In the 38 year period between his first film, folk horror classic The Wicker Man, and his last, The Wicker Tree, director Robin Hardy only made one other film: The Fantasist, a bizarre slasher thriller set in Dublin, Ireland. It's not a good film - the characters are too eccentric, the script is incredibly silly, and the pace is very slow - but it's still worth watching just to immerse yourself in the sheer bizarreness for an hour and a half...
Moira Harris plays lovely 'Oirish lass Patricia Teeling, who leaves the countryside for a teaching job in Dublin; her move coincides with a spate of murders, the killer at first phoning his victims to try and bore them to death with terrible poetry, but opting to stab them in the back when his dreadful recitals fail to do the trick.
Meanwhile, Patricia is looking for the man of her dreams, but only seems to attract oddballs: a hairy man with halitosis (in a nightclub where Level 42 are the house band!); weirdy-beardy English master Robert Foxley (John Kavanagh), who gargles wine loudly in restaurants and wants to rub Patricia's tummy; and American Danny Sullivan (Timothy Bottoms), who pretends to be an Albanian osteopath and talks dirty to his wife over the phone.
After Patricia discovers Danny's wife with a knife in her back, she starts to receive phone calls from the maniac; police inspector McMyler (Christopher Cazenove) investigates.
The nonsensical murder mystery plot makes the film feel a bit like an Irish giallo at times, especially the scene in which Patricia escapes from one of the suspects by climbing out of a window and crawling across the roof of the building (very Argento). However, Hardy's inept handling of the film in general makes it hard to believe that it was directed by the same man who gave us the impeccable The Wicker Man. The finalé is particularly strange, the killer trapping Patricia in his photographic studio, and forcing her to strip so that he can use her bare ass as a set of bongo drums.
So, technically speaking, the film is fairly terrible, but for those who enjoy bad films, it could prove quite entertaining.
