The Shroud — The Shroud (Blu Ray)

The Shroud is a 2022 Italian horror movie written and directed by Fabrizio Spurio (Vanity, Instinct and Innesti) and starring Francesco Lonigro (Instinct, Gazzelle: Polynesia and Put Grandma in the Freezer), Chiara Pavoni (Employee’s Mystery, Corona Days and Blue Sunset), Monica Rondino (Thanatos - Impulsi di Morte) and Andrea Pacilli (who also scored the movie).

A witch is brutally murdered by two men in a scene that harks back to the pre-credit sequence of Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond. We then cut to the modern day, where a man finds a metal container hidden among some ruins. Inside the container is the shroud that the witch was wrapped in after her murder, and it appears to move of its own volition. The sentient shroud then appears to crush the man to death. Next up Chiara Pavoni turns up as the badly beaten nun who has been raped at the hands of two men who were also looking for the witches shroud. She calls Francesco Lonigro’s character and explains to him what has happened. He tells her that he knows a man who can track down the shroud, which he does indeed do when he tracks it down to the man who we saw earlier writhing on the floor with it. He takes the shroud and passes it to Francesco, who begins to have dark twisted dreams once it is in his possession. The nun tells him that she is a member of an order of nuns who were formed in the 16th century to guard the shroud. It turns out that the witch’s evil spirit passed into the shroud when she died and that the nun plans to burn it to finally be rid of it forever. Naturally, this doesn’t happen, and Chiara suffers some sort of mental degradation from being in possession of the shroud, and things get even crazier.

The Shroud is a bad film, but in a good way. It’s a ton of fun, and to be honest, both Chiara Pavoni and Francesco Lonigro are excellent in their roles, giving it everything they have. I also think it is worth mentioning the amount of red stuff on display here, there is a lot of cheap and cheerful splashy gore around, which seems appropriate for a film that hints at Spurio’s love of classic Italian horror with little nods here and there to the masters of the genre, particularly Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento. The use of vibrant blues, greens and reds throughout seems to be a homage to the latter. The film’s ending is the big disappointment for me, it just feels as though an ending needed to be shot and Spurio took an easy way out rather than bring things to an appropriate conclusion. That said, it’s still a crazy, fun, z-rated movie that is often far better than it deserves to be on such a minuscule budget.

The new Blu-ray from SRS features a blooper reel, a photo gallery and a couple of music videos, as well as some trailers for other titles on the SRS label. The whole package is far better than it ought to be, but you can tell that Spurio has a deep love for the genre and he just wants to make something approaching what his heroes did and while he doesn’t even have the sort of budget that Fulci would have had, he tries to create something that is going to be enjoyed by other Italian horror fans and I think this is where he succeeds. He has created a solid, fun and cheap horror film for genre fans, which also acts as a love letter to his heroes. Solid and surprising stuff.