Needed on Blu-ray: Lamberto Bava's IL GIOKO (1999)

I'm as guilty as most when it comes to looking down on new horror movies that are plainly derivative and not much more. However, I've also always appreciated those instances when a new film serves as a kitchen (or mad laboratory) of the genre, mixing up elements from earlier films that one wouldn't necessarily expect to be complementary, somehow producing a mutation that is fraught with familiar touchstones yet original in its approach.

One such film is Lamberto Bava's undeservedly obscure La gioko ("The Game"), his third of four offerings for Reteitalia's brief Italian terror-suspense anthology series Alta Tensione, which ran from June through July 1999. The others in this series, in their original order of broadcast, were Il maestro del terrore (aka THE PRINCE OF TERROR), L'uomo che non voleva moirire (aka THE MAN WHO DIDN'T WANT TO DIE), and Testamente oculare (aka EYEWITNESS). For some reason, Il gioko is misfiled on the IMDb under the title SCHOOL OF FEAR, which is a banal if reasonable enough title, but it seems to contradict the fact that it has never had an English-friendly release anywhere. The original teleplay was a collaboration with three writers with whom Lamberto had worked before: Roberto Gandus (MACABRE and his previous Brivido giallo series of 1987), Dardano Sacchetti (A BLADE IN THE DARK, BLASTFIGHTER, DEMONS and DEMONS 2, DEVILFISH), and Giorgio Stegani (the rebranded La maschera del demonio of 1990). The title of the film itself is tricky, a deliberate misspelling of "il gioco" in the then-timely manner of Stephen King's PET SEMATERY, the misspelling suggesting the word as it might be transcribed or coded by a child.

The pre-credits sequence opens with the story already in progress. It's the proverbial dark and stormy night, bursts of lightning flashing on and off a dreary, almost lunar façade that evokes Villa Graps from Mario Bava's KILL, BABY... KILL! Somewhere inside this educational facility, which is located somewhere near Pisa, a girl in her early teens is shown exploring a series of dark corridors. Sudden shadows and taunting voices goad her into an adjoining laboratory full of jars containing myriad creepy anatomical odds and ends. One of these is accidentally overturned and she flees the noise she has made. She soon finds herself with only one possible exit—by climbing up the bricks-and-mortar tunnel housing a deep well. She undertakes the climb in desperation, clobbered by the pouring rain, but her efforts are ultimately for naught. Her failure dissolves to the bedroom of another girl her own age—this is Anna Giusti (a coolly effective Morena Turchi), the shot opening on a shot of her stuffed toy dog (an important detail) and panning over to the child in bed with teary eyes. Despite her tears, she walks to her rain-lashed window, writes some illegible word on the pane with her finger, then runs back into bed, pulling the cover over her apparent sobbing, an illusion shattered once we cut below the sheet to find her laughing maliciously.

The story proper begins with the early arrival at the school by a new faculty member, Diana Berti (Alessandra Acciai), eager to begin her first day as an Italian Literature instructor. The school itself is upscale and its co-ed pupils are all the children of privileged families. The school uniform, worn by both the boys and girls, is a kind of oversized blazer that suggests the adults they will soon bloom into as well as David Byrne's fat suit from STOP MAKING SENSE. Diana knows she is entering into a delicate situation, replacing a teacher who made a spectacle of her death, and approaches the children gently, explaining that it's her wish to be one of them, to be accepted not only as a teacher but as their friend. At the end of her first day, she meets with the school's principal (a well-cast Daria Nicolodi, still looking good) and her handsy vice-principal (Stefano de Sando), whose abilities to say things sweetly while implying the sour and far worse suggests they might both be graduates of that catty academy in SUSPIRIA. After being "gently" advised by them to dress more conservatively for work in the future, a somewhat shaken Diana returns to her apartment where she grades surprisingly evolved philosophical papers by the students within view of a lovingly preserved teddy bear. Things take a steeply unpleasant turn as the disappearance of the pre-credits classmate becomes known, and as Diana attempts to form a bond with her most gifted student, Anna, who is clearly pursuing this bond for impish reasons of her own. By undertaking explorations of her own, Diana discovers a secret society among her students, whose status she initially respects until she feels herself at the center of the latest of its malicious "games"—one of which may have led her predecessor to self-destruction. One night, after witnessing the apparent rape of a newly-absent student by some of the boys, an hysteria Diana goes to the Principal—and to her incidentally collected police commissioner boyfriend (Jean Hebert)—to report all she knows, but her confessions only lead to making it known that she was only accepted for this teaching position following years of intensive therapy after being raped herself. This traumatic event is randomly cut into the film as a memory that unfolds into sense gradually, much like the red shoes trauma in Argento's TENEBRAE (which Lamberto assistant-directed), and it's given an absurd twist by having Diana dressed as Dorothy in THE WIZARD OF OZ while being chased and assaulted by a malevolent trio wearing amusement park cartoon heads. The empty swimming pool in which she was attacked dovetails nicely with the setting of the well in the pre-credits sequence, even proposing it as a metaphor for that earlier experience.  

