HoopTober 8: Mosquito Takes Mandragon

Movie 16
1st of 2 films set in the woods

There's only one name more guaranteed to ensure film-making quality than Bruno Mattei or Claudio Fragasso and that, my friends, is Joe D'Amato. And yes, he was the director of this movie and, yes, it is a movie.

And it's a movie with a story. And the story is... well.. that's where things get a little less unequivocal, I suppose.

So, a Vietnam vet returns home (this is an 80's movie, remember), he kills his cheating wife only to have her menagerie of birds attack him in vengeful feathered fury, plucking out his eyes in a way which brings a bit of gore to proceedings but which honestly doesn't look as good in the film as it does on that poster.

Anyway, fast forward to Loyola University New Orleans in "present day" - the beating heart of cutting edge ornithology. An expedition is formed to find a rare species of woodpecker in the Louisiana woods. Tank tops and mullets reign supreme in this van full of spunky young tweeter twits as they venture forth, only to stumble upon the abandoned house where this attack on the unfortunate cuckolded murderer took place all those years before. Well, I say stumble upon, even though they are directed straight to the place by the Vietnam vet in question, only he has aged so badly he's become Robert Vaughn who, despite being blind for twenty years is the last person to have seen this woodpecker, and who now spends his days uttering gnomic pronouncements about this species of the picidae family and also some stuff about retribution from beyond the grave.

I am genuinely curious how much Vaughn pocketed for turning up for a day, putting on dark glasses, and being filmed sitting in a chair and every now and then sitting up and peering around as if he has sensed something supernatural in the atmosphere. Once these students get into the forest, the film frequently cuts back to footage of this kind of thing, suggesting he has some kind of psychic link with what is going on. I think it's supposed to be a kind of Scatman Crothers thing, but it's hard to impute logic or intent behind a lot of what happens in the film.

For all its impenetrable weirdness and ineptitude from a story point of view - and let's be honest, if it didn't exhibit that kind of hamfistedness, I would have been disappointed - this is a pretty entertaining late 80's Italsploitation jam. The movie spins its wheels for sections, as it tries vainly to find some dramatic impetus to keep us interested (or even convinced) by these university students just hanging around in an old house, but when the zombies appear - spoiler: yes, there are zombies, and when they eventually appeared I gave a sigh of relief that the integrity of the Zombie franchise had been preserved - this being originally marketed as Zombie 5: Killing Birds. But I digress. When they do appear, we get some decent horror set pieces that make it worth enduring the film's slower passages.

This is far from my favourite period in Italian exploitation cinema, so this probably ranks as one of the stronger efforts outside the isolated brilliance of guys like Michele Soavi. It's probably upper tier D'Amato.