The Sect (1991)

Original title: La setta

After a prologue taking place a couple of decades earlier in the USA introduces us to a rather nasty cult leader (Tomas Arana) with the habit of cutting off faces in a rather occult-scientific way and threatens a decades-long plan, we fast forward into the future of the early 1990s, to a small town near Frankfurt.

After orphan turned teacher Miriam Kreisl (Kelly Curtis) invites a rather smelly looking old gentleman – who will turn out to have the delightful name of Moebius Kelly (Herbert Lom) - into her house because she nearly ran him over with her car, her life turns into a living nightmare, of course involving that face-cutting cult and the endgame of their plan.

In between an actual labyrinth hidden in her house’s cellar that contains a well connected to hell or a comparably unpleasant place, a nasty bug that may or may not lay an egg in her brain, a really creepy weirdo as her love interest, and the eventual realization that her whole life is a lie, the face cutting bit might actually appear rather harmless to our protagonist.

Before Michele Soavi became a work for hire director for Italian TV, and after working as an assistant director for Lamberto Bava and Dario Argento, he directed a quartet of incredible horror movies, so wonderfully Italian in all the best ways, it is hard to believe they were made at the tail end of successful genre filmmaking in the country when most of his peers couldn’t get a good movie financed to save their lives.

The Sect is usually the least appreciated of these films. I’m not terribly surprised about that fact, for where the nightmarish mood of the other three films – Stage Fright, The Church and even that of Dellamorte dellamore - is rooted in as much proper narrative as you get with this arm of Italian horror (which isn’t much by the boring standards of the here and now), the film at hand goes as far in the direction of free-floating, macabre strangeness as possible while still being recognizable as a genre narrative. In this sense, as in its extreme – if different – stylishness this reminds me most of my favourite Argento movie Inferno. There as here, narrative concerns and real world logic matter little when compared to creating moods, feelings and impressions through a distinctive visual style.

Which rather seems to be the point of the whole project of the cinema of the fantastic as a whole when seen through the lens of these films, and most certainly the point of The Sect. The irrational and the supernatural by their very nature are meant to defy logic and explanation, and from this perspective, their only proper treatment would be through a film becoming illogical and outright weird.

In Miriam’s specific case, all of her ideas about her identity and the reasons underlying the way she leads her life are completely undermined (rather as if she had a labyrinth where most people have a cellar), and she finds herself the pawn of a ritual the cultists being involved in don’t actually appear to be able to grasp beyond a belief they are involved in a variation of Rosemary’s Baby.

Clearly, unlike the cultists, Soavi (who co-wrote with Argento and Gianni Romoli) was not terribly impressed with the ending of that film, so he writes a better one for Miriam than Rosemary got, an ending that mixes about five surprisingly feminist minutes with a further dollop of utter irrational weirdness only proper in this particular movie.

Needless to say, this is even less a film for everyone than most other movies are; though if it sings to you, as it does to me, it’s going to truly sing.

In short: Aquarius (1987)

aka StageFright

Original title: Deliria

Freshly escaped insane killer Irving Wallace (Clain Parker) secretly hitches a ride on the back seat of dancer Alicia's (Barbara Cupisti) car to the soundstage where the final rehearsals for a very 80s low-rent musical about a serial killer the woman dances in are taking place.

Irv doesn't hesitate, and kills the musical's costume designer in the appropriately gruesome manner. Alicia finds the body, and the police is called. The cops don't find the killer around the soundstage, so they take their leave again, only posting two deaf and stupid colleagues in front of the building in case, well, I don't know in case of what.

The musical's director Peter (David Brandon) sees a golden opportunity here, spontaneously renames the killer of his piece into Irving Wallace and locks his play's core cast in with him, letting the dancer who's going to die next hide away the key, so he can, well, I don't know what the key business is supposed to be about. Oh right, because the killer's in the building too, and we wouldn't have much of a movie when everybody could just leave when Irving begins to slaughter further dancers.

Aquarius is the first of a handful of pretty swell horror movies actor, assistant director (among others for Argento's Tenebre and Phenomena), and all-around Italian movie person Michele Soavi directed between 1987 and 1994.

The film is a perfect example for my pet theory that in Italian horror of the country's prime periods, dumb writing and horrendously convoluted and illogical scripting was not the slightest impediment to a film turning out pretty exciting. It's all a question of presenting the stupid as if it were as quotidian as a visit to the loo. You might think it's lazy writing, but when it works, this technique gives a movie all the aspects of a particularly bizarre dream.

Of course, just having a script of doubtful taste and logic (but with some great ideas on how to set up murder scenes) is not all that's needed to make a proper Italian horror movie of dream-like aspect. There's also the small but important point of having a director who's able to take all the ingredients in the script and make them sing with style. Fortunately, Soavi shows himself to be very great at being stylish. He takes half of the stuff he probably learned while working with Dario Argento, some Hitchcock-style suspense, the gory pay-offs of post-Friday-the-13th slasher movies, and applies some of the lessons he learned about the importance of what happens in the visual background of a scene from John Carpenter's original Halloween to it, and fastly makes you forget how dumb the whole script is. When Aquarius doesn't feel like a dream, all floating camera movements and nightmare edits, it's tight and exciting.

Seemingly, all the thinking that wasn't applied to the script went into the visual presentation, leaving the viewer - as is so often the case in Italian genre cinema - with a film where the style is the substance.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,in short,horror,slasher,michele soavi,david brandon,barbara cupisti