Paganini Horror

source: Paganini Horror

Some musical broads decide to record an unpublished Paganini song which ends up opening a portal to hell or something. Paganini Horror is bad. The story is incoherent and idiotic. It's like I get where they were going with it but they just throw in random $#!+ all over the place that doesn't make sense to the story. Some of the killing sequences were fun and bloody but this is one of those rare occurrences to where the bad acting was actually a lot more entertaining than the violence. I literally almost crapped blood with laughter from it. It also has some pacing issues like two music sequences of some rocks songs (one of them, a deliberate rip off of a Bon Jovi song) some may or may not like but at least you get to see a chick in tight pink spandex revealing the curvature of her succulent buttock so that counts for something. Plus the effects are poorly shot and looks r·tarded. In the end... (sigh) I think it's a genuine $#!+show masterpiece of unintentional humor and weirdness. I struck gold with this one. Loved it.

The female rock and roll band formed by Kate (Jasmine Main), Elena (Michel Klippstein) and Rita (Luana Ravegnini) want to release a new album, but their producer Lavinia (Maria Cristina Mastrangeli) refuses since their songs are very poor. Their friend Daniel (Pascal Persiano) buys a piece of music from a stranger called Mr. Pickett (Donald Pleasence) that explains that the music was written by Paganini himself and never released. Lavinia believes that the music will become a hit and she hires the filmmaker Mark Singer (Pietro Genuardi) to make a videoclip in a manor she has hired from her acquaintance Sylvia Hackett (Daria Nicolodi). Soon Rita and Daniel disappear and the floor collapses beneath Kate that also vanishes in the hole. The survivors try to flee from the real state but they discover that they are trapped in hell. "Paganini Horror" is a trash so lame and ridiculous that becomes funny. The awful story and screenplay associated to ham performances with a cast that overacts most of the time, highlighted by the dreadful dubbing in English and terrible cinematography make this movie a classic of the trash genre. There is no explanation why the members of the band are doomed to hell. I do not understand why Daria Nicolodi and Donald Pleasence accepted to include this film in their filmographies. My vote is three. Title (Brazil): "Paganini Horror"

This movie is so bad.... The acting, the story, the dialogues, the special effects, the direction, the sound.... Everything in this movie is soooo bad that I LOVE it!! It's supposed to be a horror movie but it's the best and funniest comedy I ever seen!! I can't stop laughing every time I'm watching it and I'm so in love with it that I ended up buying the video! If you want to laugh for 80 minutes, watch it!! The best line?? "Spirito del Male.... TI DETESTO!" - Italian people will understand.

"Paganini Horror" isn't a masterpiece,but it is a solid horror flick that will keep almost all horror fans entertained.The acting,apart from Daria Nicolodi("Deep Red","Tenebre")and Donald Pleasance("Phenomena","Halloween"),is pretty bad and the rock music is extremely cheesy and annoying.Director Luigi Cozzi("Il Gatto Nero")desperately tries to create some spooky atmosphere and,in my opinion,he partially succeeds.The film is full of rich,glowing colors,and the gore effects are pretty well-done(for example nasty head explosion,violin stabbings etc).All in all I really enjoyed this one,so check it out for yourself.

Do you want the bad news or good news? Bad news is there isn't much good news for this Italian horror flick. The good is some of the scenes and direction feel proper for a good giallo as well as the killings , soundtrack is decent, and you have Donald Pleasance giving a decent cameo with a twist, as well as Daria Nicolodi, and the girl at the beginning. The bad is the English dub makes the dialogue very bad in turn making it look like bad acting, too much unnecessary dialogue takes away from the atmosphere of the film. The producer is the most hated character was hoping for her to die first, but her death was pretty impressive. Not the worst film I've seen but wasn't as good as I was expecting as the plot sounded promising. 2/5.

This 1988 horror film features a rock band planning to make a horror style music video with a classical touch. They get an unpublished score sheet written by deceased composer, Paganini and the band is able to shoot their video in his old, ancestral home in which he haunts them. This is a cheesy flick which starts ok, but goes downhill after. Some of the dubbing is annoying, but there's a gothic horror element similar to "Phantom of the Opera" which is good and I like the score. It also has a bit of a Dario Argento feel and his ex-wife, Daria Nicolodi appears and the late, great Donald Pleasence who was in "Phenomena" aka "Creepers." If you like horror, give this a try.

This one has been hard to find for years (at least in semi-watchable form), so I'm happy to say I've finally seen it and it's ok. A dubbed Donald Pleasance plays a creepy music peddler or something who gives an all-girl pop band an old piece of sheet music that was apparently composed by a crazed composer who used human heartstrings for strings on his violin. They end up in a secluded country estate owned by Daria Nicolodi to shoot a music video for their newest hit and they end up opening up a portal to hell or something to that extent. To be honest, this movie was confusing as all hell. I never knew what was going on or what the rules were, but it's a pretty short movie and there are some fun effects and sequences that kept my interest. It's definitely far from the worst horror movie I've ever seen, but it's hard to not see it as a missed opportunity. The ending has a fun twist, too.

When a predominantly female rock band are lambasted by their producer for failing to write a decent tune, their male drummer purchases an unpublished score written by violinist Paganini, who was rumoured to have murdered his wife and sold his soul to the devil in exchange for fame and fortune. The band use the music as the basis for their newest song, and decide to shoot the accompanying video in the very house in which Paganini sealed his Satanic deal. This proves to be a bad idea when they discover that evil forces are still at work in the old building, where time and space have their own rules and a mysterious masked murderer lurks, armed with deadly violin equipped with a spring-loaded blade. "What a strange light," mentions one character to her friends as they investigate the spooky house at the centre of the Paganini Horror. "It's more than strange", comes the reply, "it's weird." This dreadful exchange of dialogue (one of many) is fairly representative of this late-80s Italian horror as a whole: it makes no sense whatsoever—not surprising since it was written and directed by Luigi Cozzi, the man who gave us dumb, Z-grade, trash sci-fi flicks Hercules and Starcrash, and the very daft Alien rip-off Contamination. Cozzi seems to be aiming at delivering a Dario Argento-style supernatural horror in the vein of Suspiria or Inferno, but being a total hack, only manages to emulate Argento's garish lighting with any degree of success. The plot is so muddled that even Argento's most outrageous work seems logical in comparison (believe it or not, one character is inexplicably killed by wood fungus!), the direction is basic at best, and the score is a diabolical mix of 80s pop-rock and classical music. Not one of the cast puts in a credible performance, with particularly bad acting from Pietro Genuardi as the band's video director Mark Singer, who is supposedly a top horror film maker, but who works with a single shoulder mounted camera, no crew and absolutely no sign of a script or storyboard; even Argento's muse Daria Nicolodi and Donald Pleasance are dreadful, with Nicolodi overacting wildly and Pleasance looking rather embarrassed to be involved. Don't go expecting much in the way of decent gore either: most of the deaths are pretty bloodless, and even the most gruesome moment—a woman's head crushed by an invisible wall—will have you laughing at the cheap effect, achieved by pressing the actress's face against a sheet of glass whilst running fake blood over her head. If it hadn't been for the fact that a couple of the women are very easy on the eye and happily squeeze into body-hugging outfits, I probably would have fallen asleep way before Cozzi calls it a day and wraps the film up with a simply awful surprise ending.

Maybe it was just the atrocious dubbing. Maybe the translators were underpaid. That one star is for the costume department. There were some funky dresses. How on earth did this movie even get made?