Yes. There's a mysterious dwarf in the film also.

The prior elements Il gioko recombines into an interesting new order can be traced back to Roman Polanski's THE TENANT (a protagonist stepping into the life vacated by a suicidal jumper) and Wolf Rilla's VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (the private education of a group of elite-natured children), as well as Narciso Ibañez Serrador's THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED (La residencia) and WHO WOULD KILL A CHILD? (Quien puede mater a un niño?)—the latter of which was first known in America as ISLAND OF THE DAMNED, thus arriving at its own conscious connection with the earlier Rilla film. As I believe the accompanying images show, one of the film's great strengths is the superb, often beautifully composed cinematography of Gianfranco Transunto, who photographed all the Alta Tensione films and two of Lamberto's Brivido giallo titles, HOUSE OF THE OGRE and DINNER WITH A VAMPIRE. As with many Italian films, particularly those made for television, the characters come across as more than realistically attractive and fashionable, but working within that standard, Lamberto has by now become a smooth and skilled professional; he is expert at staging atmospheric set-pieces but he can also put two or more characters together in conversation in ways that don't look awkward, as they sometimes do in certain scenes of SHOCK and his early solo work A BLADE IN THE DARK. The film is also nicely helped along by Simon Boswell's spidery soundtrack.

I was able to view Il gioko as a fan-made disc that added English fan-subs to the duper remains of a television broadcast, with commercial breaks edited out. I can't steer you to that, but a much better-looking copy of the film can be found on YouTube under a Russian title; it's worth checking out for a taste, but you'll probably be driven away by how the soundtrack is constantly overridden by a Russian voice translating the dialogue. We've had Dario Argento's DOOR INTO DARKNESS and Christopher Lee's THEATER MACABRE on DVD and Blu-ray, so why not Lamberto Bava's Brividi giallo and Alta tensione movies as well?

There is an accepted belief about these horror films that they don't really matter because they were made for Italian television as the Italian film industry sank into an abyss from which it has yet to fully recover. I see these films as a lesser, yes, but still important refuge where the surviving artisans the Italian Gothic were continuing to work, to experiment with new ideas, and even to realize some old unfulfilled dreams. For example, THE MAN WHO DIDN'T WANT TO DIE was based on poliziotesschi novelist Giorgio Scernanenco's novel Il centodelitti, an unrealized project of Mario Bava's—scripted by Gianfranco Clerici, the author of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST! I might have chosen to write about it instead, but I've never found this grueling drama with English subtitles.

While its story is somewhat dragged down by its obligation to unfold at least partly as a police procedural tinged with incidental romance, not to mention the obvious limitations imposed on its telling by its 1990s made-for-television status, Il gioko nevertheless offers a pointed cautionary tale about the hazy separation between adolescence and adulthood, the way the world turns on an ugly political system that ensures and perpetuates the untouchability of the privileged and the decadence of the indolent. Given its opening and other horrific moments, it may strike you as disappointing that it doesn't build to an electrifying climax. Instead, it gives us something we can chew a bit longer than the usual fireworks; it delivers our troubled heroine to a new stage of adulthood, where she realizes that growing up is just the accepted form of giving in... to the games the architects of our money-driven society continue to play, even as children.

   

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