There's no mistaking Fulci's guiding hand in Giovanni Simonelli's Hansel e Gretel, especially with a ludicrous story involving malevolent children (as per Fulci's Sweet House of Horrors) and some classic Fulci-style eyeball trauma (one of the film's victims has her head shoved onto a spike, the point pushing her eyeball out of the socket). Sadly, the rest of the deaths - of which there are plenty - aren't all that gory or imaginative, making this a rather tedious affair overall.
The film definitely had potential to be a genuinely grim (or should that be Grimm?) shocker, with a plot that involves the harvesting of organs from kidnapped children, but Simonelli doesn't fully fully explore this extremely dark subject, spending most of his time on the silly supernatural revenge antics of the titular moppets, the latest children to fall foul of the organ traffickers.
Those who conspired to abduct and kill the kids are confronted by Hansel and Gretel's spirits and despatched in a variety of ways: the siblings' stepfather, who happily sold the kids, is chewed up by some farm machinery (an effect achieved using what looks like a side of beef); a woman falls in a pool and drowns; a man is crushed by a wine barrel; another bloke drowns in slurry; a guy shoots himself in the face; two idiots fall into some waterworks. Simonelli's spectacularly uninspired direction renders these deaths laughable, with the two ghostly glowing-eyed children not in the least bit menacing. The repetitious nursery rhyme that precedes each slaying really gets on the nerves.
Investigating the murders is rookie cop Silvia (Elisabete Pimenta Boaretto) who is unable to convince her superiors that the deaths are supernatural in nature. Fred, the husband of the organ traffickers' ringleader, looks like the most likely suspect - he decides to flee the scene in the film's not-at-all-exciting climax, taking Silvia as his hostage. The spooky sprogs put paid to his plans, and, having claimed their last victim, are finally able to rest in peace.
4/10 for the juicy eyeball scene (which Fulci would borrow for his own movie A Cat In The Brain AKA Nightmare Concert), and a spot of gratuitous female nudity (a bath scene, a sex scene, and Silvia slipping into her nightclothes).
