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Old 19th March 2017, 03:46 PM
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Frankie Teardrop Frankie Teardrop is offline
Cultist on the Rampage
 
Join Date: May 2011
Location: Leeds, UK
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AENIGMA – A student at a girl school is psychically invaded by a vengeance-crazed coma victim, courtesy of eminent hack-auteur Lucio Fulci. Even third tier Fulci has its good points, and 'Aenigma', whilst not really outdoing the likes of 'Murderrock' or 'A Touch of Death' or any other flick from the more fallow end of his oeuvre, still delivers a fair whack of entertaining oddness. As I've said before, I often enjoy these supposedly lesser Fulcis more than the 'real deal' anyway, and I certainly liked 'Aenigma'. It ticks a number of boxes for me. It has the highly synthetic feel of most eighties Italian schlock cinema, it's reasonably pacey and contains quite a few creative kill scenes. There's a horrible theme song and some lovely Fulci set-pieces. More importantly it is full of little moments which are just unfathomable. There's a bit where the camera homes in on a snail that's crawled across a poster of Sylvester Stallone. So what in a way, it's just signing that there are evil snails about which will eventually en masse suffocate one of the girl school's bitchy residents. Maybe, but it's lingered over for just a little too long and strange meaning begins to form around it. Snails. Sly Stallone. Why? What? Am I awake? Near the end, when the last dregs of blood drain from an uprooted cannula, a single note sounds when each droplet hits the floor. Maybe it's a reference to something else that I'm unaware of, but it just seems freaky. Minor touches that hardly break the deal when it comes to the kind of film that most genre fanciers will think twice about investing in, but they contribute to the slightly unhinged atmosphere here. And atmosphere is pretty key when it comes to Fulci I think, he has a knack of elevating pretty banal material and giving it a really strange, hard to describe flavour. That's what he does with 'Aenigma', a film which at base is just an anaemic mongrel incorporating bits of 'Patrick', 'Carrie', maybe shreds of 'Phenomena' amidst sundry other semi digested horror steals. In other hands, particularly American ones from around the time, this might just amount to being a relatively diverting potboiler, but Fulci turns it away from being totally straightforward and linear. Sure, it's not as loud as something like 'The Beyond', but it's still larded with stylistic excess and a general lack of rationality. A lot of people think it's dull and skip it in favour of his more canonised work, but I say see it if you like Fulci or the dog-end of Italian genre cinema, or just eighties gunk in general. It's great to finally watch it in a good version, via 88's new blu-ray.
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