The Butterfly Room - La stanza delle farfalle
Directed by:
Jonathan ZarantonelloCinematography:
Andrew StrahornCast:
Barbara Steele, Ray Wise, Erica Leerhsen, Heather Langenkamp, Ellery Sprayberry, Camille Keaton, P. J. Soles, Adrienne King, James Karen, Joe Dante (more)Plots(1)
Ann, a reclusive elegant lady, with an obsession for butterflies, is surprisingly befriended by the eerily beautiful young Alice. Using her seductive innocence, Alice establishes a disturbing mother daughter relationship with Ann. Lured into her twisted world, Ann soon discovers that she is not the only recipient of the girl's affections.Confronted by Alice's other lady friends, Ann's shock awakens a dark, hidden past, unchaining a spiral of madness: a series of brutal and bizarre crimes that Ann will have to commit to preserve her harmless and deceptive appearances. The only one who recognizes there's something unsettling about Ann, is nine year old Julie, her next door neighbor's daughter. With the inevitable curiosity of a child, Julie begins to explore the corners of Ann's apartment, discovering a dark secret hidden in the walls of the forbidden butterfly room.No one believes what she's seen except for Ann's estranged daughter Dorothy. Horrified, she realizes that the fate of the young girl lies in her hands. To save both Julie, and herself, she must summon up the courage to confront an evil that has haunted her for years.With special effects created by Academy Award winning AFX Studio and elegant and refined visuals, in contrast with the sickness of the story, the Butterfly Room is an all female story, an American thriller, with an European soul. (Maritim Pictures)
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Reviews (3)
The creators of The Butterfly Room apparently wanted to make a tribute to good old horror movies and shockers of the kind that Hitchcock gave to viewers, particularly in the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Like those classic, the premise of this film has only one ace up its sleeve in the form of a revelation that the whole narrative builds toward, while the attraction consists in the fact that viewers have an idea of what’s going on, but they are kept in suspense until they finally see it. Unfortunately for both the film and its viewers, Jonathan Zarantonello, adapting his own novel, is very far from being a master storyteller and alchemist of suspense in the mould of Hitchcock. It’s easy to imagine that someone better could make a functional whole out of the implausible premise, which requires from the viewer a great deal of willingness to cooperate. But the director/screenwriter/author evidently doesn’t know what he actually wants. Instead of living up to his unacknowledged inspirations with a correspondingly unimaginative form, he tries desperately to score points with the audience with hyper-flashy visuals with a lot of annoyingly gratuitous post-production effects and a chronologically muddled narrative that serves solely for incorporating twists at regular intervals during the runtime instead of building tension. Though the cast will please connoisseurs, it is impossible to shake off the feeling that Zarantonello is just a more skilful version of Tomáš Magnusek, for whom films are also an opportunity to expand his collection of autographs and build himself up with the feeling that he has given an opportunity to old acting greats who otherwise no one cares about one anymore.
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The queen of old gothic horror Barbara Steele will likely be the main attraction to bring in viewers to The Butterfly Room. If anything, at least they will enjoy her presence because she hardly ever leaves the screen. Otherwise, the film is well put together, and if you accept the improbable story without thinking too much, it’s also watchable.
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The Italian-American movie The Butterfly Room is first and foremost aimed at the enthusiasts of horror movies from the 1960s to the late 1980s. It works as a movie because you can tell the cast love acting in horror movies, and Barbara Steele is absolutely incredible at seventy-five. The Butterfly Room is right up my street, so I could not care that this is an otherwise straightforward horror movie about a bad lady.
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