Deborah Ballin (Lee Grant) is an outspoken reporter who does a news segment dealing with domestic violence that angers misogynist Colt (Michael Ironside). For revenge he attacks her inside her home, but she manages to escape and gets treated at the local hospital. Unfortunately the psychotic Colt continues to stalk her inside the hospital, which causes her, other patients and the hospital staff to fear for their lives.
The script is predictable and unimaginative. It sticks to the tired 80’s slasher formula like it is a religion. The set-up is awkward and rushed while the rest of the film dealing with Colt’s perpetual stalking becomes prolonged and redundant. The scares lack excitement and the frights are non-existent. The only potentially interesting part that could’ve allowed this film to really stand out is when Deborah is taken into the operating room and put under anesthesia and thinks that the surgeon arriving to do the operation is Colt in disguise. The film teases the viewer with this possibility, but then chickens out.
The only novelty is having a 55-year-old actress as the heroine as opposed to the youthful, virginal looking types that get cast in these things in-part because of their screaming abilities. Having Grant playing a self-assured, confident character is refreshing change of pace for the genre, but then the film compromises even this by having Deborah’s young nurse played by Linda Purl become the target of Colt’s evil rage and by the end it’s Purl who has the most screen time.
Ironside is a competent actor and it is no surprise that he would be cast in the role of a killer due to his menacing facial features. He is talented enough to make the scenes he is in interesting despite the fact that he says less than 15 words during the whole film. Still the cutaways showing the reason for his mental illness being due to him witnessing as a child his mother throwing boiling water on his father is hooky. Also having him wear a small bell around his neck that rings every time he moves if awfully stupid for a person with a habit of stalking people.
The film has a similar concept toHalloween IIthat also dealt with a killer stalking a victim while inside a hospital, but here at least they use an actual hospital that is lighted the way a real hospital should be. The foot chase between Grant and Ironside that has them going to all areas of the building reminded me a little of the chase between Genvieve Bujold and Lance LeGault in the film Coma although that one is still far superior to the one here.
There are few mildly intense moments at the end that helps save this from being a complete boring waste, but still does little to make up for the rest of it that falls flat. Oh yeah, William Shatner also appears here in a pointless and dull role as Deborah’s boss.
Scanners are people with strange psychic powers that can not only read other people’s minds, but also kill them and even move objects with their brainwaves. A corrupt group of scanners lead by Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) threatens world domination. Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) who works for a company that is trying to stop these dangerous people finds a scanner named Cameron (Stephan Lack) that Darryl’s groups is seeking, but has not yet located. Ruth trains Cameron on how to hone in his scanning powers and then track down Darryl’s group and destroy it.
Director David Cronenberg is still in my estimation one of the premiere cult/horror directors around. It is one thing to make a great horror movie when you have a big budget and state of the art special effects, but it is another to make an effective movie when you have little to work with and yet Cronenberg has continually shown that a creative imagination can triumph over all else. He has also shown a refreshingly daring vision throughout his career and seems to have no hesitation in tackling taboo subjects.
This film proves no exception. The story is quite creative and there are continually new and surprising twists thrown in. The special effects are excellent and imaginative. I loved the protruding, blood spurting veins coming out of the arms and heads of Cameron and Darryl during their intense scanner showdown at the end. The melting telephone receiver isn’t bad and off course the exploding head is memorable and deserves its place in the annals of gross cinema history.
With that said I still felt the film could have done a better job at setting up the story. It starts right away with a lot of action before anything is explained and makes things confusing. Some sort of prolog in this case would have been appropriate. Everything also seems rushed. This is a great plot with interesting scenarios and I as a viewer wanted a little more time to soak it all in, but wasn’t given any. The sets and backdrops are redundantly dark and grimy and lack visual design. Overall the film has a seriously dated look and although there are way too many films being remade these days and some that are not necessary this is one movie were I would advocate it especially if done with a high budget and a competent director.
Stephan Lack makes for incredibly weak leading man. He is better known in the art world as a renowned painter and his film career was quite brief. After watching his performance here it is not hard to see why. He has very much of a ‘deer-in-headlights’ look and a voice tone that shown no infliction, or emotion. His lack of charisma or stature seriously weakens the film’s overall effect and why he was chosen for the part is a mystery.
