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A scream is silenced by a knife through the head in the prelude, a soul is trapped in a black-and-white photograph by the end of the opening credits. The creature is an unwrapped mummy in a tattered Victorian coat amusingly named Freudstein, the experimental surgeon who sets up shop under a boarded-up New England manse and drags one gory corpse after another to the basement. The New York psychiatrist (Paolo Malco) moves in with wife (Catriona MacColl) and son (Giovanni Frezza), and the splendidly grisly hallucinations take off. "Great place for a vacation, isn't it?" For his riposte to The Shining, Lucio Fulci goes straight to the source, namely Frost's "The Witch of Coös." A freckled moppet (Silvia Collatina) stares at a window display dummy until its head falls off into a pool of chocolatey blood, she turns up as a dilapidated porcelain doll and spectral confidante while the mannequin materializes as the baleful babysitter (Ania Pieroni). Mom meanwhile sweeps the parlor and finds a tombstone beneath the rug ("typical example of the local architecture"), creaks, whimpers and moans multiply into an infernal cacophony. Decomposing family and decomposing reality, thus the nightmare of childhood. (A handheld camera on flayed cadavers gives way to the tyke blissfully unaware, equipped with toy car and dubbed gurgling.) Voluptuous splatter spikes the elegant late-autumn palette to paint the image of the splintery kitchen door that leads into a gruesome dungeon—going down means Escher's staircases and the rolling noggin from Fellini's Toby Dammit (Spirits of the Dead), going up means a purgatory of kids as monsters or monsters as kids. "I've lost all critical perspective!" The ersatz Henry James quote at the close points up the relationship to Clayton's The Innocents. With Dagmar Lassander, Giovanni De Nava, Giampaolo Saccarola, and Daniela Doria.
--- Fernando F. Croce |