Fulci’s “Carrie”… If Carrie Was Boring
Lucio Fulci, the maestro of Italian gore, wanted to do his own Carrie. What we got instead was Ænigma, a movie that feels like it was pieced together from a VHS rental store’s bargain bin and glued shut with snail slime. Fulci once called it “one of my best films of recent years.” If that’s true, it means his recent years were rougher than Kathy’s date night with the sadistic gym teacher.
The Setup: Practical Jokes Kill (But Not Quickly Enough)
At St. Mary’s College—allegedly in Boston, but clearly Sarajevo with a Catholic paint job—a gang of mean girls and their sleazy gym coach trick Kathy, the school’s lonely outcast, into thinking she has a shot at romance. They mock her, chase her into traffic, and she ends up comatose in a hospital bed, hooked to machines and waiting for vengeance. It’s Carrie without the prom, without the pigs’ blood, without the telekinetic fireworks. In other words, it’s Carrie minus the good stuff.
Enter Eva: Kathy’s Spirit with a Side of Lip Gloss
Into Kathy’s old room moves Eva Gordon, the mysterious new girl. She’s glamorous, flirty, and just so happens to be possessed by Kathy’s spirit. Eva immediately sets about seducing her teachers, creeping on her classmates, and, of course, murdering the people responsible for Kathy’s accident. It’s supposed to be unsettling. Instead, it’s like watching your theater kid cousin try to play both the villain and the ingénue in the school play.
Deaths on a Budget: Mirror, Mollusk, Marble
Now, if you know Fulci, you expect gore. Zombie gave us the infamous eye-gouging scene. The Beyond gave us acid face-melts. City of the Living Dead gave us intestine-vomiting. What does Ænigma give us?
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Mirror strangulation: Sleazy Coach Fred Vernon gets murdered by his own reflection. Instead of horrifying, it looks like a bad mime act. He could’ve just stepped back and lived, but no—death by looking glass.
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The Snail Attack: Virginia, one of the pranksters, gets smothered to death by hundreds of snails. Actual snails. Slow, slimy, lettuce-munching snails. Watching them “attack” her is like watching a salad bar revolt. She screams in terror while the audience screams in laughter. Hitchcock had The Birds. Fulci had The Slugs That Couldn’t Be Bothered.
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Statue Drop: Grace, another tormentor, sneaks into an art gallery and gets crushed by a marble statue that conveniently comes alive. This kill is as subtle as ACME dropping anvils on Wile E. Coyote.
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Window Blinds of Doom: Kim hallucinates her boyfriend being decapitated, panics, and falls out a window. Then, just to add insult to stupidity, her actual boyfriend gets decapitated by a falling window blind. Fulci: the only director who could make a Home Depot clearance item into a murder weapon.
The Doctor Will Bore You Now
Enter Dr. Anderson (Jared Martin), the neurologist in charge of comatose Kathy. He’s concerned about her vital signs, which flare up during every death. But instead of connecting the dots like a rational human, he spends most of the movie being seduced by Eva, then backing away like a bashful schoolboy. He even dreams about her killing him during sex, which is less prophetic horror and more “every Italian horror heroine audition tape ever.”
When he isn’t trying to resist Eva, he’s cozying up to Jenny, the one nice girl who regrets the prank. That makes Jenny the Final Girl by default, though in this film, “final” just means “slightly less dumb than everyone else.”
The Mom: From Mop to Murderer
Kathy’s mother, Mary, works as the school’s cleaner. She pops up occasionally to glare at students and mop floors ominously, before eventually pulling the plug on Kathy’s hospital equipment to end the killing spree. She’s the only character who shows initiative. Imagine Friday the 13th if Pamela Voorhees worked part-time as a janitor and decided to clean up her daughter’s mess literally.
Sex, Snails, and Sarajevo
The production value doesn’t help. Though the story is set in Boston, it was filmed in Sarajevo, and boy, does it show. Nothing screams “New England boarding school” like Balkan architecture and extras who look like they’ve wandered in from a Yugoslav soap opera.
Fulci tries to spice things up with dream sequences and sex scenes, but they mostly feel awkward. Eva seduces Dr. Anderson with all the subtlety of a soap opera villainess. At one point, Anderson wakes up from a nightmare where she stabs him post-coitus. You can almost hear Fulci thinking: “Yes, this is erotic horror. Yes, this is art.” Spoiler: it’s neither.
Why It Fails (and Fails Hard)
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Derivative Plot: It’s Carrie with a coma. It’s Patrick with snails. It’s Suspiria without style.
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Ridiculous Kills: Snails? Window blinds? Marble statues? These aren’t murders; they’re slapstick.
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Unconvincing Setting: “Boston” looks suspiciously like Sarajevo on a cloudy day. Because it is.
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Flat Characters: Eva/Kathy is supposed to be menacing but comes off as petulant. Dr. Anderson is the kind of doctor who’d lose a game of Operation. Jenny is just… there.
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Pacing Issues: For a 90-minute movie, it feels like a 3-hour tour of bad ideas.
The Fulci Factor: Maestro or Malpractice?
Fulci was a legend of Italian horror, but by 1988 his glory days were behind him. Ænigma feels less like a maestro’s vision and more like a tired man contractually obligated to crank out something vaguely supernatural. Yes, there are flashes of his weird genius—Eva’s eerie seduction, the surreal death hallucinations—but they’re buried under the weight of clumsy plotting and the most lethargic mollusk attack in cinema history.
The cinematographer claimed Fulci’s strange decisions “did not make sense until you saw the results.” Watching Ænigma, you realize the results don’t make sense either.
The Ending: Unplugged and Unimpressive
In the climax, Eva/Kathy corners Jenny and Dr. Anderson in a hospital morgue. She’s about to stab them when—gasp—her mother unplugs her hospital machines upstairs. Eva gasps, collapses, and dies instantly. Kathy’s spirit floats out of her body and drifts away into the night sky, presumably to find another mediocre Italian horror film to haunt.
It’s an ending so abrupt you wonder if the reel snapped. One minute: attempted murder. Next minute: ghost girl floats away like a bad screensaver.
Final Verdict: Ænigma? More Like Ennui
Ænigma wants to be a supernatural shocker, a revenge fantasy, and a gothic ghost story rolled into one. What it is, instead, is a limp rehash of better movies with worse ideas. The deaths are unintentionally hilarious, the plot is derivative, and the atmosphere is about as threatening as a petting zoo.
If you want Fulci brilliance, watch The Beyond or Zombie. If you want to watch someone die slowly surrounded by slimy snails, just eat at a questionable French restaurant. At least the wine will be better.
