Saturday, January 7, 2012

More Extreme European Horror! Nympha Film Review!

Nympha is an obscure, low budget Italian horror film made a few years. I had never heard of it, but Pollystaffle owner Chad Freeman had a stack of review copies of films that he brought over one time. this one was on the top. I saw Martyrs recently and wondered if this film was a rip off of Martyrs, but it appears that Nympha came out the year before Martyrs in 2007. I don't know if the makers of Martyrs were aware of the similarly themed Nympha. Nympha is obscure but it deserves recognition. This film can almost get away with stealing the un-scary bleeding walls bit from Amityville Horror by being unbelievably over-the-top sick and perverted in every conceivable way. This one's got it all, rape, torture, incest, human tongue cut out, all present and accounted for and then some. It's a little difficult to follow at first but by the end it makes sense. The gist of it is that there's this woman named Sarah whose taken by a convent of some very strange order of nuns, they bring in a drunk doctor to torture here, lots of blood, vomit, etc. The torture is some kind of religious initiation. Then there are flashbacks to the childhood of this woman girl/woman named Nympha. Her mother has died in childbirth and she is raised by her grandfather who is clearly sexually abusing her and is also, without giving away too much, her father. The grandfather also kills a whole bunch of people, and justifies it as being the will of God. The idea is that Nympha is a saint to the order of nuns and that Sarah is having divine visions of her, the way medieval nuns would have visions of the saints. Pretty messed up huh? I must say I have not seen that in a film before. The tone of the film is grim with lots of blood, plenty of full frontal nudity, and footage of flies on rotting meat. There is a soft-core type sequence with the two actresses playing Sarah and Nympha. There's also a scene where they cut out Sarah's tongue, it is much more so highly gory and bloody horror cinema though it might be likely to raise the question "Who's masturbatory material is this excrement?". Nympha is all about the flies circling the rotted meat, the blood pouring out of the walls, and of course, the crucifix, heavy, heavy catholic religious iconography through out the film. It's an extreme, extreme film. I'm generally not big on a lot of the horror cinema of recent years shoot on digital film. This film could get away with it I felt. The torture sequences are particularly life like, so if the goal of a horror film is to frighten, this film is successful in some measure. The part where they cut out the chick's tongue is pretty freaky. Nympha is not a bad film, I kind of like it. The two actresses in it are very pretty. One of them is played by Tiffany Shepis whose a popular "scream queen" in a whole mess of films, some soft-core, Scarecrow, a Troma film (not that I care for Toma). She's in a Ted Bundy bio-film. She's in a whole bunch of low budget horror films and has a substantial cult following. I don't know about turning this one horror actresses I've never meet into an obsessive fetish object, but Tiffany Shepis was good in Nympha. She's in the same social circles as myself a little bit. I don't know her though. She's on my Facebook, I think.

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