Horrified by a series of vivid dreams, a woman heads to Italy to look after her husband's excavation of an Etruscan tomb, but when a series of murders strikes those around her she and her friends race to find the truth about the treasure before more are killed by the maniac.
There's not a lot to like about this one. Among the few likable factors here come from the setup of the film focusing on the discovery of the tomb and what it means in terms of generating a murder spree to protect its contents. That there's a fantastic setup involving the mystery surrounding the connection between the old community and the series of dreams she has regarding their ceremonies coming to life and tormenting her. Not only is the imagery of the dreams and hallucinations rather impressive with the activity taking place in gloomy, Gothic dungeons and caves filled with ornate monuments and worms covering everything around them but the idea of the mystery about the whole thing being a cover for a drug-smuggling operation makes for some tense scenes inside the underground caves. However, beyond this, there's not much to enjoy here. Most of this is due to the jumbled and incredibly garbled presentation of the film being edited down from a lengthy miniseries adaptation. Originally broadcast in seven one-hour installments, editing this down into a nearly one-hundred-minute feature causes a lot of material to be lost just in general principle but also causes this one to feel somewhat plodding and lethargic even with a lot of excesses trimmed off it. The majority of what's in this version is based on excessively overlong dialogue scenes involving the disappearance of the husband and the notes left behind or the strange behavior of the father concerned about the contents of the tomb which are both included without much purpose for being here. So much of this one has very few explanations for what's going on and it seems to go about these factors as a given that it comes across as jumbled and underwhelming as a result. On top of that, the film also stumbles incredibly hard when it comes to a series of ineffectual and underwhelming series of action and stalking scenes that are somewhat plain and lifeless. The main culprit is due to the generally uninvolved method of killing by having everyone get their necks snapped and turned around to face the other side which is a somewhat lame means of death since there's little that can be done with it and it repeats itself as the main mode of death so often that it's not threatening all that much afterward. Even the lack of proper investigation into the killer comes off weak, and that there's also the lack of action here with a standard yet uninvolved car chase and shootout inside the tomb accounting for the main thrills here all comes off bland as a result. These factors all manage to bring this one down.
Rated Unrated/R: Language and Violence.
