Director: Luigi Montefiori
Year: 1990
Country: Italy
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Creature Feature
Plot:
After receiving word from his superiors, a brilliant doctor is informed of the need to produce evidence of his experiments and decides to push through on the testing by using himself as a subject, yet when he begins experiencing unintended side effects he races to find a way to keep it from consuming him.
Review:
This was a slightly disappointing overall genre effort. What brings it down at first is the beginning to this one which keeps this one from generating any interest. The brilliant yet egotistical scientist ranting and raving about funding for his mythic experiments isn't an endearing move to get us onto his side since he comes off as arrogant and elitist. That he comes to believe his entire work is to be completely and utterly isolated from interference and continues to value the unregulated nature of the experiments at all cost doesn't make us root or feel sympathy for him in the slightest.
Moreover, this whole first section of the film comes off as interminably boring. The focus on him fighting with the various members of the college board or romancing the girl who feels compelled to help him all but drains any life this could've presented with the storyline which itself doesn't make any sense. Through all the technical and scientific jargon this utilizes to try to play off what he's doing, very little of it is understandable and the cliched romance angle is exactly a cliche being completely expected as well as underwritten, making for a dull middle section to the film.
That's carried over for the rest of the film where hardly anything interesting happens. The romance angle serves no purpose other than building to an ill-fated territorial battle for her, while the investigation from the doctors into his experiments is inherently time-consuming delaying the inevitable. All of this ends up cutting into the horror elements until so late in the film that they're barely useful in overcoming the flaws built up previously with the overall lack of content about what he's turning into or what happened as the uninteresting pace or focus away from these features for the majority of its running time.
That leaves the few horror elements present in this one which are incredibly hit-or-miss. The first half is based on underwhelming ideas and setups, from the laughably inept attack on the slutty student to a flashback attack on a random waitress, both of which are fine in concept but fail in execution. The hospital escape and resulting rampage offer up much more impressive attacks taking advantage of the fabulous metamorphosis make-up and the inability to recognize who he is until it's too late providing some decent gore in the process. Coupled with the suspenseful stalking throughout the college where this takes place, it does have some positive points.
Overview: */5
Graced with a problematic beginning, too much boredom and not much in the way of effective genre fare until the admittedly rousing finale, there's really not much to this one. Only go into this one if you're a fan of these late 80s/early 90s Italian genre efforts or of the creative crew, while those who aren't into that style or turned off by the flaws should heed extreme caution if not outright avoidance.
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