Dark of the Heart (1998)

On the recommendation of at least two "friends" (one of whom I suspect was winding me up, the other is only a "friend" in the sense that taking a shit in your own back patio is a "party") I had the misfortune of sitting down to watch a 1998 "classic" low-budget horror movie, Dark of the Heart. If not entertained, I expected at least to be mildly amused and titillatingly grossed out. I'd probably have had more fun watching an imbecilic episode of Doctor Who.

Directed by the otherwise unknown to me Stuart Emersen Cade, this DVD came with a label that looked like it had been hand-printed. I think that's the budget rather than a pirate copy, but it is quite hard to tell. The movie bills itself as "hilarious", "homage" and "cult", but those aren't the words that came to my mind. (They might rhyme with them.) There are quite obvious references to the classic movies, and more importantly the cinematic styles and trademark cheapness of directors like Bava, Romero, Argento, and all the low-budget masters of '70s Italian horror. The trouble is, Cade imitates without improving, pastiches without critiquing, borrows from without any self-awareness, irony, humour, or--saddest of all--talent whatsoever. To take a single example, Dark of the Heart is as sexist, gratuitous, misogynistic and soft-pornographic as the most tasteless of the European classics, not as a critique of the now horribly dated tradition, but unimaginatively and gratuitously in its own right. Pretty much every scene is an excuse for half- or fully naked women to run screaming or expose their tits on a mortuary slab. Of course, this lack of self-awareness or self-respect describes most cheap horror films made in in the 1990s or even today.

The storyline is nonexistent; I have no idea whatsoever why Squire's camply villainous doctor is after the girl's heart. I have no idea why the two sisters (played by Valentina Vitalia and Luce Antonini, who look entirely unalike, and I suspect at least one of them was only pretending to be Italian) came to a creepy, apparently non-functioning surgery and take off all their outer clothes. Vitalia then spends half the film running out while doffing and donning random items of clothing as she does so, while Antonini is either in a stupor, drugged, unconscious, undergoing surgery (suddenly conscious again and of course screaming) and eventually dead, all while showing her admirably immobile breasts from various angles.

I understand that this production was not actually short of funding, but that the low-budget effects were meant to imitate the classic horror films of the genre. That turned out to be pretty stupid, as all it did was fail to draw attention from the director's complete lack of talent, the laxness in scriptwriting, the soporific behaviour of the "actors", and the sheer stupidity of the whole exercise. Every squirt of ketchup or pasta sauce (at one point you could actually see the zucchini and melanzane pieces dripping down Antonini's enhanced cleavage), every camera cut from human to wax dummy, every mistimed scream or in-shot microphone boom just made the viewing more tedious.

Perhaps the most bizarre failure of the production is the lack of basic props. In one scene, Vitalia and Antonini and their partners are drinking in a sophisticated lounge, mixing expensive cocktails and bantering about the more expensive malt whiskeys, but they appear to be drinking out of paper cups, have no access to ice or fruit, and have mismatched chairs in a room with no carpet or wall-hangings (all filmed from a single angle, of course).

I fully expect that Cade will die in the obscurity he deserves, having never again been given the budget or the authority to fuck an audience in the eyes by making a turgid piece of crap like this. He'll be missed about as much as a used paper cup stained with cheap piss-coloured whiskey. Fuck you. Give me my two fucking hours back.