(1991)
Dir - Fabrizio Laurenti/Joe D'Amato
Overall: WOOF
Filmed in the same Utah town as Claudio Fragasso's infamous Troll 2 and serving as yet another unofficial Italian/American installment to a series of films that have nothing to do with each other, The Crawlers, (Troll 3, Creepers, Contamination .7), is a killer tree movie that meanders around too much to keep its schlock straight. A town is besieged by radioactive foliage, but of course the schlubby police force is too lazy to get out of their chairs to deal with it, let alone believe it is even happening. At least that is our first assumption since Vince O'Neil's fluffy sheriff also tells a bunch of young adults that they must be on drugs when they rush in to report a dead body. As it turns out, he is probably in on the toxic waste dumping conspiracy, either that or the script is too hackneyed to understand what a cop's bare minimum duties are. Chalk it up to an Italians-doing-American thing then. The ADR dubbing is distractingly bad at best, (Though when is it not?), and close to nothing exciting happens until about an hour in when some tree roots stab through the stupid sheriff's fat stupid face. Everywhere else, it is just meandering drama, dim-witted characters, and a plot that tries and fails to make the unexciting exciting.
(1992)
Dir - Fabio Salerno
Overall: MEH
The final full-length of sorts from underground filmmaker Fabio Salerno was L'Altra dimensione, (The Other Dimension); an anthology of three shorts whose only narrative through-line is that they each focus on a loser with an unhealthy attachment to a woman, to say the least. "Delirium" features a guy who decides that the only way to cure his depression after his girlfriend dumps him is to drug her and rape her, the second "Mortal Instinct" has someone who gets his female obsession to live with him by way of occult magic, and the third and longest "Eros and Thanatos" features another hopeless romantic who feels that the best course of action after his girlfriend's suicide is to eat her corpse over several days. All shot on grainy Super 8 film with non actors in presumably the apartments of Salerno and his friends, this is textbook, no budget DIY movie-making. The visuals are mostly as ugly as the subject matter, but Salerno pulls off some garish make-up effects and even some bold color gels to enhance the dreary nightmare vibe that he is going for. It is still bottom-barrel stuff that is horrendously slow and difficult to stay invested in, but the low-key tone is appreciated, plus it makes for some fringe exploitation that is not good, but is at least singular.
(1999)
Dir - Sergio Martino
Overall: MEH
The to-date final giallo from Sergio Martino, Mozart è un assassino, (Mozart Is a Murderer), goes through all of the motifs of a clandestine masked killer making threatening phone calls and leaving deliberate clues, pointing at red herrings left and right along the way. On the one hand, the made-for-TV presentation neuters the sleaze since there is no nudity and the bloodshed is less egregious than what was allowed in the genre's heyday, but we still have exploitative elements like sex scenes, drug dealing, and pedophilia, so it is hardly a PG-rated affair. Despite the late 90s low-budget aesthetic which is not conducive to the more flashy cinematic style that Martino had used when he made his most famous giallos, he and Francesco Contaldo's script still manages to keep the momentum going for the first two acts. After a couple of bodies pile up and detective Enzo Decaro gets taken off the case and his therapist girlfriend Daniela Scarlatti finds out that she is pregnant, the pacing lulls and leads way to a far-fetched finish where the killer manages to easily do away with a slew of armed guards yet has a clumsy time finishing off one last would-be female victim.
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