Jennifer O’Neill is gorgeous as Kim a female scanner who works with Cameron in his quest to find Darryl. The woman, who was a former model, has a face that is so beautiful it is mesmerizing no matter what angle she is shown at or emotion that she is conveying. My only complaint is the small streak of gray that was put into her hair, which I found unnecessary especially since she was portraying someone who was Cameron’s same age, which was the early 30’s.
On the villainous side Ironside certainly has the chiseled threatening features of a bad guy. However, I actually thought that Canadian character actor Lawrence Dane who plays one of Darryl’s spies was actually more effective.
The artwork done by the Benjamin Pierce character (Robert A. Silverman) visualizing giant heads and the thoughts inside people’s heads was really cool and avant-garde.
Dr. Dan Challis (Tom Atkins) is an emergency room physician treating a patient (Al Berry) who arrives in the facility clutching a Halloween mask and stating that someone is out to kill him. When the man does end up being killed Dan becomes suspicious that it may have something to do with the mask. He teams up with the victim’s daughter Ellie (Stacey Nelkin) and the two find that the trouble began when her father visited the Silver Shamrock factory. It is here that they meet the company owner Conal Cochran (Dan O’Herlihy) who turns out to be a maniacal man who has created Halloween masks that have a computer chip implanted in them that will kill the children wearing them.
Although listed as the third part of the Halloween franchise there is no Michael Meyers here, nor any of the other familiar characters. The idea was to continue the series by having creepy stories with some connection to the Halloween holiday released each year, but this film did so poorly at the box office that the idea was dropped. The original script by Nigel Kneale was meant to be a dark comedy, but producer Dino De Laurentis wanted to play it as a straight horror film and striped the screenplay of the humor. Had it been kept in the humorous vein it might have worked, but the idea is too ludicrous to be taken seriously with glaring plot holes that defy all logic.
One of the biggest ones is the fact that Cochran plans on killing the children by having them all watch an advertisement his company has created and will be broadcast on all the channels at 9:00 Halloween night. Supposedly there is some sort of signal in the ad that will set of the computer chips in the masks, which the children are all supposed to be wearing while they watch the ad that will kill them instantly while also creating deadly snakes and spiders in the process. How a computer chip could create live creatures is ridiculous enough, but the fact that somehow Cochran does this by using pieces of a Stonehenge rock that he has stolen is even more absurd. There is also the fact that if the commercial airs at 9:00 eastern time it would only be 6:00 on the west coast. Therefore the commercial would be delayed by four hours, which would be enough time for the authorities to figure out what was going on and pull the ad before it ever even aired in California and probably have Cochran under arrest by then.
There also the fact that Cochran seems to have no plan B here. The reason for why he is doing this is murky at best, but what he hopes to gain from it is even more elusive. There is also the question of how he plans to escape once it becomes obvious to everyone what happened. None of this of course is ever explained and these are just a few of a myriad of implausibilities that the story spits out. There are so many of them that they aren’t even worth explaining, but clearly any film that expects the viewer to overlook so many glaring loopholes is not good. The film is like a flimsy outline to an idea that no one bothered to think through with the details.
I was also unimpressed with the masks themselves and couldn’t understand why all the children would be so excited to have them. They looked like something one could pick-up at a cheap dime store and had nothing unique or distinctive about them except that they could supposedly glow in the dark. The factory where the masks where is made is equally unimpressive looking like an old, rundown, non-descript building that had no visual presence. I was expecting the building especially from a company that could create such a nefarious technology as these masks to be sleek, modern, and imposing, which would have helped create a more foreboding feeling. The commercial used to advertise the masks is unimaginative and cheap looking. The jingle used in the ad, which was set to the melody of ‘London Bridges’ because apparently that was under public domain at the time, becomes irritating to listen to and gets overplayed.
