Honigmund (1981)

Honigmund: Directed by Gianfranco Angelucci. With Clio Goldsmith, Catherine Spaak, Fernando Rey, Donatella Damiani. Young, naive Annie enters a hotel to spend the night–without knowing that it’s the particular kind of hotel that serves more than breakfast. Curiously she walks around and watches the maids doing their jobs. She’s especially fascinated by a forbidden room where a silent, strange man lives.

“The opening is intriguing: a mysterious woman invades the office of a book editor and forces him, at gunpoint, to read her manuscript aloud. Why is this so crucially important to her? The manuscript itself, as we see it playing out on screen, is a surreal erotic fantasy about a young woman who checks into a bizarre, labyrinthine hotel where all the guests and personnel are strange and lustful. As this modern-day Alice-In-Erotic-Wonderland, Clio Goldsmith has a good body but a thoroughly unattractive face – from certain angles, she positively looks like a man in drag. Back at the editoru0026#39;s office, Catherine Spaak and Fernardo Rey are much better – especially Rey, who has a way of making a movie seem better that it is simply because he appears in it. But all through this movie, youu0026#39;re waiting for some kind of revelation, some kind of connection between the u0026quot;realu0026quot; and the u0026quot;fictionalu0026quot; world; it never comes. The ending of u0026quot;Honeyu0026quot; provokes only a u0026quot;say what?u0026quot;/u0026quot;so what?u0026quot; reaction, and the whole u0026quot;reading the manuscriptu0026quot; business turns out to be little more than a pretentious device. Lovely score by Riz Ortolani. (**)”