I’m always slightly hesitant about watching supernaturally themed European horror films. While Italy, and to a lesser extent France and Spain, tend to excel in creating stylistic and visually arresting thrillers, their monster movies tend to lack something. Or, rather, they tend to go a bit overboard with the gore and don’t feel the need to interrupt the gore with a story. Or characters.

And this Dario Argento/Lamberto Bava collaboration is pretty strongly in that category. Plot is almost nonexistent. Characters have no real personality and are largely interchangeable. We’re given no real reason to root for our final couple other than that she’s less of a bitch than her friend and he’s not as much of a creep as his friend. And these are the heroes, mind you, and we spend less time with them than we do with a quartet of coke-snorting “punk rockers” who appear in a particularly inane subplot. As for the story, well…it’s your basic zombie movie, only the zombies are demons, and the action is confined, or so we’re led to believe to the interior of a movie house showing a Satanic film. So it’s cabin-spam, with demon/zombie killers, and ciphers for characters.
It’s the sort of thing I would have loved when I was a teenager, in other words, but don’t really have much patience for now.

And it’s a shame, because there are some nice touches that hint at a better film. The “film within a film” gimmick that presages the possession could have been explored more. Voyeurism is a popular theme in horror films, as it indicts the film’s audiences in with whatever bad act the characters are creating, and the audience watching people watch a film that causes demons to attack is a nice opening for some metatextual commentary on horror films and horror audiences. But it’s not explored. Just as how, exactly, the world falls to zombie/demon chaos when we’re pretty clearly led to believe that the possession is limited to the theater is dealt with in a manner that feels like a post-production pick-up shot so that the audience doesn’t ask questions about a massive plot-hole.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 12:01 AM and is filed under Spooky Month, movies, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.