One of the few things that I liked about the movie was the fact that the protagonist was a middle-aged man instead of teenagers. The gruesome special effects are okay and veteran actor O’Herlihy shows enough sinister mugs to the camera to be fun. I also liked at the end how Ellie for some unexplained reason turns into a robot and keeps on attacking Dan even as he vigorously dismantles it.
Segments from the original Halloween can be seen in this one. The first time it is shown while Dan is watching TV at a bar it is a clever in-joke, but when it gets shown again near the end it becomes a mistake because it reminds the viewer how much better that movie is compared to this one.
My Rating: 2 out of 10
Released: October 22, 1982
Runtime: 1Hour 39Minutes
Rated R
Director: Tommy Lee Wallace
Studio: Universal
Available: VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Instant Video
It’s still Halloween night 1978. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is rushed to the nearby Haddonfield Memorial Hospital to have her wounds attended to while Michael Meyers (Dick Warlock) roams the streets. Eventually he becomes aware of where she is and stalks her in the hospital while killing off anyone who gets in his way.
The film starts out okay. I liked the camera closing in on the pumpkin during the opening credits and revealing the shape of a skull inside. A fiery car crash that burns a kid wearing a similar mask to Michael’s is effectively graphic and showing things from Michael’s point-of-view as he peers inside the neighbor’s homes has shades of Rear Window to it. However, I was confused why it wasn’t shown through the two eye holes of the mask since Michael was still wearing it and that was how it was done in the first film.
Things start to decline as it goes on and deviates too much to the standard slasher formula. I forget where I read it, but I remember somebody writing about the perennial characteristics of a tacky 80’s slasher film and one of them was having a scared cat jump out at someone some time during the film. The scene where the hospital security guard (Cliff Emmich) is going through the dumpster behind the building I started to think that this is the part for the proverbial scared cat and sure enough within seconds one jumps out pretty much cementing this for me as a second-rate shocker.
Donald Pleasance as Dr. Loomis is solid as always. The intensity that he displays is good and seeing him as a good guy for a change since the majority of his career he played dark and twisted characters is refreshing. Curtis is also good in the reprisal of her part, but for the first hour she barely appears at all. I was also confused with the scene where she for some unexplained reason falls into a comatose state and then just as strangely snaps out of it a few minutes later.
The Meyers character becomes a detriment here. Having him constantly getting shot at and then bouncing back up without any rational explanation was irritating. He gets around at too many different places and seems a little too slick. For instance he’s able to cut off the phone lines to the hospital in some unexplained way as well as slashing the tires of every single car in the hospital’s parking lot. Also, where does a guy who has been institutionalized since age six manage to figure out the meaning and origins of samhain, which is a word that he writes in blood on a wall of a classroom?
There are other loopholes as well. For instance the hospital seems extremely dark and shadowy. Most hospitals I have been to are always well lit inside especially the hallways, but here it is almost like there are no lights on at all. The part where Michael stabs a nurse in her back with a thin surgical blade and then is able to lift her from the floor with it is ridiculous because the blade just wouldn’t be strong enough. The knife that Michael steals from an old lady (Lucille Benson) when he sneaks into her house is different from the one that he jams into the desk of a classroom that he breaks into.
The extreme lapses of logic are a big problem. When the film starts to have no bearing in reality then I find it hard if not impossible to get caught up into it. Clearly the screenwriter and director were making up the rules as they went along causing the climatic sequence that should have been suspenseful to be, at least to me, boring and annoying instead.
On Halloween night in 1963 6 year old Michael Myers stabs to death his older sister Judith. He is taken away to a mental institution, but fifteen years later he escapes and comes back to his hometown of Haddonfield to stalk three teenage women (Jamie Lee Curtis, Nancy Loomis, P.J. Soles) on Halloween night.
I first saw this film 25 years ago when I was in College and thought it was cool, but now on my second viewing I’m not quite as impressed. There are still some good things about it, but also in my opinion some glaring loopholes. I’ll start with the things I liked.
Cinematically it is a well mounted thriller. The lighting is perfect. The dark shadowy interiors create the feeling of menace and the little light that is shown has a bluish tone and resembles authentic moonlight. The music by director John Carpenter is distinct and has an effective up-tempo beat almost like a warning siren. The editing and pacing is great. It builds the tension nicely and has some creepy imagery.
