70's Italian Horror Part Twenty

NECROPOLIS

(1970)

Dir - Franco Brocani

Overall: WOOF

 

A mercilessly pretensions art film and the full-length debut from director Franco Brocani, Necropolis is a maddening experience from front to back.  Essentially an avant-garde, counter culture stage play made up of painfully long, (very, very, very long), takes while actors soliloquize against minimalist backdrops, it is remarkable that each and every line in such an enormously gratuitous amount of dialog can be completely void of meaning.  This is a movie that could be watched on mute and/or without subtitles and the audience will walk away with an equal amount of frustration and confusion over having wasting their time with such aimless dribble.  To Brocani's credit, he is certainly not making anything remotely commercial here, nor anything that adheres to any conventional confines of cinema in general.  It is a work of pure experimentation which could be appreciated if it was remotely watchable.  Instead, people pretend to be various historical or fictitious characters, (though good luck putting together which historical or fictitious characters most of them are), and deliver incoherent monologues made up of arbitrary words for well over ten minutes at a time.  As one could guess, it wears out its welcome well before the two hour running time has buried its pompous premise into the ground.

 

WEB OF THE SPIDER

(1971)

Dir - Antonio Margheriti

Overall: MEH

Prolific genre director Antonio Margheriti remade his own Castle of Blood a mere five years later as Web of the Spider, (Nella stretta morsa del ragno, Les fantômes de Hurlevent, Dracula im Schloß des Schreckens), though it unfortunately suffers from the same issues as its comparatively still better predecessor.  While it is a hoot to see Klaus Kinski in anything really, he is wasted in mere bookending cameos here as none other than Edgar Allan Poe; a hilariously inappropriate casting decision if ever there was one.  Once the story properly kicks in where Anthony Franciosa agrees to spend the night in a haunted mansion for mere shits and giggles, only a handful of those initial minutes are eerily inciting.  The spacious abode is at first completely isolated and Franciosa jumps at every sound and nuance under such suggestively foreboding circumstances.  Things quickly succumb to elongated flashback sequences though once the ghosts start showing up, at which point the movie loses its atmospheric momentum and becomes a poorly paced slog.  The initial materiel that made up the aforementioned Castle of Blood was already cliche-ridden, so yet another version of it and so soon afterwards is redundant to say the least, despite the fact that Kinski is barely in it and that the whole thing was shot in color this time.

IL BACIO DI UNA MORTA

(1974)

Dir - Carlo Infascelli

Overall: MEH

Mislabeled as a horror movie, Carlo Infascelli's last directorial effort Il bacio di una morta, (Kiss of a Dead Woman), is actually an infidelity melodrama, be it one that opens with a man visiting a woman's tomb on an eerie night only to find her still very much alive.  Outside of this macabre detail though, the rest of the film is broken up into a lengthy flashback sequence that brings the viewer up to date, followed by another lengthy conclusion that leans on the unsatisfying side.  Orso Maria Guerrini's Count is an unlikable central character due to his reckless and selfish behavior, so the fact that he does not get his just comeuppance may be an annoyance to some.  It is a melancholic turn of events in this regard where some of the guilty parties are outed for their unwholesome acts, while Guerrini is reunited with his wife in a relationship that can only continue on in the most dysfunctional of manners.  Regardless of the dopey plot, it is all played stiff as a board with every performer delivering emotionally stripped performances as to never once veer the project into anything resembling camp.  This is an admirable move, but it is also one that renders the whole thing a bore that is only mildly interesting in its final, be it disappointing moments.