A Blade In The Dark (1983)
[Contains spoilers]
Anytime the slightly feminine guy you rent your isolated villa from says that he is going off to Kuwait to work on his rich daddy's oil rig and then chicks start getting killed off at your house, you should probably just forget about getting your security deposit back and just boogie on down to the Holiday Inn Express. I'm always impressed with the courage the main character demonstrates by staying in the house, even after mysterious women start disappearing, counter tops develop gouges from butcher knives and blood droplets start appearing everywhere.
If it were me, I probably wouldn't be the type to carefully re-insert the knife into the hole I just found to make sure which knife the maniacal killer used and I probably wouldn't investigate the room that the landlord keeps locked - don't worry though, it only contains boxes of tennis balls! But then again, I'm not some wispy musician that has been hired to score a crappy horror movie.
Director Lamberto Bava (Demons) supposedly emulates some of father Mario Bava's most famous films and tries to incorporate some of their themes into this movie. I know this because I read the liner notes by Tim Lucas, not because I was able to discern any of that from the film itself. The best thing in this movie though turns out not to be something he cribbed from his daddy, but from Lucio Fulci!
Does the name Giovanni Frezza ring a bell? No? Well how about Bobby from House By The Cemetery? Oh yeah, baby! That little blonde simp is back!
We all remember Bobby as the little boy with the improbably soprano voice prattling on and on about his imaginary girlfriend. This time his Ric Flair hair and his Angelina Jolie lips are playing the part of a little boy who is being tormented by two of his friends. The three of them are going into this dark, spooky house and they're calling Bobby a "female" over and over showing a decidedly more sophisticated form of teasing than when I was a youngster on the playground calling people "four eyes," "lard ass," and "adopted".
Bobby's two friends fire a ball down the basement stairs into the dark and then Bobby has to go get it to prove he ain't no stinking female. He goes down there, we hear a scream and then the ball is fired back up the stairs, hits the wall and leaves a bloodstain behind. What was in the basement? What happened to Bobby? Was he really a female or just some kind of Italian hermaphrodite? Well, we never find out the answers to any of these questions because it turns out that these Romans have again pulled out the old "movie within a movie" gimmick!
That scene was the beginning of the movie that Bruno has been hired to score. The woman director refuses to show him the last reel of the film, thus supposedly creating suspense down the line that the solution to all the murders that happen around Bruno must somehow be on that film. The ending is one of those where you're going to give it points for actually being an ending with a killer unmasked and all that, but you're also going to fling the DVD into the your toilet because all the "clues" we spent over an hour and a half accumulating don't add up and make about as much sense as casting Bobby in such a small role.
Since Bruno is one of those serious musicians that wouldn't be caught dead at a Goblin concert, the director thought that he needed a little inspiration for his work and that's why he's set up in this big, isolated, and deserted villa. We are introduced to the guy renting out the villa and find out that his name is Tony.
Tony is played by Michele Soavi, the assistant director of A Blade In The Dark who would later go on to helm his own Italian horror films including Dellamorte Dellamore , which is so much better than anything Lamberto ever did, you just know that he despises Michele and is glad he made him dress up as a woman in this film.
This villa also comes complete with its own creepy caretaker, a scuzzy guy prone to wearing bibs and hanging up pictures from porn mags on his walls. He also hauls out suspiciously heavy garbage bags at night (just old porn, most likely) and you immediately know that not only isn't he our killer, he won't even survive the movie.
Bruno spends his time recording and playing the same annoying horror theme (kind of a mix between The Exorcist's "Tubular Bells" and Halloween's theme) over and over apparently never realizing that at some point in the movie you will need to have some synthesizers and probably a really bad heavy metal song for some scenes.
Suddenly he finds a girl in his villa! What is she doing there? She's looking for her friend Linda that used to live there and blah, blah, blah. There's some stupid diary involved, but it ends up burned up and Linda disappears. She would be one of three chicks in this movie to wear those ugly jean skirts that were all the rage in backward countries like Italy in the early eighties. We saw a yellow one, a blue one, and an orange one. All three of these broads ended up as regular stalk and slash victims as well as fashion victims, the rainbow-colored denim skirt craze dying overseas with them before it could infect the rest of the planet.
