1980s Lucio Fulci Part Three

CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD
(1980)
Overall: MEH

It may be the first, but Lucio Fulci's City of the Dead, (aka The Gates of Hell), is easily the weakest in his "Gates of Hell Trilogy".  Pick any of his other exertions into this genre and you are going to find plot holes and nonsensical moments galore, but this one seems to do nothing else than pounce from one wacky scene to the next.  A woman puking up her own entrails when a demon/zombie looks at her and makes her eyes bleed is indeed a memorable horror movie moment if ever there was one though.  A few others like the hurricane worthy gust of maggots and Catriona MacColl, (who appeared in all three "Gates" films), waking up after being buried alive are also on point.  Naturally, Euro-horror needs not a rhyme or reason all the time for its showstoppers, (Dario Argento has made a career out of mostly gruesome death scenes that can hardly be classified as "realistic"), but here, Fulci mixes the illogical moments with dull pacing and just too haphazard of a script.  Still, that guts puking scene is pretty damn awesome.

THE NEW YORK RIPPER
(1982)
Overall: MEH

A lot of mileage is gotten out of the premise of a slasher killer who talks like Donald Duck in Lucio Fulci's raunchy, abundantly misogynistic The New York Ripper, (Lo squartatore di New York).   It is probably the most blatantly sleazy film in the director's career.  On top of all of the extreme violence towards women serving as its main objective, it also indulges in prolonged, odd sex scenes like watching a couple bang on stage in some kind of typical, "New York City sure is wild and weird isn't it?" scenario.  Also, another woman gets her gentiles massaged by a guy's foot in a bar.  The dialog is lots silly and it fittingly paints females in an unflattering manner, ("You women should stay home where you belong.  You're a menace to the public.  And you got the brains of a chicken!" and "Your overpowering touch shorts out my brain circuits." spoken by a woman).  Fulci may have been attempting to make a statement about chauvinism, but his violent, cinematic quirks distract such a potential message.  On that note, the duck-quacking murderer has to be seen, (or heard), to be believed though and that very odd detail alone gives it a memorable edge amongst other more conventional giallos and slasher movies.

CONQUEST
(1983)
Overall: GOOD

Lucio Fulci may not have ever kicked up the camp value into higher gear than he did with the hilariously strange, B-movie ham-fest Conquest.  A caveman/sci-fi/adventure/fantasy/sword and sorcery hybrid that still found time to include hideous beast men and filthy zombies, (as well as lots of boobs, torso-ripping, head-smashing gore, and a retro soft focus the entire film), it is pretty endlessly wild and fun.  It is also clearly done on a shoe-string budget, and filmed in both Mexico and Italy with an international cast of dubbed actors from both countries as well as Spain.  This is part of its charm though since as a piece of derivative barbarian fiction, its primitive and silly production values enhance the camp level tenfold.  The story is so elementary that the entire plot can fit on a single piece of paper even if your writing is huge and in crayon.  Similar to the low-budget nature being a plus, it is likewise not a detriment how simple the narrative is since scenes of bloody carnage with monster henchmen and He-Man-clad alphas liquefying bodies with weapons interrupt every scene of dialog only about every eleven seconds or so anyway.  This leaves nothing really to follow, just lots of Italian-flavored, Neanderthal-warrior mumbo jumbo and carnage to sit back and devour the popcorn while laughing with/at.

1980s Lucio Fulci Part Two

THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY
(1981)
Overall: GOOD

The finale in Lucio Fulci's "Gates of Hell Trilogy", The House By the Cemetery, (Quella villa accanto al cimitero), is the Italian gore-meister's take on the haunted house film more or less.  Gory ghost movies are not a massively saturated genre, though if they were, Fulci's maggot-infested, blood-oozing crack at it would be a landmark entry.  That said, its a somewhat more subdued affair for the filmmaker.  Long stretches go by without any nastiness and just some subtle, (if cliched), creepiness taking its place.  When the blood and guts do make an appearance, one can hardly be disappointed though.  Knives through the brain and out the mouth, throats being ripped out, heads being cut off, and maggots spewing from stab-wounds, (all in splendid detail no less), certainly deliver.  Homely and goofy looking child actor Giovanni Frezza is surprisingly not as distracting as many children in such genre outings, which is also a plus.  The flaws here are the same ones in all of Fulci's great, good, or poor offerings though which includes so-so pacing, monsters slower than senior citizens driving with Wisconsin license plates, and any kind of logical sense being thrown right out the window.  With a consistent tone and mood in place though, it is still rather satisfactory.

MANHATTAN BABY

(1982)

Overall: MEH

 

The second Lucio Fulci film in a row to be shot on location in New York, the appropriately dubbed Manhattan Baby, (The Possessed), is a far weaker and different entry by comparison than his The New York Ripper which was released several months prior.  Fulci himself was not a fan of the finished product, one whose once substantial budget was cut in half at the last minute and most likely suffers because of it.  It still features a solid share of arbitrary, supernatural happenings that follow no decipherable logic, (a Fulci staple to be sure), such as the floor to an elevator giving out, people not being visible in Polaroids, people disappearing through portals and then the script completely forgetting about them, and reptiles showing up dramatically and doing things.  While these are all fun on paper, the pacing is utterly horrendous.  Several of the characters are so unmemorable that you cannot even recall if they have showed up already in a previous scene.  As the bulk of the movie follows them around doing lots of talking, good luck being all that interested in anything except the random, weird moments.  Speaking of weird, that unfortunately creepy looking kid from The House by the Cemetery also returns and is dubbed more distractedly hilarious than even usual.

