(1983)
Dir - Pupi Avati
Overall: MEH
The second strange and uneven giallo-esque offering from Pupi Avati after 1976's The House with Laughing Windows, Zeder, (Revenge of the Dead), gets points for little else besides its ambitions and a handful of brief, quite spooky moments. It is a frustrating example of having a fairly unique enough premise that at very infrequent intervals has glimpses of atmospheric and macabre visuals. Such things are ultimately wasted when the film is looked at as a whole though. Once again, Avati's pacing is just dreadful, blowing at least its entire middle hour by advancing the plot with the most mundane, minute conversations between characters. The problem is that while such things are happening, nothing else is. This includes anything remotely creepy or befitting to such a genre film. On that note, the bombastic horror music soundtrack seems to turn on at completely arbitrary intervals, often during scenes where nothing at all foreboding is even happening. It becomes difficult to tell just what exactly is going on after awhile anyway, but not in a challenging manner. Instead, the film seems to just meander aimlessly with too many people talking about too many things that are void of interest, let alone scares.
(1987)
Dir - Michele Soavi
Overall: MEH
Serving as the behind the lens debut from Dario Argento protégé and actor turned director Michele Soavi, Stage Fright, (Deliria), has a singular premise of a theater trope locked up with a maniac in a rehearsal studio. On top of that though, Soavi like Argento, (and Alfred Hitchcock before both), focuses on specific little details to rev-up tension. The finale gets a lot of mileage out of a single key per example. While the camera work is typically flashy for this kind of giallo-influenced fare and the film is well dressed in general, Soavi does not quite have the chops yet to keep the pacing from slagging, particularly in its first two lumbering acts. While the final few set pieces do a tremendous job of making up for that, the very ending of the movie seems bafflingly tagged on and becomes both laughable and annoying as the final girl returns to the scene of the crime only to find the dead murderer who the police already took away still there inexplicably. This is after he got stabbed in the eye, fell from the theater ceiling, and was set on fire. Which then leads to the janitor rambling about how you have to take the safety off of a handgun before he shoots him "right between the eyes" and proceeds to say just those words about nine-hundred and eighty-four times in the last thirty seconds of the movie. Remove that moronic nonsense and tighten up the first hour, and the movie passes the test of being a unique enough slasher to recommend.
(1988)
Dir - Gianfranco Giagni
Overall: MEH
The relatively obscure and rather strange The Spider Labyrinth, (Il nido del ragno), remains the only non television or documentary work from director Gianfranco Giagni. Also serving as his debut, Giagni brought in singer-songwriter Gianfranco Manfredi to co-tweak the initial script that had been floating around for sometime, a script with an odd premise of some kind of spider god worshiping cult operating in Budapest. It is plenty atmospheric in spots and well shot by cinematographer Nino Celeste, but the first half is a sluggish crawl. After the kind of pedestrian, standard opening dream sequence, the initial, board room set up that follows is a poor place to kick things into motion and sadly the script never picks up any proper momentum until well past the point of either noticing or caring what is even going on. There is a mystery at hand, but when that mystery is not properly engaging as is the case here, the entire presentation assuredly suffers. A freaky spider lady with mad scientist hair, wide eyes, and fangs does provide some much needed jolts, but the real horror movie meat and potatoes set piece doe not come until the very end, though it does make up for some of the humdrum approach of everything proceeding it. It is probably more worthy of checking out a few select scenes the partaking of the actual complete filmgoing experience if one was so inclined though.
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