20 of 31 Horror Films I've Never Seen: Deep Sleep (2013)

I've reviewed a number of Neo-Giallo films last year and I'm constantly looking for more.  I just can't help myself, I love the genre.  The films are so full of provocations so unabashedly exploitative in nature.  Everything is fair game in a Giallo. Sex, death, car chases, you name it.  They can be serious, they can be silly, they can be somewhere in the middle.  They can border and blur the lines of horror and crime stories.  They're fetishistic and they have some of the most awesome soundtracks and scores known to cinema.  Since around 2012 they've been making a come back as fans of the genre are starting to make their own films, taking the low budget aesthetics and applying them in great homage.  Luciano Onetti's Deep Sleep takes homage one step further, fully justifying it's status as a Neo-Giallo.

After a killer with a traumatized childhood murders a Brazilian prostitute someone slips an envelope under their door with pictures of the murder and a phone number written down.  The killer calls the number and is informed by the voice on the other line that they are going to kill them.  In a refreshing twist, the killer becomes the hunted and must try to figure out who the mysterious voice on the telephone is before it's too late, but what takes place is full of twists and turns as nothing is quite as it appears.

Onetti (who wrote, shot, edited, and scored the film) certainly seems to have a knack for the disturbing and the deranged.  past and present converge between constant first person perspective to get the audience in the mind of his incredibly deranged killer.  Hallucinogenic hardly begins to describe the kaleidoscopic childhood memory sequence and the music and sound design only heighten this property.  There are a lot of interesting visual cues.  The two gloved killers are denoted by white latex gloves for one and black leather gloves for the other.  Plenty of nods to Dario Argento's Deep Red, Sergio Martino's Case of the Scorpions Tail (particularly the colorfully tripped out trailer) and other works of the genre are represented through roughshod film grain and color timing to match the seedy quality of fading prints.

The problem with the film is it's constant POV which dominates the 66 minute runtime.  While Onetti peppers it with other creepy close up shots of clocks, photographs, other actors (usually victims and hands) he relies far to heavily upon the POV creating an overly claustrophobic look.  While this is effective at times, on the whole, it cheapens the narrative.  Still it's an intriguing story with little dialogue and an incredible score that sounds like it could have been actually recorded in the 70s.  A great look at what can be done with no budget, but probably only of interest to serious fans of the genre.

15 of 31 Horror Films I've Never Seen 2016: The Church (1989)

Did anyone make films quite as weird as the Italians did in the 80s?  Who would think to match science fiction with demonic possession (The Visitor) or zombie demons inhabitting human souls through a movie screen (Demons) or crazy witches being buried alive under a church like in Michele Soavi's The Church.

A bunch of Tutonic Knights massacre of village of people believing them to be witches and harbingers of the plague.  They bury them in a mass grave and bless the cite, erecting a gargantuan Gothic Cathedral of it.  Cut to the present day:  Evan (Thomas Arana) is the new librarian of said Cathedral.  He immediately starts a romance with Lisa (Barbara Cupisti) an artist who is restoring a rather gruesome looking fresco and with her help discovers an ancient piece of parchment that promises power underneath the church.  Driven by ambition he goes to the church catacombs where he discovers the grave cite and removes a creepy looking head stone, suffers a bizarre vision quest, and unleashes an evil and ancient vengeance upon the Church.

I'm a little bit of a fan of Soavi, particularly his first film Stage Fright and more so Cemetery Man, but it took me a while to finally get to The Church.  First off, this film is a little bit of a mess, but ultimately still strangely fulfilling and satisfying.  The dialogue is horribly dubbed (in English that is) as many Italian productions usually are which can be distracting at times, but overall the ultra stylish look of the film makes up for it.  When I found myself rolling my eyes I was luckily treated with dialogue-less scene relying and heavy mood lighting and incredible music (Keith Emerson, Goblin, Philip Glass, Fabio Pignatelli) to convey the story (the real success of this film) and bring my attention back to it.  Like Stage Fright the majority of the film takes a bit of time to get to the meaty bits, but that was something that always separated Soavi from his contemporaries.  He was more interested in mood than shoot it cheap and get to the gore.  Luckily, when he does do gore and FX (especially creature FX) he delivers as good, if not better than most.

Produced by Dario Argento, the story goes that Argento had intended the film to be Demons 3 but Soavi insisted on it being a stand alone.  Still there are obvious nods to the Demons films, likely from Argento's active producer and co-screen writer role, which is probably why at times the plot-line feels disjointed.  Soavi would only make one more collaborative effort with Argento in his 1990 film The Sect after which he chose to pursue other avenues of film making rather than being trapped as a purely horror director.  Also, worth mentioning, Soavi served as an assistant director to Terry Gilliam on The Adventures of the Baron Munchausen and the impression that experience must have made is quite evident in the fantastic elements of his style.  Truth be told, as often as the film annoyed me, I kept marveling at the sheer scope of it.  It was clearly a very ambitious film for Soavi and likely served as a learning experience that he would take to his later films.  I'm eager to re-watch it now in the original Italian language, but for that I'll have to find a physical copy somewhere.  If you're an Amazon Prime member you can stream it for no extra cost on through amazon.