99.9 (1997) Blu-ray/DVD Combo
Director: Agustí Villaronga
Cult Epics

Director Agustí Villaronga's takes rustic horror into the mainstream with the vaguely Lovecraftian 99.9 on Blu-ray/DVD combo from Cult Epics.

The host of a late night paranormal radio show, Lara (María Barranco, TIE ME UP! TIE ME DOWN!) receives a package with a videotape and newspaper clippings informing her that Victor (Gustavo Salmerón, THE ART OF DYING), the father of her infant son, died two months before in Jimena. Although the police investigation has ruled it an accident, Lara questions how he ended up impaled atop a cemetery gate fully nude. The videotape shows Victor filming static off of a television before being interrupted by what sounds like a gunshot and fleeing the scene. Former priest-turned-paranormal investigator Galiana (Miguel Picazo, TESIS) reveals that when neurology student Victor left Lara, he developed his own obsessive interest in the paranormal and identifies the location of Victor's videotape as a haunted house in Jimena based on a strange face carved in the wall. Accessing Victor's files, she discovers that Victor developed a theory that the phenomenon of psychophany (voices of the dead) and concurrent pulsating apparitions that appear as electrical interference on untuned televisions are not evidence of the paranormal but projections of living beings. Experimenting illegally with derelicts, he discovers that these phenomena are most vivid in altered states, with the most vivid occurring when one of his subjects died.

Traveling to Jimena, Lara discovers that the cemetery in which Victor died held the crypt of the Gil-Linares family, the owners of the haunted house in which Victor was conducing experiments. The current owner, farmer Lázaro (Ángel de Andrés López, WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN) is uncooperative, but Lara learns that his mother Dolores (Terele Pávez, WITCHING AND BITCHING) had discovered a pit of calcified bones in the house which was once a brothel where French soldiers murdered the prostitutes and their children two centuries before. The faces appeared on the walls soon after, and Dolores believed they were the ghosts of the children and that they had a life of their own. Checking into the local boarding house run by sculptor Simon (Simón Andreu, THE BLOOD-SPATTERED BRIDE), Lara becomes part of a tense triangle with jealous Julia (Ruth Gabriel) and her boyfriend Mauri (Juan Márquez, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER) who claims that the house has a strange effect on the people who enter it including Victor. Lara, meanwhile, believes that her former lover was murdered by a living being.

Bearing surface similarities to some of H.P. Lovecraft's stories that emphasize the existence of the unnatural within the decay of old houses, 99.9 actually seems as much inspired by the rustic horrors of Pupi Avati including THE HOUSE WITH THE LAUGHING WINDOWS, ZEDER, or THE ARCANE ENCHANTER in which the possibility of the supernatural co-exists with human madness in which the latter may be the more deadly threat. After the front-heavy exposition about the paranormal, the film deliberately devolves into a looser series of threads that eventually do come together but not in a manner that can ever bring true closure to the mourning protagonist. Openly-gay director Agustí Villaronga, who achieved international cult notoriety with IN A GLASS CAGE, does include a subplot about Victor's homosexuality (of which Lara was aware when she entered a relationship with him and conceived a child); however, the possibility of one or more assignations does more than just a means of adding a couple more suspects, it adds a bit of shading to the notions of secrecy and prying in a provincial village, as well as the possibility that the reason for his death might be something outside of his obsession (it also reminds us of Andreu's simultaneous macho casting in exploitation films and the queer characters he essayed in art films during the same period in the seventies). The film is gorgeously-lensed by Javier Aguirresarobe who was Hollywood-bound after lensing Alejandro Amenábar's THE OTHERS, not unlike composer Javier Navarrete whose ticket west was his scoring work for Guillermo del Toro including THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE. Although Villaronga has remained active as a filmmaker, only his brutal subsequent film EL MAR has seen wide distribution in English-speaking countries; he has, however, made sinister special appearances as an actor in the thriller THE UNINVITED GUEST and the "Turn of the Screw" adaptation PRESENCE OF MIND.

Unreleased theatrically in the United States, 99.9 first turned up over here as a PAL-converted subtitled DVD from Urban Vision, a cut-rate company that distributed Latin titles as well as some Asian anime. Cult Epic's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray comes from a new 4K scan of the original camera negative. The first twenty minutes or so of the film is full of cool blue night scenes and moody interiors that are less hazy than on the DVD, revealing a more considered sense of design and composition with the murk scraped away. The Jimena scenes look warner and evince more rugged textures, but it is upon Lara's entrance into the haunted house that one really gets a sense of fine detail as Aguirresarobe's camera glides through and probes the dust, dirt, splintered wood, and cracks in the walls. Spying (human) faces also seem more expressive where once the shadows and backlighting as represented on the poor DVD. The Dolby Digital mix is presented in both DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and LPCM 2.0 stereo, and the surround mix is in keeping with the modern horrors of the nineties with directional effects that include shock sounds as well as unclear rear channel activity to unnerve the viewer. The English subtitles are optional and free of any obvious errors.

Extras start off with an interview with director Villaronga (10:10) from 2018 in which he reveals that the film started out as a pilot for an X-FILES-esque television series but funding difficulties lead to it being developed as a feature. He also discusses his interest in the language of horror cinema and his interest in applying it to non-genre subjects (the example being his subsequent EL MAR). The 1997 promotional piece "The Making of 99.9" (18:39) features Villaronga, Barranco, Salmerón, Picazo, Gabriel, and Pávez, interviewing them both on the first day of shooting and into production for their reactions to the project. Also included is the full isolated score by Javier Navarette (47:12), the film's theatrical trailer (1:50), as well as trailers for Villaronga's MOONCHILD (available from Cult Epics) and IN A GLASS CAGE (which is now out of print). The first 250 copies ordered directly from Cult Epics included a separate soundtrack CD. (Eric Cotenas)

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