Rating: C-
Dir: Claudio Guerín
Star: Renaud Verley, Viveca Lindfors, Maribel Martín, Nuria Gimeno
You want a cursed movie? The director of this one fell from the bell-tower on the last day of shooting and was killed: the film ended up completed by Juan Antonio Bardem (yes, he’s Javier’s uncle). The version reviewed here is the commonly available one, running 92 minutes. The “uncut” one includes such joys as ‘we see the full shot of Marta eating soup’. Not being a soup fetishist, I didn’t make the effort, and sincerely doubt all the gazpacho slurping in the world would make much difference. This does a reasonably good job setting up its premise, then gives up on its plot in favour of various, vaguely giallo-inspired bits of nonsense, and returns diminish consequently.
The lead character is Juan (Verley), who is released from a psychiatric facility after several years, having been put there following accusations by his aunt Marta (Lindfors) – y’know, the soup drinker – and her three daughters, who have an eye on inheriting Juan’s fortune. For Marta is the executor of her sisters’ estate, and if Juan gets re-committed, her side of the family would become the beneficiaries. Juan is… a little odd, and it’s a legitimate question to ask if he is mad, putting aside the claims of his relatives. For instance, his first job out of the asylum is a short-term one at the local slaughterhouse, which he quits after telling his employer, “I’ve learned enough.” He’s clearly not going to let it lie.
It makes the subsequent relationship between Juan and his aunt/cousins all the more dubious, with them popping round for tea, snark and sexually-charged conversations. The young man certainly has an odd sense of humour, playing more or less elaborate pranks on anyone in the area. For instance, after one of his cousins is menaced by a group of hunters, Juan goes through a scheme involving fake broken arms, in order to get the ringleader to touch Juan’s penis. Oh, hold my aching sides. Or he comes up with an undetectable latex mask, so he can pretend to tear his own eyes out (top). I guess he must have had a lot of time on his hands in the loony bin.
Mind you, their idea of dealing with Juan, is knocking him out and using him as a counterweight to the new, two-ton church bell. Hang on: so they could just have killed him all along to get their inheritance, rendering the whole “insanity” thing completely irrelevant? It’s this kind of blatant idiocy which separates Bell from the superior Hammer films along similar lines, written by Jimmy Sangster, such as Crescendo. Naturally, such a needlessly convoluted method of dispatch is bound to fail, and Juan has one more “prank” left in him. By the end though, you’d be hard pushed to care, since nobody here is the slightest bit sympathetic, and the whole thing ends up about as appealing as last week’s warmed-over minestrone. And that’s probably enough soup references.