H6: Diary of a Serial Killer (2007)

I thought that H6: Diary Of A Serial Killer was a good but brutal horror film. H6 tells the story of Antonio Frau, a serial killer set free after serving 25 years in jail for the murder of his girlfriend. After inheriting and old motel from a relative he never knew, he sees this as a place where he is able to do his tasks of relieving the grief of those who have lost the will to live. He takes his victims to room Number 6 in the motel where he 'purifies' them, while, at the same time, continues his everyday life next to his wife. I thought that this was a very brutal, but a good horror film. The film contained quite a lot of strong violence and torture.

A man out of prison for strangling his girlfriend inherits an uninhabited "guest house" that had been used as a house of prostitution. Inspired by the unexpected gift and by real life serial killer Henri Désiré Landru, he prepares room 6 to starve, interrogate, humiliate, rape, and kill prostitutes he invites in from the street. He thinks he can somehow purify them, but his motives aren't all "good," as he's interested in money and fame for himself as well. Like Landru supposedly did, he keeps a detailed diary with Polaroid photographs (now a thing of the past) as evidence of his crime, since he manages to destroy all the other evidence he doesn't care to have discovered.Meanwhile, he also manages to be a loving husband to his new wife, even tolerating her open affair with a doctor at her hospital where she is a nurse. The inspector who had arrested him for his first killing is the one who comes to suspect him of the recent ones.There is plenty of blood spray in the movie, and some cannibalism, but the cuts themselves are not shown, so if that's your bag, you'll be disappointed. I found the movie to be engrossing enough and very well-shot for it to hold my attention.

Antonio Frau is a cold-blooded killer.Frau has just been released from prison after serving 14 years for killing his girlfriend.He has inherited a run-down former brothel from a late aunt and married Francisca,who he met through a dating service and started writing to while inside.He lures prostitutes,most of them drug addicts,into his hotel at night where he ties them to a table,tortures and rapes them for days then cuts them into pieces using a chainsaw."H6:Diary of a Serial Killer" is occasionally pretty grim,but mostly uninteresting serial killer movie.It is not as extremely intense as my all time favourite Austrian "Angst",but there are some mildly shocking moments including rapes and chainsaw dismemberment.Fernado Acaso is pretty believable as a misogynistic killer and there is a bit of gore.Give it a look.

(Only minor spoilers except as noted).I've enjoyed a lot of Spanish cinema recently; both the actual Spanish cinema of people like Almodovar, and the Latin American cinema of directors like del Toro, whose superb "Devil's Backbone", set in Civil War Spain, was the finest horror film of the last decade. It's no surprise, then, that this film is both well-made, well-acted, and manages to sustain that distinctively different Spanish atmosphere. But it's also as nasty and pointless a film as one could hope not to have to see.What actually is the purpose of all this? We have no real idea what caused the creepy central character to embark on his killing spree, despite the fact that large amounts of narrative voice-over are drawn directly from his own narcissistic journal. In a routinely unpleasant opening sequence, set more than a decade earlier, we see the central character killing his girlfriend in a rage of jealousy and control-freakery ("…if I can't have you nobody can…."). Oddly enough, that is perhaps one of the best sequences in the film, but it has no discernible relation to his subsequent killing spree, which appears completely different in both motivation and execution. What happened to him in jail to cause this change? We have no idea, though we do later discover, as an absurd sort of afterthought, that he obtained a law degree while imprisoned.In Britain, in several of our notorious "serial killer" or "sex killer" cases, the terrible question arises; what about the wife? Did she know, or suspect what was going on? This is a question that this film could have asked, and indeed the wife does begin to emerge as one of the more intriguing characters. But banally, the answer to the question is quite clearly: "No, she didn't". Even when a dramatic opportunity like this is presented on a plate, the film still manages to bungle it. All we actually get, sketched perfunctorily out at the end, is her slightly amoral preparedness to cash in on the proceeds after the event. Compare this to the awful revelatory moment in Ten Rillington Place, where Christie's wife says "you know what I mean…." thereby sealing her own fate and allowing us an appalled glimpse into unimaginable chasms of suppressed knowledge and horror.(Major spoiler in this paragraph). In the meantime, we are supposed to believe that the killer himself is a criminal mastermind who comprehensively outwits the police, thereby securing the briefest of incarcerations in a mental hospital before being released so that he can kill again. How exactly did he achieve this? The plot gets extremely sketchy at this point; something to do with deliberately leaving certain clues for the police; but how this all works or why, or how the subsequent court case actually proceeds, remains a mystery.I actually don't believe serial killers are like this. The Silence of the Lambs may be comic book stuff, but – Lecter aside – it gets its serial killers right. They are deeply disturbed, deeply dysfunctional, deeply inadequate people; not the creepily charming mastermind presented here (closely related to the equally implausible suave killer of The Last Horror Movie, or indeed even Man Bites Dog, though it appears not to have been noticed that that was a satire).This film has little suspense, and bungles what little intrigue the plot might have generated. It has nothing useful to say about the motivations of serial killers, either generally, or in the specific cultural milieu of Spain. This is nothing more than a poorly plotted excuse to show some pretty misogynistic violence to women. And oddly, what makes that violence even more repulsive is a certain prissy failure of nerve even in how it is presented. The soft core character of what is actually shown just makes it seem even more repellently titillatory. Just one explicit shot, properly timed, would have been infinitely more shocking, and would have rendered all the rest completely unnecessary, freeing up more film time to flesh out the gaping holes in plot and characterisation. Instead we just get endless shots of young women vulnerably spreadeagled on a table in their pretty but slightly revealing underwear. Very, very creepy. I'm sorry to be rude; I love horror films, and can tolerate even the most extreme, to the extent even of worrying my partner. But I think anyone who finds this film good, or interesting, even I'd find myself edging away from. The purpose of a horror film is to scare you; this is just lascivious.It leaves a very bad taste in the mouth indeed. I have to give this film more than one star just because it's competently executed, but morally it deserves none at all and should never have been made.