Venicephrenia movie review is exquisitely boring

Spanish productions of the horror genre have been well received by locals and strangers, making them popular. The Fear Collection is a production company created by Pokeepsie Films together with Sony Pictures Spain and Amazon Studios, whose objective is to produce films dedicated to the horror genre. horror that premieres with Veneciafrenia, the new film by director Álex de la Iglesia.

It has already been saying and we have seen many times that in this particular genre there is nothing that surprises us anymore, stories that have been told over and over and over again from different ways and perspectives.

In the particular case of Veneciafrenia we are not seeing something new but something with a different audiovisual aesthetic that may be different coming from a director who has had significant successes such as el día de la Bestia (1995), Perdita Durango (1997), 800 balas ( 2002), The Oxford Murders (2007) and very recently the 30 Coin Series (2020)

What is the film about?

A group of young Spanish tourists travels to Venice to have fun and spend their holidays, unaware of the problems that surround them caused by overcrowding, security problems, and dirt, in their eagerness to try new things they will be involved in a wicked game where their lives are at risk.

It is inevitable not to compare this work with the previous ones, the desperate horror that it manages takes shape from the first minutes where we see how they beat and kidnap two other tourists, a man dressed as a harlequin who makes everyone believe that what they are witnessing is part of a street show like many that are presented in the city, but the nature of the acts has another intention.

The credits sequence has a clear influence from the Italian Giallo, a very particular style of suspense and horror, mystery, and murder films produced in Italy in the 60s and ’70s that generally combines the atmosphere and suspense of thrillers with elements of horror and violence.

That said, this gives a twist to the entire production and what we are going to see in it, everything, every reference it has is based on this style, it promised itself to be a slasher but the director makes it very clear to us that something more terrifying is happening, when this group of young people arrives in Venice to spend a few days of vacation there, a crowd of anti-tourist locals awaits them at the port, their threatening presence will be a constant throughout the film trying to get the message across that as visitors we have to be responsible for our actions.

It must be recognized that the costumes designed by Laura Milan, the masks, as well as the art direction by José Luis Arrizabalaga and Biafra, and the entire setting that takes place outside of Venice are most impressive, we do not see all the splendor of the city ​​because that is not the intention but to see something more underground than its nightlife which is not very fascinating.

Its rhythm and narrative are very fast from the beginning, they present the facts without giving too many details, in the first minutes almost everything has already happened, we have seen murders, we know the characters and their personality is defined, we have the taxi driver, the selfish one, the one with common sense, the worried lady who is going to get married, the uneducated and unbearable one, and the party girl, each of them will have their situation, and all without going beyond what we should know because we don’t go any fault, the script written by Jorge Guerricaechevarría and the same de la Iglesia does not take the trouble to explain anything else and it is here where the great problem of this film begins.

Having said the above, we are facing a project that apparently and from its trailer had everything to be something different, not surprising but different, something that was not very well understood and now we know why, its narrative aims to take us for a walk through what we believe which will be a thriller/slasher and turns out to be an uncomfortably involuntary comedy where the scenes involving a crime go completely unnoticed and it feels like they are there more by force than desire, for example at the beginning when a couple of tourists meet the brother evil twin of the villain named Rigoletto, it’s great to see the costumes but come on, who on a vacation asks a character like that to take a picture of you? It shouldn’t be the other way around, well past this point and after he attacks him with his camera, the people around him think it’s a show and they believe it, they even record everything with their cell phones and nobody ever finds out that these 2 boys have disappeared.

Then we see the protagonists arriving at a hotel where they make them see that they are not well received but they do not care because they are in Venice and are going to have fun and dress up and have a good time, that is how they go to a dinner where they meet a man dressed in black with a mask that represents Dr. Death and his companion a harlequin who invite them to a private party but are rejected, then they continue to party drinking in another bar from which they leave without paying to follow this mysterious man to a building where a wild party is held as they wanted and were looking for but which is a tourist trap where they consume something called Theriaca a drink that was said to be magical and medicinal that could cure any disease, it was prepared alone a few times a year using 64 ingredients of which many were debatable, such as deer testicle powder and adder powder and here They present it as a drug.

When the uneducated and unbearable brother of the worried lady who is going to get married disappears, a desperate search begins to find him, it should be noted that this man is a conspiracy theorist and does not manage social networks or allow photographs to be taken of him, something very convenient for the plot , everything points to the fact that he did not exist on that trip, there is no record in the hotel and those who could identify him do not do so, moreover, it is not even contemplated in the script, after a few hours of searching they decide to go to the police who paint it here as disinterested and useless to take a case of disappearance as if there were none before, while the worried lady who is going to get married goes to the consulate with the party girl and they are taken by the taxi driver, the one with common sense and the selfish one decide look for a place where they could make a transfer of a super 8 tape of a camera that they had and that they used to record themselves when they arrived and that could serve as a reference to the police for their search, m While they are going to I don’t know where on a boat through a city canal, Rigoletto suddenly appears and tells them that his friend, the uneducated and unbearable one, is fine on an island and then hits her in the face and stabs her several times and finally cuts her head to the other with a dagger that he carries hidden in his cane and then throw the body overboard, all this happens and nobody notices, he runs away telling some jokes and passing between the people who apparently are idiots.

