PELTS

The furrier Jake Feldman comes into possession of a shipment of raccoon skins taken from animals living in a sacred area for an ancient cult. It seems that these skins manage to have a strange influence on anyone who comes into contact with them, driving them to self-harm. In fact, during the phases of processing the skins, Jake's workers are victims of strange accidents. When the furrier decides to conquer the heart of a prostitute he is in love with by offering her to model for his new creation, he must deal with the curse that looms over those skins. "Masters of Horror" is a unique project born from the mind of Mick Garris, a director known in the horror field especially for the adaptations of Stephen King's novels. Garris thought of bringing together the most representative horror film directors in a project destined for cable TV Showtime and home video, the result is "Masters of Horror", a series of 13 half-hour films of 60 minutes each, each directed by a great name in the genre; each episode has a budget of 1.8 million dollars, the location fixed in the Canadian city of Vancouver and total creative freedom was granted to each director. The names involved in the second season of this project are: Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento, Stuart Gordon, Joe Dante, John Carpenter, John Landis, Ernest Dickerson, Brand Anderson, Tom Holland, Peter Medak, Rob Schmidt, Norio Tsuruta and Mick Garris himself. And here we are dealing with the episode directed by Dario Argento for the second season of "Masters of Horror". In the first season, Argento had given us an episode not perfect but really very pleasant, thanks above all to a fairly original story that combined horror and erotica in a functional and effective way. Now, the Roman director tries to replicate and partly hits the target. "Jenifer" presented itself very well, especially for the "coherence" of the narrative of which it boasted, but "Pelts" also turns out to be an interesting product, albeit slightly inferior to its predecessor. The components on which this episode (rebaptized in Italy with the bland "Istinto animale") relies are those now dear to Argento of recent years: sex and violence. "Jenifer", "Pelts" and "La terza madre" all rely heavily on an insistent exploitative component that, on the one hand, has completely denatured the author's style making him unrecognizable to his old fans, on the other hand is gradually showing a coherence that now underlines how the director has renewed his style. Therefore, there is also no room for the magnificent shooting experiments and for the perfect synchronization with music and lights, but emphasis is placed on the massive grandguignolesque component combined with abundant use of nudity and sexual allusions that almost make it a soft-core. What leaves you stunned in this "Pelts" is above all the dose of extreme violence, probably never seen in a product destined for television, which not only makes this half-hour film the most "explicit" of the series, but probably also the most splatter film of Argento's career. Mutilations, flayings, self-flagellations, lesbian scenes, stripteases and so much other violated or exhibited flesh capture the viewer's attention, distracting him from the narrative itinerary. And this is a good thing, because narratively speaking "Pelts" is a little foolishness almost embarrassing. Starting from the short story by F. Paul Wilson, Matt Venne ("White Noise 2: The Light") builds a somewhat ramshackle screenplay that tries in every way to give interest to a silly and banal story. The animalist subtext is quite evident, but it is obscured by the subversive charge of the images, and the almost fairy-tale atmosphere that hovers over the story of the "enchanted" animals is unconvincing and almost intrusive; just think of how out of place Feldman's visit to the old forest guard's home appears. The cast is made up of fairly important names. In the role of the protagonist furrier there is an effective Meat Loaf ("Fight Club"; "Bloodrayne"), a slimy and morally repulsive man, who however manages to demonstrate true feelings towards Shana (Ellen Ewusie), a "material girl" a bit stereotyped but nevertheless effective in her characterization. The characters that populate "Pelts" are all devoted to evil, an evil that backfires on themselves leading their opulent or statuesque bodies towards a disintegration that has much of splatter-punk literature, and probably this is the only merit of the screenplay, which otherwise is really too simplistic. In a small role also appears the legendary John Saxon, who had already worked with Argento in a relevant role in "Tenebre". In the end "Pelts" has evident defects and confirms (a bit reluctantly for me) the now changed directorial and content personality of Dario Argento's works. However, it remains a fast, fun and extremely extreme film, capable of making the happiness of any splatter maniac. In the average of the good products of the "Masters of Horror" series.