This mysterious woman that shows up at Bruno's villa for no real reason gets killed off by somebody with an utility-style knife and the killer spends a lot of screen time dragging her body all over the estate, thus allowing Bruno a chance to go looking for the source of that strange sound he hears outside. The phone rings and he finds nothing, though he does notice his pants have blood on them later.
Later, Bruno's crabby girlfriend, Julie shows up unexpectedly. She's an actress in a play about lesbians and is at the villa to spend a little quality time with Bruno. She's all pissy that all he can talk about is the mysterious broad that broke into his villa and left her burned up diary. She leaves to go back to her play and Bruno is left all by himself, at least until Angela shows up.
She is roommates with the first mysterious girl and even though it was so cold that you could see her breath when she first came to the villa, she decides that she's going to take a dip in the pool! She finds the utility knife on the pool bottom, gets out of the pool and then goes upstairs to the bathroom to freshen up. While in the bathroom, she is attacked by the killer and in the movie's only really good scene, her hand is staked to the counter with a knife and she gets suffocated with a plastic bag. It's pretty gruesome as far as death scenes of people you don't know or care about go and you can't help but wince when her hand slides off the counter, leaving a chunk of it still pinned by the knife.
The killer cleans up in a hurry and then the movie settles in for forty minutes or so of nothing but boring talk, false alarms, crabby girlfriend appearances, ridiculous coincidences, and bogus red herrings. You only get those two murders for the first hour and a half of the movie. You know, usually I decry resorting to killing off people in these movies just to build up a body count, but once you've experienced a slasher movie without any slashing, you realize that those death scenes are in there for a reason.
I don't know what Lamberto was up to with the middle of this movie, but he wasn't generating any atmosphere, mystery, chills, or excitement. I suppose we were fed some clues, but you could probably just skip to the last fifteen minutes since these clues are stuff like: the director knew this Linda that used to live at the villa! Bruno's girlfriend was never really in a play about lesbians at all! And of course, the real stunner involving the box of tennis balls!
Bruno becomes convinced that he needs to see the final reel of the horror movie he's supposed to be scoring to solve the riddle of the murders he is involved in. Why, I don't know, but it turns out that he's right, so who am I to argue? About this time, the killer comes back from vacation and knocks off three people as the movie comes to its end.
Bruno rushes back to the villa after seeing that in the last part of the movie, little Bobby ended up dressed up like a girl and the next thing you know he's smashing Michele Soavi who's decked out in an ugly wig and an even uglier dress with a brick after Soavi puts a knife through Julia. Bruno rapidly explains to the probably fairly disinterested film editor he watched the last reel of the film and that Soavi had a female alter ego named Linda and that he killed women to show he wasn't scared or because he didn't like their skirts or something.
What I love about this ending is that it doesn't really make any sense compared to the rest of the junk that Lamberto threw in there. This woman film director knew "Linda" and was using her life story as the basis for her movie, okay? The only thing I don't get is how anyone could hang out with "Linda" and not know that she was a guy in drag! And "Linda" also fooled the two dumb broads that mysteriously showed up in the villa! Once you've seen "Linda" you'll know that she couldn't have fooled a blind man in a dark alley in that get up!
They also explained that he developed this female alter ego to cope with something, but I've already forgotten what it was, probably some whiny crap about a cool kid calling him names on the playground. And what was all the stupid crap about the girlfriend about? Why did she lie about being in that play? The director said that she was actually in some educational play, but that she just stopped showing up for work a week ago. Why did she do that? Just so that Lamberto would have another suspect for us to wonder about? Unanswered questions and hideous pacing aside, along with his turn as a guy taking a whiz on alien rocks in Alien 2, this is an essential Soavi acting performance.