There's another pesky serial killer on the loose in the cineplex, and this once distinctly American genre has now gone arty and European, with entries like the very good French stab (forgive the pun) The Crimson Rivers. Now the less satisfying but even more grisly and stylish new German chiller Tattoo appears, in which a tattoo fetishist commits a series of bloody murders while removing exotic and valuable body art from the victims.

The film begins with a scene of horrific intensity, as a disoriented, mutilated young woman steps out onto a late night street to escape an unseen pursuer - and is quickly run down by a passing truck. There's real gruesome beauty to this scene, principally aesthetic but with a potent visceral punch as well.

Handily filling in its requisite genre requirements, Tattoo efficiently introduces its older, seasoned, damaged cop - in this case Chief Inspector Minks (Christian Redl); distraught over the death of his wife and apparent runaway of his teenaged daughter. He's quickly paired up with young renegade recruit Marc Schrader (August Diehl, a bit wan and unconvincing in the physical scenes), fresh out of the academy and cornered into playing the rookie to Minks' pro.

As the two hit the trail of the killer and the mutilations pile up, it turns out that there's a secret group of tattoo collectors who stop at nothing to secure the tattoos of a legendary Japanese body artist, who created twelve such works and are highly coveted. Enter beautiful Maya (Nadeshda Brennicke), a cool blonde seductress who has a connection to a victim and whose own body is covered in tattoo number thirteen.

Though Tattoo remains watchable and stylish throughout, its major problems arise from a familiarity with the old cop/young cop, serial killer chase picture, which has been done better (and worse) just about everywhere else.

And then there are the scaled-down, underwritten characters and underplayed performances. We're never engaged by any of the actors or their roles, and there's a significant iciness that works in the set-up to chilly effect but took me out of the picture midway. There's always a tendency to buy this minimalist character development in European films under the guise that we're seeing something "arty," but in an American film, this deliberate "minimalism" is always decried as shallow.

What does work is the gorgeous visual style, which is cold, confident and beautifully shot in 2.35:1 with de-saturated colors punctuated with the heavy crimson of its bountiful blood supply. First-time director Robert Schwentke has an assured hand with his production design and cinematography, creating a cold, damp, oppressive world.

It's almost as beautifully lit and fully realized in its designer grime as was David Fincher's Seven, a much superior film and undoubtedly the prototype here. And as an homage to a film like Seven, Tattoo works reasonably well on its own terms. But stack it next to something like The Silence of the Lambs, and there's a great divide between a human being we care about in grave danger, and two cardboard types in hot pursuit of a wildly contrived villain.

In Tattoo, there's no psychology for the killing; no tormented pathology. It's a clever situation that goes nowhere. The killer has no connection to the cops. The cops have no real passion to find the killer. There's no victim at stake. It's simplistic to a fault, and as a result, we're left in the cold.

Tattoo has its share of effective scenes. In the finest of its many effective visual flourishes, Maya reveals her full body tattoo to Schrader by standing in her signature white dress, allowing a pelting rain storm to soak her through until the sheer white fabric gives way to the masterful design beneath her wet, clinging clothes. The moment of discovery is a sublime and mysterious flourish in an otherwise routine film.

I guessed the killer's identify in the first half hour, and though I appreciated the straightforward approach to Tattoo's horror, I found the mystery unsatisfying, the suspense level pretty low and the conclusion contrived.