31 Days of Halloween: A Classic Horror Story

2021, Roberto De Feo & Paolo Strippoli (The Next and some shorts) -- Netflix

Overhead shot, vehicle driving through unending forest (this time, in remote Italy), something forces them to pull over. The trope is age old. Don't trust dark forests, being away from civilization is dangerous, you will always lose cell signal. De Feo and Strippoli start a movie with all the familiar tropes and then go much further than doubling down. This is a movie about horror movie tropes, as much as it is a horror movie. It is metatastic! OK, its fine, its just metaOK.

A group of strangers are travelling with each other via a ride sharing offer, with Fabrizio driving the ancient RV that his mom owns. Oh yeah, creepy RV trope. There is the nice girl with a secret, the pretty girl, the toxic boyfriend and the brooding older doctor. And Fabrizio (Francesco Russo, Il Regno), the awkward weirdo. After an accident with the RV, the group wakes up to find the RV in a field, nowhere near the road they were driving upon. Nearby there is a building that looks like a mashup of your traditional cabin in the woods and a church from a cult movie, ala Midsommar. Nobody knows how they got there. There is no cell signal.

When they try to leave, they either walk in circles or come across even creepier set dressing, such as scarecrows, wicker men and severed pig heads. Inside the structure they find ancient trappings and a girl tucked inside some sort of woven wicker nest. A group of wooden masked strangers appear outside, grabbing toxic boyfriend from the RV, dragging him into the structure while the others hide above, peering down on the scene via cracks between the floor struts. The strangers kill him in brutal ways that remind one of Saw and Misery. Oh, and there are nerve grating sirens and red lights blasting whenever the wooden masked strangers appear. Its all expected to unhinge one from their sanity.

Eventually only Elisa (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz, Revenge), the nice girl with a secret (she has an unwanted pregnancy), is the survivor, the Final Girl, and she is presented the true secret behind the movie. We are supposed to get a scrrrrrrrtch-record-scratch moment (do people get that reference any more?) when its revealed that Fabrizio is the son of a Mafia queen, and he desires to raise horror films in Italy out of the mire they are in. He wants to bring popular Hollywood style horror to Italy, and he does so by not only stealing every fucking trope on the wikipedia page, but by actually murdering people and filming it. He has extras and crew and money at his disposal, so gets to play the auteur AND a minor role in his own movies.

But unknown to Fabrizio he is also in a real horror movie, one that follows the Final Girl getting revenge on her antagonists.

This is a fun little flick that does some good reworking of familiar tropes, but many would accuse them of just stealing them, but that is obviously entirely intentional. There are some good scares, but once the table is turned, and we see the set revealed, it does feel a bit ... wonky and unrealistic. Sure, mafia bosses control people and kill all the time, but... this seems outside even their comfort zones.