Occasionally, as he did in his ill-advised recut of The Warriors, Hill freezes the frame and cuts to a comic-book panel, as if suggesting the movie is best read as a moralistic horror story out of his horror anthology TV series Tales From the Crypt, which was itself heavily inspired by Poe. There's a subtle camp to Weaver's performance, as when she admires one mobster as "such a Darwinian creation", that hints as much. But to work as a gory fable, the movie would have had to be bolder and more purposefully tasteless. It's not hard to imagine Paul Verhoeven or John Waters wading in up to their waists, or conversely, Pedro Almodóvar more delicately exploring its erotic resonances. (The latter is especially easy to imagine, since Almodóvar did as much in 2011's The Skin I Live In.)

Rachel, who favours suits and ties when she's not stuffed into a straitjacket, claims to have "liberated" Frank from "the macho prison you've been living in", but (Re)Assignment is still stuck in one, depicting a world in which femininity has been all but erased. The men are men and the women are masculine, with the exception of Johnnie (Caitlin Gerard), the svelte blonde nurse who somewhat improbably comes to Frank's aid. For the work of a 74-year-old veteran director, the movie feels dispiritingly juvenile, more like the fantasy of a frightened boy than a film-making great. It's hard to know whether we should hope Hill makes another film so that (Re)Assignment isn't his last or that he quits before he tarnishes his legacy further.

★☆☆☆☆

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