Specters (1987)

A film that I had wanted to see ever since I saw the VHS cover somewhere close to Demons, it's hard to approach a film that has seemingly evaded me for almost four decades without some sense of optimism. I wasn't expecting any kind of classic, but I was hoping for some decent gore gags and good fun. Sadly, Specters has neither of those things present.

It's very standard stuff, in terms of Italian horror from the 1980s anyway. A professor of archaeology (Lasky, played by Donald Pleasence) heads up a research team as they uncover and explore an ancient tomb. It was sealed, of course, and it turns out that it was sealed with good reason. It's not long until some powerful presence is working through the group, killing them off, one by one.

While there aren't many names here that will be too familiar to film fans, one or two will stand out. Pleasence is, of course, the biggest name in front of the camera, although this isn't one of his best roles. Dardano Sacchetti, one of the writers, is arguably the main name behind the camera (having written numerous movies for Lucio Fulci, as well as Demons, and many other features). Director Marcello Avallone has about a dozen movies to his name, and he also joins Sacchetti, Andrea Puragtori, and Maurizio Tedesco in the writing department, with none of them managing to deliver a coherent and consistent narrative. Not that anyone explores horror movies from Italy in the 1980s with a yearning for coherence and consistency, but it's good when you get the feeling that whatever lunacy you are experiencing comes from the mind of someone who has some idea of their destination. That isn't the case here.

John Pepper and Trine Michelsen are the nominal leads, working in the shadow of the mighty Pleasence. They're not very good, neither one standing out enough from the crowd, and any one of the other main cast members - Massimo De Rossi, Riccardo De Torrebruna, Lavinia Grizi, Riccardo Parisio Perrotti, etc - could have been positioned in the main roles with very minor tweaks.

The music (by Lele Marchitelli and Danilo Rea) isn't bad, and there are one or two shots that make use of a decent puppet, but those are two minor positives in a film stuffed full of reasons to avoid it. The recycled sets never convince, the cast can't compensate for the weak script, the pacing makes it feel much longer than the 92-minute runtime, and the grand finale is shockingly tiresome and weak. One or two kills might impress viewers, but even they are pretty pathetic when compared to the grue and nastiness found in other films from this time and place.

You can't win 'em all, I guess, although I am sure that there are some people out there who are fans of this one. I'd love to know what won them over.

3/10

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