MILD SPOILERS


I picked up Lamberto Bava's GHOST SON at Best Buy today. Contrary to early reports, Xenon's (Xenon?!) DVD is thankfully not fullscreen, but 2.35:1 widescreen, but there's no extras whatsoever, unless you count "Scene Selection." It's not likely to be regarded as an essential Lamberto Bava film, but it has its moments, two of which reference other legendary Italian horror flicks (one of them is a trick straight out of his old man's SHOCK, and you probably know what I mean; the other would be too obvious if I mentioned it).

In fact, the whole film is a sort-of reworking of SHOCK, only with an infant in place of a six or seven-year old. It's very low-key and slowly-paced, but Laura Harring does get some fevered Daria Nicolodi intensity going by the end. The film also features John Hannah (and way more of John Hannah than I ever wanted to see), the venerable Pete Postlethwaite, and Euro-cult fave Coralina Cataldi Tassoni (in much too small a role), plus some animatronic effects by Sergio Stivaletti.

Like I said, it's no classic, but new Italian or Italian-based horror (the film is an Italian-British-Spanish-South African co-production) is pretty hard to come by, so this will likely be of interest to a lot of folks here, at least as a rental. Still, it's largely either for Bava family completists/Italian horror geeks (me) or Pete Postlethwaite groupies.

I just watched this last night. While the first half is nicely directed and very deliberate, the second half really put me off. There were some nice ideas that never really came to fruition in any dramatic way and I found the scenes with the animatronic baby to be just ridiculous. I like a lot of Lamberto Bava's work (His reworking of MASK OF SATAN is a favorite) but this one was more like THE OGRE or UNTIL DEATH. It just felt incomplete and ultimately kind of silly. There's a death in the last third of the film that is so random that it felt more like contractual obligation for violence than anything else. SHOCK is a much more frightening and poignant film than GHOST SON.

D.

I think it contains some of Lamberto's best work to date, but it also contains several annoying little cheap shocks, all in the second half, that make a mockery of the sometimes palpably real emotions set up in the first. The editor could have done the movie an immense favor just by cutting out the "possessed milk barf" scene.

I had read about the milk barf bit and was kind of expecting it. It was odd but...


**SPOILERS***
















Not as odd as the "Infant with an erection" bit. The idea was wonderfully disturbing, but something about it didn't quite work for me. Perhaps because it was augmented by the shot of the fake baby hand caressing Laura Harring's breast. I don't know. I really, really wanted to like the film. I almost would have preferred more cheap shocks than fewer.