The WTF

Of course, we must give credit to the first scene, which is tremendous and promises what will never come: A slow motion that walks through a group of men of all types and colors, serious, masturbating and waiting in a red light, waiting be elevated to the category of male after ejaculating in a bukakke. There is also a well-accomplished scene, which shows a performance of group sex that overwhelms, not thanks to its protagonists (with the same grace and scenic movement of a porn actor), but thanks to the only female character that has a name (Tampa, dignified personified by Tonya Cornelisse) and that is of a brutal sadness … sadness that I am not so clear that it is perceived by the general public in a general way.

Now let’s talk about the subtext of the movie. It is interesting to question the idea of success of the main characters and think how embedded it is in today’s society, basically because it is disastrous: “I will be popular and they will all love me because I am a porn star and I have fucked them all, so I will find my wife, who will love me for the rest of my life”. Dreaming of possession, where the weapon is the phallus and conquest is the admiration of their peers and the desire of the woman; totally invisible as a person and transformed into a trophy or a piece of meat.

I still have the doubt if this movie tries to say something about toxic masculinity related to mainstream porn, machismo and the objectification of women (I want to think that the fact that almost no female character has neither name nor importance is for something more than indifference), or it is a short and superficial vision of this tragic episode of horror. I want to think so, but it is a bet and a desire rather than an assertion.

The first story has its point when we find the protagonist with gigantic tits with eyes, instead of nipples: the culprits of all her sufferings, because there was no man who did not run away. Ok ok. After the tears in those eyes transformed an albino spider into a murderous monster that kills Parisian prostitutes (the context gives us a bad French accent and all the cliché of Paris) while she sleeps. Phew! an argument that can be fun, as long as everything comes together to make it happen … but it didn’t.

A porn movie aesthetic, poor lighting, careless camera, even worse performances; in short, everything coming together so that what it provokes is laughter of disbelief. Is this a satire? I want to think so, but we have to check. We enter again with the presenter, the only thing moderately achieved in this that cannot be cataloged. Good makeup, the best photography and scenery of the entire film. She is a kind of “guardian of the crypt” in a sexy key that presents each story. Let’s see what the second story gives us … Horror. It wants to be a thriller of a disfigured murderer who wants to appropriate the beauty of the faces of her victims; but it ends up being a kind of footage of testosterone enjoyment when seeing half-naked girls dancing in a pole to the sound of music composed by Danzing himself. Long, very long scenes, without any argument and of doubtful taste. Here the laugh lasts less, because repeated joke comes out rotten; but something – we don’t know what – keeps us sitting in those seats waiting for this that we cannot define with the right words to end. The second story ends (without really finishing, where it seems that the winner is the murderer) and our presenter gives us the pass of the third and last story. At the beginning we think: “ok, at least there are exteriors”; but here the heroine is a woman thirsty for blood and youth, which condemns us to a loop of images of this woman “bathing in blood” and looking in the mirror, which repeats itself meaninglessly, in a kind of hypnosis attempt that rub the boundary between laughter and rage.

The final moment of farewell arrives, a relief and a question: why have I stayed to watch this full movie? I think that everyone who was there asked us the same thing, however, almost none dared to get out of there before it ended.

It is certainly an indescribable film, very close to what caused “the Room” in its time. The question is whether this director has consciously teased us with this horrific exercise, or if it has been done as a genuine tribute to the directors of the Italian and European horror movies of which Danzing claims to be a fan. I am afraid to believe the latter, because it shows us a character that lives in a parallel world, with a kind of sexual obsession with young strippers and that completely delegitimizes his vision of the darkness that surrounds his music, something that has accompanied him all his life. Time will tell us if what we have witnessed remains as a cult file or disappears in the memory of those who had the (bad) luck of seeing it.

So far we consider that this is the debut feature by the director, and it shows: there is no fewer unnecessary scenes and repeated effects can be ignored, the same with the scenes a bit pretentious as to symmetry planes, purely aesthetic and very long. OK, but the need to cover everything in terms of horror genres, no. There are the terrifying place, the darkness of the characters, the evil of the mother, the sadistic doctor, the psychological terror, the escape … is it necessary to force something else? At the end of the movie, what is left in my head is a big and bright one: WHY? If there is something to do with this movie is to debug, take out all that is left over, because, although the Italian is usually exuberant, here more is not better. And the end … the end (in my view) finishes killing everything that was built weakly during the previous 105 minutes.

It is an absurd comedy, which has its points of humor well achieved and characters that are endearing, but that is lost as it progresses. My question is: is romantic history necessary to close the movie? I do not think so. And that is precisely what makes this film fall into this category.