Jericho Mansions

Things got weird back in the 60s and 70s, but Hunter Thompson wrote, "it never got weird enough for me".

Hunter has obviously never seen Jericho Mansions.

The plot is kind of a "Angel Heart meets Lost Highway" thing. Sonny Corleone plays an agoraphobic superintendent in a run-down tenement house which he has not left in thirty years. One of his tenants turns up dead. The police consider him the main suspect, so he ends up doing his own search for the killer, who may in fact be himself. Or perhaps he is actually the victim. Or perhaps he is both. Or neither. Perhaps there was no murder. Perhaps he is not even in this movie, and is a Mexican masked wrestler, because he wakes up one night and finds that he can speak fluent Spanish. This must somehow be related to his flashbacks of a bloody, Spanish-speaking man walking through the desert. But how?

DVD info from Amazon

no features, no widescreen, but a good transfer

Director Alberto Sciamma has obviously watched Mulholland Drive too many times, and tries to evoke the same David Lynch sense of "slickly-filmed thriller on the surface, but with some mysterious psychological and philosophical underpinnings". Some of what we see is real, some of it dreams, some of it flashbacks, some of it imagined.

Or maybe we don't really exist, and our universe is just one collective delusion. Beats the shit out of me.

The Critics Vote ...

No major reviews onlne

The People Vote ...

IMDB summary. IMDb voters score it 6.2/10

The meaning of the IMDb score: 7.5 usually indicates a level of excellence equivalent to about three and a half stars from the critics. 6.0 usually indicates lukewarm watchability, comparable to approximately two and a half stars from the critics. The fives are generally not worthwhile unless they are really your kind of material, equivalent to about a two star rating from the critics, or a C- from our system. Films rated below five are generally awful even if you like that kind of film - this score is roughly equivalent to one and a half stars from the critics or a D on our scale. (Possibly even less, depending on just how far below five the rating is.

My own guideline: A means the movie is so good it will appeal to you even if you hate the genre. B means the movie is not good enough to win you over if you hate the genre, but is good enough to do so if you have an open mind about this type of film. C means it will only appeal to genre addicts, and has no crossover appeal. (C+ means it has no crossover appeal, but will be considered excellent by genre fans, while C- indicates that it we found it to be a poor movie although genre addicts find it watchable). D means you'll hate it even if you like the genre. E means that you'll hate it even if you love the genre. F means that the film is not only unappealing across-the-board, but technically inept as well. Any film rated C- or better is recommended for fans of that type of film. Any film rated B- or better is recommended for just about anyone. We don't score films below C- that often, because we like movies and we think that most of them have at least a solid niche audience. Now that you know that, you should have serious reservations about any movie below C-.

Based on this description, this is a C-. For lovers of the steadicam and the bizarre.