Not your typical giallo thriller, think of The Card Player as CSI Argento. A serial killer begins abducting young women to use as the stakes in a game of online poker with the police, a tactic that turns particularly ugly when the next victim is the police chief’s daughter. (It’s actually a whole lot less hokey than it sounds.) Police officer Anna Mari, who has something of a requisite troubled past, teams up with British cop John Brennan, who has something of a requisite drinking problem, and the two are soon hot on the heels of the murderer with a little help from a young man who just happens to be a whiz at online card games. Of course, being a Dario Argento film, look for the surprise ending…even if this one isn’t that much of a surprise. My only real complaint against this film is the soundtrack; though I’m usually enamored of Claudio Simonetti’s work, the electronic score just didn’t sit right with the movie’s most tense moments. One the bright side, if you can call it that, The Card Player has some of the best FX corpses I’ve seen in many a moon.

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