Il mostro di Firenze AKA The Monster of Florence (1986)

There's a serial killer on the loose in Florence. He shoots couples who are making out in cars in the woods. It's based on a real serial killer.

A writer is writing about the serial killer. He imagines who the killer is and how he does his killing, playing the potential scenes over and over in his head. He bores his wife and the cops and the viewer and everyone who will listen to his boring murder predictions.

Then the middle hour and a half happens. Ugh. It has all the pacing of a sloth stuck in glue. Arpeggios play on an out-of-tune piano in the background the whole time, and people have pointless conversations. There's a lot of silent pacing around rooms and looking at walls. Truly, never has a thriller been less thrilling.

A creepy guy who looks like an Italian Tobey Maguire is good with guns, bad with women, and lives with an over-controlling mother. He's introduced so slowly and uninterestingly that I can't tell why the movie is even showing us this.

It flashes back to the creepy guy's childhood, takes ever so long to get to the point, and then the young boy walks in on his father being cuckolded by his mother. This is how serial killers are born. Slowly, excruciatingly slowly. He spends the next few minutes poking a doll's eyeball, because film was too cheap or something.

It flashes back forward and spends ages, just ages, repeatedly showing people in cars getting shot in slow motion. Who knew violent murder could be made so boring? There is one singularly cool shot, where blood runs down the splayed legs of an anonymous dead person leaning against a car, which represents some 30 out of the 6000 seconds you must suffer.

It switches to black-and-white for a trial scene because, I guess, they blew all their budget on slow shots of clown dolls and typewriters. The trial scene cuts around between random people in the jury and crowd looked dramatically at the camera. It doesn't really have any story, so there's nothing to wrap up, and thus they wrap nothing up. That takes 15 minutes.