aka Spettri

• Directed by Marcello Avallone
• Written by Marcello Avallone, Andrea Purgatori, Dardano Sacchetti, and Maurizio Tedesco
• Starring
  • Donald Pleasence
  • John Pepper
  • Katrina Michelsen
  • Massino de Rossi

I rented this one the same time as Warlords of the 21st Century, and watched it over the same weekend. That was not a good weekend for videos.

Of all the fine actors who’ve gotten trapped in the Roach Motel of bad movies, none arouse my pity as much as poor Donald Pleasence. He began as a stage actor, did some Dickens, and worked steadily through the sixties, alternating between big movies (The Diary of Anne Frank, Fantastic Voyage, The Great Escape, You Only Live Twice) and less ambitious genre fare (The Hands of Orlac). By the seventies it appeared he would become like Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee, an elder statesmen of mid-level but entertaining horror films.

Somewhere in there, Halloween — and Halloween 2 — somehow changed all that. Pigeonholed into the new breed of horror, he started being pulled into projects that can only be described as “godawful” as the sole star power; his respectable-to-crap ratio started leaning heavily toward the latter. He was a good actor, and as a matter of course through his heart into his roles; but I suspect that by the time he appeared (again, as the lone “star” and single non-Italian in the cast) in Specters, he had finally realized that he was never going to rise to the old ranks again, and decided that his new philosophy would be “Show up, say the words, get the paycheck.” I wonder if he ever cried when he heard Steve Winwood’s “Back in the High Life” on the radio.

However, once he made the mistake of signing on to this movie, I think that “say the lines” is about the best strategy for coping. What we have here, masquerading as a movie, is a loose storyline barely hinted at in the scenes shot. It feels like a mini-series condensed to feature length, except that, through some bureaucratic snafu, this video contains the trimmed scenes, excised from the feature version.

Let’s see if I can make sense of it for you here.

We open in Italy (I assume it’s Rome, or some other antiquity-laden city), where excavations for the subway beneath the city’s famous catacombs have accidentally opened a sealed passage in the section which Professor Lasky (Pleasence) and his fellows are studying. A mysterious Latin plaque lies in the entrance: “Whether invoked or not invoked, evil will come.”

Now, in a competent movie, you’d expect that exploration of the hidden catacomb would soon follow, right? But not here. No, we’re now going to meet a couple in a convertible who park out in the dark misty hinterlands. The man says leaves the car and tells her to close her eyes; after a few minutes, suspicious at his absence, she gets out of the car, stumbles to the edge of a pond, looks into the water — and the Creature From the Black Lagoon jumps out!

“Cut!” Oh, I get it, we’re doing that “shooting a movie within the movie” thing. The actress is Alex (Katrine Michelsen), a supposedly-American but very Euro-looking star, and her tenuous connection to the main “plot” is that her boyfriend is Marcus, Prof. Lasky’s right-hand man. Marcus, in fact, has been preferring the dig to his dame of late, which is causing tension.

So now we can get back to the excavation, right? No, not yet. We do get to hear Lasky pontificate upon “Domitiano’s tomb,” which predates the Christian use of the catacombs, and which had been the site of sacrifices to “monstrous divinities”, especially a god of, yes, “ee-vil.” (Alas, it is not “pure ee-vil,” but such is life.)

Let’s veer from the main action again and meet a tour group going into the “tame” catacombs, led by a blind guide. (That would qualify as one of the classically Bad Ideas.) Despite his admonition not to wander off, two horny teens do, and find themselves beset upon by a sudden wind, a cave-in, and a horde of rats. (No, they don’t die.)

Then… Let’s see. Alex the Actress is at a bar with Barbara, the Lone Woman of the dig, while the bartender does Alex’s horoscope. This scene is only here for setup — one of the setups being that the bartender later goes into thewine cellar (which apparently abuts the catacombs) to be hit by popping corks, and then electrocuted by faulty wiring that burns a channel in the floor.

And meanwhile Alex starts discovering goo beneath her carpet and having funky dreams.

All right. It’s twenty minutes later, can we pleeze explore the catacomb? Finally, Marcus crawls in, with cameras and whatnot strapped to him. He discovers a crypt with an empty sarcophagus, a fresco showing some bestial deity-thing assaulting a woman, a knife made of antler with four extra points, and an old skeleton that turns out later to be that of a Neandertal. (Huh? Your guess is as good as mine, bubba.)

Cut to more of the girlfriend’s dreaming, then cut to a bald gay guy who hired an evil David Bowie clone to find out what’s in the hidden catacomb… Dear heavens, I’m not even holding my own interest here. There are some movies that are impossible to review in any detail and still be interesting.

We’re still only half an hour into the video. The next hour is occupied with the mysterious death (accompanied by that wind, naturally) of Barbara, right after she discovers that Alex’s aastrological chart matches one scratched on the side of the sarcophagus; the deaths of the gay bald guy and the evil David Bowie clone (due to a big monster hand); the death of the anthropologist who identified the Neandertal bones; Alex’s hallucination of a recording studio mike as a snake; and Alex being pulled into her bed in a very Ghostbusters-esque scene.

Eventually, Lasky is also done in by the mysterious wind, but manages to survive long enough to tell Marcus that, “I saw ee-vil” (Ladies and gentlemen, Donald Pleasence!), and urge him to close the tunnels, which he attempts to do with some convenient dynamite (from here on out, we conveniently ignore the fact that the catacombs are above the level of the new subway tunnel, and a big charge of TNT will probably not go over well with Rome’s Public Works department).

Oh yeah, Marcus also discovers the abducted Alex in the catacombs, and runs away from the monster with her (we finally see the beast to be some horned thingie), assisted at the last second by the blind guide, who pops up from nowhere and gets disemboweled for his efforts. Marcus and Alex escape, and Marcus asks her to marry him. The end.

Not unlike Warlords of the 21st Century, this movie has had a hard time sticking in my mind long enough to write a review. The “story” is practically non-existent; while I can see a plot if I squint my eyes just right, it’s only because I’m filling in all the gaps that the filmmakers didn’t see fit to provide us, as if I had been running out to the bathroom with diarrhea every ten minutes and not bothering to pause the tape. And the parts that we do see are in no way remarkable enough to be memorable either; by the time the monster finally shows up, the viewing audience’s nerve endings are too numb to even appreciate its presence, except in the sense that its revelation means that we’re finally nearing the end.

With four credited screenwriters, it’s appalling that not a one of them thought that a story would be a necessary feature in the script. I almost wonder if each writer was assigned one part or story thread, and when they were written they were simply shuffled into chronological order and shot, without any attempt to bridge the gaps. If so, every writer apparently thought that someone else was writing the good part; none of them ended up doing so. Which is sad, because how many productions have the ultra-cool setting of the Christian catacombs to work with?

Sigh…

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 7
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 1
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0