| Product: |
Madhouse (DVD) |
| Date: |
10.04.08 (82 review reads) |
| Rating: |
 |
Advantages: Great music, a few scary bits
Disadvantages: Pretty dull, appalling sound on DVD
A review of the Film 2000 DVD.
This is a deservedly obscure video nasty from 1981. Originally called There Was A Little Girl, it was released as Madhouse in the UK for reasons that are far from clear - there is no madhouse anywhere in the film. Although an Italian film, it at least features US actors, so the usual problems with lip-synching aren't present.
Julia is a teacher at a school for the deaf. She has an uncle who's a priest and a twin sister who's confined to a hospital with some kind of disfiguring virus. This sister used to terrorise Julia as a child with her scary dog. The sister vanishes from her hospital and soon enough people close to Julia are being attacked by a scary dog...
This is a curiously nondescript film, one which leaves very little impression on the viewer. The plot is a bit too convoluted to work as a simple slasher film, but too simple to be a giallo. And it's rarely been so obvious that characters only exist to be killed. There's a kind of TV movie blandness to the visual style and most of the acting, and while there are a few scenes of quite unpleasant gore, there are also several murders that are understated or not shown at all, suggesting a film that can't decide what it should be.
The acting from the leads - especially Julia and her dull doctor boyfriend - is generally uninteresting. Few of the actors rise to the occasion, although the material doesn't really lend itself to any serious histrionics. There are a couple of really fun OTT psycho performances towards the end, but that's too late to make me care. The ending actually goes some way towards redeeming the film; it's endearingly silly and contains at lest one memorable image, even if it's been nicked from somewhere else. This is a derivative film all round, with the usual nods to The Shining, and a scary dog straight out of The Omen. (The dog's a mean looking brute, a particularly ugly rottweiler, but there are only so many ways - one, in fact - that a dog can kill a person, which becomes a bit tedious. The fake dog head used for attack close-ups is particularly risible, too.)
There are a few things that really don't make sense, mainly the complete lack of explanation for the murders; we're never allowed to know what the villains actually hope to achieve. I also don't understand why Julia was a teacher of deaf children, unless the film was using deaf people for some cheap uncanny frisson - entirely possible in a story that seems to regard mental illness and disfigurement as inherently horrifying.
It's not all bad, though. There are one or two good scares (although the percentage of supposedly scary bits that actually work isn't high). The soundtrack is a peculiar treat, too. It's by Riz Ortolani, who also did the amazing music for Cannibal Holocaust, and it's quite similar (which is disappointing in a way, it makes the Cannibal soundtrack less special). It uses the same bleeps and other weird noises to underline shocking moments (although the more conventional music is a bit ordinary). The electronic whooshes, boings and zings Ortolani provides make for an interesting soundscape, one which is rather wasted on such an otherwise unremarkable film.
I guess it's made competently enough, although the boom was visible at one point. There's a rather racist depiction of a Japanese character who is absurdly bad at English even though he's apparently a third generation immigrant. And apart from that nothing else really stands out, except perhaps the leading man's ridiculously big glasses.
Unfortunately, although I'd usually have given this two stars, the sound quality on the DVD is genuinely appalling. I had to turn the volume on my TV up to about three quarters of its capacity just to be able to hear dialogue, and even then I couldn't hear anyone who talked quietly. This really is shockingly unprofessional.
Otherwise the DVD has trailers for four absolutely terrible looking shot-on-DV horror films. I think I'd rather cut my own penis off and feed it to the swans than watch any of them. This costs about £4 from amazon, but until someone releases a version with decent sound I really wouldn't bother. (And even then, I still probably wouldn't bother.)
Summary: Another fairly worthless video nasty
|
|
