Showing posts with label Lamberto Bava. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lamberto Bava. Show all posts

Saturday, October 24, 2020

Ten Days of Terror!: Shock/Beyond the Door II

Films: Shock/Beyond the Door II
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on the new internet machine.

Beyond the Door was a movie that was clearly designed to attract the same audience as The Exorcist. The plot was similar in a lot of ways, but it was a cheap knock off, about as scary as one of my chihuahuas. A few years later, we got Beyond the Door II, which was so exploitative that the only thing it had in common with the first movie was the child actor. In truth, the movie was also released as Shock, so it’s not entirely a cashgrab.

We’re going to be focused on Dora Baldini (Daria Nicolodi), who has moved back into her old house with her son Marco (David Colin Jr.) and her new husband Bruno (John Steiner). It turns out this is a house she lived in before, with her first husband, Carlo (Nicola Salerno). While Dora was pregnant with Marco, Carlo became abusive and addicted to heroin, and was thought to have committed suicide when his boat was found abandoned and adrift. Dora ended up in an asylum, treated with electroshock therapy. It’s seven years later, Carlo has been declared legally dead after being missing for seven years. And now, with her shattered memory, she has returned remarried.

Thursday, May 12, 2016

Off Script: Demons

Films: Demoni (Demons)
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla Digital on The Nook.

I always go into Italian horror movies expecting to like them. I genuinely do, and almost always I end up disappointed. The biggest issue with Italian horror is that it never really makes sense to me. Things just happen all over the place and there are monsters that appear out of nowhere and nobody makes any decisions that make any sense. Sure, there are a few that I respect, but in most cases I’m just left scratching my head. I went into Demoni (typically known as Demons) with that same hope that it would transcend the typical problems of Italian horror. Discovering that it was produced by Dario Argento and directed by Mario Bava’s sone Lamberto didn’t fill me with hope, though.

The sell of Demoni is that it takes place in a movie theater, which means that when the film was released, the audience would be in a theater watching a movie where the people in the movie are in the theater watching a movie. Even better, what happens on the screen in the movie within the movie starts to happen in the theater. It’s like a nesting doll of scary stuff.