MonsterHunter

Stefano has taken a job finishing a fresco (which is apparently different than a Fresca, a refreshingly different soft drink) at a church on an isolated island somewhere in Italy. I had high hopes for this film by Pupi Avati when Stefano got off the boat and set foot onto the island. There was a sultry broad making eyes at him and a midget greeted him on shore. This midget, Solmi, was the mayor of the island and some of you are probably bursting a few blood vessels trying to place him. He also appeared as Mr. Big in the hit movie Zeder, another film by Pupi Avati! How could you possibly forget that!

Pupi’s Zeder was also released in the United States years ago on video under the zombie-esque title Revenge Of The Dead. Though it has been many years since I first saw that movie one terrible afternoon, not a day goes by that I don’t reflect on the momentous boredom I suffered as I sat through scenes of people babbling on about K Zones.

Pupi shows us the embryonic stages of his uniquely dull style with The House With The Windows That Laughed, but he tricks the viewer with the lush scenery and the mounting mystery of what strange things are going on at this church and the fresco. Naturally, the pay-off for all of this is fairly stupid and prompts lots of shoulder shrugging, but at least you got to see lots of green fields and water and old houses along the way. (That’s called “atmosphere” in the biz - you use a lot of that when you don’t have much in the way of excitement in your film.)

So what’s the deal with this painting? The old artist disappeared and never finished it. The picture is of a saint getting stabbed by a couple of chicks and it really isn’t very good, but Stefano figures a job’s a job. But first he hooks up with the local school teacher the first night he’s there (his buddy - how did he have a buddy on this isolated island of all places?) says she’s a whore and has pumped everybody in the village except the priest and Stefano says that sounds good to him. She later disappears and I was never sure if she was supposed to be a victim of whatever sinister forces were at work on the island, but Stefano isn’t too irked because the replacement teacher proves to be just as easy as the first one!

As might be expected on an island run by a midget who thinks that a painting in a church of a dude getting hacked up will jumpstart the tourist trade, strange things begin occurring. First of all there is Stefano’s buddy. This guy keeps getting ready to tell Stefano something about a house and the first painter, but is always interrupted and finally gets himself tossed out of second story window to his death. Stefano swears he saw a shadow behind his friend, but no one else can say that so the matter pretty much drops and Stefano seems to forget that his friend died mysteriously before he could give up any info. That’s okay though, because so much other crazy stuff is going on that Stefano is kept rather busy.

He gets prank calls telling him not to finish the picture. He sees strange flowers in the church that he saw someone else pick earlier. He hears threatening voices on a tape machine. And there’s the strange altar boy that pedals around on his bike with a container that he won’t tell Stefano what it’s filled with.

It’s all very intriguing, if exceptionally tortoise-paced and you’re hoping for more details so that you can figure out what is going on. The film though, takes it’s own sweet time doing much of anything and when it does something, it’s not exactly news-flash material - Stefano getting kicked out of his hotel room for a guest that doesn’t exist? Odd, but not anything that’s going to make me quit lying down on my couch and sit up in fear or anything.

This Pupi guy parcels out clues and action like it was ten buck champagne. Once Stefano is kicked out of his hotel room, the altar boy sets him up at his old, run down place that is also inhabited by a bed-ridden old woman. The yawns keep coming as we get to watch him move the new school teacher in there with him.

I was never too sure what was going on with Stefano. First, he hosed that first teacher, then he went and nabbed the new one (Francesca), all the while rarely showing up for work at the church. When he wasn’t pumping schoolmarms, he was outside looking at old buildings, asking the town drunk what he knew about that crazy painter before him (he did a lot more painting than pumping, I’ll wager) and accusing Francesca of screwing up his precious tapes of the painter’s ghostly voice.

Pupi has no choice toward the end of the film, but to add some action to things. You could tell that this goes against his general nature when we get not one, but two digging scenes. The town drunk tells the story about the painter and somehow it involves the painter’s two sisters and killing a bunch of people. He takes him out to the painter’s house (I think this is the house with the big Rolling Stone-style lips painted around the windows - hence the title) and digs up some bones there to prove that this is literally where the secrets are buried.

Then you have Stefano taking the police there to show them where the bodies are buried, but of course they turn up nothing. They do manage to turn up the town drunk, all dead and bloated in the water though, so it wasn’t a total loss. Stefano ends up back at that house where he and Francesca had been bunking and gets himself stabbed. He also finds out the answers to such burning questions as, “what happened to the painter,” “how are his sisters involved” and “what was in that stupid can the retarded altar boy was carrying around?”

The remainder of the movie is him stumbling around town with his little stab wound, trying to get help, but the only person who will answer his pleas is that priest at the church where he was working on the fresco. The priest turns out to be a refugee from one of those Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible movies which allows the film to have one of those shock endings that is required under Italian law.

The movie could be called an interesting departure from the entire Italian giallo movement, except that the more the movie plods along, giving the minutest tidbits about things, the less interested you become. By the time it was finally over, I just wanted to see it so that I could saw that I saw it. I wasn’t getting any enjoyment out of it. It wasn’t particularly scary and Pupi underplayed everything in the movie so that you weren’t even jolted by musical cues, which is usually de rigueur in Italian horror flicks.

Another big problem with all this restrained-to-the-point-of-non-existent terror is that Stefano fails to engage us on any level. He shows up to paint, sticks his nose in the other painter’s business, and beds every girl under thirty on the island. Other than being a nosy stud, you know little about who he is and the guy who plays him does so in a completely disconnected way. He just wanders from odd occurrence to odd occurrence, never demonstrating any reason to like him. It felt like I was watching a stranger even though I spent almost two hours with him.

An overrated, uninvolving affair, that felt like it should have been a lot better. It’s highlighted by the beautiful job they did restoring the print and the great location shooting by Pupi, but what you are ultimately left with is a surprisingly nice looking film that eventually chokes on its own atmosphere.

© 2008 MonsterHunter