Hansel e Gretel

"Hansel and Gretel" was inspired by an old fairy tale written by the Brothers Grimm – it tells of a brother and sister who go out in the forest. On their way they find a candy house. The house is inhabited by a kindly old lady, but in truth she's a witch, and what she has in store for them....

"Hansel e Gretel" (Never Hurt Children) by Giovanni Simonelli – Italy 1990, is, what we could call, a modernization of the fairy tale - Hansel and Gretel are going home through the forest, and on their way they are kidnapped by a gang that sells body organs to the rich in need of a transplant.

The children are taken to a clandestine clinic, and there they die after the operation. Hans and Gretel are buried in a shallow grave, but they will come back from the dead and take grisly revenge on all those who took direct or indirect part in their murder.

The story is good but it's not well developed. The film is a mixture of slasher and horror film, with rights to sentimentality, "moral indignation" (!) and tastelessness. The ghosts of Hansel and Gretel will kill and kill and kill, and they also have supernatural powers to boot. The killing scenes follow each other closely, and some of them will satisfy the gorehounds.

"Hansel e Gretel" (Never Hurt Children) lacks tension, but those that have a sense of humor will have their fun, and in its own way the film is entertaining.

This film, which is identical with "Hansel & Gretel" (which is listed in the IMDb as a different movie), is one of five films Lucio Fulci "presented" and "supervised" towards the end of the 1980s (the others are "Non Avere Paura Della Zia Marta" aka "The Murder Secret", "Snake House" aka "Bloody Psycho", "Massacro" and "Fuga Dalla Morte" aka "Luna di Sangue"). From these four films, Fulci later used most of the gore effects again in his "Un Gatto nel Cervello" aka "Nightmare Concert".

The idea is a good one: Two children get abducted by villains who take their organs to sell it illegally for transplantation. The ghosts of the kids return and take revenge, forcing the bad folks to suffer more or less nasty deadly accidents. The problem is that Giovanni Simonelli brought too much insignificant dialogue into this film, so it early loses most of its pace and goes on rather slowly. The budget obviously was quite low, therefore, even though the villains suffer mostly ghastly demises, only few of them are really gory (especially an accident involving the victim's eye, which is the only scene Fulci used again for "Nightmare Concert").

Although the film isn't really good, it's still quite interesting and entertaining, mainly because of the good idea. I just don't understand why this film never was released even in Italy (the same fate suffered "Fuga Dalla Morte", while "Snake House" got a release in Italy and Germany, "Massacro" at least in Germany, and "The Murder Secret" in France), because compared to many other (mostly direct-to-video) low budget horror, "Non Si Seviziano i Bambini" is an okay film.

There's no mistaking Fulci's guiding hand in Giovanni Simonelli's Hansel e Gretel, especially with a ludicrous story involving malevolent children (as per Fulci's Sweet House of Horrors) and some classic Fulci-style eyeball trauma (one of the film's victims has her head shoved onto a spike, the point pushing her eyeball out of the socket). Sadly, the rest of the deaths - of which there are plenty - aren't all that gory or imaginative, making this a rather tedious affair overall.

The film definitely had potential to be a genuinely grim (or should that be Grimm?) shocker, with a plot that involves the harvesting of organs from kidnapped children, but Simonelli doesn't fully fully explore this extremely dark subject, spending most of his time on the silly supernatural revenge antics of the titular moppets, the latest children to fall foul of the organ traffickers.

Those who conspired to abduct and kill the kids are confronted by Hansel and Gretel's spirits and despatched in a variety of ways: the siblings' stepfather, who happily sold the kids, is chewed up by some farm machinery (an effect achieved using what looks like a side of beef); a woman falls in a pool and drowns; a man is crushed by a wine barrel; another bloke drowns in slurry; a guy shoots himself in the face; two idiots fall into some waterworks. Simonelli's spectacularly uninspired direction renders these deaths laughable, with the two ghostly glowing-eyed children not in the least bit menacing. The repetitious nursery rhyme that precedes each slaying really gets on the nerves.

