I just managed to sit through "Rosso Sangue" aka "Absurd" aka "Antropophagus II" aka "Horrible" (add to those about 10 other aka-titles -- surely this should already tell you we're not dealing with an excellent picture here).
So D'Amato delivers a straight-up horror movie this time. Is it any good? Barely. It is a relaxing film, though. Because between the handful moments of gore, you'll have plenty of time to doze off & catch a nap since there's hardly anything going on.
The mighty George Eastman wrote the script and I'm sure it must have read a little something like this when he handed it over to his buddy D'Amato: "I say nothing in this film, I'm indestructible and I kill everybody". Now you just figure out how to turn this into a movie, Joe.
And so did Joe, being the talented man that he is. Also, some distributors tried to market this as a sequel to D'Amato's "Antropophagus" aka "The Grim Reaper". But it's not. Just because Eastman looses his intestines again in this film, doesn't make it a sequel.
D'Amato pretty much turned it into a plain slasher flick. In a way, "Absurd" is like John Carpenter's "Halloween", only with Eastman's evil bearded face to scare you instead of a masked Michael Myers and without the likable Jamie Lee Curtis to root for. Eastman escapes a hospital, kills his way through a whole town, eventually ending up in some house to do some more killing. All this while a priest & a cop are on his trail, blabbering on about Eastman's character being some ultimate creature of evil. So, it's more or less the same movie. Plus, it's a lot worse too, of course. Still, as far as slashers go, there are also a lot worse out there.
Now I was under the impression that this was supposedly one of the goriest & most demented horror efforts ever to come out of Italy. Sadly, it's not all that exciting. There's a handful of gory scenes, yes (drill through the head, saw through the head, etc.) and they are amusing to watch, but nothing we haven't seen before. All the rest of the film, is just plain dullness I'm afraid. The climax features a blinded Eastman (his eyes stabbed out) versus a physically disabled teenage girl. You can imagine how exciting them two stumbling about in a darkened mansion turns out to be. The ending tries to be shocking, but it's basically just a happy end.
I remember once being impressed with "Beyond The Darkness" aka "Buio Omega". Maybe I should re-watch it to see if it still holds up well, because D'Amato is rapidly loosing some filmmaker credit with the stuff I've recently seen by him.
