CITY WIDE FEVER Review: Not Really a Giallo Homage, And That's Ok
Josh Heaps’ City Wide Fever is a real oddity. On the surface, it’s a small DIY thriller that looks shot on the cheap, which already narrows down its appeal. But if you get on its wavelength over the course of its very brief 70 minutes (sans credits), you might even start to feel a small twinge of nostalgia.
Said nostalgia comes from a very different source than advertised. Billed as an homage to giallo, this certainly has a setup those Italian films would have a field day with: A film student named Sam (Diletta Guglielmi) finds a USB in a park one day, containing the life and work of forgotten director Saturnino Barresi, including his unfinished final film, which gives this one its title. As she investigates the filmmaker’s disappearance, odd things start happening, mainly that a mysterious figure in a bright pink ski mask is killing everyone she talks to.
Sure, some giallo elements are present – the harsh, oddly sensuous lighting, the gory deaths – but this quickly starts to pine for the days of 1970s and 1980s grindhouse cheapies, the kind that would find a home on the fabled 42nd Street; no surprise that it’s namedropped by Sam’s douchebag film studies professor (Onur Tukel), who seems to be giving a quick primer directly to the audience. A lot of people here – including a cameoing Larry Fessenden as a skeevy porn shop owner – seem nostalgic for shot-on-camcorder indies and those Italian films that were set in New York or some other big city, but everyone in the cast had Italian surnames.
It’s nostalgia for a no-holds-barred era of filmmaking that wasn’t tamped down by big studios, box office earnings, focus groups, YouTube channels dissecting every movie to within an inch of its life, and so on; it’s filmmaking that took more risks and had the liberty to do so. Whether or not those films were any good is up to the viewer.
The nostalgia is what mostly holds this one up; as its thin runtime wears on, this movie tries to go for a surreal, artsy vibe that makes the protagonist question her own reality, though the attempt is hampered by a limited budget. By the time veteran actress Rutanya Alda pops up to rail against the most unsavory aspects of a giallo, the plot gets messy and convoluted and you’ll be wondering why Guglielmi is randomly replaced by a different actress with no warning.
City Wide Fever makes more sense as a call-back to grimy indie film and B-movies, or as a satire of them; its attitudes and characters are too contemporary to be truly called a giallo. That subgenre is so indebted to the 1970s and European cinema of the time, that any attempt to resurrect it is automatically going to be a self-referential pastiche. If you want something closer to an homage, go to Argentina and check out something like Abrakadabra (2018) from the Onetti Brothers.
City Wide Fever is playing as part of the Alamo Drafthouse Weird Wednesday Series nationwide on April 15. Visit the official Alamo Drafthouse site for locations and showtimes. It will be followed by a digital release on May 1.
