SCHERZO DIABOLICO: Adrián García Bogliano's best yet gets VOD/Digital HD debut this week

The Spanish genre filmmaker Adrián García Bogliano -- who, a couple of years back, gave us the very interesting, low-key horror film Here Comes the Devil, and followed that up with a good episode from the horror omnibus, The ABCs of Death, then handed us a pretty crappy werewolf attempt called Late Phases -- is back this week with his latest and best endeavor so far, a dark, often surprising, and very nasty kidnap thriller called SCHERZO DIABOLICO.

Bogliano, shown at left, seems most often to deal with not-very-healthy family situations, not to mention people to whom it is rather difficult to warm. While this makes what happens to many of his characters a tad easier to accept, it can also distance us from his film's protagonists. This is very much the case with Scherzo Diabolico, the protagonist of which is a short-but-not-unattractive family man (his small fingers would not reach an octave, or so his piano teacher once told him: Listen up, Donald Trump!) whose boss refuses to pay him for overtime and whose wife is all-too-quick with the insults.

So our "hero" hatches a very oddball plot, the putting-into-action of which proves both bizarre and hugely disconcerting. Though it involves kidnapping, there's really no rape or torture included, yet so absolutely thoughtless of the mental well-being of his prisoner is our guy that what eventually happens, while it takes quite a leap of faith, is also so bizarre and joltingly effective that genre aficionados are likely remain on board right through the vicious finale.

Some kind of vengeance is on almost everybody's mind in this thriller, and Bogliano's penchant for exploring narcissistic egos and dysfunctionality is put to fine use. To go further into plot would simply spoil things. Suffice it to say that the musical score, which makes use of some good classical stuff, is top-notch, and the performances are, too -- right down the line.

Especially fine are Bogliano regular Francisco Barreiro (above and further above) as the corporate-ladder-climbing male and Daniela Soto Vell (below, and three photos up) as his "victim." Both are terrifically compelling and believable. And the filmmaker is getting especially good at bouncing back and forth between subtlety and shock, dark comedy and sheer horror. This is a wild ride, but it's one that you'll likely remember for awhile, even given our continuing glut of more-than-passably-entertaining genre movies.

Scherzo Diabolico -- from Dark Sky Films and running 91 minutes -- hits VOD and Digital HD this Tuesday, May 3, for either purchase or rental. I watched the DVD version of the film, and on the disc is a very enjoyable bonus feature in which three of the film's five good actresses talk about their roles as the strong women behind the weak men in the movie. Two of the three actresses' ideas are smart and provocative and make this maybe-20-minute "extra" very much worth watching.  

Werewolves, anyone? Genre clunker Adrián García Bogliano's LATE PHASES hits theaters

"A masterpiece of the werewolf genre," as its poster proclaims? Only if you're totally unfamiliar with the werewolf genre and have never seen The Howling, Dog Soldiers, An American Werewolf in London (or even its silly-fun follow-up, in Paris) and any number of other fine werewolf films, could you possibly be taken in by this trivial pursuit that seems about as arbitrary and as clunkily put together as a genre movie can be. Despite a fine lead performance from Nick Damici (two photos below), as a blind Viet Nam vet stuck into a retirement community on the edge of town by his uncaring son (Ethan Embry), LATE PHASES mostly sucks, playing fast and loose with the usual werewolf tropes and making too little sense on too many levels.

As directed by Spaniard Adrián García Bogliano (pictured at left), quite far afield from his more subtle and disturbing Here Comes  the Devil, this later movie has the director out of his element in more ways than mere locale. Forget that the carnage begins the very night that Damici's character moves into the community, and that he finds a very large wolf's nail embedded in a huge, scratched-out claw print in his wall (What? The people-in-charge of this community don't clean up the houses prior to renting them?), and that the town's police don't pay a lick of attention to all the deaths occurring here. Well, maybe they're involved? If only the movie had something more complex than gore and special effects on its tiny brain.

Actually, it does. And that thing is a father/son fallout that goes way back, and is even more clunkily handled than the rest of this sorry movie. As you might guess, I am a big werewolf fan, so I sat there during the screening, trying to make excuses for what was passing before my eyes until there were no more remaining.

Much is made of our blind man's sense of smell -- until it suddenly doesn't seem to matter any more. And although we see our werewolf almost from the second or third scene of the film, the movie appears to be mostly a mystery as to who, exactly, this werewolf is. We learn the answer too soon, which drains the little suspense that has built up.

Subsidiary characters exist only to move the movie along, though they are played by some enticing pros like Tom Noonan (below, right), Larry Fessenden and Tina Louise. And when we finally get the big-deal, human-to-werewolf transformation (in photo, bottom), it's far too little too late. The filmmaker and special effect maven -- Robert Kurtzman and crew -- do get points, however, for trying to make the wolf look something like the human it represents.

Finally, the film seems a super-clunky melding of worthless family-secrets drama and sub-par monster-horror. Barely releasable crap is my verdict.

Late Phases, from Dark Sky Films and running a too-long 95 minutes, opens today, Friday, November 21, in New York City at the IFC Center (once daily at 9:45pm) and maybe elsewhere, too.