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Paganini Horror
The Killing Violin / Il Violino che Uccide
Italy 1989
produced by Fabrizio De Angelis for Fulvia Film
directed by Lewis Coates (= Luigi Cozzi)
starring Daria Nicolodi, Jasmine Maimone (as Jasmine Main), Pascal Persiano, Maria Cristina Mastrangeli, Michel Klippstein, Pietro Genuardi, Luana Ravegnini, Roberto Giannini, Giada Cozzi, Elena Pompei, Perla Costantini, Donald Pleasence
story by Raimondo Del Balzo, screenplay by Luigi Cozzi, Daria Nicolodi, music by Vince Tempera, special makeup effects by Franco Casagni, Rosario Prestopino, special effects by Paolo Ricci
review by Mike Haberfelner
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Available on DVD! To buy, click on link(s) below and help keep this site afloat (commissions earned) |
Always make sure of DVD-compatibility!!!
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Daniel (Pascal Persiano) has just bought a lost composition by Paganini
from Mr Pickett (Donald Pleasence) - who will later turn out to be Satan
himself -, and now wants to use it in the next song of Kate's (Jasmine
Maimione) rockband ... and everybody seems to be so ecstatic about it that
they want to shoot a videoclip with a horror-theme in a certified
horror-house owned by Sylvia (Daria Nicolodi) to go with the song. They
even hire Mark Singer (Pietro Genuardi), a genuine horror director, to
direct the whole thing. But once they are in the horrorhouse, things go
wrong, like crewmembers and Kate's bandmates being bumped off, the horror
sets turning into real horror and the like ... and before you know it,
everybody is on the run from an assailant who could be the reincarnation
of Paganini or Satan himself or something, and ultimately, only Kate makes
it out of the house alive ... to meet Sylvia (who has previously been
killed) and Mr Pickett, who welcome her to her own little hell. Kate
argues that she can't be in hell though since she hasn't died ... but it
turns out that the only way to escape this, her personal hell, would have
been to play the Paganini composition in reverse, which she hasn't ... so
Mr Pickett stabs her in cold blood on the spot, so she cannot escape. Few
people know it nowadays, but once upon a time (circa the early to
mid-1970's), Luigi Cozzi emerged as an extremely promising genre director
... this however is his last film, made in 1989, and it's nothing but an
uninspired conglomeration of horror clichés held together by a silly
story and made on a way too low budget. A cast of underachieving actors
doesn't help either, nor does its reliance on 1980's fashion and a set of
atrocious hairdos. to be fair, there are still some moody shots of Venice
where Cozzi's talent as a filmmaker still shines through, but overall,
this is just your typical piece of notoriously bad Italian horror cinema
from the late 1980's that's worth neither your time nor money.
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