The Scary of Sixty-First

The movie should have been a cool psychological thriller. It started well but became incoherent. There was no explanation to why things were happening. People just started acting crazy for no reason.

And rather than focusing on the story/legend /conspiracy, they were more focused on meaningless and irritating sexual activity.

While the giallo influence may have been intentional, it didn't land for me. The conspiracy-driven plot combined with ritual horror was more frustrating than eerie. The constant tonal shifts, including the off-putting audio choices, made it feel more awkward than unsettling. I kept wondering if the weirdness was part of the charm for fans of this style, but it just didn't click. If you're into offbeat horror that pushes the boundary of strange, it might be for you, but I found myself distracted by how rough it all felt.

Even with its strange premise, it felt like it was trying too hard to shock rather than build suspense. The Epstein conspiracy angle didn't add depth, and I kept waiting for something to pay off that never did. Overall, it's a miss for me.

Two roomies score a suspiciously cheap apartment in Manhattan, but after a first night of disturbed sleep the nightmare never ends ...

Strange shoe-string budget production, written by two of the actors. It's well edited and paced, cinematography pretty rough, probably too much dialogue, but the score has a nice synth vibe here and there, and the sensibility is reminiscent of pervie '70s stuff, from the era when New York was a nutters' paradise.

The shape of it is intriguing, with three overlapping delusions fuelled by pharamceuticals. I say three, because there are three principal characters, each of whom has gone off the deep end in her own way, but the delusions are inseparable from each other.

The intro makes a point of figures and faces in the lofty architecture overseeing the madness that's about to break out below, and there's a sense of a demiurge in charge of an evil world, personified by the media characters of those involved in the Jeffrey Epstein affair. In the climax, which involves a protective magic crystal, there's an insert of what looks like Epstein's face, tying him in with an occult force at work. Reviews emphasizing the reality of that affair are missing the point entirely.

The performances are energetic but patchy, failing to give meaning in any subtle way - that's probably down to a naive reliance on dialogue and lack of experience in the direction and acting. Mind you, the mental breakdown of the Jewish girl is worryingly authentic. The sex scenes have a certain JNSQ - or maybe they're just porn. There is humour in the air, but the only time I got a sniff of it was when the boyfriend is dragged along to witness the aftermath.

In the end the story didn't seem coherent to me, either pychologically or emotionally, but still an engaging mystery of why we insist on mysteries.

This movie is outrageous, purposely offensive, gross, stupid, and overflowing with conspiracies and I absolutely loved every minute of it. I am not sure I have laughed so hard in my life as I did to some of the more outrageous scenes. I can only assume the bad reviews here are from prudish folk who either wandered into the wrong film or just are not capable of understanding a joke, albeit, a wildly offensive one.

If you love goofy conspiracies (Epstein, Clintons, etc) and can stand an offensive joke and some seriously whacky sex scenes, and would like it all wrapped up in the style of a 70s Italian slasher flick, you will love this movie.

Neither suspenseful and self-aware enough to be a gallo film nor clever in its psychological distress of the stripe of Argento, nor as conspiracy-addled as Eyes Wide Shut (despite the material lends itself to a serious search-no Aquino, no Wexner Ohio police force, none of the threads re: Epstein's being a tapped gifted student the likes of Sarfatti; an episode of Subliminal Jihad will take you much further). Nor is the film willing to hurl itself into experimentation and formal editing proper (a Brakhage-esque experiment in conspiracy qua audio-visual editing, like a Project Wandering Soul meets Paul McCarthy, would be genuinely interesting). This is a film that loses its thread early on and lapses into clichés that do not embrace their being clichés, which means the film refuses to be self-referential. It loses the thread in a way that is similar to Jacques Rozier's Maine Ocean, but is not as smartly edited or funny. This ends up looking like the director made a poor film not as a critical exercise with which to playfully challenge but because they simply could not make a good film. The sole saving grace is, at certain points, the lighting. A pity, because the Epstein matter lends itself to cinema. Go watch Francesco Rosi for much more accurate and affecting cinematic portrays of conspiracy. I do hope the director's subsequent film takes up the challenge of making a genuinely good film.