Released on probation from a psychiatric clinic, morbid practical joker John (Renaud Verley) returns to his late mother's home to plot revenge on the greedy relatives who had him committed in order to get their mitts on his inheritance.
Am I on the right IMDb page? Are all these other reviews for the same film that I saw? I have to ask because they are almost unanimous in their praise while I thought A Bell From Hell was just about as dull and frustratingly incomprehensible as Euro-horror can get (and I've seen quite a few!). I found the narrative confusing, the performances utterly bizarre, the direction torpid, and struggled desperately to stay awake till the very end.
The film's seemingly random plot sees John take a crash course in butchery (the abattoir scenes allowing for some nauseating real-life animal killing), fill his house with strange pets, try to kill his aunt with the aid of some honey and a hive of bees, play a practical joke by pretending to gouge out his eyeballs, strip his cousins naked and suspend them from meathooks, and, in what must be the most incongruous scene in the whole film, rescue a young girl from a group of sex-pest, trigger-happy hunters; all of this potentially entertaining weirdness is relayed in such a mind-numbingly boring art-house fashion that I find the film's popularity genuinely perplexing.
Am I on the right IMDb page? Are all these other reviews for the same film that I saw? I have to ask because they are almost unanimous in their praise while I thought A Bell From Hell was just about as dull and frustratingly incomprehensible as Euro-horror can get (and I've seen quite a few!). I found the narrative confusing, the performances utterly bizarre, the direction torpid, and struggled desperately to stay awake till the very end.
The film's seemingly random plot sees John take a crash course in butchery (the abattoir scenes allowing for some nauseating real-life animal killing), fill his house with strange pets, try to kill his aunt with the aid of some honey and a hive of bees, play a practical joke by pretending to gouge out his eyeballs, strip his cousins naked and suspend them from meathooks, and, in what must be the most incongruous scene in the whole film, rescue a young girl from a group of sex-pest, trigger-happy hunters; all of this potentially entertaining weirdness is relayed in such a mind-numbingly boring art-house fashion that I find the film's popularity genuinely perplexing.