Director: Lucio Fulci
Year: 1987
Country: Italy/Yugoslavia
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Supernatural
Plot:
After a savage accident, the students at a high-end college find themselves being stalked and killed in equally gruesome accidents, and it soon dawns on them that the new kid at the school is a cipher for her supernatural revenge forcing them to find a way of stopping her deadly rampage.
Review:
This here wasn't as bad as it could've been. One of the better features here is the initial setup for this story and how it gets played out in here. The concept for the main girls' predicament, being placed in a coma as the result of a prank gone wrong and a vessel aiming to carry out their revenge on the guilty party, serves as a perfectly fine scenario to get this moving along which is what happens here. That this in turn is aided along by the fun opening prank which is a rather cruel prank that could really get played out in real life, while the way the scenes of the doctor and the nurse at her side gradually let the story unfurl in short spurts gives this some nice moments.
There's also the the rather fun scenes of the attacks getting unleashed, starting with the creepy snail sequence of the nude victim awaking to find themselves covered with snails, to a victim inside a church imagining that a painting on the ceiling is bleeding onto them and the escape leads into plenty of creepy confrontations with a series of chilling animals and finally leading to the finale where it offers up some nice action. From the hallucination dream where the victim imagines they're being ripped apart to a chase inside an abandoned corridor and turning into the frenzied finale in the hospital, there's some nice action and gore here which holds this up over its flaws.
Among the main detrimental factors here is that the film, for such a simple and supposedly straightforward story, there's some useless filler throughout here which really upsets the pacing in here. There are quite a few scenes of the girl and her boyfriend out on dates, making out or sneaking around which are so unnecessary that they stick out by being bland as well as sticking out for interrupting the pacing here by featuring some truly obvious filler scenes in a subplot no one cares about so the scenes really just stop the plot.
The other big problem here is the rather shocking inability of the group here to spot what's going on as this one is pretty transparent about her being the cause of the incidents. Frankly, she shows up just after the prank, knows nothing about the area despite being from there and blacks out at the most inopportune times which just so happen to coincide with the incidents, and the overall connection with the hospitalized victim which begins displaying her signs of life during these very some moments. There's very little doubt about what's going on here so their confusion in the finale once it's all revealed is quite strange. Along with the no-budget feel of this one, these are what hold it down over the flaws.
Overview: **/5
While this has some enjoyable elements throughout here, the film is undone by a few nagging detrimental areas that it becomes pretty problematic as a whole. This is really only worthwhile to the most hardcore Fulci fanatics or Eurohorror apologists, while others with a higher baseline for their genre efforts should heed caution.
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