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Director Lucio Fulci (himself) has been making gory horror films for
years, but now that all proves to be a little too much for him, because no
matter what he does, he sees gore scenes before his very eyes, so much so
that he thinks he's going crazy. And since he doesn't want to go crazy, he
visits a neighbouring psychiatrist, Doctor Schwarz (David L.Thompson) and
asks for help.
Problem is, Doctor Schwarz is planning to kill his wife (Malisa Longo),
and to evade suspicion he kills a few other women as well to make the
whole thing look like the work of a serialkiller. And now he thinks he has
found the ideal scapegoat in Fulci, whom he puts under hypnosis to let him
see even more gorescenes and make him doubt his own sanity while also
suggesting that he, Fulci, is responsible for all the killings.
It almost works, too, and before long Fulci is convinced he has really
killed all those women and wants to give himself up to his friend, police
officer Gabrieli (Jeoffrey Kennedy) - but Gabrieli simply refuses to
believe that Lucio Fulci is really a serialkiller and lets him go - but he
has Fulci shadowed and utlimately finds out the whole terrible truth about
the treacherous and murderous psychiatrist that way. In the end, Doc
Schwarz is killed in a shootout with the police (that weirdly enough isn't
even shown) while Fulci gets the doctor's nurse (Paola Cozzo), takes her
yachting on a vessel called Perversion - and saws her to pieces
with a chainsaw ... but wait a minute, this was just the ending of Fulci's
last movie.
The basic storyline of this film - the story of the director who is so
overworked he can no longer tell fact from fiction (the fiction of his own
films that is) and the psychiatrist who uses hypnosis to make the man his
tool - is not at all without interest, a bit overused perhaps, but
interesting still. However, this is pretty much where the good news ends:
The script based on the storyline is somewhat muddled and gives the killer
away way too soon, and the actual film is little more than a compilation
of gore scenes from recent horror films, both by Lucio Fulci himself (Ghosts
of Sodom, Touch of Death/When Alice Broke the Mirror) and by other
directors like Leandro Lucchetti (Bloody Psycho), Enzo Milioni (Escape
from Death), Andrea Bianchi (Massacre), Mario Bianchi
(The Murder Secret/Broken
Mirror)
and Giovanni Simonelli (Hansel e Gretel) - and clips from these
films show up with such a persistance that they after a while do little
more than to distract from the plot and become both self-sufficient and
pointless, and it's not made any better when some of the highlights
of these clips are repeated several times.
So what could have been a self-reflective magnum opus of an ageing gore
director has become nothing more than an example of cheap recycling cinema
that is without any real interest. Pity.
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