Five teenagers find themselves prey to a revenge-fuelled cattle rancher when their backwoods trip goes badly wrong in this slasher-adjacent thriller from New Zealand. Clearly inspired by North American teen horror films, BRIDGE TO NOWHERE drips with mid-80s ambience and, despite a few rough edges, benefits from a genuinely gripping final scene and a subversion of a number of expectations.
 
Grabbing their boombox and beer, city youngsters head into the wilderness to hike to the eponymous bridge (a real location in the middle of nowhere with no connecting roads, left to rot after the area was largely abandoned by the 1940s). Tanya (Margaret Umbers) bitches to her Mom about having to take her younger brother, Carl (Matthew Hunter), who is something of a shy recluse. She is worried it will cramp her style with her date, Leon (Phillip Gordon). Also joining them are her best friend, Julie (Shelly Luxford), and Leon’s friend, Gray (Stephen Judd).
  
Arriving by jeep at the starting point for the hike, they attract the attention of local cattle rancher Mac (Bruno Lawrence) and his young wife or lover, Lise (Alison Routledge), whose good looks draw admiring glances. However, when Leon—who has taken his parents’ rifle without permission—tries to shoot one of Mac’s escaped bulls, he is tackled by the cattle rancher, who attempts to disable his weapon. Already tightly wound, Leon finds this humiliation too much to handle. After finally reaching the bridge, the group starts to party, but Leon begins to spiral and attempts to rape Tanya, who manages to fight him off. Leon storms off into the woods, where he sees the cattle rancher’s home and spies Lise naked, washing herself outside. The young woman is aware that Leon is watching and seems to enjoy the covert attention. Knowing he is still there, Lise proceeds to seduce Mac, but Leon accidentally gives himself away, resulting in a standoff and a gunshot ringing out in the night. It is unclear who has been shot. 
 
By morning, the teenagers debate whether to go searching for Leon or leave him to find his own way home. When they do go looking, they return to find all their belongings missing and assume their missing friend is playing a trick on them. However, as they try to make their way back to the jeep, they discover that the rancher is following them on horseback, using his dogs to corral them like cattle and preventing the group from leaving the area …  

Featuring brief but still surprising full-frontal male nudity, BRIDGE TO NOWHERE is clearly modelled on early ‘80s North American slashers, such as JUST BEFORE DAWN (1981), via DELIVERANCE (1972) (and its variants). The teenagers—at least on the surface—are straight out of ‘80s slasher-movie casting: boozing, whooping and hollering, and quite literally dancing their way through the woods, boombox held aloft (the film is full of teen-friendly pop and rock songs). However, the New Zealand versions tend to be much more acerbic and jagged than their North American cousins. It is also a welcome twist that, despite the seeming teen cyphers, the characters do change through their experiences—with the bullied and largely ostracised Carl becoming pivotal to the group’s survival.
 
Made in 1985, the vistas in BRIDGE TO NOWHERE are impressively striking but are as unhospitable as the cattleman—especially a barren, blackened, and desolate valley scarred by a wildfire. The film largely shares the approach of North American films that blend the slasher template with backwoods survival drama, such as THE ZERO BOYS and HUNTER’S BLOOD(both also released in 1986). Its setup of teens hunted in the woods fits here, but the fact that most of the deaths (outside of one flying knife) are gun-related perhaps makes the film slasher-adjacent at best.
 
Bruno Lawrence is great as the initially reluctant hunter, who displays a quiet, expressionless menace as he corrals the group before his purpose is clear. He had previously appeared with Alison Routledge in the undersung Kiwi post-apocalyptic classic THE QUIET EARTH (1985). Routledge perhaps struggles in a complex role here as his unstable girlfriend, and it is never clear whether she is his captive or there willingly (although, apparently, she won an award for the role). At just sixteen when he made this, Matthew Hunter is especially impressive as the put-upon younger brother who turns into a hero. Margaret Umbers, who plays his initially antagonistic sister, was also in MR WRONG (1984), another New Zealand twist on the slasher movie formula. Prolific actor/director Ian Mune (who was recently in the excellent THE RULE OF JENNY PEN (2024)) had scored a hit with the comedy CAME A HOT FRIDAY the year before, in 1985. Mune co-wrote BRIDGE TO NOWHERE with American writer Bill Baer. The website says that the film was pre-sold to an American investor, but Mune’s LA agent warned against killing a dog in the film. Mune ignored him, and (albeit totally implied) the teenagers trap and kill one of Mac’s dogs (an adorable-looking border collie who couldn’t look less threatening). The agent appears to have been right, as the film bypassed cinemas in North America to go straight to video in 1987. Moral being: never kill the dog.

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The sinister encounter with horror ...

