I finally decided to watch this movie when it came up on a streaming service for three reasons.

First, I remember the lurid picture on the VHS cover from a million video stores, of a man carrying the seemingly dead body of a woman, both of them smeared with so much blood I was sure it must be a video nasty.

Second, it stars Isabelle Adjani, who I had a crush on as a much younger moviegoer thanks to her role in Queen Margot (a similarly bloody affair). And third, I was fascinated that an actor from the antipodes like Adjani's costar Sam Neill was be appearing in high art European horror like this and The Final Conflict so long ago when Australia and New Zealand didn't really have movie stars.

After decades of waiting I'm glad I got through it, but I barely did – it took two sittings, both of which felt like endurance tests.

What's it about? What's the story? What – if anything – is the basic theme? I still have no idea. Mark (Neill) is apparently a spy in early 80s Berlin that's just finished an assignment in East Germany. He's returned home to his wife Anna (Adjani) and their preteen son to a relationship that's already strained.

They spend their first night together trying to figure out whether it's worth going on or it's just what most couples go through, but the next day Anna asks Mark for a divorce, admitting there's another man.

As to what happens after that, I wouldn't even try to explain. How it ends up with a monster Anna's keeping in a dingy apartment across town (designed and executed using makeup effects from Carlo Rambaldi of ET: The Extra-Terrestrial and King Kong fame) – a place she also starts bringing random men home to murder – is completely beyond me.

It's somewhere between a domestic drama about a crumbling marriage and a horror story about some blood-slicked creature that eats people – maybe one is a metaphor for the other.

But around the time Adjani is walking home through a subway access tunnel and suddenly starts screaming, flailing her body in all directions, throwing her grocery bags against the wall and rolling around in the smashed containers and other filth (for so long it veers into bizarre performance art), I'd mentally checked out entirely.

It would have been interesting to be around back when it came out to see if it was taken seriously or whether it's taken on Mommie Dearest -style cultdom in the years since. But even then, the plot is so absent it's unbearably boring to watch despite the presence of murders, blood and guts and puppeteered monsters.