add anything to the movie more than to sort of just be annoying almost to the point of fanboydom over Stan and his working on the original Uncle Eddie case.

Is the movie horrible?  Not by any means.  The concept is cool and the killings are done in a very creative style.  But when you leave so many plot holes left unfilled at the end it just really disappoints.  There were numerous ways they could have fixed them but we’re left only shaking our head wondering.

The DVD is pretty lackluster as well.  The trailer, one deleted scene, and the making of Featurette seems like it was shown on Showtime to promote the movie and not really take you behind the scenes.  There is a lot of stuff to delve into about the movie that could make for an interesting behind the scenes.  All in all I would say if it’s on TV give it a watch but by all means don’t buy this one.

Score: 2.5/5

Quick Thoughts:

• Dafoe does a great job as always
• Killer concept is intriguing but leads no where
• Too many plot holes and dangling threads