Aenigma (1987)
Supposedly director Lucio Fulci lifted the concept of the movie Carrie for this tale of an ugly chick who is tricked by her peers, accidentally run over, goes into a coma, develops strange mental powers (despite being brain dead), and uses a new student to get her sweet revenge. I'm not going to rap Fulci for emulating Carrie though, mainly because I've never seen Carrie.
I was in high school for a couple of years and having made fun of plenty of strange looking broads myself, I have no desire to see one of these pro-mousey girls' flicks that glamorize brutality toward bullies. Besides, I managed to hate this movie all on my own, without being one of those snobs that whine and moan about such and such film being merely a rip-off of some supposedly superior film. I don't care who or what you rip off as long as you aren't embarrassing your family with some pathetic effort that you would have been better off blaming someone like Andrea Bianchi for.
This one was made at the tail end of Fulci's life (around the same time he had to quit Zombi 3) and one can only guess that his relatives were hoping he'd either put down the camera for good or just croak already, because the genius that practically invented the maggot storm had by this time slipped into churning out films that have rightly been obscure everywhere except at Fulci family reunions.
Somehow the advent of the DVD format has prompted everyone and their brother to go through their film vaults, attics, and shoe boxes under their beds to find films by Fulci to release, thus putting the world in the bizarre situation of having more Fulci films available on home video now, years after his death and even more years after the last decent Fulci movie, than at any time in human history. Twould seem that we are living in a golden age then, right? Well, a golden age at least for those dudes that own the rights to these movies and are finally recouping the $700 million lira (about 1500 American dollars) they "invested" in Lucio's final movies.
I don't know what finally kicked Lucio off this mortal coil (I don't care enough to look it up), but if I had to guess based solely on what I saw in this movie, I would lay down a sawbuck on something like Alzheimer's or maybe general dementia. How else could anyone explain what was running through the Godfather of Gore's (I only say that to piss off H.G. Lewis - we all know he really was the guy that invented the gore movie, I mean, he's spent most of his career telling us that over and over) mind when he selected the song to play over the opening credits of the film.
It's not often that my gag reflex kicks in as soon as a movie starts. Most movies this ineptly made don't get around to actively sucking for something like ten or fifteen minutes (that's part of their ineptness - they're slow to get going), but Lucio, the man that glorified the drill to the head, that perfected the "Greek with three fingers" red herring, the dude that resurrected Donald Duck's horror movie career (Twice!), starts it all of with a soft rock ballad so awful, I actual thought to myself that it sounded like bad REO Speedwagon.
It was some malignant tumor called "Head Over Heels" and this fey-sounding dude kept singing about putting on your make-up and stuff and I was wondering if this was a song left over from the Phoebe Cates classic, Private School. Of course that movie had Phoebe and we were stuck with some bird-faced thing, whose friends were making her up to look really hot for her first big date.
It should have been obvious to anyone involved (ugly people as a rule in life should generally be suspicious anytime a beautiful person offers to help them in some capacity) that this girl and her boyfriend that were helping the ugly girl get ready for her date were just laying the foundation for a really hilarious practical joke. I mean, the make-up they put on her (particularly the copious amounts of gold eye shadow) made her look like Cleopatra's brother in drag. But sometimes a homely person's sick desire to be accepted by the rest of us (just accept your fate and live among other flops of nature) overwhelms their defense mechanisms and they swallow the bait. This is where us hotties make our money!
Kathy (our homely villain) is sent out on her date with hunky Fred Vernon. Fred is the school's P.E. teacher. I'm assuming that St. Mary's School For Girls is some type of college since the kids are pumping teachers, smoking joints and pumping their treating physicians. I think maybe truth in advertising regs would require that this school be renamed St. Mary's School For Druggie Skanks, but I don't think all that would fit on the very cheap-looking t-shirts and sweatshirts Lucio had printed up for all the ladies to wear.
Even though you and I both know that the city of Boston would never let Lucio within a country mile of it, he constantly tries to trick us into thinking this takes place in Boston, mainly because of these bogus shirts, the fact that everyone says it's in Boston, and because all the strange foreign-looking motor vehicles have fake Massachusetts license plates on them. The few exterior shots we get were clearly not Boston. I mean, I've seen all those Spenser: For Hire episodes so I know what Boston looks like and what I saw in this movie wasn't Boston. This movie could have used Hawk though to come in and shoot some of these whiny whores, but that would have deprived us of the big snail-attack scene, right?
So Fred and Kathy go out and park. He acts like he's going to go all the way with her, prompting her to gush about how great he is and she's always loved him, and blah, blah, blah. Of course, Fred has some kind of microphone in the car that is broadcasting all this to his devoted listeners that are hiding in their own cars in lovers' lane and giggling at how gullible and ugly Kathy is.
