|
Scorpion in foreground and camel in background, a tilt from the Sphinx down to a little girl's baleful smile, it might be Pound's "The Tomb at Akr Çaar" except it's Lucio Fulci in Cairo unleashing a febrile suite of mirages. The archeologist (Christopher Connelly) ventures into the ancient crypt and gets zapped blind for his trouble, meanwhile his daughter (Brigitta Boccoli) receives an amulet from a stranger with blank pupils. "The sacred symbol of the grand shadow," opines a fellow Egyptologist, back home the girl's little brother (Giovanni Frezza) is far more interested in mummies: "Were they as scary as zombies?" Mom (Laura Lenzi) works at a newspaper, the babysitter (Cinzia De Ponti) is struck by serpentine visions, a malediction hangs over their New York home. The antiques dealer (Cosimo Cinieri) has an inkling, "the power within this gem can open the infernal gate of time and space, and work miracles of evil beyond all arcane dimensions." Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist are the poles for the necromantic twitch under the veneer of civilization, and there's a pleasing concurrence with Poltergeist. A screen blanched by lightning or reddened by viscera, the glowing portal in a child's bedroom that disintegrates a tiresome prankster into a carpet of sand. "Hocus pocus! Abracadabra! Locus mocus! Open sesame!" The discarded Polaroid coming to haunted life against a grassy backdrop, a cobra materializing upon a ribcage radiograph, the crimson stain spreading on a blank wall not unlike a projection canvas. The East River swallows the malevolent talisman, though not before a gruesome attack by stuffed birds that evokes Godard on Hitchcock, "let the wires show." Barker helps himself to the coda for Hellraiser. With Carlo De Mejo, Enzo Marino Bellanich, Elisa Briganti, Andrea Bosic, and Tonino Pulci.
--- Fernando F. Croce |