Opiniones de usuarios

Footprints is a very interesting movie that is somewhat difficult to categorize. "Psychological thriller" is the most appropriate description I can think of. The female protagonist, Alice Cespi, discovers that she doesn't remember anything of the last three days. The only clue she has is a torn photo of a hotel. She is also haunted by a recurring, very vivid, dream about a science fiction movie that she believes she saw many years ago. In her pursuit of the truth behind her amnesia she doesn't trust anyone, but little by little it becomes obvious that she has visited the town where the hotel is located before. This is an exciting flick whose main virtue is that it is virtually impossible to predict how the events will unfold, and particularly, how it will end. The unusual loneliness of the main character and the unreliability of everyone else ensure that the good old paranoid feeling is present throughout the film, whereas beautiful colors and some spectacularly filmed sequences make this a visually attractive movie as well. The important part of the one and only Nicoletta Elmi, everyone's all time favorite redheaded obnoxious child star of Italian horror, is an extra bonus.

This is actually a very good surreal mystery movie, despite the description that tries to sell it as a Sci-Fi movie. Balkan stars as a woman haunted by mysterious visions and lost memories that she is trying to piece together. She spends the majority of the movie trying to make sense of her visions. Very atmospheric and effective. It is true that Kinski does not appear very much in this film, but the staring actors are very good. There is only an English dubbed version available in the US, and the dubbing leaves something to be desired, but the actors do a very good job. The cinematography, by Academy Award winner Vittorio Storaro is excellent. An earlier Giallo by director Bazzoni, THE FIFTH CORD, is also excellent, and also lensed by Storarro.

Interesting and entertaining 'mind game', dream-like, moody mystery, as a woman can't account for several lost days of her life, or why so many people at a resort she's never visited seem to know her.

She's also haunted by very odd black and white dreams where an astronaut is betrayed and left to die alone on the moon.

The film is slow in parts, and some of the big twists are easy to see coming, but it is beautifully photographed by Vittorio Storraro, and eschews the gratuitous violence and awkward sex of most of the Italian thrillers of the era.

This doesn't feel like its trapped by any formula or rules. And the acting is pretty good for a dubbed film.

Not in the class of films like 'Don't Look Now" or "Vertigo", but gets points for trying to be and doing so in a classy way. I'll be interested to see this again.

This is why I love Italian gialli. Despite the somewhat true but nevertheless very tiresome claims that the Italian filmmakers are just rip-off artists, this one loose genre that only really had its heyday for a few years in the early 70's displays more originality and creativity than mainstream Hollywood films have in the last 20 years. (And some American fanboy directors like Quentin Tarantino have largely made their career by ripping THEM off).This film is not only unlike any other gialli; it's unlike any other movie I've seen. A woman (Florinda Bolkan) is haunted in her dreams by a long ago television show she saw of astronauts being left stranded on the moon. To relax she goes to an eerily deserted seaside resort town where she thinks she's never been , but where everyone seems to remember her visiting the week before. She gets more and more paranoid and confused. Meanwhile strange men in astronaut suits keep appearing. . .

Unlike the typically hysterical-from-the-get-go gialli, this movie gradually creates a sense of paranoia and unease. It mixes dream, reality, memory, and the media (television) to the point where the viewer is left as disoriented as the troubled protagonist. The end is bound to be a little disappointing after the build-up, but it's pretty memorable too.

While most gialli have an overabundance of characters, this movie is largely carried by Bolkan. Fortunately, she is more than up to the task. Bolkan was a Brazilian actress who, like Austrian beauty Marissa Mell, had a career that was often overshadowed by her personal life (and she probably didn't help this with her lesbian affairs and public claims of having been JFK's last lover). Unlike Mell though she was much more than just a pretty face and her talent can readily be seen in movies like this, Fulci's "A Lizard in Women's Skin", and the nunsploitation classic "Flavia, the Heretic". Klaus Kinski and the Ida Galli also put in brief cameos in the movie, and unfortunately so does young Nicoletta Elmi (who was kind of the Dakota Fanning of 70's Italian films--not a terrible actress but one that appeared in so many films you start to look forward to seeing her on the back of a milk carton).

Director Luigi Bazzoni's first giallo "The Fifth Cord" just came out on DVD. Hopefully, this one won't be far behind. Snap it up if you like gialli or if just enjoy unique, well-made movies. Highly Recommended.

Unable to cope with mounting pressures at work and haunted by visions of a lone astronaut abandoned on the surface of the moon, Alice travels to the exotic sea side town of Garma to get away from it all.

