I abso-bloody-lutely loved Necrostorm's first movie Adam Chaplin, directed by and starring Emanuele De Santi, but was rather disappointed by their follow up, Taeter City, which was helmed by Chaplin's special effects man Giulio De Santi: it tried hard to impress, but simply didn't work anywhere near as well as a whole, despite once again featuring tons of superb splatter. But I'm a generous kind of guy, always willing to give a film-maker a second chance to impress, and with Hotel Inferno, impress me De Santi most certainly has. As Yoda might say. If he watched gore films.
Shot entirely in first-person POV, Hotel Inferno is quite unlike anything I have ever witnessed before. Sure, I've seen first-person POV employed sparingly in films like Doom and House of the Dead, but never has it been used as fully or so effectively as it is here, the viewer being fully immersed in the action from start to incredibly bloody finish. Quite how De Santi pulls off some of his technical trickery is simply mind-boggling, the whole film feeling like one long take during which numerous foes are dispatched in graphic fashion by the film's anti-hero Frank Zimosa, the hit-man through whose eyes we witness the action.
Zimosa (Rayner Bourton) has been hired by mysterious businessman Jorge Mistrandia (Michael Howe) to kill a couple currently staying in a fancy schmancy hotel in some strange, unspecified foreign country. Mistrandia, who keeps in contact with Zimosa via high-tech glasses that relay everything the hit-man sees, insists that the kills be carried out in a ritualistic manner with specific weapons. Always the professional, Zimosa obeys, but becomes concerned when his second intended victim displays some worrying symptoms before he has even been touched, spewing blood and pus all over the bathroom while mumbling about 'She' being 'fed on pain'. Suspecting that something is seriously wrong, the hit-man decides to split, but Mistrandia has other ideas and sends other killers to prevent Zimosa from leaving the hotel.
What follows is an hour and a quarter of extreme, jaw dropping brutality, with the plot taking strange turns into the world of the occult, pitting Zimosa against an army of deformed zombie-like creatures and—in the manner of the video games that it so closely emulates—an end-of-level boss that is super powerful and seriously freaky. Admittedly, the film loses focus in the final act and feels a little longer than it really needs to be, but overall this is a very impressive piece of horror cinema—innovative, exciting, and oh-so-incredibly-gory!
Shot entirely in first-person POV, Hotel Inferno is quite unlike anything I have ever witnessed before. Sure, I've seen first-person POV employed sparingly in films like Doom and House of the Dead, but never has it been used as fully or so effectively as it is here, the viewer being fully immersed in the action from start to incredibly bloody finish. Quite how De Santi pulls off some of his technical trickery is simply mind-boggling, the whole film feeling like one long take during which numerous foes are dispatched in graphic fashion by the film's anti-hero Frank Zimosa, the hit-man through whose eyes we witness the action.
Zimosa (Rayner Bourton) has been hired by mysterious businessman Jorge Mistrandia (Michael Howe) to kill a couple currently staying in a fancy schmancy hotel in some strange, unspecified foreign country. Mistrandia, who keeps in contact with Zimosa via high-tech glasses that relay everything the hit-man sees, insists that the kills be carried out in a ritualistic manner with specific weapons. Always the professional, Zimosa obeys, but becomes concerned when his second intended victim displays some worrying symptoms before he has even been touched, spewing blood and pus all over the bathroom while mumbling about 'She' being 'fed on pain'. Suspecting that something is seriously wrong, the hit-man decides to split, but Mistrandia has other ideas and sends other killers to prevent Zimosa from leaving the hotel.
What follows is an hour and a quarter of extreme, jaw dropping brutality, with the plot taking strange turns into the world of the occult, pitting Zimosa against an army of deformed zombie-like creatures and—in the manner of the video games that it so closely emulates—an end-of-level boss that is super powerful and seriously freaky. Admittedly, the film loses focus in the final act and feels a little longer than it really needs to be, but overall this is a very impressive piece of horror cinema—innovative, exciting, and oh-so-incredibly-gory!