Italian Horror films of 2008: Part 2

This is a continuation of the post Italian Horror films of 2008: Part 1

Il monastero
Here’s a familiar face, Antonio Bonifacio. Bonifacio started out on a variety of roles in the 80s before moving up to direct a couple of giallos, Appuntamento in nero (90) and Il delitto di Via Monte Parioli (98), as well as other films like Kreola (93) and La strana storia di Olga ‘O’ (95).  Il monastero was his first film for a decade, though, and it doesn’t seem to have had anything much in the way of distribution.  It was also co-written by Daniele Stroppa, a busy b-movie scribe who worked regularly with the likes of Claudio Fragasso and Lucio Fulci (in his later years), and the plot follows a group of chums who end up in a village dominated by an abandoned monastery which, years before, had been used as an orphanage.  Now it is apparently haunted, and the whereabouts of the children who had lived there has never been truly uncovered.

Made for $200,000, this had a number of problems: not least the death of the distributor and Bonifacio suffering from a long period of illness.  There are reports of it being finished and released, but I can’t find any more details – let alone a review – anywhere.  A shame, as I’d quite like to see this one.  This is so obscure there isn’t even a trailer up on YouTube.

Bumba atomika
Bumba Atomika is a comedy horror film that showed at a couple of Horror Festival around the world.  The plot goes something like this:

In a small town in the hills of the Marche province, not far from the sea, four (im) probable first-year university students have a passion for alcohol which is their sole reason for living. Their biggest problem is how to find the money to continue drinking such copious amounts  of alcohol. When the aunt of one of them dies suddenly, the boys have the brilliant idea of putting the corpse for sale on the Internet, discovering the existence of a profitable business. This kicks off an uncontrollable spiral of searching for corpses to be sold via the internet, death, alcohol and grotesque events in the frantic search for an ideal and idyllic new world.

Director Michele Sinesi previously worked as a writer for Nocturno, so he certainly knows his genre stuff, and the user ratings on the IMDB are quite high, although nobody in their right mind would trust that too much.  It sounds like a fast paced, none-too-serious splatter movie, and if that’s your cup of tea it might be worth checking out.  I can’t find any reviews though, and I don’t think it’s out on DVD (although it was shown in certain festivals with English subs).

Here’s the trailer:

And that’s it… just five films, none of which had any kind of international impact and most of which played on the festival circuit if anywhere at all.  I haven’t seen any of them, so can’t really comment on how good or bad they may be, and quite frankly there are a couple that I have abslutely no desire to see anyway!

About Matt Blake 890 Articles
The WildEye is a blog dedicated to the wild world of Italian cinema (and, ok, sometimes I digress into discussing films from other countries as well). Peplums, comedies, dramas, spaghetti westerns... they're all covered here.

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