It isn't long before they reveal their presence, sending a distraught Kathy running away, while they chase her. Kathy ends up running into a speeding car and the next thing you know she's hooked up to a bunch of machines and her doctor is declaring her brain dead. Now, even though she's brain dead, the hospital staff keep checking on her and monitoring her progress (nope, no sign of psychic vengeance yet). I can't imagine that a veg like Kathy would really have a nurse standing there watching her all the time, but this nurse's assistance seem to consist of her telling the doctor how scared she was all the time (Thank you, nurse. Let me know if there's a change in your level of fear anytime soon.).
Back at the school, troubled student Eva is joining up. She has some kind of mental problem past, but she isn't as ugly as a mudfence so the headmistress figures she's still trading up from Kathy. Eva immediately is hated by the viewer when she declares that a successful school year for her is making out with as many boys as possible.
We then get the funniest sequence in the movie that ends all too soon when Fred Vernon is killed by a double of himself walking out of a mirror and strangling him. Before that, Fred is teaching an aerobics class or something and he's prancing around in a canary yellow tank top and ogling the girls. Watching him with his greased up arms and painfully feathered hair as he tells one of the students she needs to keep working out so that her big ass doesn't jiggle, followed up by him slapping it right there in class with everyone else watching is probably the funniest bit Lucio ever filmed. It's such a shame that this was supposed to be a horror movie and not one of those Porky-style movies, but sometimes you have to pick the seeds out of the bird poop, right?
Eva sets her sights on Fred and suddenly develops a cramp near her crotch that she needs him to massage. They decide to hook up later that night. In the meantime, Kathy is working her psychic magic on Eva, causing her to have these little episodes where she is possessed by Kathy and sees things and remembers things of Kathy's life. Kathy's mom is also involved in all this. She's the maid whose eyes glow red every now and again and the girls are convinced that she's retarded, but none of this is ever really used in the movie, so feel free to ignore all the nasty looks the mentally-challenged maid is sending the students.
Fred gets killed by some Kathy-style revenge and this is the start of a series of unfortunate accidents at the school, including the by now infamous snail scenes. There's this girl and all these snails are crawling around on her while she lies in bed. I can't think of anything less scary to have crawling around on me in bed than snails. Heck, the germs I probably got on me are probably creepier than these mollusks. Somehow they kill her, but it appears she has suffocated herself with her pillow, so I guess it was really one of those deals where her mind played tricks on her and her greatest fear caused her to be scared to death. That is, if your greatest fear is being attacked by snails (maybe she was a big fan of Uzumaki).
The rest of the movie plays out in the familiar and uninteresting manner you would expect. A few more people are killed, Eva starts dating Kathy's doctor for some reason, Eva gets sent away to a mental hospital because she goes whacko at the school, Eva writes letters to the doctor professing her true love, the doctor starts dating one of her classmates, Eva tries to kill everyone, Kathy's mother pulls the plug on her veg daughter and the soft rock classic "Head Over Heels" gets a nice reprise at the end of the movie, to make sure you didn't forget what a completely botched effort this movie was.
Everything in this movie seems low-rent and slipshod, from that crappy (not to mention out of place) song, to the sets (just because you put up posters of American movies, doesn't mean I believe for one second that this wasn't filmed in some Roman studio), to the dubbing (as bad as anything we've seen recently) to the cast made up of talentless creatures that made you think that best performance was either delivered by the snails or the retarded maid.
How bad was the cast? Well, Eva was played by the annoying girlfriend from A Blade In The Dark, which even though I had only watched one week before, I had no idea who she was when I saw this abomination. The doctor was played by one of the stars of the late eighties syndicated blockbuster War Of The Worlds. Still another person was also supposedly in Zombi 3, though I could never figure who she was in either movie.
You even get a lightweight version of the trademark Fulci gore and camera work. The gore is nothing memorable, doesn't happen too often and is usually in the characters' imaginations. Fulci sometimes doesn't even seem like he's paying attention to what he's doing with the camera, though the lackluster set ups and bland scenes don't exactly inspire maverick (or competent) film making. At about 83 minutes, Fulci barely had time to get across anything resembling a story, though from what we saw, he wasn't exactly busting his ass in that department with this one.
The maid's red eyes are never explained, the comments about strange things going on with the headmistress aren't mentioned more than once, and why would the brain dead Kathy be capable of anything other than drooling on herself? Also, would Kathy really care that that hussy Eva's doctor's boyfriend is cheating on her? Why did she need to get revenge for that? This of course ignores the complete lack of believability that the doctor would drop Eva and immediately hook up with her roommate seconds after Eva gets locked in the looney bin.
Overall, a stunning achievement in ineptness from a man that has wowed us in the past with his lack of taste, sloppy storytelling, and reliance on plots that usually involve dead people running around harassing Italian guys with beards. I'll bet the snails don't even list this one on their resumes.