Macabre…ish Horror Review: Nati Morti
Born Dead, 2021/ 1 hr 20 min
aka Nati Morti)
Luna (Ingrid Monacelli) has a passion for anything concerning death. So much so that she is trained as a doctor and her hobby is taxidermy. One day while walking in the woods searching for more specimens, she finds a man and a woman, the woman’s been beaten, and is very recently dead. The man is injured but only unconscious.
Luna drags the man back to her car. But as she’s driving off, she notices she’s forgotten her bag and goes back for it and decides to take the woman too. She doesn’t get help, she takes them back to her home studio.
Luna lays the lady out on her table and sews up the wounds of the man, now tied to a chair. And the man begins to come around. So Luna starts photographing the woman who lies naked on her work table.
The man, Tony (Lorenzo Lepori), is aggressive and suffering from a fever. Luna leaves him to his hallucinations and later returns with food to try to feed him. Though she’s nursing him back to health, she is violent to him in response to his behavior.
She later prints out the photos of the dead woman and hangs them on her wall with the other graphic photos, then masturbates to them. Luna later decides to cut the remains up. And Tony tries to get Luna to untie him. Instead she takes more photos of the woman’s body, this time there are maggots.
After asking repeatedly, if Tony raped the woman and he says yes, he attacks Luna after slipping his restraints. She restrains him again with a chain this time and promises not to help him anymore.
Later on, Tony begs for help but Luna says she does not trust him. He’s in bad shape so she changes her mind but first she takes photos of him clutching the remains of the woman on the table. He is soon delirious again and having terrible dreams of his victim and Luna. He wakes up with decomposing flesh in his mouth.
So Luna returns to nursing him but she leaves him on the floor where decomp fluids drip on his face. While Luna is away, Tony is feeling good enough to get up, arm himself with one of her tools and goes to find her. He finds her in the dining room with lunch on the table, she was waiting for him. Even though he wants to kill her, she gives him medicine and insists he eat.
They end up in kind of an uneasy truce. After changing his bandage, they decide to chop up the remains. Luna thinks of him as an artist and he sees it as getting rid of evidence. He hacks away at the corpse and Luna takes photographs. And she’s getting aroused by it. She picks up a handful of entrails and rubs them all over her body.
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Some time later, everyone is cleaned up and Luna tells Tony that if he wants to leave, now is the time because her dad’s second wife, Clizia (Corinna Coroneo), is arriving. Tony decides not to go.
Clizia arrives after dark after commenting on the smell and the mess. She wants Luna to sign off on the deed to the house so it can be sold but Luna won’t be leaving and neither will Clizia and her husband, Luca (Edoardo Lazari). Tony sneaks up on them and attacks the husband and Luna strikes her former step mother. This will not be a quick, painless death.
Tony hacked away at Luca’s body and displayed it as a gift for Luna. Call it foreplay, if you will. But it won’t last long because now they need to get rid of all the evidence including vehicles but in the frenzy of it, Tony is interrupted by the mail carrier while digging graves and the fight results in two more bodies. And then once again, Luna is alone.
This Italian horror was directed by Alex Visani. This movie is very disturbing but well made. The physical effects and cinematography is good. The cast, though small had to have been exceptional to pull off this performance because there were some gag worthy moments. The end is bleak and sad despite my distaste for the characters.