THE HOUSE IN THE WIND OF THE DEAD

Northern Italy, 1940s. The actor Attilio, removed from the stage for political reasons, organizes a robbery in a post office with three of his friends. The heist goes as planned but not in the best way: Eurigio is mortally wounded and the police are on the trail of the remaining robbers. Attilio, Ugo, and Ciccillo are then forced to abandon their car and continue on foot through the woods to mislead the authorities. The three, tired and hungry, arrive at an isolated house among the trees and are welcomed by four women. This marks the beginning of a nightmare that will last all night! Criminals and horror cinema seem to go hand in hand, and there is a good reason for this: if the protagonists of the story are described as ruthless outlaws, the threat they will have to face will inevitably be worse than them. Therefore, from the very first minutes, the tendency is to give the protagonists negative traits to increase the expectation of an imminent situation of horror and death potentially very intense, because given the premises, what follows will necessarily be exponentially more terrible. This was the driving force behind the characterization of the characters in "From Dusk Till Dawn," to mention one of the most famous and imitated titles, and this is also the reason behind the long opening of "The House in the Wind of the Dead," the second feature film by the Emilian director Francesco Campanini. "The House in the Wind of the Dead" is the evocative title — reminiscent of certain Italian cinema of the past — for one of the few Italian horror films to have enjoyed a theatrical release. Of course, we are talking about a release on the verge of invisibility, almost a technical release, because for some strange reason Italy fears its own horror films in cinema... but that is another story. Campanini, who made his debut in 2008 with the noir film "The Loner," has a good hand and manages to give the film a certain formal elegance that absolutely does not make the small budget available noticeable. A certain playful care can be noticed starting from the beautiful pop-retro opening credits — matched by the closing credits — and from a perfectly functional use of rural locations, maximized to give ample scope to the scenes of the first part and claustrophobia to those of the second part, set inside the house of the title. The photography by Raoul Torresi is also praiseworthy, always preferring warm colors, and the typically horror music by Lelio Padovani. What works less in Campanini's film is everything else. The story, written by Luca Magri and co-written with Chiara Agostini, is rather classic and respectful of a certain type of survival horror consolidated over the last 40 years. The first part — the best in the opinion of the writer — brings to mind a certain type of hard-boiled cinema but with an unprecedented Italian setting, rural and from the 1940s, thus offering the viewer something unusual and relatively new, also supported by veiled references to the crisis of Italian cinema in the post-fascist era. The second part, on the other hand, settles decidedly on the already seen, offering the viewer the usual situation in "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," which in this specific case recalls more the recent "Frontiers — The Edge of Hell," for the criminal background of the protagonists. The only pleasant variation is the exclusively female composition of the hosting clan, on whose reasons and peculiarities, unfortunately, not enough attention is paid. Amid all this, there are several out-of-place dialogues and the actors' performances are not entirely convincing. In this regard, the quartet of peasant women functions much better, among whom is the talented Nina Torresi of "The Beauty of the Donkey," compared to the male trio, led by the same screenwriter Luca Magri and among whom Francesco Barilli can also be noticed, known to the public of genre cinema above all as the director of cult films from the 1970s such as "The Perfume of the Lady in Black" and "Pension Fear." Barilli is also credited as the director for a sequence in the film. "The House in the Wind of the Dead" is therefore a partially successful film, strong in its technical department and aesthetic superior to many other contemporary Italian independent productions but lacking in the more purely narrative and acting aspects. It certainly deserves half a pumpkin more.