Zeder

Pop K-Zones

Zeder
aka Revenge Of The Dead
Italy 1983 Directed by Pupi Avati
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Gets into spoiler territory for the last shot of the movie.

Wow... Zeder is far more restrained and atmospheric than I would expect from any other Italian horror film which springs to mind from the same decade as this. It’s written and directed by Pupi Avati, best known in this country for his celebrated giallo The House With Laughing Windows (yeah, can’t remember if I liked that one or not but it’s in one of the Blu Ray upgrade piles for me to revisit for the blog at some point in the future) and it’s got, to my mind, a surprisingly Western attitude in the way it’s been shot and edited. 

This one starts off with an extended prologue set in 1956, where a young girl is being used by researchers to find the once dead guy who is sometimes getting up and rising from a hidden burial ground to kill the occasional person. In the process, the little girl is ferociously attacked by the object of the researchers’ desire and she has to have a leg amputated. 

We then switch to the present day and a young couple, Stefano (played by Gabriele Lavia, who has been in at least three Argento movies at this point) and Alessandra (played by Anne Canovas). On their first year of a wedding anniversary, Allessandra gifts Stefano a present of an old, electric typewriter... Stefano being a budding novelist working on his third novel (even though the first two have not found a publisher). Then, as he is trying it out, he finds the remains of two letters on the remnants of the old typewriter ribbon, written by one Paulo Zeder and talking about overcoming the barriers of death and about the mysterious K-Zones which can be found dotted around the planet. Basically, areas of anti-time are found two metres below the Earth in certain places which allow for a return from death. Zeder has donated his own body to the research and hidden it. 

Realising that this is an excellent idea for his third novel, Stefano and the reluctant Alessandra begin to investigate and end up stumbling into a conspiracy of an interested party who seem to be working hand in hand with the police and who also are acting out of their research, funded by a private investor and made possible by special order of the church and involving the secret archives in Vatican City. This all culminates in a bunch of researchers who cross paths with Stefano and, via mysterious bloody deaths and secret passages etc, all end up in the grounds of a long abandoned hotel and its K-Zone in the grounds. 

And yeah... it feels like a somewhat suppressed Italian horror film of the period... RAI TV seem to have put money into it so I suspect the reduced opportunities for gore and the more subtle approach might indicate it was originally made with an Italian TV broadcast in mind but instead given a theatrical release. That’s my guess. 

So what you have here is a strange hybrid. A bunch of familiar Italian faces embroiled in a conspiracy theory which is somewhat like a procedural in a giallo or a polizei with a score by the great Riz Ortolani which definitely (and I suspect quite deliberately) goes into the kind of Goblin-like territory found in a lot of the Italian horrors of this period. But, as I said, it’s quite restrained in the way it’s doing things... with a definite slow burn kind of atmosphere and, to my mind, this makes it much more watchable (though perhaps not as fun) as a lot of its contemporaries. 

Similarly, Lavia and Canovas seem a lot stronger and subtler in their performances here than in other films I could name, which all adds to the atmosphere that the government and some religious order are collaborating to find out just what is going on and, it is hinted, making sure the knowledge is in the hands of only a few. Because, of course, who wants a cure for death on an already overpopulated planet. 

Now, I can’t imagine being as gripped and enthralled as I was by a second watch of this one (although I will certainly try in a decade or so) as much as, say, a film by Fulci or Argento... but for the first watch, I was certainly on the edge of my seat for some of it and intrigued to see how the premise was going to be revealed. There was the occasional jump scare in the movie too... one of the most effective of which kinda made no sense. I mean, why would a bunch of pigeons come to be found and released from inside a closed coffin? But it’s fine, the quality of the rest of the film excuses these little indulgences. 

The end of Zeder was something which I found was nicely ambiguous too. Although it supports the underlying premise of the film in no uncertain terms, it also manages to be nicely vague in its tone. I mean, that last shot... is Stefano screaming in pain because of something which is happening to him behind his back or is he voicing the repercussions of what he, himself, has brought about? It is, perhaps, an unsettling moment when looked back in contemplation... which is a nice description of the film itself, I think. I’ve been ummming and ahhing about whether I should pick this one up for years and now that I have, I wish I’d seen this one sooner. It’s an untypical entry into the Italian horror genre... at least compared to many of the ones I’ve seen.