Investigating the murders is rookie cop Silvia (Elisabete Pimenta Boaretto) who is unable to convince her superiors that the deaths are supernatural in nature. Fred, the husband of the organ traffickers' ringleader, looks like the most likely suspect - he decides to flee the scene in the film's not-at-all-exciting climax, taking Silvia as his hostage. The spooky sprogs put paid to his plans, and, having claimed their last victim, are finally able to rest in peace.

4/10 for the juicy eyeball scene (which Fulci would borrow for his own movie A Cat In The Brain AKA Nightmare Concert), and a spot of gratuitous female nudity (a bath scene, a sex scene, and Silvia slipping into her nightclothes).

I'll give you three reasons why "Hansel & Gretel" was on top of my must-see list for several long years in a row, and why I never abandoned my search for a decent copy with English subtitles. For starters, I'm a giant fan of a very small and peculiar sub-genre of horror cinema, namely films that are based on or inspired by fairy- tales. They are rare but definitely do exist, like "The Company of Wolves" (1984) or "Blancanieves" 2012). Secondly, I'm an avid collector of Italian horror and especially during between the 1960 and 1990 this was the finest and most prominent country to produce horror, cult and exploitation classics. Even though numbers and quality were drastically declining as per the mid-80s, this effort still narrowly falls within the golden period. And finally, there's a direct link with Lucio Fulci and – as far as I'm concerned – Fulci was God! Together with Mario Bava and Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci was one of the sole true deities of the (Italian) horror industry. Obviously my concerns increased as the years went by and I still couldn't manage to find a half-decent copy of the film. The fact that "Hansel e Gretel" remained tremendously obscure and little known, even though modern technologies like digital remastering kept spawning movies out of oblivion, was an alarmingly bad omen. If nobody bothers to make it available then it must suck, right?

Well, guess what! I did find it, eventually, and of course it sucked … but I nevertheless enjoyed it a lot! The basic premise is brilliant and there are a handful moments of adequate suspense and marvelous gore, but the execution is poor – borderline amateurish, in fact – and the film is literally chock-full of foolish and utterly senseless sequences. Two siblings, Hansel and Gretel, are sold by their wicked stepfather, kidnapped by thugs and transported (strangely enough in two different cars) to a sleazy private hospital. The poor kids' organs are removed to be sold on the black market, while their bodies are simply buried in the garden of a remote farmhouse. By the way, in case you assume the clandestine organ business is run by the mafia or hardcore Eastern European crime networks, you are wrong… The evil brains behind the nasty organ business are a family of farmers! Without any type of explanation, the bambini resurrect from the dead with a vengeance and kill everyone at the farm. They don't get their hands dirty, mind you. They merely just stand motionless, while their eyes glow red and their victims die in nasty freak-accidents. A young and ambitious female police detective is put on the case, and she randomly decides to move into the farmhouse during her investigation. Sure, live together with a bunch of deviant criminals; that makes sense! While the corpses keep piling up, the children's ghosts even come to talk to the police woman and naturally she – professional that she is - sympathizes with them. Some of the death sequences are weak, like inflicted heart attacks or drowning, but most of them are vintage Fulci material, with people ending up underneath tractors, suffocating in manure and – inevitably – having their eyeball poked out! Recommend to fans of unscrupulous and exploitative Italian smut, but for everyone else this film shall remain eternally obscure.

The story is familiar with the fairytale, as both brother and sister are also named Hansel and Gretel. Instead of getting lost in woods and finding a gingerbread house, they're both fascinated by a car, and two men kidnap them and take them to a heavily secured building. Inside is a clinic full of scientists who work in illegal experiments. The poor kids are chosen as organ donors and they die in the process. Their ghosts return from the grave seeking revenge on all those involved. What happens are some gruesome scenes, as the kids behave like monsters. I found the tune being hummed by the kids throughout the film mostly annoying. I expected more to this film but the story became predictable.