Riecco Aborym (2007) [REVIEW] | Cross Of The Seven Pences (free Talisman inside!)

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.

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The Spooktacular Eight #39: La Croce Dalle 7 Pietre/Cross Of The Seven Jewels (1987)

I wanted to do something special for the werewolf entry of this year’s Spooktacular Eight… and then realized i had the perfect movie hidden under my nose, in a way, because in anno domini 1987, in Italy released La Croce Dalle Sette Pietre (lit “The Cross Of The Seven Jewels/Stones”)….. and by that i do mean it got a theatrical release.

In just 2 theathers in the entire frigging country, but if you were lucky/unlucky enough and you lived in Sicily back in 1987 you could actually go to the cinemas and witness what would become hailed as one of the worst Italian movie ever made, ever.

Then again, an Italian horror movie with werewolves, satanic orgies, and the camorra (a Southern Italian specific mafia-style criminal group originating from Neaples) was always gonna be a cult trash film, especially if made on the cheap and treated as an embarassing relic to disregard.

And with good reason, this is some primo trash that feels made for retrospective reviewers to unearth and poke fun at…. which the movie does deserve, because it’s so unbelievably bad it’s downright magical, it’s that kind of “so bad it’s good” you can never forget.

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[EXPRESSO] Wolf Man (2025) | “Get away you weirdo monkey man!!”

Leigh Whannell continues his “remake rumpus” of the classic monsters following up his 2020 releaed The Invisible Man (and the whole Dark Universe failure) with his take on the Wolf Man.

The story revolves around a family on vacation in a house in the woods of Oregon, with the father trying to use the unfortunate circumstances that brought them there in order to mend his strained family situation, then being bitten by a strange animal while protecting his wife and daughter, and gradually transforming into a beastly creature…

The themes of “sins of the father/parental neglect-abuse” are interesting for a werewolf film, as it the idea to opt for body horror, to focus on the slow transformation to parallel the father’s descent into the brutal, alienated and alienating monster that once walked the skin of a man, and i’d never felt like the idea didn’t work or the script didn’t quite click, nor like there was some “filler”.

Nothing like that.

Honestly, it’s far from bad, but it also frustates me as being so close to being straight up a good, because it’s quite decent but it’s bogged down by feeling honestly uneven, starting good, delivering on the tension, on the claustrophobic atmosphere, even managing to make you care more than you’d wager about these characters that at a first glance feel generic… and honestly never proper bloom, despite the good acting, especially by Christopher Abbott (yes, funnily enough) as the father.

That combined with some questionable special effects, some retreads on cliches, the movie never achieves the emotional depth it soughts to, so it ends up feeling incomplete, like something is plain missing, uneven in execution and underdeveloped where it counts in spite of clear effort.

Not bad, at all, just… kinda disappointing, especially considering the talent involved.

Pity.