Necropolis

The average viewer looking for a horror film will indeed find it, but in a reversed form, because this film is not the domain of conventional cinema, but quite the opposite - the average viewer will run away from the film in horror (by which Necropolis paradoxically fulfills one of the ideal goals of the horror genre). It is, in fact, a total European art film - the end of the 1960s, counterculture, long intellectual declamations in even longer shots, and traditional B-movie and historical characters turned upside down into pop-art material used to create completely different meanings (Frankenstein as a thinker/propagator of revolutionary ideas in the style of consciousness-raising, Bathory as a modern neurotic woman dissatisfied with her husband, etc.). The entire film is shot in a studio using minimalist but aesthetically exquisitely crafted sets, which provide a great background for detailed studies of characters and actors with the slow and static camera. The actors are chosen in an interesting way because they mirror the multi-layered nature of the film - from more avant-garde and art actors like Clémenti or Viva to the supremely avant-garde playwright and director Carmelo Bene, and even Bruno Corazzari, who acted in spaghetti westerns. The film also has a decent humorous component and, moreover, even at first glance, the sequence of scenes, which is only loosely connected, has a certain internal logic and relationships. (2016-03-12)