Se tavallinen kauhutarina

You Feel like you have already seen it! Classic Horror Story had all the makings of being a great horror film, and, though it's certainly not a bad one, I'm a bit disappointed and will be more strict with my rating this time. The Italian touch is fine, the rural setting is beautiful (the forest is awesome), the music is great, the make-up effects are good, there is an impressive cottage (Hansel and Gretel?), and a quite unconventional story with a surprising twist, with sirens and dark red, and nice horror references. Not to confuse a rip-off with an homage, that's clearly the makers' intention. The film has a Texas Chainsaw Massacre feel from the start and slowly references various exploitation and hixploitation films, which is my favourite sub-genre, so logically I was really looking forward it. Itit switches into a sort of variation on Ari Aster's Midsommar, which is all fine and dandy, but it struck me that Leatherface left his chainsaw in the shed and I can't quite explain why a hixploitation from Italy is more afraid of gore than I am of spiders! If the makers are going to put torture in a film, why should everything be left to the viewer's imagination? Ok, bookworms may not mind, but I was looking forward to a proper some gore after five years (there should have been blood should have spurting from the screen to my living room! ), but it all remained somewhere in the hints. In this the film definitely doesn't fulfill its potential, and that it can't be said either that there is an intense or unpleasant horror atmosphere, which is a pity, because the film had a good start, a lot of other things (music, setting, visuals, plot) that work, but for me they are not enough. If I had to compare it to something, it's like going to a brothel and getting your balls tickled by a hooker, but without the blowjob. Story 3/5, Action 2/5, Humour 0/5, Violence 2/5, Fun 3/5 Music 4/5, Visuals 4/5, Atmosphere 3/5, Suspense 3/5. 6/10. (14.07.2021)

A Classic Horror Story is exactly what it says in the title - a classic horror film that takes a lot of elements from well-known classics and doesn't stand out that much, but it's the fairly original twist, along with the excellent music that makes it decent and after a long time quite creepy above average film. As I mentioned before, more than half of the experience is the background music, which gets under your skin and only enhances its importance in key scenes, while making the rest of the film even more stifling on its own. The atmosphere is great, the cult masks are creepy, the characters aren't (exceptionally) annoying or grating, but instead quite fun to watch. The film has a lot of ideas we've kind of seen before, but it combines them skillfully and artfully into a whole where nothing is eye-poppingly stupid and everything works as it should. In the second half, the film shifts into Midsommar waters with a scene that looks identical, but it doesn't hang around for very long (about 5 minutes) and to be honest, I guess it doesn't quite fit, it feels like they forcefully wanted to merge this with Ari Aster's work and this weird creepy five minutes sort of fizzle out into nothing in the context of the rest of film – it just doesn't really fit. The second issue is the lack of gore and for me that's an almost unforgivable transgression, because in a film this scary, suffocating and atmospheric, gore would have taken it to heights of satisfaction, but here all the murders are out of frame and that's almost incomprehensible to me when there's a massacre every 10 minutes. Anyway, the final impression is very positive and I'm really happy because I haven't seen a horror film this good in a long time, and although it's not a genre smash, I'm having a pretty good time at the moment so I'll gladly throw in that fourth star. (04.08.2021)

Classic Horror, with its meta title and meta trailer, which teased a sort of mash-up of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Midsommer, spiced up with the ambitions of Cabin in the Woods, raised expectations of a big twist that would turn everything on its head, so we definitely wouldn't be dealing with "classic horror". Ironically, if it were a classic horror film, I would have liked it at least one star more. The twist is conceptually nice, but it takes away all the previous charm. The beautiful summer atmosphere of southern Italy, the mystery around the forest, the abandoned cottage, the unexplained phenomena, the strange cult, it all made for a great horror film, just the way I like it, even if it was nothing original. In fact, for the first hour, I felt I was watching the best and scariest horror flick of the year. After the twist, it's slightly original (though not shockingly so, I'm sure I've seen something similar before), but all the previous atmosphere is gone. The idea is good, but the final shape doesn't really work as a whole. (24.07.2021)

I call that Classic bad Horror finale. Oh well, if only the creators realized that on paper it might work, but on camera it's more like a punch in the eye. Until the twist was unraveled and the truth revealed, it played on a superb Italian atmosphere, decent acting as well (although the characters could be annoying at times), visually delightful and basically also a horror. One wonders why this was created for Netflix. But actually, one stops wondering before the end, because it somehow nastily commercialized as I say and ruined all the decent effort put into at least a very atmospheric Italian piece. (24.10.2021)

A cheap copy in a cheap copy... A motorhome racing with the devil under the watchful eyes of the mountains, a club causing misery in the lower limbs, sirens from mining towns, and feasts in the fresh air to celebrate the solstice... this is just a part of the admitted inspirations that were supposed to lure the audience into a trap. However, when the slick social commentary snapped into place, I felt like they were making something out of me that resembled a skylight from that cottage clearing in the woods. Don't those 2+1 directors know who gets through the hole in the fence in classic horror with a chubby guy in red sleeves? Or do they know, and I'm the idiot? (28.07.2021)