THE HAUNTING OF HELENA (2012)

Studio:       The Collective
Director:    Ascanio Malgarini, Christian Bisceglia
Writer:       Christian Bisceglia
Producer:  Manuela Cacciamani
Stars:     Harriet MacMasters-Green, Sabrina Jolie Perez, Jarret Merz, Matt Patresi, Giuliano Montaldo

Review Score: 

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Summary:

A single mother learns that the “Tooth Fairy” visiting her daughter may actually be connected to a sinister Italian legend. 

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

An establishing shot tracks down the hallway of an old home. Blood and teeth can be seen on the floor along with a bucket, a rag, and a crude pair of pliers. The blood trail leads to a large freestanding armoire with the figure of a woman carved on the wardrobe’s door.

Sophia presents a lecture on mosquitoes and the spread of malaria in Littoria, Italy during Mussolini’s Fascist regime. Afterwards, Sophia and her daughter Helena move into their new apartment in an old Italian building, which is the same structure seen in the opening sequence. Via Skype on her iPad, Sophia speaks to her ex-husband Robert, who is also Helena’s father. Robert shows her a diamond that he now has in a front tooth. Helena finds the old wardrobe in a storage closet and her mother agrees to have it brought up to Helena’s bedroom. Mr. Ferri, the old man living across the hall from Sophia, watches wide-eyed from his peephole as the armoire is moved.

In the morning, Helena tells her mother that she has a loose baby tooth. Sophia tells her about the Tooth Fairy. Distracted by a glitch on her car’s GPS system, Sophia hits an oncoming truck and the car goes off a bridge. During the accident, Sophia sees the ghost of a child sitting in the backseat.

As they recover in the hospital, Helena angrily tells her mother that she wants the tooth she lost in the crash. Later, Helena realizes that another tooth is loose. Sophia examines Helena’s mouth and has a horrifying vision of the girl’s face disfigured. Sophia then pulls out the girl’s tooth. The next day, Helena begins drawing pictures of the Tooth Fairy. She also shows her mother an old coin that was left under her pillow. Sophia notices deep scratches on the inside door of the wardrobe. She is then called to the school where she is informed that Helena has been buying teeth from the other children using old coins. Helena tells her mother that the Tooth Fairy is now angry with her teacher and wants the woman’s teeth. Sophia consults a doctor about Helena’s behavior. He asks if there is a history of hallucinations in the family and Sophia says no.

Mr. Ferri confronts Sophia and tells her to leave the house. Later that night, Helena’s teacher is killed in her bed after being swarmed by mosquitoes. The following morning, Helena tells her mother that Miss Cavendish died before Sophia receives a call from the school saying the same thing. At the beach, Sophia follows a vision of the ghost girl and discovers a memorial built for children who died after being attacked by wolves. A second doctor informs Sophia that her house has a dark history. She learns that a man named Battista Greco once removed his wife’s teeth as punishment for drawing the attention of another man. He then locked her in the closet and forced her to die slowly. Sophia finds the door open to Mr. Ferri’s apartment and enters. There, she reads a wall of newspaper clippings about the crime and the wolf attacks before Mr. Ferri interrupts.

Sophia returns home and moves a piano in front of the armoire. During the night, the piano inexplicably appears blocking the hallway. Sophia grabs Helena and rushes to move past the piano and leave the apartment. Sophia becomes caught between the piano and the wall. She sees the Tooth Fairy appear. Helena goes towards the creature and gives her the teeth she has been collecting. Sophia manages to grab the teeth and scatter them on the floor. While the Tooth Fairy grabs at the teeth and puts one in her mouth, Sophia and Helena exit the apartment.

Eighteen Months Later – Helena is being treated in an institution. Robert wants to take their daughter away from Italy. The doctor treating Helena discovers that Sophia’s mother was schizophrenic and that Sophia withheld other information about her own mental illness. As Sophia gives another lecture, she notices that one of the slides in her presentation is of the Greco family. Back at the hospital, Helena tells her mother that the Tooth Fairy has returned. The Tooth Fairy is mad at Helena because the teeth she was given were not hers. She wants her own teeth, but they are hidden “in a secret place.”

When Helena is left alone in her hospital room, she sees a vision of the ghost child in a mirror and the ceiling begins raining bloody teeth. Sophia tells Robert about the Tooth Fairy and the visions, but he only wants to use the story as a means to take sole custody. Later, a vision of the ghost girl leads Robert to the wardrobe. A swarm of mosquitoes then emerges and attacks him. While sitting with Helena at the institution, Sophia sees the locker in the room bend into the shape of the female figure from the armoire. Sophia looks inside the locker and finds Robert’s teeth.

