|
Available on DVD! To buy, click on link(s) below and help keep this site afloat (commissions earned) |
Always make sure of DVD-compatibility!!!
|
|
|
|
|
As a kid, Sandra (Francesca Faiella) has lost her sister (Monica
Citarda) when they were playing in a forest near a mansion. Nobody exactly
knows what has happened, but a certain organ-collecting serialkiller
dubbed the Surgeon might have had to do with it, a serialkiller who
committed suicide only a few years later, taking his secrets (including
the whereabouts of Sandra's sister) to his grave with him. 15 years
later, Sandra is a videojournalist, and since she and her cinematographer
Marco (Marco Benevento) have botched up their last job, the two of them
are pretty much professionally forced to make a behind-the-scenes
documentary about a porn shoot - that just happens to take place at the
Surgeon's former mansion. Hesitant at first, Sandra eventually comes to
the conclusion that this might be a good opportunity to overcome the guilt
she feels since her sister's disappearance. At first, nothing seems too
much out of the ordinary during their stay at the mansion - sure, Sandra
has nightmares about her sister, but as much was to be expected. She even
thinks she sees her spirit time and again, but that might be her nerves.
The whole shoot is as awkward as expected, too: The director with the
beautiful porn name Klaus Kinki (Paolo Ricci) is an overrated prick, the
producer and male star Tony Capone (Virgilio Olivari) immediately charms
Sandra, and the amateur couple (Francesco Malcolm, Alessandra Aulicino)
trying to make it in the porn world soon discover they're not on the same
page as jealousy kicks in, and Marco finds he might have a future in porn
... and then the amateurs are killed upon leaving, Sandra finds the corpse
of her sister on the premises, and finds out the Surgeon is still alive
and collecting bodyparts - and suddenly everybody's on the run. Sure,
Klaus Kinki is too much the madman not wanting to make a real life snuff
film out of everything, but that's the least of everybody's problems - and
it's not so much just the Surgeon alone, either, problem is, his victims
return as zombies. And the more of our motley crew are killed, the less
Sandra can be sure who's still on her side, until she learns she is the
reason that the whole crew has decided to film in the mansion. And what's
the deal with her sister's spirit, who she eventually finds out is more
than a figment of her imagination? ... Bloodline is an
incredibly nice throwback to Italian supernatural horror from the 1980's -
without being derivative or (even worse) repeating the same mistakes from
roughly 30 years ago: Everything you liked about the movies of old is
there - an over-the-top script with wild plottwists, plenty of gruesome
gore effects (thanks to veteran Sergio Stivaletti), cool music (another
veteran, Claudio Simonetti), weirdness, sudden shocks, suspense, and of
course its fair share of sleaze (even though there's a surprising lack of
actual nudity considering this takes place on a porn set). What's
fortunately amiss is the camp factor (above what the horror genre as such
demands, obviously), the predictability and the empty characters - quite
the contrary, despite the over-the-top nature of the script it's rather
well-structured and features interesting plottwists and at least a few
believable characters. Oh, and did I mention this thing is pretty well
shot and paced as well? Well, it is. Very nice, actually.
|