Absurd (1981)

Day 82 of Sobriety.

Absurd was apparently originally developed as a sequel to director Joe D’Amato’s film Anthropophagus, which came out the previous year and also starred the physically imposing George Eastman. Looking at D’Amato’s filmography on Wikipedia, Absurd was one of ten films that he directed that year. Judging by the titles, almost all of the others seem to be porn movies.

Absurd does rather look like the product of a director with heavily divided attentions. It is not a particularly polished film by any stretch of the imagination. Apparently George Eastman was so unimpressed by the original “Anthropophagus 2”-themed screenplay, that he completely re-wrote it, modelling it largely after John Carpenter’s (then) recent hit Halloween (1978).

In Absurd, Eastman plays a psychopath with supernaturally rapid healing abilities, who has escaped from the church-sponsored medical lab that gave him his superhuman regenerative capabilities as part of an experimental treatment. The film begins with him arriving at a small US town, where he promptly goes on a killing spree while being pursued by a priest from the medical facility, who teams up with a local police officer.

 

The borrowings from Halloween are pretty obvious: the police/priest team-up is an interpolation of the psychiatrist/police team up in Halloween. The main plot thread involves the killer stalking a babysitter, and the murderer is referred to at least once during the film  as “the boogeyman.” As menacing as George Eastman is, however, he still just looks like a man (albeit a very large and intimidating one), and fails to evoke anything like the supernaturally eerie presence of the blank-masked Michael Myers.

I enjoyed Absurd well enough, but it is a pretty flawed, slap-dash film. The gore effects, while sadistically inventive and more graphic than anything in Halloween, look pretty cheap for the most part. Although it was filmed in Italy, it is meant to set in the US, with D’Amato trying to achieve that illusion by ensuring the kitchen is well stocked with US cereal boxes, and having some of the characters make a big deal about watching an American football game on TV—ironically while chomping down bowls of spaghetti.

The fact that the film seems to have been shot entirely at night gives it a certain gloomy atmosphere that I really liked, and one other stand-out element was the film’s soundtrack. The soundtrack was composed by Carlo Maria Cordio, who has composed great music for quite a lot of horror films, including Lucio Fulci’s Aenigma (1987), Pieces (1982), and Witchery (1988) to name but a few. The score for Absurd ranges from moody piano motifs accompanied by swirling, spooky synthesizers to full on Goblin-esque prog workouts. I was already very familiar with the music from its appearance on various compilation albums, and sometimes it was so amped-up and prominent that it almost seemed to overpower the other aspects of the film. Great music though.

From what I gather from reading online, most genre fans seem to prefer Absurd to its spiritual predecessor Anthropophagus, but I’m not so sure. I think I found the weird plotting of Anthropophagus a bit more interesting, but I’ll reserve judgment until such time as I can re-watch them both. I have to admit, I was half falling asleep while watching Absurd—through fatigue, though, not through any fault of the film, so I definitely feel like I owe it another viewing.