Rossa Venezia

It seems impossible these days to have a western horror movie that does not leverage one of our fabricated ideas that we package around the sex act. Sex in many of its dimensions is our most cinematic quality and seems especially pliable in the service of fear.

This film is in the tradition of Jess Franco, and indeed it even features him and his increasingly less interesting wife. Depending on your point of view, it is a serious film, an amalgam of scary tropes from then recent thriller movies with sex interspersed or a simple porn film with window dressing. I think it is the former and deserves to be judged that way.

Naturally it fails spectacularly and that is rather puzzling.

What if you had a talented filmmaker who decided to both not hide sex in the story, and who was willing to exploit it more fully in the service of the film. "Trouble Every Day" - which I saw with this — went halfway but stopped at explicit cannibalism and sex, and not because offscreen implication was more powerful.

Jess Franco was our explorer in this. Cheap, fast movies. Lynchian offhandedness in the narrative. But real cinematic adventure. It seems to have ended around here.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.