*** 

aka LA CASA DEL BUON RITORNO

Directed by: Beppe Cino

Starring: Stefano Gabrini, Amanda Sandrelli, Fiammetta Carena,Lola Ledda, Francesco Costa, Stanis Leda, Fabrizio Capuani, Eloisa Cino, Eleonora Salvadori, Elvira Ca

Choice dialogue:  “I’ll slit my throat for you!”

THE HOUSE OF THE BLUE SHADOWS is a world away from the garish excesses and day-glo charms of other mid-‘80s Gialli. A man returns with his fiancée to his childhood home for the first time since the death of his sister, which he may, or may not, have caused. He becomes ever more obsessed and haunted by the lingering presence of his dead sibling. Meanwhile, someone in a Japanese Oniniba mask appears from the shadows and starts to kill the neighbours. Slow-moving, but with a haunting ambience. Some will find it mesmerising, whilst others might think it frustratingly abstract.
 
Carefree couple Luca (Stefano Gabrini) and his wife-to-be Margit (Amanda Sandrelli) return to his family home for the first time in 15 years. When he was ten years old, his older sister, who was wearing the Onibaba mask, fell to her death from the roof whilst they were playing hide-and-seek with the local children. Despite the house having been empty for all that time, they are surprised to find a woman in black coming down the stairs when they arrive. Ayesha (Fiammetta Carena) tells Luca that they were friends when he was a young boy, although at first, he doesn’t recall her. However, eventually, snippets of memory come back to him. Ayesha lives in the house opposite and is a neighbour with another childhood friend, Bruno (Francesco Costa), who watches the couple with interest.
 
Margit is spooked by a creepy, black-faced mannequin with blonde pigtails that stands near one of the windows. Luca sees another woman in black whilst out shopping; he pursues her, but she seemingly vanishes. On his return, he becomes angry that Margit is wearing his dead sister's hat and begins to dress the mannequin in his sibling’s clothes. Whilst seemingly alone in the house, Margit is attacked by someone wearing the Japanese demon mask and only survives the attack by barricading herself in the bedroom. She flees in the morning. Luca remains but risks losing touch with reality as he tries to unravel the mysteries still lurking in his childhood home …  

THE HOUSE OF THE BLUE SHADOWS is certainly not a typical Giallo. There is no black-gloved killer, but the Onibaba-masked presence is certainly creepy enough. However, it is not really the main focus of the film (the first murder doesn’t occur until about 20 minutes from the end of the movie). It has more in common with films that broach arthouse territory, such as Pupi Avati’s exemplary THE HOUSE WITH THE LAUGHING WINDOWS (1976) or Francesco Barilli’s THE PERFUME OF THE LADY IN BLACK (1974)—although it isn’t as successful as either of those two examples. Beppe Cino’s film lives up to its name with its chilly hues (in various shades of blue). The director conjures up some striking imagery and interesting camerawork to evoke the house’s high strangeness. However, it is arguably more of a mood piece than a thriller, although it does achieve some suspenseful passages near its close. It flits around various horror and thriller themes like a ghoulish butterfly without settling on any particular one. At times, it feels like a study of a character’s descent into madness akin to Roman Polanski’s REPULSION (1965)—as Luca reverts back to his boyhood by physically transforming himself by shaving off first his beard and then his moustache. We are never sure if Lola’s death was an accident or if she was pushed from the roof, and if so, by whom? The script references fairy tales such as "Red Riding Hood" and alludes to the legend of Bluebeard (who killed successive wives). At times, it could be a ghost story. Has Lola returned from the grave to get her revenge? It teases that Ayesha is a witch who may be looking to take revenge for Lola’s death (she keeps a shrine of photos of the young girl and seemingly never ages). At other times, it tips its hat to the North American slasher movie, with its masked killer descending or ascending the house's stairs in search of victims. The film even suggests darker themes, such as possible incest, but like the other threads, is abandoned as soon as it is introduced. This eclecticism is perhaps intriguing, but it prevents the viewer from being fully invested in the mystery of what exactly is happening. Likewise, anyone hoping for a clear resolution to any of the film’s myriad mysteries will be disappointed as it doesn’t tie everything up in anything even approaching a neat bow—and arguably leaves more questions than answers. Ultimately, it raises the possibility that the film is actually just a hot mess rather than a purposeful, finely crafted enigma. I guess it is up to the viewer to decide which it is.
 
Despite its seeming lack of mainstream appeal, THE HOUSE OF THE BLUE SHADOWS did receive an Italian cinema release in early 1987 (after appearing at the Venice Film Festival in the summer of 1986). It was shot quickly over 12 days in and around Rome on 16mm. Reviews were not particularly kind, with Gabrini’s acting attracting particular scorn (although he really isn’t that bad).
 
Those looking for a traditional thriller narrative might be better served elsewhere, but this atypical Giallo is perhaps a film to be experienced rather than scrutinised.  

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