Shadows and Fog

Director: Woody Allen
Year Released: 1991
Rating: 1.0

Bergman, Kafka and Woody Allen's nebbish schtick don't mix well together. Allen's usual awkward, paranoid outsider is greeted with suspicion when the townspeople discover there's a murderer running around town choking people with piano wire. Allen's doing his own worry-wart routine while everyone else is morbid and serious - it's neither funny enough to be a comedy nor 'dark' enough to be a drama, making it mostly an exercise by Santo Loquasto (a former classmate of my father's ... just throwing that out there) in set design and Carlo Di Palma in cinematography. Plus, there are many, many fog machines. Stick with reading the short play it's based on in Without Feathers (which belongs on every bookshelf).