She encounters a number of people there who claim to know her from earlier as Nicole, even though she insists this is her first time there. Brazillian born Florinda Bolkan turns in a solid performance as the elusive Portugese translator caught in the grips of a fugue.

A strange but oddly compelling existential mystery about dual identities and self-fulfilling prophecies, Footprints on the moon is more reminiscent of art-house favorites such as Antonioni's L'aventura and Passenger and Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, than say other Mystery/Thriller Genre fare so popular at the time in Italy.

The story unfolds at a languorous pace and things get redundant after a while, but it does allow Cinematographer extraordinaire Vittorio Storaro to really explore the unique locations and dazzle with his wonderfully dexterous camera-work. He furthers the style he pioneered in The Conformist.

Also, watch out for Klaus Kinski in a small role as a sinister Space Commander on the lookout for guinea pigs to conduct his secret experiments for a shadowy Government agency. Yes, I'm talking about the same movie.

A very insightful psychological thriller! Footprints is a stylish example of the 70's powerful Italian film making.And Luigi Bazzoni, a wrongly underrated director and visually amazing 'auteur'. The movie develops its unusual plot with an incredibly suspenseful atmosphere and never disappoints,especially in its sad and dramatic finale! Florinda Bolkan delivers an excellent performance,rich of nuances and touching sensitivity,being able to portray a dark lady who is not only fascinating,but also painfully real and tragically lonesome.But the all cast is a treat,as well! Lila Kedrova,Nicoletta Elmi(the mysterious kid by the beach),Italian screen legend Caterina Boratto and stunningly beautiful B movie queen Evelyn Stewart in the brief but haunting role of the protagonist's friend! And Klaus Kinski in a surprisingly disturbing cameo! It's peculiar to notice how incredibly well done movies like Footprints were! Vittorio Storaro's moody and creepy cinematography,stylized locations and sets,Nicola Piovani's haunting score and first of all the story,so intense and disturbing,so intelligently layered and structured! A thriller with fantastic elements,but especially with a soul and a personal vision. I wish movies like Footprints would not be forgotten! I wish the movies were more insightful and personal today as they were back in the 60's/70's! And yes..i wish somebody will soon make a digitally remastered widescreen DVD out of this little masterpiece!

Alice (Florinda Bolkan), a translator living in Italy, discovers that she has a memory loss and can't recall the last couple of days. She starts to follow a trace of memory fragments, which leads her to the small town of Garma. People in the town seem to recognize her and she's beginning to suspect that the re-occurring nightmares of astronauts conducting horrible experiments has something to do with her own amnesia.

The movie is interesting and the plot is good, but it's a bit to slow moving and arty for my taste. The plot takes some nice twists and it's really hard to figure out where it's heading. Florinda Bolkan is good in her role (but even better in "Flavia the Heretic") and it's always nice to see "star" child actor Nocoletta Elmi. Klaus Kinski's role is too small though. This is not a movie for the die-hard gore hound or exploitation addict, but still a very nice hour-and-a-half mystery.

The translator Alice Cespi (Florinda Bolkan) has nightmares with an astronaut left alone on the moon and is addicted in sleeping pills. When she goes to work, she is fired since she missed three days without any justification. She returns home and finds a torn postcard of the Garma Hotel in Garma and decides to visit the seaside touristic place. She stumbles upon the weird girl Paola Bersel (Nicoletta Elmi), the stranger Harry (Peter McEnery) and other locals that believe she is a woman called Nicole. Along the days, Alice tries to unravel the mystery of her missing days.

"Le orme", a.k.a. "Footprints on the Moon", is a weird film with a dream-like atmosphere. The intriguing mystery is supported by magnificent performance of Florinda Bolkan and great cinematography. However the confused story disappoints the viewer that expects a conventional giallo with gore, murders and sex. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil):"Os Passos" ("The Steps")

Note: On 15 June 2020 I saw this film again.

When, oh, when will someone like Anchor Bay or Blue Underground release this on widescreen DVD??? Le Orme, which I only know because of my rare/vintage video collecting habit, is a film in my collection that I would not only sit through, but actually enjoy watching. The fact that Klaus Kinski is top billed, but is only in small parts of the film, means little to me. (Though several comments expressed disappointment in his rather limited screen time.) I cannot say that this is a good horror film, a good mystery, a sci-fi epic or anything of that nature. It is simply unclassifiable in the "genre" sense of things. It is more like a confusing, frightening (though not particularly violent or bloody) dream, filled with great visuals and mystery. It relies on visuals and emotion, much like Bava's "Lisa and the Devil". Both films are beautiful in almost every sense, but almost impossible to describe in a logical manner; they both occur in such a dream-like atmosphere. Don't be deterred by Force Video's synopsis on the back cover. It is infinitely more complex and intriguing than that. Though Force Video's release from 1986 (the only one in the US, that I know of) is cropped to full-screen on tape, even in that format it is still great. Releasing it remastered and/or letterboxed would make it magnificent (hint, hint... DVD companies).

