Director: Luigi Cozzi (as Lewis Coastes)
Year: 1989
Country: Italy
Alternate Titles: The Killing Violin
Genre: Supernatural
Plot:
Trying to work on their sound, members of an all-girl rock band trying to get ahead of their career decide to use a piece of previously unpublished music from Paganini as the basis of their work, but as they shoot the music video for the song realize they’ve brought a supernatural curse upon themselves.
Review:
There’s a lot to like with this overtly goofy cheesefest. Among the more enjoyable features here is the rather clumsy and cheesy manner through which this one gets the main premise going. The means through which they come into possessing the sacred song, by means of their desperation for a hit song and the somewhat lame black-ops style meeting with the dealer who has the specific writings, is such a goofy setup that there’s a charm to the absurd premise. That is all the more obvious as their recordings are fine enough already that the duplicity to carry out this kind of espionage on something so meaningless is a large part of what sells the film going forward, especially with what we see of the dealer following their initial encounter.
Once the setup has gotten underway, there’s some cheesy fun to be had with how everything unfolds. The cheesiness of the video shoot at the house, ranging from the nightmare sequence retelling the legend of the composer to the choreography in their dances and the presentation of the whole product, is the kind of cheese that’s quite fun to witness. That is matched by the equally fun deaths where the slowly-split-up group is attacked or the traps set off to denote something’s gone wrong, from the floor swallowing people whole, invisible barriers preventing them from leaving or being tormented by shadowy figures and disembodied voices. As these manage to give this one some likable elements, they’re enough to keep this one at least entertaining enough to be watchable.
There are some issues on display with this one. The main issue here is that the aforementioned cheese feels so overwhelming at points it’s hard to take what’s going on seriously. The idea of the cursed music awakening the fabled being but the charmingly obvious low-budget on display and the highly confusing action all come together into a highly goofy affair that’s hard to call scary. That’s also obvious with the finale where this one’s so rushed with trying to pull off this odd and rather underwhelming finish to everything trying to make sense of the group coming upon the curse and the implications surrounding it which are so rushed and ludicrous that there’s no chance to get anything out of it. These issues are quite overwhelming over the positives which are on display.
Overview: **.5/5
A goofy and silly enough genre effort that is somewhat undermined by its cheesy attitude and a clumsy structure brought on by that cheesy nature on display, overall it’s a mixed bag of a film. Give it a look if you’re a fan of cheesy genre fare or are a die-hard Eurohorror fanatic, while all others out there who aren’t into these factors should heed caution.
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