A BLADE IN THE DARK
Lamberto's gotta be the mailman's kid. He's just gotta.
I mean it. Nobody can be the son of the great Mario Bava and be this consistently pathetic and incompetent.
There is not one good thing I can say about this movie, and yet something about it prevents me from expanding the Terrible Twelve into the Unthinkable Thirteen. I can't put my finger on what that is...because this movie sure sucked from every angle. Loaded with the dumbest shit I've seen in a horror movie in a long time, this one is as least as stupid and amateurishly put together as the universally-despised I Still Know, but I'll bet this one has its fans anyway.
A composer, living in a new house while he writes and records the score for a horror movie, keeps running into these women he's never met before, and then the women get killed. That's pretty much the whole plot. But plot aside, let's have a look at just how stupid this shit is. I can forgive something like, say, the scene where we see a picture of a naked woman being slashed up with an Exacto-knife, followed up by the discovery of said picture, slashed up in a different way than we'd seen.
What I can't let slip so lightly are, say...
-the first killing, where the woman looks calmly at the killer as the killer draws and "clicks open" that Exacto knife, one notch at a time, and then runs only AFTER she's slashed. Later, she's hiding, and looking straight ahead, and has the crap scared out of her by the killer who's right in front of her and had to be clearly in her sight the whole time.
-a scene where a woman jumps out of a closet, crying "I'm so scared, a spider, kill it, kill it!". Then we're given a very clear shot of a large spider slowly crawling away, as the man says "That's not a spider, that's a cockroach." What the hell? Is this one of those jokes that only Italians get, that just doesn't translate? Or is this one of those things that's supposed to make things scarier because it represents the unravelling of reality?
-the second killing, which is almost entirely cut out, it seems. Okay, I can't blame Lamberto & co. for that.
-dialogue like "Is it possible that you're such a vacant nerd?"
-yet another one of those killers that nobody would ever, ever suspect, not in a million years, unless you're smart enough to figure out that constantly showing the killer as a female might just be a false clue. I mean, duh.
-and, of course, the scene where the guy's recording the music on the piano (which we hear throughout the film, ad nauseum). He's laid down ONE track, and playing it back, hears some whispering on there. So, he rewinds, and turns one knob to eliminate the piano. Wow, that's some recorder you've got there!
I've yet to decide if the opening scene is cheating or not. We're given an admittedly interesting scene in which a child is dared to go down a dark stairway, and all that comes back is a bloody tennis ball. Then we're shown the credits, and THEN we're shown that this was just a movie-within-the-movie. I dunno, if they'd revealed that before the credits - or showed the credits before all this happened - I'd be satisfied, but something about this bothers me. Maybe it's just that the rest of the film is so incompetently put together, I'm tempted to see that in the film's only arguably effective moment.
The only thing on this tape I'd care to watch again is the trailer for Screamtime, which amused me with its absurd claims ("Don't be put off by rumors of dead bodies in the theater -they're just people who fainted from fear!").