I first heard of this one while searching the 'Net for reviews of another Italian giallo/horror effort, the contemporaneous THE PERFUME OF THE LADY IN BLACK (1974; whose R2 SE DVD from Raro Video, by the way, I recently acquired) – where it's referenced as being in a similar vein but also just as good. Having watched FOOTSTEPS for myself now, I can see where that reviewer was coming from – in that both films deal with the psychological meltdown of their female protagonist. Stylistically, however, this one owes far more to Art-house cinema than anything else – in particular, the work of Alain Resnais and Michelangelo Antonioni (and, specifically, LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD [1961] and THE PASSENGER [1975] respectively); accordingly, some have accused it of being "deadly boring" – an epithet often attached to such 'pretentious' (read: cerebral) fare!

Anyway, the film involves the quest of a woman (Florinda Bolkan) to determine her movements in the preceding three days – of which she seems to have no recollection. Following a series of cryptic clues, she travels to the 'mythical' land of Garma (nearby locations, then, bear the equally fictitious names of Muda and Rheember) – where she encounters several people (including Lila Kedrova as an aristocratic regular of the resort) who ostensibly recall the heroine staying there during her 'blackout'! Most prominent, though, are a young man (Peter McEnery) and a little girl (Nicoletta Elmi, from Mario Bava's BARON BLOOD [1972]) – the former always seems to happen on the scene at propitious moments, while the latter apparently confuses Bolkan with another woman (sporting long red hair and a mean streak!).

While essentially a mood piece, this is nonetheless a gripping puzzle: inevitably, vague events transpire at a deliberate pace – and where much of the film's power derives from the remarkable central performance (which can be seen as an extension of Bolkan's role in the fine Lucio Fulci giallo A LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN [1971]). However, there's no denying the contribution of cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (who provides any number of sweeping camera moves and an effective color scheme – adopting orange/red/blue filters to create atmosphere and coming up with a saturated look for the disorientating, bizarre finale) and Nicola Piovani's fitting melancholy score (the composer is best-known nowadays for his Oscar-winning work on Roberto Benigni's Holocaust-themed tragi-comedy LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL [1997]).

With this in mind, it's worth discussing how FOOTSTEPS was presented in the version I watched: well, being apparently hard-to-get in its original form (I can't be sure whether it's uncut here or not, except to say that the film ran for 89 minutes while the IMDb – lists it at 96), this edition is culled from a fairly battered English-language VHS (the dubbing is surprisingly good, given the international cast) with burnt-in Swedish subtitles to boot (besides, the DivX copy froze for a few seconds at a crucial point in the story around the 82-minute mark)! Still, we do get a welcome bonus i.e. a 9-minute 'Highlights From The Soundtrack' in MP3 format.

I realize I haven't yet mentioned the moon mission subplot, to which Klaus Kinski's presence is restricted: incidentally, around this same time, he had a similarly brief but pivotal role in another good arty thriller with sci-fi leanings (and also set in a distinctive location) – namely, LIFESPAN (1974). As I lay watching the film, I couldn't fathom what possible connection this had with the central plot…except that Bolkan mentioned a recurring dream about a movie she had once seen, though not through to the end, called "Footsteps On The Moon" (a somewhat misleading alternate title for the film itself) – amusingly, she at first recalls the picture as being called BLOOD ON THE MOON (which, of course, is a classic 1948 Western noir with Robert Mitchum and directed by Robert Wise!). That said, I took this 'diversion' in stride as merely one more outlandish touch to the film (given also Bolkan's former employment as a translator at a conference discussing Earth's future) – and certainly didn't expect the astronauts to turn up on Garma's beach at the very end to pursue the female lead, where the sand then turns ominously into the moon's surface…!

The film's plot will probably make more sense on a second viewing – though, to be honest, this is best approached as a visual/aural experience and one shouldn't really expect it to deliver a narrative that's in any way clear-cut and easily rationalized! For the record, the only other Bazzoni effort I'd managed to catch prior to this one was the middling straight giallo THE FIFTH CORD (1971), starring Franco Nero (which I had recorded off late-night Italian TV); some time ago, I did get hold of his Spaghetti Western rendition of "Carmen" titled MAN, PRIDE AND VENGEANCE (1968) – also with Nero and Kinski – as a DivX (after I'd already missed a matinée broadcast of it)…but the conversion had somehow proved faulty and, consequently, the disc wouldn't play properly!