One of the scenes I always found to be the creepiest is when Tommy, the young boy that the Curtis character is babysitting, sees from across the street Michael carrying one of his dead victims from the car to the house. In fact all the long shots showing Michael are the most effective. Somehow it was a combination not only of the way the actor walked in the costume, but his mask as well, which was apparently a William Shatner Captain Kirk mask that was painted all white.
The fact that there is never any reason given for why Michael became the way he did is also good. There are many similar true-life crimes where even after the murderer is interviewed by the psychiatrists they still can’t always come up with a satisfying explanation. Movies that try to show the reason behind why the bad guy becomes murderous usually end up being contrived and clichéd.
The three actresses looked too old for teenagers and in the case of both Loomis and Soles where already in their late twenties. Loomis though is kind of funny in her part especially with the way she interacts with Lindsey (Kyle Richards) the young girl that she is babysitting. Curtis is good and although I respect her right to going natural with the gray hair that she now sports I still felt she was at her most attractive when she had the long red hair like she has here.
On the negative side there seemed to be too many story elements that didn’t make sense. For instance Michael is institutionalized when he is six and then escapes fifteen years later and is able to miraculously drive a car even though he was never trained. The book version of the movie explains this anomaly by stating that when Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) would take Michael to sanity hearings over the years that Michael would watch very closely how Loomis operated the vehicle and thus ‘learned’ how to drive, but that still doesn’t make sense because watching how something is done and then finally doing it yourself are two completely different things. Besides if watching how somebody drives where enough then every child who watched his parents drive could learn it and there would be no need for driving schools. Also, Michael escapes from the asylum without any explanation, which seemed way too convenient.
When Dr. Loomis shows up in town and tells the sheriff (Charles Cyphers) that there may be an escaped mental patient in the vicinity the sheriff comes up with the logical step of warning everybody about it, but Loomis disagrees and his reasoning is ridiculous. Also, when Laurie (Curtis) gets a call from Lynda (Soles) that sounds like she is being murdered Laurie doesn’t do the most sensible thing and that is to call the police and let them investigate it. Instead she decides to go over to the home in the middle of the night and investigate it herself, which not only needlessly puts her in a dangerous position, but also leaves the two kids that she is supposed to be watching home alone in bed, which is something a good babysitter should never do.
I also had some problems with the setting itself. Now of course the town of Haddonfield is fictitious, but the state of Illinois isn’t. It is situated right in the middle of the Midwest and there are no palm trees anywhere within its borders and yet I spotted a few lining the streets especially near the beginning when Laurie is seen walking home from school. I didn’t buy into the idea that the Meyers house would stand vacant for 15 years either. There are a lot of homes that have murders committed in them that do not remain abandoned, or considered ‘haunted’. In some cases the original house is torn down and a new one is built in its place such as the infamous John Wayne Gacy house in Des Plaines, Illinois, which is now being occupied by a new family. The neighborhood in the film looks nice and well-kept. The other homeowners wouldn’t stand for a building being abandoned for that long as it brings down the property values.
When I first saw this movie I got a real kick out of the part where Michael kills a man and then hangs him by a knife on a wall and stares at the corpse in a child-like way. However, on second viewing I don’t think the blade of the knife would have been long enough, or strong enough to go through a man’s body as well as a wooden door.
The opening sequence where we see Michael killing his sister from his perspective didn’t completely work with me either. I liked the idea of seeing the action through the two eye holes of the mask that Michael was wearing, but I think if someone is stabbing someone else that they would be looking at what they are doing, but instead the eye holes remain fixated on the sister’s face during the stabbing that is being done on the lower parts of her body, which looked stilted and unrealistic.
Now, I know this movie has a large legion of fans and some may take umbrage to my negative points, but hey, I take my film criticism seriously and feel I need to say it the way I see it. That is not to say that I ‘hated’ the movie either. I still liked it overall, but when given the issues that I described above I can only give it 6 points.
