HOOP-X #18 of CINEMONSTER's Hooptober X: Hooptober, Hooptober Let Satan Come Over

My Fully Weird List and Complete Set of Reviews can be found here: Slappy McGee's Hoop-Tober 10.0 List.

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Not recommended for everyone - especially if you hate avant-garde cinema. But also, it is a film that was lost for 50 years and then rediscovered in the director's old shed... but with 20 minutes missing.

Many claim that is why the movie is so difficult to understand fully and the plot seems to be all over the place most of the time. Also, there are NO TITLE CARDS in this SILENT FILM... so that makes following the narrative extremely difficult. You don't know what the actors are mouthing at times, and character details, plot details and the like are kind of left by the wayside.

That being said...

It grew on me.

By the end, I had a completely different interpretation of the events taking place than the summary seems to indicate. I - personally - don't think this is a film about "a man takes a job as a custodian at an asylum with hopes of freeing his imprisoned wife."

No, I felt by the end of it... that this film was originally something else entirely and with a tricky little secret at the end. Could be just my wishful thinking, but I really think all of the "story" was leading up to the final images in this film.

(I'll not spoil it here with my conclusion... but if you're curious, you can ask about it in the comments and I'm happy to discuss it.)

When I first started watching this, I thought it was gonna be another crappy avant-garde misfire... but as I mentioned above... the dark fingers of madness crept in and rotted my brain, growing inside my thoughts and causing me to actually like this film.

Do I recommend it? No, not really.
(And I don't think it's a horror movie, truth be told. It's a psychological meditation with a couple of thriller-like moments and certainly an expressionistic piece of work... but, yeah, this is not horror).

But I did enjoy the ending which made me reevaluate this short cinematic journey I had taken.