HELL'S FEVER

A motley group of criminals steals one million euros from the coffers of a university in an unspecified European capital and then flees to the snowy woods to meet an accomplice who must provide them with a means to get away and dispose of the evidence. However, not everything goes as planned, and during the robbery, a guard is killed. Pursued by the police as murderers and not just as robbers, the six criminals take refuge in an abandoned mine; here, the internal tensions within the group will surface, and moreover, a dangerous and mysterious beast escaped from a veterinary research center, wanders through the woods. Do you remember those abominable films produced in Italy in the 1980s that, to sell the product better, resorted to insipid attempts to link the title to the name of a renowned author who had nothing to do with the film or to deceive the viewer with clever titles and posters copied from American films? If someone were to ask if it is still possible today in Italy to reach similar levels, a positive answer would be found in "Hell's Fever", the latest "masterpiece" by Alessandro Perrella, distributed directly on DVD. If the packaging already says a lot, since the title (which, by the way, has nothing to do with the film) could remind the unsuspecting viewer of the funny "Cabin Fever" by Eli Roth and the DVD cover inexplicably steals the image from the poster of "11:14", the content is even worse! We are faced with a terrible product in every respect. The story is a failed mix between the crime movie and the beast movie; the entire plot follows the unlikely exploits of some ridiculous and clumsy criminals, and here and there some dialogue between veterinarians and rangers discussing a very dangerous rabid beast, a beast that we will never see (also because it is completely unrelated to the plot) until the ridiculous ending where it will be shown as a harmless little dog that just barks at a car. But "Hell's Fever" is not only a narrative mess without equal, in which the characters (all adults) behave like retarded twelve-year-olds and some screenplay solutions seem improvised by the clown Sbirulino (the corpse that supports itself on its arm resting on the chin beats them all), but it is also poorly directed and poorly acted. The direction relies on nothing, Perrella (who in the past has directed mostly porn films) does nothing but film in a completely detached and anonymous way what happens on the scene, without adding a minimum of personality; the actors, then, in addition to being poorly directed, are completely incapable and totally unsuited to the role they have been assigned. A team of such unlikely thieves that they make the trio Villaggio-Banfi-Boldi of "Scuola di Ladri" seem like real professionals. A poorly matched group of criminals who see as leaders two hotheads who do nothing but argue throughout the film about who should carry the suitcase with the money; two women including a girl with a pure face (seen in numerous commercials) who is not at all suited to the role and an unattractive, corpulent diabetic; a boy to whom the most stupid dialogues are entrusted, who enjoys scaring his accomplices right after two members of the group have been slaughtered, all the money has been lost, and there is a severed hand on the floor; a confused man of color who utters the classic lines from an American film's man of color; a hulking man who, in addition to having a crush on the chatterbox, walks around with two dead hares around his neck. In short, a total disaster, further accentuated by an amateur performance by a group of complete unknowns. Here and there some splatter is inserted, often out of place, using clearly fake and poorly made special effects. "Hell's Fever" is therefore one of those films that, surely unwittingly, revive the heyday of bad horror, but so bad that it seems absurd that someone spent money to make it, a characteristic frequent in various domestic productions of twenty years ago.