Nightmare Symphony

An homage is tough to pull off, especially when you announce your intentions up front.  Nightmare Symphony(2020) is not just a love letter to all things Lucio Fulci - the Italian director whose biggest success came during a particular gore drenched string of international hits during the ‘80s – but a reboot of one film in particular:  A Cat in the Brain (aka Nightmare Concert) which took an autobiographical approach to tell a behind-the-scenes horror story of a director suffering a creative crisis.

In Nightmare Symphony, Frank LaLoggia (director of Fear No Evil and Lady in White) plays a fictionalized version of himself, just putting the finishing touches on his new film.  But his arrival in Italy is marred by the vicious murder of his female star, poor feedback from his collaborator and outrageous demands by his producer.  His only lifeline is Isabelle (Antonella Salvucci), editor and ex-lover, who attempts to talk Frank down from the creative cliff.  But the murders continue, targeting the very troublemakers who have been sabotaging the project, causing Frank to question his own motivations…and sanity.

 

Full of Fulci references and past collaborators (screenwriter Antonio Tentori, who plays himself, wrote the original A Cat in the Brain in 1990) there’s certainly no doubt the co-directors Domiziano Cristopharo and Daniele Trani are huge fans of the genre.  And with very limited resources they’ve managed to tell a competent – if familiar – story that reflects the horrors of the loss of creative control.  LaLoggia, who bears a striking resemblance to Paul Giamatti, deserves particular credit for pulling of a great bit of non-acting as the director struggling to recover his mojo.

 

But for a film built around the giallo format, Nightmare Symphony gets the pacing all wrong.  Opening with a drawn-out torture sequence full of cool blues and scarlet blood, the film is so enamored with the mechanics of it all, it forgets to add the suspense.  Subsequent killings revel in the same cut-rate make-up effects, but are almost completely bereft of the visceral impact Fulci managed to achieve.  Nightmare Symphony is a plagiarized love letter to Italian cinema that’s all style but no heart.

 

The Blu-ray release features a pair of interviews and behind-the-scenes reel, along with a chapter-based copy of the score, with a killer main title theme from Fabio Frizzi. 

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