For those who have seen more than one giallo on their watch, please save yourself the time. If you must know what the hub-bub is truly about, I will release spoilers later in the review.
To get right to the underlying reason for watching these kinds of films, Mimsy gets naked twice: once briefly in a fairly rapid love making scene (where the camera likes to pan away) and at the very end with the "surprise" twistish ending. The murders don't really happen until the 1:20 mark, and there is no real gore to speak of until the very end, so be prepared for a very LONG wait for anything to happen.
By the way, did I mention that this film is very dull? When I see words like "hypnotic" and "dreamlike" popping up when describing any film, they seem to be code for "drawn out" or "putting me to sleep".
The plot goes something like this:
Mimsy Farmer is a technician at a factory (either producing chemicals or beer, I couldn't tell which), who has frequent nightmares about her childhood and her mother (particularly how she died). In the course of this, she has a meeting with her boyfriend and some friends of his, some of whom appear to be dignitaries from Africa who converse about the dawning of science over witchcraft. As the story progresses, Mimsy's mental health starts to deteriorate as she begins to see a little girl who looks strangely like herself at the same age, as well as her mother in mirrors and the like. By the end of it, she is dressing like her mother and has gone quite mad, killing her boyfriend, the elderly scholar who resided beside her and her mother's former lover. It is revealed that Mimsy interrupted her mother having intercourse with the "lover" (or payee, if you know what I mean) and killed her own mother by pushing her out a window...thus, over time, the guilt (and maybe a little bit of shamanistic help from the aforementioned African dignitaries) pushed her over the edge quite literally.
Yet, while one could consider this to be a proper ending for the main character, it is further revealed that the 3 people she killed are indeed still alive (which I am guessing the entire sequence was "in her head"), and they proceed to take her body to an underground tunnel, where everyone given any screen time in the movie participates in a cannibalistic ritual, with her boyfriend gutting her and the rest lining up to pull out a piece to eat.
Now I can respect the visual aspect of the last shot, which (other than the Mimsy nudity) is the only saving grace of the film. Otherwise (as a friend put it tonight after finishing the film), "that's a pretty convoluted way to get your dinner".
All in all, I was just too bored in the end to care about either twist, as I could see the "Mimsy dying the same way her mother did" ending the moment the method was revealed, and the cannibal ritual stuff was never dealt with very well to the degree that it felt tacked onto the main story.
To get right to the underlying reason for watching these kinds of films, Mimsy gets naked twice: once briefly in a fairly rapid love making scene (where the camera likes to pan away) and at the very end with the "surprise" twistish ending. The murders don't really happen until the 1:20 mark, and there is no real gore to speak of until the very end, so be prepared for a very LONG wait for anything to happen.
By the way, did I mention that this film is very dull? When I see words like "hypnotic" and "dreamlike" popping up when describing any film, they seem to be code for "drawn out" or "putting me to sleep".
The plot goes something like this:
Mimsy Farmer is a technician at a factory (either producing chemicals or beer, I couldn't tell which), who has frequent nightmares about her childhood and her mother (particularly how she died). In the course of this, she has a meeting with her boyfriend and some friends of his, some of whom appear to be dignitaries from Africa who converse about the dawning of science over witchcraft. As the story progresses, Mimsy's mental health starts to deteriorate as she begins to see a little girl who looks strangely like herself at the same age, as well as her mother in mirrors and the like. By the end of it, she is dressing like her mother and has gone quite mad, killing her boyfriend, the elderly scholar who resided beside her and her mother's former lover. It is revealed that Mimsy interrupted her mother having intercourse with the "lover" (or payee, if you know what I mean) and killed her own mother by pushing her out a window...thus, over time, the guilt (and maybe a little bit of shamanistic help from the aforementioned African dignitaries) pushed her over the edge quite literally.
Yet, while one could consider this to be a proper ending for the main character, it is further revealed that the 3 people she killed are indeed still alive (which I am guessing the entire sequence was "in her head"), and they proceed to take her body to an underground tunnel, where everyone given any screen time in the movie participates in a cannibalistic ritual, with her boyfriend gutting her and the rest lining up to pull out a piece to eat.
Now I can respect the visual aspect of the last shot, which (other than the Mimsy nudity) is the only saving grace of the film. Otherwise (as a friend put it tonight after finishing the film), "that's a pretty convoluted way to get your dinner".
All in all, I was just too bored in the end to care about either twist, as I could see the "Mimsy dying the same way her mother did" ending the moment the method was revealed, and the cannibal ritual stuff was never dealt with very well to the degree that it felt tacked onto the main story.