“Don’t Ever Tell This Tale To Your Kids.”

This is truly divisive territory, love it or loathe it, masterpiece or, “what?” and I’m almost 90% voting in its favour. Maybe it’s because, after the Randal Kleiser musical version, I wanted nothing more than to see a little girl slaughtering her merry way through Rome, but I think it’s so much more than that. In fact, it’s worth pointing out first off how little this has to do with the Brothers Grimm tale – sure there’s a little girl, played iffily yet strangely compellingly by Susan Satta; sure she wears a hood, but it’s black (though red creeps intriguingly into the colour scheme of the movie as time wears on). She also claims to have had a puppy which has grown up into a man shaped best friend who seems to be killing the people she deems to be wicked in often miniscule ways (the first victim, a lady who steals a bottle of wine from the market, is first stabbed and then has her hand chopped off). “He” also wears red wellington boots and gloves and a mask that looks like it came out of the Eyes Wide Shut props department.

The morality of the whole thing is extremely questionable – the girl’s father, a US politician, is killed by a youth at the start and the whole operation is supposedly to restore God, good, and justice to the world – but to quibble about how weakly that noble premise is explored would be foolhardy, for we’re in Italian horror land, and Susan Satta’s irresistably evil smile says all that needs to be said.

Some people I’m sure won’t see the point of this movie at all, but I found it, as I said, bizarrely watchable, even hypnotic, like so many Italian horrors, and it does at least try to ask some questions along the way. I really hope Susan Satta does more movies in the future, though possibly not the greatest actress (though she’s cast perfectly here as a nutcase) she’s stunning to look at. I already mentioned how well this works following the Kleiser musical … just about any bloody horror movie would … but as for a more serious double recommendation, look no further than The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane starring Jodie Foster, a movie which arguably did the same thing as this one but in a much more morally focussed and intelligent fashion. Incidentally, it should go without saying and the subtitle with which I began the review should only re-inforce it, but this movie really isn’t for the fainthearted. For me it is really up there with the old Dario Argento movies, sometimes astonishingly so – only a Powerbook in the final scene stopped me from wondering how long the movie had been sitting on a shelf before its 2003 release.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 1st, 2007 at 5:50 pm and is filed under 4 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.