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AENIGMA

Goddamn it, Lucio...

The last film I wrote about in this slot was Fulci's BEATRICE CENCI, a remarkable little film with genuine emotional pull. I should have known better than to follow that up with another one of his films. Outside of his gialli, Fulci has squeezed out more turds than a dairy cow, and AENIGMA, one of the few Fulci films I had never seen before, is a five-pounder. A curious mix of PATRICK, SUSPIRIA, and Argento's equally stinky PHENOMENA, AENIGMA is far from the magnitude of crappiness that is MANHATTAN BABY but it's a piece of shit nonetheless. It is so far removed from anything resembling "good" that I wonder whether or not anybody anywhere could actually like it and just what that would say about them as intelligent human beings if they did.

AENIGMA starts out with a cruel prank of the 1980s slasher movie fashion. A young, ugly girl named Kathy is tricked into thinking the stud gym teacher at her boarding school - St. Mary's College in Boston(!) - wants to go on a date with her. During their make-out session, out pops a group of her peers. They proceed to chase her down the road and right into the path of an oncoming car, the resulting accident placing her in a coma. A new student, Eva, joins the school soon after and is given Kathy's old room. She makes friends with the perpetrators of the vicious prank and soon finds herself under the influence of Kathy's vengeful spirit which starts knocking off the wrongdoers one by one. Each act of vengeance triggers powerful brain activity in the comatose girl, something noticed by Doctor Andersen, Kathy's neurologist. When Eva has a fit, battering her roommate with a shirt and generally destroying everything in sight, Doctor Andersen is called in to examine her. And examine her he does. Soon the two are an item - which would be creepy if Eva didn't look like she was 30 - but Doctor Andersen has his worries about her stability. He's relieved when her parents pull her out of school and hops in bed almost immediately with Eva's old roommate, Jenny. But Kathy still wants Jenny dead and fills Eva in on their affair. Soon, Eva comes calling.

And that's with me trying to make it interesting...

Where to start... I can't be sure if this film is meant to be a spoof or not. It most certainly has all the chips lined up. We have a boarding school for girls that inexplicably has a hunky male gym instructor that everyone has either had sex with or wants to have sex with, a group of girls that all look like they're in their early thirties, a bad electro-score, really lousy special effects, and a fair amount of over-acted - and over-dubbed - heavy petting. The murder scenes are all laughable. A marble statue comes to life to strangle a girl, the gym instructor is strangled by his own reflection, a boyfriend has his head lopped off by a falling blind and, in the films most laughable scene, a girl is attacked and killed by snails.

Really? Snails?

Yes, really. You don't know comedy until you've seen a nude woman, lying completely still, S L O W L Y being killed by an army of snails. As ridiculous as the tarantula scene in THE BEYOND was, it at least made sense within the films narrative. Here, it's just terribly out of place and hilarious. I'm convinced Fulci did this as some sort of self-parody. I can't imagine anyone - even the man who made THE HOUSE OF CLOCKS and DOOR TO SILENCE - thinking that this would be in any way horrifying. If anything in this film is truly horrifying, it's watching Lara Naszinsky and Jared Martin suck face. Absolutely stomach turning.

It's obvious Fulci spent his last years working for a paycheck and little more. The steep decline in the quality of his work - even the worst films during the early 80s were, in one small way or another, interesting - all but proves that. AENIGMA was made in 1987, a good four or five years after the death of the Italian horror industry proper, so it shouldn't really be of any surprise that this film is sorely lacking in budget and commitment. But you would figure that someone like Fulci could have, at the very least, managed one single scene that isn't undermined by point-and-shoot direction, bad lighting, and/or terrible special effects. You can feel him reaching for a little magic in the way he handles certain scenes - the museum attack, for example - but his efforts are truly for naught. Everything conspires against him. I guess his heart just wasn't in it. I can't say I blame him for it.

Awful.