A group of people go into the deep dark jungles of the Amazon looking for a missing film crew. They never find the crew, but they do find some lost film footage of theirs. They bring it back home and play it and what they see is so gruesome that it startles the imagination.
This is truly a gross-out classic. If you have ever watched a horror movie purporting to have gruesome special effects and then walked away disappointed then this one will make up for the rest and everything else in between. No cutaways here and certainly no restraint for good taste. The effects look real and, at times, almost too real. Best of all is the fact that the story is handled in a realistic fashion giving the effects even more credibility. For instance the cutting off of one of the characters legs after he is bitten by a snake looks completely authentic. There is also a castration scene that has to be one of the most vivid ones ever filmed. There is also the cutting up of man’s body into little pieces and some really graphic rape scenes.
The film also doesn’t have that cheap look like with most horror films and it gets you immersed in the jungle atmosphere. It is well paced and builds up some really good tension. The editing is seamless without any of those annoying jump cuts. The music score is melodic, but distinct and effective making it one of the best scores ever made for a horror film. The eventual showing of the lost crew’s footage packs a wallop.
Former adult film star Richard Bolla plays the professor and the leader of the search party. He is credited as the star of the film yet his character is bland and forgettable. His only memorable moment comes when he jumps naked into a river and allows the adolescent girls from a nearby tribe to grope him, which has got to be a cinematic first. My favorite character was Chaco (Salvatore Basile). He is gruff and rough and absolutely nothing seems to faze him. He is so hardened by it all that it actually becomes amusing and I wished he would have stayed on for the duration.
The actual lost film crew is a vile bunch giving the film its main message of just who is ‘civilized’ and who is the savage. Their behavior is so disgusting that most viewers will actually look forward to their eventual gruesome demise.
The same cannot be said for the animals. There are graphic, ugly scenes involving the torture and mutilation of animals and it is not pretty. The animals flail their arms and legs and scream in very real pain and fright. It’s all handled in a distasteful and mocking way with the dissection of a sea turtle making even this jaded viewer feel nauseous. This will certainly be unsettling for animal lovers, but fortunately for those people the DVD release has a version that will cut out these segments while still allowing the viewer to enjoy the rest of the movie.
Claire (Annabella Sciorra) is a young mother who feels that her doctor (John de Lancie) molested her during her exam. She goes to the authorities, which brings out more complaints from other patients. This leads the doctor into killing himself and causing his widowed wife (Rebecca De Mornay) to miscarry. In revenge the widow decides to destroy the life of the woman who brought up the charges and does so by posing as the family’s nanny named Peyton Flanders.
Just when you think that the old psycho formula has gone stale this film comes along that injects a whole new life into it. That is not to say that there is anything new here because there isn’t yet it is a pure thriller that captures the formula well and hits it on all cylinders. It builds the suspense slowly but consistently without throwing in any cheap teasers. You really ARE on the edge of your seat as the tension grows. The climatic sequence is well mounted, but the best part is that it creates a villain that is not only a threat, but also someone you hate, really hate! You look forward to the inevitable showdown and become emotionally involved in its outcome.
De Mornay makes a terrific bad lady. Usually villainess females work of their sensuality, but not here. Yes it is intimated, but it is incased in a very cold and calculating exterior. The character is deliberate and spins an elaborate web while coming up with some clever deaths for her victims with the best one being the death by greenhouse. Her icy stares reminded me of the legendary Bette Davis.
The good guys aren’t quite as interesting and in many ways are a bit boring. The husband/father (Matt McCoy) is especially bland and almost transparent. Sciorra’s beautiful and very angelic face helps, but she seems to get rattled too easily. Julianne Moore, as Marlene a family friend, is the only one who offers anything in the way of tenacity to her personality.
The Ernie Hudson character, who is mentally handicapped, is a nice addition. It shows sensitivity to those with disabilities and doesn’t exploit it simply for entertainment. His final showdown with De Mornay is another one you just can’t wait to see. The kids are adorable and it’s nice to see that they too can be resourceful when they need to be and can’t be so easily brainwashed either.
