Reviews

Showed on TV for the first time in 1965, the mystery "Belphégor, ou La fantôme du Louvre" was immediately a great success, becoming a very important landmark in the history of television. This success still lives on, in spite of the forty years of age and the numerous replies, and in spite of the trash TV that lately reigns, undisputed (lately we have witnessed to a revival of the tele-romance, with a lot of remakes and adaptations of famous novels, but from the artistic point of view the results are very poor). This is one of those tele-romances that nostalgically are defined as "oldies"; it's a real pillar of the television language, a movie that made millions of members of the audience hold their breaths. The plot is widely known and takes us to an elegant and mysterious Paris, where, among murders, apparitions and alchemy, we feel the sensation of an obscure supernatural menace, that will dissolve realistically in the end. The interpretation of the exquisitely beautiful Juliette Greco and the kitsch, refined, elegant and nervous atmosphere of Paris, in particular of the magic interiors full of history and mysteries of the Louvre (effective co-protagonist), remain unforgettable. In 2001 a remake has been made, but it is a horror movie, not a mystery. It's a good flick, although naturally worse than the original.

Again, terror comes from the water, but don't let you be fooled, there's nothing that can be taken for granted in this eccentric Dutch horror flick. This is the third movie directed by Dick Maas, one of the most successful directors of the little known Dutch cinema, after the lucky "De Lift" (1983), awarded at the Avoriaz festival. "Amsterdamned" is a thrilling slasher that's almost a "psycho" version of the famous "Jaws", from which ironically borrows the famous scenes with subjective camera technique, underwater and on the surface. With his effective visual talent, Dick Maas (who wrote the script and composed the soundtrack, too), films a fascinating and putrescent Amsterdam, with its muddy canals and its magnificent settings. Apart from the inventions of Dick Maas' direction, the script, never banal and full of turning points, that always avoids to sink in "already seen" things, the credible acting by all the members of the cast, the excellent make-up of the disfigured maniac, shrewdly showed only in the end, are praiseworthy. This is entertainment cinema at his best. You must see it!

The Addiction is an absolutely perfect movie, the opus #10 of the great Abel Ferrara. Starting with a narrative material that's decidedly pulp, but ennobled by numerous philosophical quotations that are an expert miscellanea of the negative thought of the Eighteenth and Twentieth centuries, the director and his writer Nicholas St. John have built an anguished and tormented interrogation about the presence of the Evil in the world, a movie that instills a real sensation of anxiety and painful participation. Here the myth of vampirism is distorted and re-elaborated in a modern way as a metaphor of the addiction, and in particular of the only addiction that's common to every human being: the addiction to evil. The main character comes to the conclusion that humanity is only attracted by sin and cruelty, but the end opens to a way of redemption that comes from the understanding and acceptance of her own condition. Everything is magnificently supported by an exceptional visual apparatus, by a black and white photography inspired by the atmosphere of the expressionism and of the American noirs of the Forties, and by an extremely convincing cast. In conclusion, this is a strange, deeply disturbing movie, that maybe can be judged as dirty, realistic and iper-realistic at the same time in its personal and expressionist poetic of horror, it's a movie about pain, loneliness, addiction, contagion, incommunicability and death, and it's surely one of the most mature examples of horror cinema.