lowquality.net

Nation of Ori­gin: Italy

Rat­ings:

Kim: 2 of 5
Justin: 2 ^1/2 of 5

Notes:
First of all, the box of the DVD must have been out­sourced, because it looks so much bet­ter than any sin­gle exam­ple of cin­e­matog­ra­phy in the film. See when you have a cranky film critic bitch­ing about the film qual­ity in a hor­ror movie you know there’s some­thing else that has to be wrong. You should be able to do hor­ror in 8mm with­out the audi­ence car­ing one bit.

Hon­estly the Ital­ians aren’t known to be espe­cially scary when it comes to hor­ror, but they do gore flicks fairly well (Zombi comes to mind). I wouldn’t say that this film exem­pli­fies the Ital­ian hor­ror tra­di­tion in any way, though. The silly gore effects are all that made this second-rate Texas Chain­saw knock-off bear­able but weren’t clever or orig­i­nal enough to make up for how very bad every­thing else was. I know, “knock­off” is a strong word, and when you wait a cou­ple of decades to emu­late a film it should be con­sid­ered a trib­ute, which I sup­pose is what this was… kinda. But, Texas Chain­saw Mas­sacre is an often imi­tated pic­ture and one that I don’t watch very often because I love it so damn much. It gen­uinely scares me every time I watch it (espe­cially when you first see Leather­face meat-hook the girl and then dis­ap­pear behind a slid­ing metal door.. so bru­tal). This movie lost its foot­ing by hav­ing too many char­ac­ters you didn’t give a shit about, and hav­ing a good 15 — 20 min­utes of the lead actress run­ning and / or being doused with blood– I know that sounds cool, but some­how it isn’t. Really this film suf­fers because its just so gosh darned slow and lazy.

SPOILERS, DO NOT READ: I was going to give this movie a 2, just like Kim, but the final scene in which a can­ni­bal­is­tic child sor­row­fully hugs his quad­ri­plegic vic­tim earned this flick a whole 1/2 point in my eyes.  It might have even earned a 3 if they had done some­thing more inter­est­ing with the three douchebag raver party guys (at first I thought, “They have New Jer­sey in Italy too?” but then real­ized that, of course, gui­dos are exported from Italia). They might have been endear­ing jack­asses if they hadn’t attempted to gang rape the lead­ing lady ear­lier in the film. Yeah, you read that right. Also, why do all Ital­ian films bor­der on soft­core porn?