Italian Horror Blogathon: Aenigma
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To watch a Lucio Fulci film post-1981 is to see a film by a
once visionary genre director totally devoid of effort or care. It is with much
sadness that I write this review for the Italian horror blogathon. I always try
to get in one film from a major contributor to the subgenre that I haven’t seen,
and this year I picked a late(r) era Fulci. Aenigma
is the most clichéd kind of Euro-horror flick: shamelessly ripping off
other movies (most blatantly Carrie and
Patrick), straining to appeal to
American audiences (for example, Fulci finds a way to get images of Snoopy,
Sylvester Stallone, and Tom Cruise in his movie), and even lazily reverting to
famous gore setpieces from his own films (the spider scene from The Beyond is used here, only this time
with snails). I don’t know if Fulci’s health was declining by this point or if
he was just disillusioned with the whole lot of it, but Aenigma is a depressingly pointless movie that is uninspired,
boring, and just plain hack filmmaking.
