RG
Roberto Giacomelli
•Andrea moves with her husband into a large suburban house inherited from her recently deceased uncle. Andrea has recently suffered an accident that disfigured half of her face and took away much of her memory. During the long days spent alone wandering through the mansion, the woman discovers a notebook of her uncle's and a tape recorder in which are recorded the formulas he experimented with by filtering the plants he grew in his greenhouse. Intrigued, Andrea begins to reproduce the same potions experimented by her uncle, until she finds the formula of a serum that could restore her memory. Under the effect of the memory serum, Andrea gradually begins to remember details of her past, but at the same time strange events begin to occur in the house.
Every now and then, young Italian directors try to debut with horror, attempting to revive this genre that in the past in our country achieved excellent quality results. Unfortunately, however, it is rarely possible to revive the genre: either due to the means that are too demanding put at the disposal of the author, or due to real difficulties in fitting into a definition of "cinema" in its entirety given by the lack of professionalism of the entire production. "La radice del male" is a bit of a summary of the problems that afflict our genre cinema.
Distributed directly for home video, the film by debutant Silvana Zancolò is a clear attempt to replicate the formula of the giallo with horror overtones that dominated in the 1970s and 1980s of national production: there is the traumatic event of the protagonist, the truth hidden in an unclear past, the family intrigue, some splashes of gore; in short, the characteristic ingredients of the genre are all there... and yet not everything goes well! The story, although well scripted by Giovanni Eccher, is marked by excessive slowness in the initial and central parts, almost soporific, to then suddenly lash out with murders and plot twists in the final part, making the emotional journey of the viewer involved in the viewing somewhat inhomogeneous.
The performers are certainly not a positive point for the film, rather they leave much to be desired: on the one hand, we have a good and convincing Zora Keslerova (unforgettable in "Cannibal Ferox"), on the other, there is a really bad Giancarlo Previdi (picked at random from "Cento vetrine" and "Orgoglio"), capable of making every line assigned to him ridiculous. Among the other performers, Peter Shepard (another veteran of genre cinema with "Una farfalla con le ali insanguinate") can be noted in the role of Andrea's uncle; however, in my opinion, the choice not to dub the foreign actors, leaving them with the fake Italian accent that does not always seem appropriate to the performance, was not entirely successful.
The direction of Silvana Zancolò is certainly of good level, always attentive to enhancing the sets and the rarefied atmospheres of the places immortalized, without neglecting, in some shots, a particular taste for virtuosity.
We await the second effort of the director (currently in production with the title "The Shadow within") to really evaluate her talent, hoping for a greater consistency of the means at disposal. For now, we consider "La radice del male" a thriller only partially successful and we postpone Zancolò to September.
