O Mistério do Quarto 2A

This one drags until thankfully the stupidity of it all overwhelms the drudgery. A young girl, just paroled from prison, is sent to a boarding house by parole officer Rosalba Neri. Now we all know that something is wrong with this house, as we've just witnessed a girl being ceremoniously killed by a sadistic cult led by someone who is a big fan of the 1965 Italian film Bloody Pit of Horror. Our girl Margaret isn't too slow on the uptake either, spotting quickly a huge bloodstain on the floor of her room that keeps reappearing, sussing rapidly that the landlady is a bit of a loon, and reckoning that the landlady's son Frank is a nutter. An encounter with a man investigating the apparent suicide of his sister, a previous tenant of Room 2A, further confirms her suspicions. This leads to a long investigation/romance that goes on and on.

However, it's also about this time that the film's daftness begins to rise, what with the terrible acting of the nurse in a loony bin, choppy editing, and a flashback sequence where women are whipped in a Jess Franco fashion. The director also thinks it's a great idea to include upbeat jazz music at the most inappropriate of moments, like when the hero is thrown into the back of a car with a snake in a suitcase (a really crap way to kill someone, seeing how they just murdered everyone else without leaving anything to chance).

The gore increases around this point too, as does the introduction of two muscle men who take on the cult. You also get an explanation as to how that bloodstain keeps appearing on the floor of room 2A, and I use 'how' on purpose because you'll be asking 'why' even after you find out what's happening. There's also the mystery of who is in the red mask if you still care about that by the end of the film.

Not much Rosalba in this one either. This is a hugely stupid film but sometimes we need a bit of that in our lives too.