In short: Rest in Pieces (1987)

aka Descanse en piezas

Helen Hewitt (Lorin Jean Vall) inherits all money and property belonging to her estranged aunt Catherine (Dorothy Malone), facts presented to Helen in a jaunty video message recorded right before auntie’s suicide. The bequest includes what appears to be a whole housing block of villas. Or is it a street of mansions? Obviously, Helen and her husband Bob (Scott Thompson Baker) move right into the main villa.

There, they learn that Catherine has a whole bunch of weirdos and loonies (among them characters played by Jack Taylor and Patty Shepard) living rent free on her property. Weirdos who, the audience quickly learn, do like to end an evening of a string quartet playing the German national anthem with murdering the players. Which isn’t crueller than the choice of music, really. They also may be the living dead. Other complications include the possible return of aunt Catherine from the dead, a hidden cache of eight million dollars that may or may not exist, a bit of the old mutilation and murder, and a shovel duel.

The easiest way to explain Rest in Pieces to myself is to imagine its director, the great José Ramón Larraz, waking up one day believing to be Juan Piquer Simón. At least, Rest feels a lot more like the work of Larraz’s differently esteemed colleague than what you’d expect from its true director, even in the late stages of his career when things got weird, or rather, even weirder than was Larraz’s normal. So don’t look for the director’s particular sense of the perverse, or the strange elegance of his filmmaking, but be prepared for the typical goofiness of European genre films in the 80s at least pretending to be made in the US, where everything – the way people walk, talk and emote - feels inauthentic in the most peculiar, and typically very entertaining, way.

One should probably also go in prepared for some mind-bogglingly horrible main performances by Vail and Baker, where neither facial expressions nor line delivery suggest more than the tiniest knowledge of human behaviour. These two are so stiff, your usual typical piece of wood would be embarrassed to be associated with them; consequently, the performances are also very funny indeed, particularly once the plot goes off into its particularly weird last act full of plot twists and character reveals even a great thespian would have a hard time selling.

You cannot blame Larraz for making a boring film, at least. There’s hardly any scene going by that isn’t at least mildly bonkers in the Piquer Simón way. Add a smidgen of gore, and plot twists – well, also a plot - so nonsensical it boggles belief, it’s difficult not to love the film, even though it is not the sort of thing one hopes for from its director.