NECROPOLIS (1970)
Article 4952 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-9-2015
Directed by Franco Brocani
Featuring Nicoletta Machiavelli, Tina Aumont, Pierre Clementi
Country: Italy / UK
What it is: Art film

Famous, non-famous and fictional people talk or do not talk, as the case may be.

There’s a scene in this movie which more or less consists of what feels like a fifteen-minute monologue from a woman complaining about her husband. This is the type of scene that would be the worst scene in any number of movies; here it’s the best scene. It’s not because the scene is particularly good, mind you. It’s because it’s one of the only scenes in the movie that feels focused enough to hold my attention for at least a third of its length. It’s certainly better than the scene where the Frankenstein monster (a guy with some face make-up on) wanders around in an environment filled with what looks like red-shower curtains for about ten minutes, or when the same character gives a five-minute monologue one syllable at a time while wandering back and forth across a room, or the scene where Attila the Hun strips naked, is dressed by his helpers, and then rides around on a horse while reciting a monologue (just to name a few examples). What it’s all about escapes me; the closest I can get to an explanation is from the plot description on IMDB that it’s a “statement about life”, and this is so vague as to be of no help at all. Any one of these scenes might be effective if they ran no more than a minute or two, but the most maddening thing about this movie is that almost every scene runs at least three times longer than it should. This may rank as one of the most tedious art films I’ve seen to date.