Flurita is the latest addition to some sort of weird boarding school (by the looks of it) where the students are taught obedience mostly and are forced to clean the hallways and everything ... and she hates it from day one, but is locked in like all the others, and even her contact to her schoolmates is reduced to a minimum, as the head mistress Mother wants them to blindly obey and not question her authority, and her second-in-command Angelita, half a girl herself, is her a bit too willing executor of punishments. One night though, a little boy, Bulet, tells Flurita to take care of the birdmen, and now she tries to find out, but all her questions are blocked ... and yet she learns when she's led to a special room where a man in a bird mask awaits her to violently take her virginity. Mother then bathes her and even praises her for being an obedient girl ... but Flurita bites Mother in the neck, upon which Mother has Flurita whipped by Angelita - who takes pity in the girl though and hands her the proper keys for an escape. But just being handed the keys to all the relevant doors doesn't make an escape successful ...

The Huckster is a film pretty much out of time: It doesn't follow formulas or rules of modern horror at all (without looking old-fashioned), has a pleasently gothic and macabre flair to it, and places atmosphere over spectacle invariably. In a way, the film is reminiscent of Suspiria, actually: It's set in this absurd school with its horrible secrets that are never fully uncovered, its imagery is extremely stylized (though other than Dario Argento's colourful excesses, this one's held in black and white), it has the feel of a horrible fairy tale, and at the center there's a terrible "Mother". But this is actually where the similarities end already, storywise, The Huckster goes its own way, and even if both films are extremely stylized, they don't really compare stylistically.

And all that said, The Huckster just is a really really good film in its own right!

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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