The Butterfly Room

The creators of The Butterfly Room apparently wanted to make a tribute to good old horror movies and shockers of the kind that Hitchcock gave to viewers, particularly in the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Like those classic, the premise of this film has only one ace up its sleeve in the form of a revelation that the whole narrative builds toward, while the attraction consists in the fact that viewers have an idea of what’s going on, but they are kept in suspense until they finally see it. Unfortunately for both the film and its viewers, Jonathan Zarantonello, adapting his own novel, is very far from being a master storyteller and alchemist of suspense in the mould of Hitchcock. It’s easy to imagine that someone better could make a functional whole out of the implausible premise, which requires from the viewer a great deal of willingness to cooperate. But the director/screenwriter/author evidently doesn’t know what he actually wants. Instead of living up to his unacknowledged inspirations with a correspondingly unimaginative form, he tries desperately to score points with the audience with hyper-flashy visuals with a lot of annoyingly gratuitous post-production effects and a chronologically muddled narrative that serves solely for incorporating twists at regular intervals during the runtime instead of building tension. Though the cast will please connoisseurs, it is impossible to shake off the feeling that Zarantonello is just a more skilful version of Tomáš Magnusek, for whom films are also an opportunity to expand his collection of autographs and build himself up with the feeling that he has given an opportunity to old acting greats who otherwise no one cares about one anymore. (23.02.2013)

The Italian-American movie The Butterfly Room is first and foremost aimed at the enthusiasts of horror movies from the 1960s to the late 1980s. It works as a movie because you can tell the cast love acting in horror movies, and Barbara Steele is absolutely incredible at seventy-five. The Butterfly Room is right up my street, so I could not care that this is an otherwise straightforward horror movie about a bad lady. (08.06.2020)

The queen of old gothic horror Barbara Steele will likely be the main attraction to bring in viewers to The Butterfly Room. If anything, at least they will enjoy her presence because she hardly ever leaves the screen. Otherwise, the film is well put together, and if you accept the improbable story without thinking too much, it’s also watchable. (07.06.2013)