A slow-moving film which retains a certain cult ; it seems it's all in a dream ,or a nightmare more like ; few special effects,no gore, but a great sense of mystery,with an open ending which will make all viewers interpreting the meaning of this bewildering story according to their own sensitivity .

With its deja vu feeling, its bizarre characters (Lila Kedrova) , its strange experiments on the moon , one can wonder whether the heroine is losing her mind, or is it a recurrent nightmare ? Its atmosphere sometimes recall "carnival of souls" ,probably the first important indie in the history of cinema .The beauty of Florinda Bolkan and the threatening face of Klaus Kinski add to the fascinating and deadly charm of this offbeat work.

There's no way of classifying Footprints, I know many have gone for calling it giallo, and perhaps it's best to approach it as that having never seen it, but really it's not genre fare. Much better to compare it to the likes of Solyaris, an art-house movie using genre trappings. However there's a real interbreeding of genres in Footprints, which gives it a feeling of incredible uniqueness.

It's about a woman of a certain age, Alice, who is an interpreter for a large multinational governmental body. Her whole life we feel is a masterpiece of repression, a Freudian version of Rococo filigree. A friend tells her that there is something truly inhuman about how she dedicates herself incessantly in the pursuit of perfection at a job she hates. This of course is a sign of someone for who inner dams will eventually burst. One night Alice has a strange sci-fi dream and wakes to discover that she has lost three days of her memory. A clue leads her to an unusual resort, Garma, in a country that's unspecified, but may well be that faraway country, the past. Outside of the diegesis it's actually the ancient town of Phaselis in Turkey.

The location is fascinating, there is a graveyard with unusual tombstones, an ancient church with the most magnificent glittering of golden tessera on the ceiling around a large organ. The organist, unusually, faces the audience and is glorified by their location. It's an opulent place that you can imagine was fleetingly glorious in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire as a resort, and Arcadian in the distant past. The state of the location mirrors Alice's state, a faded woman, who has only obscure memories of happiness.

The music for the movie is provided by Nicola Piovani (who worked with the Taviani Brothers), and is of the 24 carat variety. The organ and strings piece at the start is punctuated by the beating of what sounds like a heart under a stethoscope. The accompanying shots on the moon, which inevitably remind one of 2001: A Space Odyssey, are appropriately brilliant.

The beautiful stained glass peacocks of Alice's confused memory, were of interest to me. In the Western world we see these lovely creatures as ornamental and leave them wandering around the lawns of great estates. They actually come from the jungles of India however, and there's something quite outrageously beautiful present if you see them glide down the jungle valleys. Rather a metaphor for what modernity has done to the human organism.

Excellent movie, if somewhat of a diminuendo after the awe-striking first sequence. A classic of cinematic paranoia.

I consider this a missed opportunity. I have very fond memories of the filmmaker's debut, an interesting psychosexual oddity called La Donna Del Lago, and watching this I'm inclined to think that earlier film worked so well because the giallo had not been mapped down yet; so he was free to travel where it was novel at the time. Polanski got there that same year, but he was already a name and had Deneuve with him and so made the bigger splash. Film history has noted Repulsion.

This could have been even better. He has brought ambitious imagination with him, a visual palette of bright golden hues and relaxing blues, a sense of place and folded mysterious time with memory from Marienbad. He has Vittorio Storaro's eye behind the lens.

The opening is more than promising. A woman wakes up with no memory of three days past. She has just seen a dream, a feverish vision of astronauts staggering on blasted moonscapes, which she remembers is from a movie called the same as the one we're watching; but a movie she left without watching the ending. She goes to Italy to investigate, in an effort to bring these images into focus.

There it falls apart, in Italy incidentally. In the ten years since that first film that was in some ways a giallo ancestor the genre had come and was already on its way out. Between these two films Bazzoni had worked where it was the trend in the Italian industry, making a western and another giallo called The Fifth Chord. So when the more ambitious material for this came together, there were already footsteps he was expected to walk and had been trained to. The circumstances of a commercial movie industry were just so.

So for the middle part of the film we get a giallo worked from convention. The convoluted plot where each character withholds crucial information until the time is right, and the protagonist has to cobble together a puzzle from clues and red herrings. Much ado.

