Review of Aenigma

It's commonly agreed by Euro-horror enthusiasts that Fulci's talents began to rapidly diminish following his deeply offensive (but also incredibly awesome) 1982 giallo, The New York Ripper. Having seen his interesting but snail-paced A Cat in the Brain (1990), and his depressingly awful Demonia (1990), I was inclined to agree, but my positive reaction to The Devil's Honey (a terrific sado-erotic drama from 1986) made me more interested in checking out his latter-day efforts. Aenigma is often singled out for ridicule by viewers, and to an extent I can see why. Commonly referred to as a Carrie rip-off, but even more derivative of Patrick (1978), Aenigma chronicles a comatose's girl's psychic revenge on her catty schoolmates and hunky gym teacher after they pull a cruel prank on her. Having been hit by a car after fleeing the humiliating scene, in which the gym teacher pretended to seduce her, she possesses a new classmate named Eva (played by Lara Lamberti) and begins to pick off her tormentors in increasingly bizarre ways. Things are complicated when the promiscuous Eva begins an illicit affair with a dreamboat doctor (an often befuddled Jared Martin), whose subsequent relationship with another student draws the jealous wrath of Eva and her possessor. This revenge story is often nonsensical, and at times downright comical, but Fulci brings some of the same artistry and imagination that made his earlier thrillers so effective. The cinematography by Luigi Ciccarese is sometimes flat, and has that hazy soft focus and heavy blue gel lighting that plagued so many films in the eighties, but becomes more nuanced and colorful in the film's supernatural scenes. A sequence in which a girl is smothered to death by snails is usually singled out for derision, and it does come across as a misguided attempt by Fulci to outdo the spider attack scene from The Beyond (1981), but I admire Fulci's balls in trying to make snails scary. It doesn't work, but he later provides more effective jolts in a nightmarish museum death scene, in which the exhibits come to life and attack one of the villainous schoolgirls. Overall a lesser effort from the prolific Fulci, but far more entertaining than I'd been led to believe, and it still gives the impression that an artist is behind the camera, struggling against all odds to inject some originality and style into a derivative and underfunded commercial venture.