Sophia discovers that Battista Greco was institutionalized at the same facility as Helena. She breaks into the archives and takes his file, along with an old film canister. Sophia recognizes an image in the file as belonging to a community shrine at the local church. She gives the film reel to her teacher’s aide for transferring. Sophia then returns to the church and finds a memento that contains the original set of teeth. Mr. Ferri suddenly appears and tries strangling her, but she kills him. Sophia takes the teeth back to the armoire and finds Robert’s body inside. She then dumps the teeth into the wardrobe while pleading for the Tooth Fairy to leave her and Helena alone.

Much later, Sophia finally watches the film reel from Greco’s file. She discovers that Battista actually killed his wife because she was an ogre eating local children. The newspapers attributed it to wolves. When she killed their own daughter, Battista tried to stop her by pulling out the woman’s teeth. Sophia rushes back to the institution where an old man jumps to his death. Before dying, he tells Sophia that the ogre has teeth again and can now eat children. Sophia runs past the bodies of hospital staff and opens the door to Helena’s room, where she stands in fright and begins screaming. Sophia is then institutionalized. Helena is seen as a ghost in the window of the opposite building.

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Review:

It is a wonder that the Tooth Fairy is not exploited more often as the kick-start for a tale of terror.  Here you have a stranger, a supernatural creature no less, entering children’s bedrooms undetected and then leaving just as mysteriously with a piece of the child’s body.  With slumber undisturbed, who knows what else the Tooth Fairy could do without anyone knowing.  But leave a few coins or a dollar bill as payment and no one cares to ask too many questions.  Truly fodder for horror when deconstructed under a more menacing light.

The being that haunts Helena in this movie is not exactly the same Tooth Fairy of familiar childhood legend.  Sophia is a single mother who moves her daughter Helena into an apartment in Italy that houses a curious wardrobe.  Being an antique armoire from a crumbling Italian building in a horror movie, mother and daughter inherit a sinister provenance along with the furniture piece.  Decades ago, Battista Greco punished his wife for attracting the attention of another man by ripping out her teeth and leaving her to die in the moveable closet.  Reformed as a vengeful spirit, this evil Fairy wants her teeth returned.  And Helena is the vessel she will possess to get what she wants.

“The Haunting of Helena” is an average ghost story that is heavy on atmosphere, but light on resonating chills.  High production values serve up platefuls of style, except the entrees are reheated leftovers of tropes and scares culled from footprints of the haunt-loaded horrors that came before it.

The movie looks great.  High contrast washes a bleak tone over suitably distinct Italian architecture from a bygone European era.  The location goes a long way towards establishing pleasing visuals for the western hemisphere crowd.  Although Italians probably find the setting as dull as Angelinos do films set in Hollywood.

Camera work is fluid.  The setups are thoughtfully crafted.  Budget digital FX are noticeable, but they are used sparingly and find a way to blend passably into the film’s color palette.  Professionals are clearly on the other side of the lens and their work is solid.

The quality extends to the music side as well.  A nice piano-centric score completes the unsettling vibe along with the occasional accompaniment of straining string instruments.  The mood is effective, except the soundtrack is used so liberally that there is nearly never a moment of quiet.  And that is how “The Haunting of Helena” coughs up redundant horror movie clichés by pushing all of its elements way too far.

The constant music is but one way that the film pours it on thick.  Transition shots to move scenes from one location to the next are cut with rain dripping images of churchyard statues.  They have no bearing on the plot, but they appear every ten or fifteen minutes as an unnecessary reminder of the dark and stormy setting.

As if to further nail the concept into the viewer’s head that “The Haunting of Helena” is a horror film, each beat change follows the introduction of yet another overly familiar genre staple.  As the evil unfolds, an old man appears who cryptically warns the mother to “leave now,” without actually taking one minute to explain why.  When more exposition is required to fill in the backstory, Sophia does the job via a collection of newspaper clippings.  Ghost children lead the living to vital clues.  The skeptic discovers too late that the tales were true.  All of it is here.  And all of it has been seen before.

Much of what is unoriginal about the story and its framing can be overlooked because the presentation is very well done, and the filmmakers take their movie seriously.  Less forgivable are the unimpassioned performances that fail to carry the film to the finish line.  It is a challenge to take the acting seriously when listening to Helena deliver lines such as, “I want my tooth.  Go find it,” with a whiny monotone normally reserved for an income tax auditor.

However, “The Haunting of Helena” does one thing exceptionally well, and that is the delivery of its final few minutes.  The script comes up with an idea so fiendishly delicious that it has an unfortunate side effect of shining a bright spotlight on the rest of the story’s mediocrity.  The reason why is because the final concept is more engrossing than the preceding 90 minutes.  Had there been a way for that element to take a larger role earlier in the film, “The Haunting of Helena” could have been deviously memorable.

Aside from its satisfying ending, “The Haunting of Helena” is a respectable effort that just does not possess enough of an identity to truly set it apart in the ghostly haunting sub-genre.  Far from an outright disappointment, the film relies too much on convention and not enough on its own creativity.

NOTE: "The Haunting of Helena" was previously known by the title “Fairytale.”

Review Score:  60

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