By Terry Sherwood
Gabriel Carrer’s The Death Cycle rides onto the screen with an oddly restrained velocity. This Canadian film that features a helmeted biker vigilante dispatching members of a corrupt family, you’d expect pedal-to-the-metal pulp energy. Instead, the screenplay deliberately adopts a slow pace, leaving long silences, protracted dialogue scenes which often leave one shaking head, and deliberate stylistic pauses between outbursts of giallo-inspired carnage.
The most interesting moment is an outlandish crawling sequence through a pure white room, a moment that feels from another cinematic dimension. It’s here that Carrer tips his hand to the heritage of giallo and European art-horror. The sequence the lobby butchery of Dario Argento’s debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage The crawl in The Death Cycle feels excessive but it is the kind of flourish that genre people latch onto, a fragment of style that elevates an otherwise linear revenge film.
The plot itself is pared down to a morality play. Journalist Luca Sullivan (Matthew Ninaber), estranged from his politically and criminally entangled family, returns home when his sister Caterina (Sasha Ormond) is left traumatized after the bloody deaths of her brother Eduardo (Matt Daciw) and Cousin Ray (Justin Bott). The killer is a biker in black leather and an opaque crash helmet, a figure that knowingly evokes cult slashers like Terror Eyes/Night School (1981) and Nail Gun Massacre (1985). Why is a homicidal biker never explained.
The film opens with some foreshadowing dialogue over black screen then on the road with Eduardo, who in a drunken rage, plows his car into two young women. Caterina watches impassively as he stomps on one victim’s head to silence her. The family’s influence ensures that Abby (Kristen Kaster), the surviving sister, is pressured into silence. From this moment, viewer sympathy is pulled from the Sullivans; when the biker begins exacting vengeance, it’s hard to shed tears. This moral imbalance is both the film’s strength and weakness: it allows Carrer to stage outlandish killings guilt-free, but it also deprives the film of tension. We may wait for the next dispatch, but we never doubt that these characters deserve their fate.
. These extended dialogue scenes are a gamble which for some will work yet you scream for pacing and diction. The tones do not vary from monotone to halting “breathing through lines’ in any of the actors on screen coupled with moments of silence and static ‘David Lean’ shots of trees seem like filler. On one hand, they slow the picture’s momentum to a near halt, reinforcing its “reservation. Their scenes evoke the theatrical staging of Euro-crime dramas, where dialogue becomes as stylized as violence that is marred again by dead delivery of lines
Characters often resemble noir or crime comic archetypes rather than flesh-and-blood figures. Sasha Ormond, as Caterina, is all quivering nerves and haunted stares. Daciw and Bott are sketches of macho arrogance, quickly reduced to pulp.
The killings themselves are staged with practical effects. Heads are crushed, helmets gleam with menace, and decapitated skulls roll across the screen. The biker’s attacks are quick, sharp set-pieces, glued together with a story so linear that one begins to anticipate.
Ultimately, The Death Cycle seems to be part of new style of Canadian horror which I personally find is a dull and self-indulgent. Silence is just silence because you don’t know what to say. It is not audience relief from the violence which at one time was done by comedy. I speak of the abominable Skinamarink and over praised somnambulist video game that thinks it’s a film In a Violent Nature. The world of the slasher is not necessarily “jump scares’ but it is not static shots of trees blowing in the wind. An attempt at reinvention like a combination: grindhouse motifs meet giallo stylization without doing the spade work of either genre or story. The is also the only giallo themed film that has no sexual content, or hint of sensuality unless you like skintight leather which was pivotal to the work. Drinking with the exception of what looks like whiskey and white wine delicately used also seems strange again since Giallo was filled with wine and whiskey even on the ever-present visible bar. In this film they drink water.
Is it effective pulp horror? To a level yes if you tune into its peculiar frequency. In its restraint, its oddball homages, and its occasional flourishes of surreal excess, The Death Cycle is a slow-paced grindhouse echo of what it could be that pedals its way into the margins of cult cinema.
The Death Cycle screened as part of Frightfest 2025.
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