Some things are just forgotten: Fear (1981)

Fear (Follia omicida) (Italy, 1981) (AKA "Murder Syndrome", "Murder Obsession")

Rating: ***

Starring: Stefano Patrizi, Martine Brochard, Henri Garcin

               

Michael Standford is an actor with a scandalous past when, at a young age, he knifed his father to death. This seems to be taking a toll to his acting career lately so as a way to relax from his job, he tagged along his girlfriend and some of his closest friends in the filming industry to a weekend with his mum. 

Upon reaching their destination, they meet the mansion's creepily superstitious butler Olivier and learns that Michael's mum isn't all too well, apparently lusting over her son in an Oedipal way ever since he grew up with a striking resemblance to her late husband. (Gay mustache included, as it seems) Stranger things started to happen when Michael refuses to sleep with his girlfriend in the same room and the girl herself experiences a rather gratuitous dream sequence involving plastic spiders, her gown opening a lot and some sort of demonic ritual. 

Not too long however, someone with gloved hands is itching to do some killing, hacking off one guest at a time in the bloodiest of manners.

With Italian gialli slowly being replaced by their grandchildren, the slashers, sometime around the 80s, titles such as this have worked their way around to the newer, younger, blood-hungry audience of the decade, artistically recapturing the artistic style of the 70s giallo and the gloomy macabre of gothic horror, all the while providing some splatter-worthy murders including a nasty axe kill and a bloody chainsaw beheading.

Just as any giallo, Fear spent most of its time trying to build a story on a whodunit angle, littered with plenty of red herrings while playing on the possibility of a supernatural threat with its talks of cults rituals. True enough, the fact that the creepy butler seems to know a lot more than what's happening, Michael's strange mother claiming to have dabbled with the dark arts, and even Michael's own murderous past could have placed them under suspicions for the killings that occurred lately. Sadly, as much as it tries to toil around making us guess who the killer is, the story has its moments of predictability and the twist reveal was fairly obvious.

As much as the film tries to impress, Fear still cannot hide the budget restraints it suffers from as some of the gore effects are cheap (though impressively bloody) and the soundtrack is a chore to listen to sometimes. Then there's this movie's the near-high cheese factor, most of it can be seen at the aforementioned prolonged nightmare sequence where a tormented lass' breasts keeps popping out whenever she moves. Nonetheless, the movie is still a watchable underrated Euro-Horror that really deserves more attention, at least for being beautifully and atmospherically shot and entertaining down to its cheesy core.

An amalgamation of a macabre horror, a giallo whodunit and a very gory slasher, Fear (or as I really prefer calling it, "Murder Obsession") is a must-see for fans of obscure horror, die-hard stalk-and-kill fanatics and Italian horror purists. Rent it or own it, it's worth a space in your collection!

Bodycount:
1 female found gutted with Switchblade
1 male gets a hatchet to the head
1 female decapitated with chainsaw
1 male stabbed to death with kitchen knife
1 male found poisoned
1 male knifed on the chest
Total: 6