FINGERPRINTS

Emerald, Texas. Melanie returns home after a period spent in rehab for a drug story. Waiting for her are her coetaneous sister Crystal, a cowardly father, and a despotic mother, as well as a host of new schoolmates ready to judge her. One evening, Melanie, Crystal, and two boys stop their car on the train tracks to verify an old legend that has been passed down in the town. It is said that in 1957 a school bus full of children was hit by a speeding train in that very place without leaving any survivors. Since then, anyone who stops their car on the tracks is supposedly 'pushed to safety' by the spirits of the children who died in the bus. Obviously, Melanie and her friends are not pushed by the spirits, but the girl sees a child and becomes convinced that she is one of the victims of the '57 incident. In the following days, Melanie begins to investigate the identity of the child, discovering that it is indeed Julia, one of the victims of the old accident, and at the same time a mysterious killer dressed as a train engineer begins to kill the high school students. The first thing that comes to mind when reading the plot of 'Innocenti presenze' ('Fingerprints' in the original) is 'Urban Legend,' the memorable slasher that Jamie Blanks directed in 1998, starting a mini-saga. Indeed, Henry Basil and the screenwriters Jason and Brian Clevelend seem to have taken 'Urban Legend' as an example to build their 'Innocenti presenze,' obviously with the due qualitative differences between the two. 'Innocenti presenze' begins with a suggestive urban legend that would have the manifestation of benevolent ghostly presences interfering in a potentially dangerous situation: ghost children pushing away cars stopped on the train tracks to prevent the catastrophe in which they lost their lives from repeating. The aim is to revise the cultural imagination that would have ghosts anchored to the earthly world as a threat to the living. It is suggestive to see the car windows fogged up by the heat of the bodies suddenly marked by small footprints while the vehicle moves slowly pushed by an invisible force. But this is the starting point from which Basil and company started to make a feature film, with the obvious consequence that this starting point alone could not be enough to support an entire film. And here comes the greatest contact with 'Urban Legend,' because what is essentially a film about an urban legend becomes, as the minutes pass, a full-fledged slasher, complete with a mysterious and masked killer who kills young victims with a white weapon. This contamination, however, does not benefit the final result, making 'Innocenti presenze' a film poorly balanced in its components and with a development that oscillates between banality and lack of credibility. What begins as a ghost story with all the hallmarks of the genre (protagonist inexplicably endowed with the ability to see the deceased, sudden apparitions, the usual ghost child dressed in white who serves as deus ex machina) transforms into a slasher that tries to respect the basic rules of the genre, including the killing of a couple caught in intimate attitudes. Some bloody scenes liven up a story that takes its time to get going and then proceeds in fourth gear towards a surprise ending that is truly such for the simple reason that it turns out to be implausible (the identity of the killer!) and therefore, at first glance, discardable by the spectator who becomes an improvised investigator. The protagonist, played by Leah Pipes ('Pact of Blood'), is within the norms of horror characters with the variation that her writing fits well with both the tropes of the ghost story and those of the slasher. The co-protagonist/sister Crystal (played by Kristin Cavallari) is not very relevant, and the excessive caricatured characterization of the parents is entirely unmotivated, especially the mother who behaves in a sadistic way without a pertinent motivation (yes, okay, your daughter has betrayed your trust with drugs, but torturing her in that way certainly won't help her!). The scene after the epilogue is one of the silliest seen in a serious film, see for yourself. In conclusion, 'Innocenti presenze' is a discreetly crafted entertainment spectacle and has its strong point in the mix between the ghost story genre and the slasher... a mix not handled for the best, especially due to an unbalanced screenplay. The film is worth watching, but it is also easily forgotten, and quite quickly.