In all fairness there are some logic loopholes that should be mentioned. One is the obvious fact that this woman makes up her past in order to get the job as the nanny. When she applies for the position you would think that a careful and responsible family such as this one would check her references carefully and find her discrepancies. Also there is the fact that the De Mornay character was at one time a prominent doctor’s wife. This would give me the impression that she would have had a large circle of friends and they would have all wondered what happened to her or at the very least spotted her in her new identity since she apparently only moved to the other side of town.
Still, this is a solid thriller that is perfectly made for fans of the genre and deserves to be on the list with the best.
A gruesome murder is committed during a graduation dance in 1945. Now, thirty-five years later, the town decides to hold another one and soon the gruesome murders start back up.
The film does have an unusual opening for a slasher film, which consists of actual newsreel footage from World War II. It also nicely recreates a 1940’s dance scene. The presence of veteran’s Farley Granger and Lawrence Tierney help a little, but not much. Neither is seen a whole lot and in the case of Tierney isn’t even given a single line of dialogue. Bill Nunnery comes off best in his brief appearance as a lazy and apathetic hotel clerk. There is also a good moment of juxtaposition featuring the girls dressing up for the dance while cutting away to show the killer dressing up to kill them.
However, the movie is incredibly boring and redundant. There seems to be no point to the murders from before and why it was even put in seems ridiculous. The teen characters are one-dimensional and useless. The scenes that are supposed to be intense and scary become excessively dragged out until they become dull. The much ballyhooed special effects by Tom Savini don’t seem all that gruesome. The killings are pretty much standard stuff with most consisting of just a quick slash to the victim’s throat and then cutting away. The only decent one involves the death of a nude shower victim via a pitchfork. One particular killing seemed hard to believe if not completely impossible. It involved the killer putting a large knife all the way through the top of the victim’s skull and then out the bottom of his jaw with just one swoop. Then somehow the killer is able to easily take this same knife all the way back out, clean if off, and use it on his next victim. The girls are decent looking, but there needed to be a lot more nudity to make it worthwhile.
Despite attaining a cult following I found the film to be unimaginative and formulaic. The killings are boring and there isn’t one single scare or fright in it.
My Rating: 2 out of 10
Released: November 6, 1981
Runtime: 1Hour 29Minutes
Rated R
Director: Joseph Zito
Studio: Sandhurst
Available: VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Instant Video
A summer camp caretaker named Cropsy (Lou David) is badly burned during a practical joke gone horribly wrong. Five years later and disfigured he gets out of the hospital and goes on a murderous rampage using a pair of gardening shears. However, he kills young campers at a completely different campsite and who had nothing to do with his accident.
Jason Alexander, in his film debut, is great. He shows a lot of charisma and pretty much carries the movie. You not only get to see him with a full head of hair, but for the lady viewers you also see his bare behind along with Fisher Stevens’s. This is also Holly Hunter’s first film, but she is seen very little. The teen characters here look like real teenagers instead of college- aged young adults like in most of the other films in this genre. They also have a little more distinctive personalities and aren’t quite as cardboard as usual. The women are good looking and there is a gratuitous nude scene involving actress/model Carole Houlihan.
On the Blue Underground DVD version make-up artist Tom Savini hosts a bonus feature, but warns everyone at the start not to watch it until they have seen the film so as not to ‘spoil’ it for them. However, it is hard to figure out what exactly it is that he would be spoiling as the movie is routine to the extreme. There are absolutely no interesting plot twists or surprises. It is also hard to believe that anyone could get a pair of simple gardening shears to do the things this killer gets them to do. The only really scary scene in this film is at the beginning where you get to see a close-up of actor Lou David’s strangely shaped nose. The camera slowly zooms into him as he is sleeping and you feel almost like you are being driven into his extremely large nostrils that seem to get bigger and bigger.
Savini’s special effects really don’t seem all that impressive especially in this day and age. There is a scene on the infamous raft killing sequence where it is quite obvious that the neck that the shears are cutting through is plastic and not really that of the actor’s. Also during the opening sequence when Cropsy runs out of the cabin while on fire he is not wearing anything on top of his head yet when the camera cuts to an outdoor shot of him it is obvious that the stunt double has something on his head.
