Now,
this is supposed to be one of the Great British Horror movies; a film with
genuine psychological heft and dramatic momentum. That is certainly not what I could
get hold of on the screen, where Hammer Horror Hamfisted Schlock was violently
to the fore.
Donald
Sutherland’s moustache bristled in a fake-horsehair manner. Vertigious shifts
of focus and field bring a sense of incipient nausea, for no apparent reason
other than flinging the audience through Venice as if on a bungee rope. Most of
the cast appear blotched and blotchy, as if they need more sunshine, or have
been reanimated in a brutal and abbatoir fashion.
The
dramatic horror seems to be contained within rapid and incoherent pulls of
focus and sudden lurches into eye-popping hysteria. From out of nowhere, high
heels totter and dry ice billows from unlikely garrets and cornices. It would
be funny if I hadn’t been feeling so much like vomiting.
There
appeared to be an implicit critique of an irreligious English Countrie Class,
though this was lost in the frantic and disjointed story. The whole business
had me yearning for the outrageous jolts of pace and properly objectively
unhinged points of view of a Dario Argento.
