An unpopular young girl with mommy issues is tormented by the cruel pranks of her classmates. (Sound familiar?) After a particularly scummy stunt ends with the girl being rendered comatose, a new student arrives to take her place…

Another day, another stupid Fulci film.

You know the drill by now. I like Fulci, others don’t, blah, blah, blah..

His usual directing flair is a bit on the ham-fisted side here. (Consider the scene where the arrival of the a student is continually overlapped with footage of the comatose girl. We get it, Lucio!) For fans of Fulchi’s trademark gore effects, the film is a bit of a letdown. There isn’t a lot of intense grue, and what’s on display is not terribly believable.

There are a couple of cool scenes however. One in which a naked woman is mauled to death by snails. (And believe me, they didn’t pay her enough to let those things crawl all over her nipples. Gah! I imagine that’s what it would be like dating Bill Maher.) Another in which museum displays spring to malevolent life is especially interesting given Fulci’s background as an art critic. (The thought of the director of ’Don’t Torture a Duckling’ being an art critic just gives me no end of chuckles. I mean, think about it! It’s like finding out that Jenna Jameson once wrote a dissertation on cold fusion, or that Britt Hume used to wrestle alligators.)

The plot is a mesh of ‘Suspiria’ and ‘Carrie’. The comatose girl uses some form of thought projection to carry out her revenge, and seems to be possessing a recent arrival to the girl’s school. It’s no big shakes; the whole plot is basically just a skeleton to hang scene after scene of horrid death on. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that…) There are a few occult-oriented rumblings to the story, but nothing is really fleshed out. Given the title, it’s not surprising that a few plot points are purposefully left fuzzy. (Such as the nature of the girl’s mother, the source of her powers, and the origins of her host-body-girl-thing.) It may not make for a satisfying ending, but it does give the film a hint of much-needed subtlety.

One of the reasons I have such a fondness for Fulci, is that even at its worst his work is not boring, and even at its most derivative it manages to be unique. ‘Aenigma’ is an odd film, and a rather shallow one at that. But it is a good “junk food” movie, and a nice way to kill a rainy Sunday afternoon.