I found this to be as bad and as uninspired as all the other Friday the 13th rip-offs. This is good only as a curio at seeing Alexander, Stevens and Hunter in their film debuts.
The film opens with a cemetery worker (Rupert Everett) talking on the phone with a friend. He hears a knock at the door and when he answers it he sees a man with bluish, decayed skin ready to attack him. The worker calmly takes out a gun, shoots the man in the head, and then goes back to talking on the phone like nothing happened. Thus begins this very quirky horror comedy that is a send-up of all those old zombie movies and has acquired a cult following. It was filmed in Italy and is based on the popular Italian comic book ‘Dylan Dog’ by Tiziano Sclavi.
The initial premise is fun. The protagonist is Francesco Dellamorte, who with his mute and mentally-challenged assistant named Gnaghi (Francois Hadji-Lazaro), are stuck running a cemetery in a small Italian town where the dead will routinely come back to life. It is then up to them to shoot the zombies in their head, which will kill them permanently. This starts a wild array of crazy scenarios that become increasingly bizarre as the film progresses.
Initially I found it to be inventive. The tongue-in-check humor is first-rate as is the snappy dialogue. The film though starts to bite off more than it can chew. All sorts of weird storylines get thrown in, but are never resolved. After about the first hour it no longer made any sense. For instance there is Francesco’s girlfriend named She (Anna Falchi), who he accidently kills at the beginning, but then she keeps getting reincarnated as different women throughout the rest of the film. For various reasons Francesco is forced to kill her in different ways all over again, which eventually becomes tiring. This is only one of the many convoluted surreal elements that eventually overwhelm the viewer. By the time it got to its extensile ending I was more than happy that it was over and really no longer cared what happened to the characters.
I felt frustrated because there were a lot of cool ideas that the film brings up, but drops without explanation. I thought the original idea was good enough that the film could have stuck with that and built around it without going off on so many tangents. The special effects were a problem as well as they looked cheap and fake. It was obvious when they were using mannequins in the place of real people and the blood and gore were thrown in haphazardly.
I did however like the pacing, which moves quickly with no letup. The set designs are imaginative and the dark humor is consistently funny. If I would suggest this movie for any reason it would be that one. Even when the story was getting annoyingly out-of-control it still had me chuckling. The best scene involves Francesco talking to a sick friend in the hospital and when anyone from the hospital staff tries to intervene he shoots them and this creates a memorably macabre imagery as the room gets filled up with bodies and blood everywhere.
I also liked the character of Gnaghi, who tends to grow on you and becomes a real scene stealer. He is short, fat and bald and looks like a young version of Uncle Fester from ‘The Adams Family’. He speaks only through grunts, but the way he responds to things is quite amusing and the director comes up with clever ways to make the most of it. The fact that he was played by a rock musician and not a professional actor makes it more interesting. The part where he falls in love with one of the corpses and wants to marry her is hilarious and should have been played out more.
I liked the character of Francessco at the beginning as well. He comes off like a rugged cowboy from the old west with a nifty matter-of-fact attitude towards his job and is cool under pressure. However, his behavior and actions become erratic and his motivations confusing until, by the end, he is almost alienating. There are also too many segments where he gets caught off guard by an attacking zombie and panics when he does not have his gun handy, which hurts the credibility since someone who has been doing this for a long time and is as savvy as he portrayed would learn to expect the unexpected and be prepared at all times for it.
I hate to say that this film was a disappointment because it is very creative and the direction is slick. Unfortunately it just could not sustain its potential, which makes it a misfire. The film did quite poorly with both the critics and viewing public when it was first released both in Europe and in the states. It was only after being hailed by director Martin Scorsese that it started to find new life in the DVD market. Actor Everett was in talks with American studios to do a big-budget Hollywood remake, but it fell through. A remake would not be a bad idea and may still happen as the horror-dark comedy genre has proven to be profitable in recent years most notably with Zombieland. A tighter script and more money on the special effects could make this a winner.
Scopophilia 