ADAM CHAPLIN

We find ourselves in Heaven Valley, an imaginary city, where Adam, a man whose fiancée was burned alive by a local mafioso, begins to investigate the woman's death. Unable to count on the help of the police, he decides to conduct the investigations on his own, guided only by his own anger and by a demon, whom he has invoked, who guides him in his searches through the city. Thus begins a no-holds-barred war in which Adam is left alone to fight against the entire corrupt and evil world, to face, in the final showdown, Denny Richards, the murderer of Emily. The vision of "Adam Chaplin" took me back almost ten years, a period during which I had the misfortune to see an underground film titled "Fist of the North Star" (1995), an American film that narrates the exploits of the Japanese animated hero Ken Shiro; I speak of misfortune because it was a very low-level work that relied entirely on senseless splatter scenes. Our compatriot Emanuele De Santi must certainly be a devotee of the aforementioned cartoon, as within the film we find very clear references to the Japanese series, primarily concerning the fight scenes between the real protagonists. The plot itself turns out to be really banal to the extreme, already seen millions of times and does not present particular twists; that said, it must be admitted that the settings present in the film are quite appealing and characterized by a degraded and hopeless world in which the population lives on expedients and violence in order to "make ends meet". The main characters present in the work are certainly well characterized, starting with Adam, a man who has become aggressive and merciless due to the death of his beloved Emily, continuing with the mafioso Denny Richards, an interesting character in several respects who gives us discount philosophy pearls between one act of violence and another. On the contrary, the demon that cohabits with the protagonist has been realized in a rather approximate manner, both in terms of appearance and characteristics. Between one hectoliter of pink blood and another, we also find interesting and intentionally comic finds, such as, for example, the presence of a blind policeman, engaged in the field in the hunt for the public enemy number one. This "Adam Chaplin" is therefore a film destined exclusively to spectators who are not weak of stomach due to the deliberately exaggerated splatter (it reminds very much, with the due distances, that present in "Splatter – Gli schizzacervelli" by Peter Jackson n.d.r.) and the exaggerated violence that accompanies us for every minute of the film. Unfortunately, this work by De Santi cannot be judged positively overall, especially due to a downright embarrassing dubbing, characterized by monotonous and sing-song voices without any ability or experience; the fact that "Adam Chaplin" has had much more success abroad than in Italy says a lot.