Film Review: IL MOSTRO DELLA CRIPTA: A Lazy Italian Horror Riff on ‘80s American Nostalgia [Locarno 2021]

Il mostro della cripta Review

Il mostro della cripta (2021) Film Review from the 74th Annual Locarno Film Festival, a movie directed by Daniele Misischia, starring Tobia De Angelis, Amanda Campana, Pasquale Petrolo, Giovanni Calcagno, Nicola Branchini, and Chiara Caselli.

Relishing in a particularly American palate of media nostalgia is one thing, but fully embodying that – problematic elements and all, in the Year of Our Potential Alien Overlords 2021 – with little self-awareness, I might add – is another thing completely. Especially when you’re director Daniele Misischia, who’s coming at it from a different culture and continent altogether. Il mostro della cripta (Italian for “The Crypt Monster”) is an occasionally fun but pretty lazy riff on the West’s recent ‘80s sci-fi horror craze, revealing the hard truth that the influence of Stranger Things and its ilk may have finally run its course.

Set in 1988 in the small Italian town of Bomba, 20-year-old movie geek Giò (Tobia De Angelis) is trying to make his own slasher movie on VHS, with the help of his longtime friend Alberino (Nicola Branchini) on sound and popular girl Vanessa (Amanda Campana) in the leading role. Content with his lack of popularity (but not with his lack of a girlfriend, as he keeps trying and failing to woo Vanessa), Giò spends his non-moviemaking hours watching ‘80s action flicks from the U.S., bemoaning European art-house cinema (Nanni Moretti gets a specific callout), and reading comics from his favorite cartoonist, Diego Busirivici (Pasquale Petrolo).

Although this latest edition of Busirivici’s comic is giving Giò some pause, as a bunch of the landmarks and set-pieces look oddly familiar to those around Bomba. A thin, tall obelisk in the black-and-white panels looks just like the one on an abandoned mountainside just out of town … the church where the freakish monster lives looks just like the chapel in the town square … the ancient text with instructions to unlock the catacombs are, as the boys soon find out, scarily accurate …

Alberino tells Giò that he’s just being paranoid and that he shouldn’t take comic books seriously. But that’s before townspeople start dying … and in extremely grisly ways. Due to poor timing and bad luck everyone now suspects Giò as the murderer, forcing him to go on the run to find Busirivici and learn what he knows about Bomba’s dark secret before any more Bomba citizens suffer a similarly violent fate.

Misischia undoubtedly has a love for Hollywood filmmaking and leans into it just like the Duffer brothers, Andy Muschietti, and any other nostalgia-poisoned thirtysomething filmmaker has done over the past decade to appease the pop culture tide. Hell, Giò even has an American flag pinned up in his room beneath his Aliens and Bad Taste posters – the perfect Film Twitter bro of yesteryear who has yet to be radicalized by the communists! (I, for one, absolutely cannot relate.) But unlike a Cosmatos or a de la Vega whose films tend to emulate a sense of time and place, Misischia’s just mimics it. The callbacks to everything from Diff’rent Strokes to Nightmare on Elm Street become vacuous, and the Blue Öyster Cult needle drops – not just BÖC, mind you, but specifically the song “Burnin’ For You” and only that song – grow really tiresome.

There are some acknowledgments thrown in about the gross social norms of the ‘80s, but for the most part the film embodies those tropes unquestioningly with nary a glance of cultural nor political hindsight. Similarly, a few laughs do push the film slightly in the direction of the self-aware, but then it stutters and falls back into its uncritical approach. Il mostro della cripta plays like a missed opportunity: a shallow attempt to bank on current media trends rather than a chance to actually create something memorable, much less fun.

Maybe that’s too harsh, as to Misischia’s credit there are some wild twists and turns in the film’s lore that keep you on your toes. There’s also some truly gnarly kills in here that place it perfectly in-between sci-fi and slasher – so much so that one might dare to suggest a sense of cosmic horror about the whole affair. And despite some rough writing given to his character, Petrolo really chews his scenes as the jaded pulp cartoonist.

All in all, Il mostro della cripta will be slightly amusing to the most shallow of genre film geeks, and everyone else will find it rather annoying. If you wanna consume problematic media, then just go straight to the source and watch some actual slashers from the ‘80s instead.

Rating: 4/10

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