Tag: Italian Horror

[EXPRESSO] Her Private Hell (2026) | Kojima-ing In The Darkness

I don’t think Her Private Hell is a bad film, and i usually like his stuff, i loved The Neon Demon, but it’s a special kind of disappointing, as this feels Refn trying to imitate itself more than anything.

And not doing it that well either, to be brutally honest.

It’s definitely his vision, no mistake, but one that feels like he’s trying to recapture the old spark…and again, coming off as a self-imitation more than anything else.

The premise sees Elle, the daughter of wealthy man, trying to reunite with her stepmother (by shooting a movie in a luxury motel), but warned about a supernatural legendary serial killer, Leatherman, whom appears when the fog permeating this Blade Runner-esque city grows even thicker, its diamond fists shining in the darkness,

She ends up crossing paths with an american GI agent that has lost his daughter to this entity, and is desperately searching for a way to get her back…

Even more than before, it’s all about the vibes, the feel, as the hyperstilization here belies little for the audiences to care about or hold onto, the cinema pastiche of sci-fi, comic book, samurai and giallo cinema, one that does look good in screenshots, but lacks the strenght it had before, so you end up just kinda tolerating more than looking forward to see where it’s all gonna go.

wondering why should even care about anything, since the plot is more of a vague outline than something worth discussing, i’d complain about the characters… if there were any (aside the stepmother), these are ideas of characters, and the movie overall is just lacking much substance – or impact – to back up its pretense and stylization, so you end not even intrigued or curious to know more about this sci-fi world.

Sadly disappointing.

[EXPRESSO] The Bunker Game (2022) | Paranazical Activity

Out of the blue a new italian (well, an italo-french production, but still, shot in Italy with italian actors) horror movie sneaked into cinemas here as an event screening.

I will say that this time i’m not so much disappointed or angry but utterly confused as to what they were even trying to do.

The setup is that there’s a LARP set up in a WWII nazi-fascist bunker in Italy, with an alternate history post-apocalyptic scenario, but when security measures break down, they evacuate the place and only the staff decides to remain and investigate to what happened, as the game/scenario creator has gone missing…

Given the title you’d expect the movie turning into either a battle royale, a Saw-style thingie, even a simple slasher, but nope, it goes into supernatural territory…. for reasons.

In the first part you kinda forget – despite the movie stating immediatly it’s a LARP – that’s a farce, a game, and i honestly wonder why it didn’t play the “alt-history Fallout cum Fourth Reich” scenario straight, i mean, the production values are quite good, the costumes too, so it could have been simply a modern nazisploitation flick.

For what it actually is, a horror movie, one where the horror part feels really forced and cliched, there’s some atmosphere due to the setting but no tension as the movie randomly veers into horror, the characters are token, unlikeable or barely have any screen time to be even worthy of adjectives.

The Bunker Game has some good cinematography, decent-to-good acting, but it feels way longer than its 90 minutes runtime, as it meanders about unsure of what the hell it’s even doing or saying, if anything at all.

Still better than In The Trap, but this one frustrated me way more since it had actual potential.