Saturday, February 16, 2013

A sci-fi giallo?













Well it's not really a giallo and it's not really sci-fi even though there are elements from both of those genres in it. It's a true Hitchcockian mystery done with the audio-visual style of giallos and involving sci-fi side plot. Alice (Florinda Bolkan) is troubled by weird dreams of astronauts being left stranded on the moon. One day she wakes up to see that she has missed two days and not knowing what has happened in those days. She starts to investigate the past and ends up in a nearly deserted island town called Garma which looks strangely familiar to her. When people seem to remember her being there before she starts to question her own sanity. I really like this movie and even though I had seen it before it didn't trouble me at all that I already knew the mystery behind all this. When I think about it, there's actually not much happening in this movie, apart from the beginning and the ending, but the atmosphere is just so magnificent that it doesn't matter one bit. It builds tension brilliantly right from the start and it even nears horror at times even though there's no serial killer on the loose or anything like that. I must say that the Shameless release of this one was a bit of a miss, I mean it's good quality as always and the added scenes were mostly good, though again they were in Italian only, but the ending is where this one goes wrong. The American cut didn't have the text at the end which gives you the answer to the biggest question this movie leaves you with, but this Shameless release has it and it kind of waters down the otherwise strong ending. Like I've always said, it's better to leave some things open for the viewer to ponder on and not overly explain everything. Without the text this would have been a brilliant movie, now it's “only” very good.
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