3/10
Dreadfully dull and convoluted gialloesque thriller
30 January 2009
Warning: Spoilers
The family of a mob boss have plenty to hide within the confines of their beachside castle. There's a body or two buried in the garden, the internment of one of these was witnessed by a criminal on the run, but he says nothing when caught by the police. Some years later that same criminal is released and he returns to blackmail the family of oddballs, lunatics and murderers. In the days before his release the family had killed a few people randomly, but now they get rid of the bodies in a vat of acid in an outhouse. Are you still with me, OK stay tuned it gets more and more hard to follow, the family also have a sister who was locked up in an asylum after she murdered her father, except she didn't, as the truth the doctors told them would be worse for her mental state. OK now, the woman we think is the mother is in fact the daughter, except she isn't, she's an imposter, then the father comes back, except it isn't really him, oh and there's rape, incest a hint of paedophilia, oh and there's some Nazi's who gas merkin wearing naked women, oh and one of the family escaped the Nazi's and now she's traumatised by those memories. Now getting back to the random killings, one of these guys rapes the mother, or was it sister, daughter, I don't think even the director knew, but yeah this girl gets raped and then he gets murdered and the sister who sleeps with the same guy after he raped her mother then gets upset because of his demise. The son, now there's a loon, he is a psycho, if only for his dreadful dress sense, in fact everyone seems to wear bad wallpaper inspired clothes. Hello are you still there, for those who are I hope you're following it because I'm pretty lost. Oh I forgot to mention there's a dog strangling too, for those who love such things, yeah this film is just full of ideas, none of them very coherent, just for good measure and to complicate things even more, the director goes for lots of crazy psychedelic camera-work, shot from crazy angles and with lots of headache inducing zooms in and zooms out and zooms in and zooms out and zooms in…I'm dizzy just thinking about it. The saving grace is the fine acting, all the performances are spot on….eh no I'm lying, they're all pretty dire, all these actors went to the Scooby doo bad guy school of acting, lots of sinister looks and eye rolling. The orchestral score is unusual for a Gialloish film and its also pretty mundane and distracting, as is the awful dubbing. So in a film which approaches so many subjects you might think its full of sex and nudity….eh no.

Oh I forgot to mention the Etruscan skeletons, damn.
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