I wasn’t expecting to do this review until next year, but i was able to luck out and find in early October an used Bluray of that very rare release of Cross Of The 7 Jewels, which includes as an extra the follow up short film Andolfi made in 2007, Riecco Aborym (which translates to “Aborym is back at it again”, more than “Aborym’s Return”) which has been shown at some regional horror cinema festivals in Italy, but never received a proper release or is officially available to stream, even unofficially i couldn’t find it for the life of me.
It’s early Halloween magic, so let’s make an extra unscheduled effort and conclude the tale of the Neapolitan werewolf man fighting the Camorra in the name of love.
Again, as i said at the end of the Cross Of The 7 Jewels review, i think its on us how this short film even came to be, because it became a popular movie to review and mock in the Italian Youtube scene, an internet sensation (thank to peer-to-peer file sharing making this easier to unearth from the folds of history), so i guess Andolfi noticing how suddendly people were talking about his movie, and decided to “do a sequel” 20 years later.
So yeah, in this way i guess it was ahead of the “legacy sequels” curve…. and only that because this isn’t even a sequel.
Heck, i’d argue this isn’t even cinema.
(also, i’m gonna spoil the entire thing, statistically speaking you’ll never even get a chance to see this damn thing, nor would you want to anyway)
The digital camera footage make it all look even cheaper, the mise-ensemble is ultra amateur stuff, like a porno were the scenes of fuckin were postponed due to budget cuts or last minute rewrite.
This is just an old one hit Z-movie wonder director that decided to do something relating his old movie before joining the choir invisible… or i assume because i really cannot fathom what the hell was ever going through his mind.
Again, this isn’t even cinema, as more than half of this 30 minutes thing is stock footage hotpot, just a random garble of out of context scenes from the 1986 film that will make no sense if you haven’t seen it before, and plenty of random documentary footage about famine in Africa, which i guess isn’t completely random because “Eddy” losing the cross (referred to as “talisman” because that was the title a recut version of the film went under) is to blame for Africa becoming ruined by an endless string of wars, illnesses, massacres and hate.
Most likely is a way to connect with the recut version of the film, Talisman, which did add new footage, and i guess reframed the cross as a sacred relic that brough good fortune and stuff, i haven’t seen that version at the time of writing.
I do know that the “stock footage shitsoup” uses bits from the fuckin Never Ending Story, and at one point cross dissolves for some frame of a naked(?) Tinkerbell from god knows where.
Not that the newly shot footage isn’t much better, aside from the magical mystical coitus with the underpants on, the couple is assaulted by a trio of the most unlikely robbers ever, eventually scared off by stock footage of the wereBacca from the old film, couldn’t afford even that.
but at least the Africa thing isn’t as random as it sounds, because after the robbers flee, the two take a walk in some public park (complete with random shouts from someone maybe playing soccer nearby), go back home, two men with shades and trenchcoats come into the apartment, shoot him in the head, then the woman reveals that she was in cohoots with them and they say they’re going to Africa, to bring back the talisman-cross.
And editing to the same old shot of Aborym implies that maybe (i guess) Eddy will become a weremonkeywolf and come back to life because they removed the cross?
Aside from this Fragasso style ending, i don’t think Adinolfi remembered he didn’t play Aborym, just completely freeballing, but i guess this the opposite of sequelbaiting, and put a nail on the jeweled coffin, so to speak.
Andinolfi knows he’s quite old, enough to credit its older self appearing in the stock footage from Cross Of The 7 Jewels, but i have the sneaking suspicion he couldn’t be bothered to rewatch the film, because he pretends to be the same character from the 1986, but also not, he uses the old pseudonym (he credited himself as “Eddy Andolf)….when his character in that movie was called Marco. XD
Fuck’s sake, he’s not even Aborym, that was the demon father of his, so not even Aborym comes back, despite the title being literally about him coming back.
But then again, what the fuck could we expect?
i dunno, it feels like i’m scolding the ghost of my grandpa for something he would have immediatly forgotten even if it was still alive… then again, i think he would have known better than attempt intercourse while still having its underpants on, like it’s a Ride To Hell Retribution cutscene.
Even with the old movie setting the bar in hell, this is somehow even more embarassing, even more incompetent, even more squallid, but in a sad way, despite some of the lines being admittely hilarious in how utterly stupid they are: even if you were just expecting him to don again the “were Chewbacca” half mask from the old film…. he doesn’t even do that.
