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sorry for the mistakes
I don't
know if you remember it, but in 1996 the Venetian ska band Fahrenheit 451
released the song Uccidiamo I chiari di luna, which later became very famous
thanks to a beautiful animated video. Well, if you don't remember it go and
look it up, not least because they had highlighted the fact that Venice had
become a fake, gentrified place, sold for money to tourists arriving on the big
cruise ships.
I don't
think Alex De La Iglesia heard this song before he wrote the screenplay for
this film with his trusty Jorge Guerricaechevarría, but, in fact, the
underlying theme is the frenetic tourism that affects the city in the lagoon.
Hence the pun in the title.
Produced in
collaboration with Amazon Studios and part of a larger project, we find
ourselves in the Spanish director's favourite field, that is, in a
thriller/horror with absurd and fantastic overtones, which does not forget
social criticism (not only of tourists on cruise ships).
Venice,
needless to say, lends itself a great deal to a thriller/horror, especially in
its carnival period, and De La Iglesia even throws in the 'cursed' island of
Poveglia, but in the end he does not fully exploit this potential and above all
his skills as a director, not sinking all the way into the story and even
leaving some narrative lines open.
No doubt,
the amount of blood and horror is as always strong and full of black humour,
and the film's pace is intense from start to finish, but it feels like an
easier, more commercial product. Superficial.
Not a bad
film in the end, but certainly not the best in the Spanish director's vast and
wacky filmography, which here recalls in small moments 'Hostel' and also No
grazie il caffè mi rende nervoso from 1982 with Troisi and Arena.
As already
mentioned, we find ourselves in Venice during carnival, where a group of
Spanish tourists decide to have a hen party. Welcomed by the locals' protests
against cruise ships, the group meets a strange guy dressed in a carnival mask.
And then, invited to a party by another strange man masquerading as a 'black plague
doctor', one of them disappears.
As always,
the police are in doubt, but between folklore and current events (and horror)
there are those who investigate this strange case.
International cast with Ingrid García Jonsson, Silvia
Alonso, Alberto Bang, Enrico Lo Verso and Cosimo Fusco.