Massacre (1989)

Directed by Andrea Bianchi [Other horror films: La tua presenza nuda! (1972), Nude per l’assassino (1975), Malabimba (1979), Le notti del terrore (1981), Maniac Killer (1987), Incontri in case private (1988), Gioco di seduzione (1990)]

This offering of a late 80’s giallo leaves a lot to be desired. It’s not an exceptionally poor movie, but it is an exceptionally generic and forgettable one, and save a few scenes, I don’t know if it’s worth it.

Which is a bit of a shame, because the director here is Andrea Bianchi. He’s probably best known for Burial Ground, but he also directed Strip Nude for Your Killer and Malabimba. He’s not an extremely big name, but I will admit I was expecting a bit more from this one once I saw he directed it (and the fact this was apparently produced by Lucio Fulci didn’t help).

The story isn’t a terrible one – a film crew working on a horror film are being killed off by a mysterious killer. Admittedly, it takes something like 40 minutes to really get moving, and the finale isn’t particularly great, but the basic story has potential.

As far as the kills went, they were okay when they popped up. The film opens with a woman being attacked, one of her hands getting cut off, and then being decapitated. And this happened in the first two minutes. It takes a while after that, though, for more kills to take place, and none of them (including a throat-slitting and someone getting stabbed multiple times with a spike) are quite as striking as the first.

One thing I really think hurt the film were the characters. We’re sort of just thrown into the cast and crew of those making a horror film, and it takes a bit for them to really stand out, and I’m not sure that some of them (including one of the leads, Patrizia Falcone) ever did. There’s only one character I really took notice of (played by Danny Degli Espositi), and that’s not particularly ideal.

In fact, because of that, performances are close to impossible to really discuss. I’d say that because he stood out, Danny Degli Espositi was pretty decent (despite not really doing that much), and I guess that Gino Concari made an okay detective, but despite having a nude scene, Silvia Conti was pretty much just there, and Lubka Lenzi was pretty much interchangeable with everyone else.

By the mid-80’s, giallo was pretty close to dead, and in the latter half of the decade, they weren’t easy to come by. Massacre is a pretty low budget film, and stylistically it seems far more akin to some SOV slasher like Night Ripper! than it does something like Lamberto Bava’s You’ll Die at Midnight (which was a reasonably solid giallo from the latter half of the 1980’s). I can’t blame Andrea Bianchi too much for that, but that ending, man, was just painful.

I won’t say that Massacre has been a film I’ve wanted to see for years, but it has been on my radar of movies to take time with. I can’t say I’m that surprised by how forgettable the movie tended to be, but at least I saw it in Italian as opposed to dubbed, which I could only imagine would make it worse. Even so, Massacre wasn’t a particularly great time.

5.5/10