Also in this release extras there is the “making of/backstage” of the short itself…which it’s fuckin hilarious as a concept given how amateur hour everything is, but also the aforementioned Talisman recut ,which i technically haven’t reviewed… and i don’t plan to anytime soon, but if and when i do, i’ll just update the review of La Croce Delle Sette Pietre/Cross Of The Seven Jewels with an addendum.
Sorry boys, there’s a lot ot treating and tricking and carving to be done as Halloween draws close.
…. okay, but just because it’s almost Halloween and i don’t wanna have to review this one later, let’s go the distance.
So yes, the Talisman cut of Cross Of The Seven Jewels, done in 1995 for home video release, apparently for the Asian market (i can’t find a single source to back this up), but most likely because the movie originally released in literally two theathers in Italy.
Nobody has seen this thing, so i guess it won’t matter if we rejig it, though the title is infortunate because in 1998 also released “Talisman”, a direct-to-video film directed by David Coteau and produced by Full Moon Pictures, the Puppet Master guys, to be brief.
But yes, i guess this was a second chance of sorts, and they did a bit more than i expected with it.
They tried to make the recut seem less choppy and gel together better with the obvious documentary footage by applying some video effect on the whole film…so it now all looks slighly outta focus, so somehow looks even worse.
I’m kinda surprised there’s actual new footage not seen in the original release… though a lot of it of b-roll they cut from the original theathrical version, and it’s pretty obvious they redubbed some scenes to adjust for how they basically tried to repurpose (in a way inverting the original order of many scenes) both old and new footage to make the main narrative flow a bit better.
The biggest change is that now the movie opens on a text dump describing how in Africa there was this sacred relic, a cross encased with 7 jewels, and when it was removed, that caused the continent to go into ruin, with constant wars, massacres… which is really an excuse so they could insert stock footage from some documentaries about Africa.
and some real footage of the Bosnian War…. which at the time of release most likely was still going on (i wasn’t able to find any precise release date besides “1995”, and yes, it doesn’t matter if you put some eye searing blue tint to it, it’s jarring to go from this hockey bullshit to real documentary footage of people who died or were maimed in the war, and i don’t even need to say, but its in incredible bad taste.
Making this the Cozzilla (or the Hong Kong ’97, if you wish) of the italian werewolf movies.
Also, for good measure, it uses stock footage from Wes Craven’s The Serpent and The Rainbow.
I find it hilarious how some scenes were recut in a way that makes more sense… yet we still have no idea how Marco ends up drinking coffee in a random woman’s house before meeting his real cousin, not that i expected them to rewrite the senseless “fake cousin” subplot into something, but i must admit there is an effort here to actually recut the film and improve it.
As said, they mostly focused on making the main narrative flow better… and it does, despite the obvious use of documentary stock footage, and how they somehow decided to make the Neapolitan stereotypes even stronger, by inserting at random “O’ Sole Mio”, the main plot and the romance subplot do feel less randomly put together.
There are still subplots that still go nowhere, the effects are still laughable, everything is still absolutely so bad its hilarious, and for every small improvement there is a drawback, for example how despite cutting many scenes, swapping them for newer ones and splicing them with the stock footage, it is somehow running longer than the original (more or less 4 minutes), which means it’s still not even 90 minutes long, yet it has still the abrupt ass ending (its Aborym subplot now even harder to piece together), it doesn’t really bothers to develop the “African backstory” of the titular cross talisman, just a small 5 seconds scene of Marco (or someone) putting the jeweled cross in a box, then some random ass stock footage of some african dancer girls, credits.
Even if you didn’t see the original version, some scenes still feel kinda repurposed out of their context anyway, due to choppy editing and the movie still being utter trash, but in this case i guess it doesn’t matter if these scenes are now put at the end of the film instead of the beginnning, because their subplots were barely…. touched upon at all to begin with.
It still trash, despite some attempts to make the main plot better flow, this (if you can even find it) is just for the super masochists that already saw the original version, but i guess Andolfi did consider this the “director’s cut”.
I assume he did consider this the “real version” because Riecco Aborym tied back to the newly made African backstory for the jeweled cross pendant (and it also recycled footage from the recut version)… but then again even the follow up short ended up just recycling already repurposed old footage that wasn’t even from the original film, and kinda but not really closed up this “the relic must come back to bless the rains in Africa” subplot.
I guess it all comes back that you can try to polish a turd, only to get shinier poo in return.