The one with common sense manages to escape by jumping from the boat to the shore like a ninja where she is chased by Rigoletto, conveniently for the plot, she uses her phone to call her friend, the worried lady who is getting married and cannot attend to her because she is talking. with her inflammable boyfriend, and what about the party girl, why didn’t she call her? and since she finally communicates instead of telling him what’s going on with her, she sends him her location so they can go get her, as if this would resolve the fact that the villain and Rigoletto end up kidnapping her.

The next day the police find the body of the decapitated egoist but not the head, come on, but how well they know how to look for evidence at a crime scene, we don’t even talk about this better because they are even more idiots, when they are with the detective who previously rejected them the case for doing something apparently better the taxi driver sees Rigoletto and follows him, when he is discovered he takes a random tourist who was out there as a hostage and murders her in cold blood on a bridge in full view of everyone who once again returns to celebrate as if it were a show, no one realizes that the body is bleeding, what’s more, no one cares, this error is so serious that it detracts from the credibility of the deaths and what they may or may not contribute to a plot that It has neither head nor tail and when the time comes to clarify all these stupid subplots that were opened and that apparently served to give more weight and push to the story, they remain as a stumble and as something wrong done in the middle of a environment that is already convincing.

The strike of the boat taxi drivers that occurs due to the arrival of another cruise ship in Venice continues while the villain plans to give a speech that will put an end to this, already installed in this the taxi driver who is now considered a traitor for helping the tourists who have fallen into misfortune together with the police discover Rigoletto’s face and immediately investigate who it is and it turns out that the main motivation of this villain to hate tourists in Venice is that his son was crushed on the dock by one of these cruises And I wonder what he was doing on the dock that he didn’t see a ship of that size arrive and if he had seen it, why didn’t he take off? go more irresponsible parents but how convenient is this for the script and give something that does not cause the least impact is more, it sounds stupid and that’s how it forms an evil secret society of anti-cruise movement which sounds even more stupid but that not all this is on the rise.

The worried lady who is going to get married remembers that upon her arrival Rigoletto gave them some free double passes to go to the theater and they assume that her brother’s uneducated and unbearable could be there and that of common sense that we already saw that this lay what fucking common sense? it is so that together with the party girl and the taxi driver they arrive at the theater in ruins, in parallel to this the immeasurable boyfriend arrives only to complicate things more because he does not help and as he gets in the way and guess what, exactly, the party girl dies at the hands of Rigoletto who he is chased by the doña and the taxi driver to a roof where the police casually arrive and after wasting time they shoot him, he dies and falls into the river, the drama could not be missed after so much action, the boyfriend sees that the doña is hugging the taxi driver and without giving him time to explain, he gives her a choice or she goes with him and there is a wedding or she stays to look for her brother and her friend but there is no wedding and it turns out the latter.

The taxi driver who has almost become the hero of the film helps the police to identify Rigoletto, who was a mental patient who was confined in an asylum located on the island of Poveglia, but that is not all, the revealing twist is missing. and it is that he is the twin brother of the villain who worked there as a director and I ask myself again, how is it that in this universe created by De la Iglesia they can enter and leave said island-like anyone else if it is one of the places with prohibition What is permanent on the planet? a priori that the historical references that the plot handles are well respected.

By the end and before the villain is caught, he gives a message to Italy where, among other things, he presents the hostages with the message that tourists are a plague that must be eliminated and that he wants to cause fear by kidnapping tourists so that stop going to Venice and being in Italy give it in the English language, why not? we are going to be international, as a spectator and at this point, we hope that the end will save all of the above and in some desperate way rescue that Italian gothic horror and leave us with a medium satisfaction but no, it does not happen the kidnapped are rescued and the villains they end up committing suicide in one act to look like martyrs…

An ending falls halfway between something anticlimactic and pathetic, poorly resolved, which visually falls far short of what he proposed with the intention of not risking everything and giving something worthwhile.

Apart from the elements that make it audiovisually attractive and unhealthy iconography, it is lost with so many obvious and blatant errors in the plot, it has nothing horror, macabre, or sinister, nor is it slasher, and everything remains in a crude attempt to present something new, De la Iglesia loses and betrays itself, on the one hand, it makes good use of the dark alleys of the city, in old buildings that convey an urgent need for credibility amid all this disorder that does not establish any rules and much less it contributes something to the genre that occupies it.

The messages that it intends to give remain as a very wrong precedent for the viewer that Spanish tourists, in particular, are the worst, that if you go to Venice and something happens to you, do not count on the police, who are inept, and that if you go shopping is perfect for buying masks and costumes, De la Iglesia and Guerricaechevarría as screenwriters have the big problem that they cannot reach a satisfactory conclusion in their stories, they open subplots that never close or explain anything, but here it does not fall into the game that the spectator is the one who guesses what is going to happen is simply that nothing happens.

The cast is made up of Ingrid García Jonsson, Silvia Alonso, Goize Blanco, Nicolás Illoro, Alberto Bang, Cosimo Fusco, Enrico Lo Verso, Armando di Razza, Caterina Murino and Nico Romero who play insufferable characters who seem to have been made for us to hate them. and let’s be happy about what is happening to them, they are a joke every time, each performance tries to give its best but the structure that they are interpreting enormously lacks nuance and compelling emotion.

The music composed by Roque Baños is also one of the best things about the film, the problem is that it is poorly placed in the editing, the pieces are too loud for moments in which nothing happens, which is almost throughout the film and it is a waste of those that have classical string instrumentation.

In conclusion, it is a pity that having all these wonderful elements that could make it a success, it remains between I want and I can’t, another failure of this director who is further from being what he was every day.

Venicephrenia will be released soon on Amazon Prime.