Zeder

Não é que eu não queira chamar-me Pupi Pomo, mas estes 98 minutos de treta, treta, treta para revelar um mistério que não diz realmente respeito aos personagens principais, isso não. As cenas de horror demoram cerca de três minutos e não há nenhum gore. A estilização retro e a atmosfera eram, no entanto, deliciosas. [Sitges FF] (07/10/2019)

This is an interesting, stylishly shot movie, but I have to admit that I was quite lost at times, and even after watching it all the way through, I still do not quite get the impression that some parts of the plot are clear to me. Pupi Avati tells a perhaps unnecessarily complicated story with an excess of various characters who are incessantly spinning around the mystery at the heart of this movie, which then just ends with a relatively simple conclusion. However, it is an atmospherically filmed mysterious horror movie, which almost resembles a crime-thriller take on the adaptation of Stephen King's book Pet Sematary, the book which was published in the same year as Zeder, and so both works were probably created independently of each other. There is zero gore on offer here, so fans of bloody Italian horror movies will have to look somewhere else. [Sitges 2019] (05/10/2019)

Revenge of the Dead is the weakest film I've seen from Pupi Avati, but that's not to say it's bad. Macabre and The House of the Laughing Windows were simply better, although they all share that somewhat strange atmosphere, not outright madness but rather absurdity, and surrealism, which presses onto you, causing uncomfortable feelings that may not be directly horror-related but still have an effect. (14/03/2015)