Karma’s a Bitch

Karma's-a-Bitch
Karma’s a Bitch

If you’ve ever watched a horror movie you’ve come across the border, you’d certainly know that the golden age of Italian horror films is history. Roberto de Feo, one claim to fame writer of this film, and Paolo Strippoli, another director, saw no point in being original. It was their brilliant idea to just steal ideas from the better horror films of the last 50 years. Even in A Classic Horror Story, scenes from American classics like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Cabin in the Woods, The Blair Witch Project, and Midsommar will stand out for the viewer. But, does this hodgepodge of elements come together and work?

Five carpoolers journey southward across Italy in a mobile home. A family friend named Elise (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz) is flying to her folks’ house and returning for an abortion; a young couple that’s planning to run away; a male doctor played out as a dull teledrama; and last but not the least, the mobile home driver, a film student. While driving in the night, they swerve to avoid a dead animal on the road and end up smashing their car into a fence.

The following morning, they are shocked to find themselves surrounded by a dense and forbidding forest, where instead of saying “a road,” they say “a cabin in the woods.” They manage to enter the babushka’s cabin after midnight. Fabrizio, one of the characters and a film student, is disturbed by some of the bizarre images plastered on the walls, which link to some dreadful folklore. More important, however, is the discovery of a frightened tongue-less woman. And it is quite clear that the death druids are soon going to eliminate all these people.

Let us start with some of the things I actually appreciated. Let me assure you, there is more than enough blood and gore to keep all of you entertained. I mean even a hardcore freak like me had to cringe at some points. Classic Horror Story captures a very dark ambiance and I am not going to complain about the cinematography (though the red color, used to show threat, seems to be a concept taken from M. Night Shyamalan and other such filmmakers).

However, when entire plots are copy-pasted from several unrelated movies, this results in a very disjointed final product. A strange sensation that I could not completely get rid of: at the movie’s conclusion, the screenwriters appeared to run out of thoughts and ideas. Moreover, piling twists one upon the other bore style of M. Night Shyamalan, and does not help the case either. When you overuse them, as is the case in the movie, you lose interest in the plot impersonally.

What is worse than all this is that for an hour and a half, you have to bear because of quite despicable characters Come under the spells of quite unsympathetic actors. Bizarrely, Elise, the main character, does nothing more than whining and weeping. And when she finally does bring the conflict to a head, it happens so out of the blue, the plausibility of it is debatable. Mark (played by Will Merrick), the English boyfriend is quite cocky, while the Italian girlfriend is quite forgettable. The doctor does very little in engaging with the rest and is quite tense. Fabrizio is such an attention seeker that he quickly becomes annoying. Honestly, I felt some relief when they were all killed.

With all due respect, don’t hold your breath for the actors. It is possible to appreciate them but considering the author’s bad script and weak characters, that is slightly difficult. On the whole, A Classic Horror Story is also suffering from a fatigue, sadly self-inflicted. I thought of the last year’s Nobody Sleeps In The Woods Tonight, the first Polish slasher, that borrowed heavily from the films and television series of the eighties. But the team of that picture managed to pick up the plot, as well as a lot of crazy killings and timely emergence of very strange supporting characters, and everything turned out to be very entertaining. Unfortunately for us, De Feo and Strippoli have completely zero sense of humor; you first saw the words ‘flaccid phallus’ in this review about 57 minutes into the film, as the first joke was uttered. How embarrassing. You can’t really change the whole picture just by showing that first and last joke.

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