It comes full circle in the finale; the agents which she has imagined to be controlling her illusion return to pull her back into the fiction of the dream. It happens with extraordinary images of a stretch of empty cosmic beachside.

Bazzoni never made another film after this. In the meantime, Polanski had rocketed into Hollywood orbit and was already on his way out. I reckon that Bazzoni was one of our sad losses, but alas he never made it to France where money didn't always expect to fill a double-bill.

Footprints on the Moon is an example of what could be described as a bloodless giallo. These were entries from the Italian sub-genre that were more directly psychological in approach. After the success of Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in 1970, these more subtle gialli became scarcer on the ground and a host of serial killer flicks were the norm. Footprints harks back to the older style but adds a dash of 70's paranoid thriller into the mix. The result is a somewhat surreal film which has a decidedly enigmatic tone and effect. It was directed by Luigi Bazzoni and shot by Vittorio Storaro, who also was cinematographer on Crystal Plumage as well as the later Hollywood film Apocalypse Now (1979). This duo also worked together on the earlier classic style giallo The Fifth Cord (1971). Both their movies display restraint in terms of salacious material, while both look beautiful due to Storaro's consummate skill. The lunar material looks wonderfully off-kilter, the widescreen compositions are consistently great and the use of black and white to recall strange memories and dreams works extremely well.

It starts fantastically well with a startling opening segment set on the moon, where we see astronauts drag an unconscious compatriot and then abandon him. It turns out a female translator is dreaming about this, when she wakes she discovers she has no memory of the last three days. She recalls a film she saw many years earlier called 'Footprints on the Moon', a film that recalls her dream, where a scientific experiment is carried out where astronauts are left stranded on the moon to test them. She discovers a torn postcard addressed to her of a place she is sure she knows but does not know why, she travels to this off-season tourist area and meets several people who know her but whom she does not know herself.

This one is typified by a sustained atmosphere of dread and it really delves into the fragile psychology of the protagonist, who is very well played by Florinda Bolkan, who was one of the most talented of the performers to regularly appear in gialli. This role is a fairly complex one and benefits a lot from Bolkan's subtle skills. There is also an appearance from another giallo regular, Nicoletta Elmi, the little red headed girl who played oddball children in several films from the time. In this film, she is given a bit more to do and is a little more integral to the plot. Evelyn Stewart and Klaus Kinski appear briefly, the former as Bolkan's friend in Italy and the latter as the mad scientist Blackmann from the film-within-a-film. The location where most of the action occurs is the resort of Garma which is an otherworldly dream-like place, with a vaguely Arabic feel and ruins; it feels like a dying place. The film feels like a combination of dreams, reality and movies. The science fiction film-within-a-film is a strong idea and the image of the abandoned astronaut is a peculiar and compelling one. This sci-fi thread blends into the fabric of the main story and that by the unforgettable final moments it has encroached entirely into Bolkan's reality. It's a memorably surreal way to end one of the most distinctive films in the giallo sub-genre.

Footprints is an interesting movie. It concerns a young woman who wakes up and can't remember the previous three days. The movie subsequently follows her quest to uncover her movements of these 3 days.

This is a slow movie, but don't be put off by this. I was never once bored, my attention was held by this woman's plight and her interactions with the people around her. The characterisation was great. A wonderfully haunting music score is used, coupled with great cinematography.

This is not strictly a Giallo, more of a mystery. For fans of Italian cinema or movie fans looking for something a bit different, this comes highly recommended.

The American title for this film, Primal Impulse, makes it sound like a bad erotic thriller from the '90s. I wish that it had been: it would probably still have been more enjoyable than the pretentious and quite unfathomable Italian twaddle that it actually is.

Also known as 'Footprints on the Moon', the film stars Florinda Bolkan as Alice, a translator who wakes to find that she can remember nothing of the past few days. Her only clues as to what has happened are a torn up postcard from the town of Garma and a mysterious yellow dress in her wardrobe. Packing her bags, she heads for Garma hoping to find the answer to the mystery.

Although almost unanimously praised here on IMDb (the film is described by most as either atmospheric, eerie, haunting or suspenseful), I found the whole thing extremely boring, a rather pointless and very slow tale in which the protagonist is probably a complete looney tune, the whole mystery being a figment of her addled imagination. Either that or she's actually part of an alien experiment masterminded by Klaus Kinski. I couldn't say for sure.

If you prefer your giallo (as this is often described) to pack a straight razor, black gloves, bloody kills and a cool score, avoid—this is not for you. If you like 'em a bit on the bizarre side (eg. Death Laid An Egg) you'll probably enjoy this a lot more than I did.