AENIGMA
(1988)
Overall: MEH

Not a particularly strong effort from Lucio Fulci, Aenigma serves as his Italian-flavored hybrid of Richard Franklin's Patrick and Brian De Palma's Carrie.  The premise is simple enough to provide ample footing for the filmmaker's trademark, bizarre supernatural set pieces and a moment where a girl gets eaten to death by snails in her bed, a man's reflection emerging from a mirror to murder him, and a statue at a museum coming to life to kill another girl certainly qualify.  There is also some primo-hilarious dialog like "I may have a fat ass but if you slap it again, I'll slap your face" and "A successful semester to me means making out with as many cute boys as possible."  Of course the horrendous dubbing makes said line readings even more silly than they already are on paper.  The movie's more slightly, (and unintentionally), schlocky qualities are really the only things that break up the kind of hum-drum story that unavoidably comes off as a lesser variant of the films that it is narratively tailored after.  This late into his career, Fulci was still able to put his mark on the project to warrant it fitting as a curiosity, but calling it a memorable movie in its own right is not entirely accurate.

1980s Lucio Fulci Part One

THE BLACK CAT
(1981)
Overall: MEH

Breaking up the more frenzied, nightmarish monotony of his "Gates of Hell Trilogy", Lucio Fulci made the very loose Edgar Allan Poe adaptation in name only The Black Cat, (Gatto nero), right in between his masterpiece The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery.  Comparatively more stripped down and simple in nature then, the story is not chock-full of just "Eh, fuck it let's just put a bunch of weird creepy crap in there", sans a few exceptions.  Instead, it genuinely follows a pretty comprehensible structure.  Unfortunately coming from a filmmaker like Fulci who usually excelled at arbitrary freakiness, (especially coming right after The Beyond), the movie's more pedestrian nature is not all that interesting.  It is not a total bore though either.  Patrick Magee in his penultimate film appearance does what he always does which is being a memorable, oddball, overacting creep.  While the main narrative of a killer cat is of course utterly ridiculous and not even remotely frightening, the subplot of Magee's bitter old supernatural medium playing recordings from beyond the grave is a bit chilling.  The feline-scratching gore is adequate for what it is, but again it pales in comparison to Fulci's usual crimson-splattered bread and butter.

MURDER ROCK
(1984)
Overall: MEH

Opening up with two hilariously dated, full dance sequences set to two different though equally horrible songs, Lucio Fulci's Murder Rock, (Murderock uccide a passo di danza, Murder-Rock: Dancing Death), is not off to that promising of a start.  Unless of course one enjoys the concept of Flashdance if it was a badly dubbed Italian slasher.  Technically a giallo then, this is a remarkably dull one despite or partly because of all the gyrating, leotard-clad dance numbers.  The mystery never picks up any serious momentum and when it side-steps to develop its characters more, things get pretty boring pretty quick.  Even the killer's inescapable quirk of poking women with needles is pretty lame, not that you get too many such scenes anyway.  Elsewhere, it is either stagnant or laughably melodramatic.  During one particularly absurd moment, a gruff detective interrogates a suspect with his lawyer standing right there, slaps the shit out of him, at which point the suspect says "She was a lousy Puerto Rican and I don't like spics!" followed by "You idiot!" and more roughing up, then chuckling from the detective.  It still ends up being little more than a collection of camera zooms, killers making threatening phone calls for no reason, red herrings, some naked boobs, and more of the usual stuff.  Just with more hot and bothered jitterbugging to shitty 80s music.

ZOMBI 3
(1988)
Dir - Lucio Fulci/Bruno Mattei
Overall: MEH

This mangled production that found Lucio Fulci quitting before filming was complete, (which in turn forced producer Claudio Fragasso to bring in second unit director Bruno Mattei to shoot additional scenes with different actors), serves as the "sure, I guess" official sequel to Fulci's own Zombi 2.  Further confusion exists from the fact that Zombi 2 was given the sequel moniker in the first place only to cash in on George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead and was in fact a stand-alone entry, plus the Zombi 3 title also belonged to a number of other movies in different markets before this one.  In any event, the finished product here is an unavoidable mess considering its troubled background.  Its first half is snore-inducing, there is unconvincing make-up effects, much ridiculous acting, and a steady lack of proper atmosphere since it is flatly shot in the sunny Philippines.  The structure is your typical one of military personnel trying to contain a zombie outbreak while arguing with scientists in lab coats.  Also, some of the zombies sprint while others cannot pick up their feet and of course some people turn into them after merely brushing up against one in a manner of seconds, while others take hours.  As a low-rent, shameless rip-off of way better movies, its got a few outrageously goofy moments, but for the most part it belongs on the do not recommend list.

1980s Foreign Horror Part Nine

DEATH WATCH
(1980)
Dir - Bertrand Tavernier
Overall: GOOD

Shot primarily in Scotland with a recognizable, international cast, (Harvey Keitel, Harry Dean Stanton, Max von Sydow, and French actress Romy Schneider in one of her last screen performances before committing suicide two years later), Death Watch, (Le mort en direct), is Bertrand Tavernier's bleak yet humanizing adaptation of David G. Compton's novel The Unsleeping Eye.  It bares little to no hallmarks of the conventional horror or even thriller genre, but its themes of voyeurism and the objectification of women are quite disturbing without becoming unpleasantly overbearing.  Even the characters that seem one-dimensionally callous are not all together unsympathetic and the same goes for Schneider as the more obvious victim.  All of this gives the entire film a rather gray, emotionally ambiguous pallet to work off of, one that spends no time spoon-feeding the audience.  As a challenging, somewhat dystopian bit of science fiction then, its lack of clear-cut fulfillment, (as well as its often imposing length), may sit uncomfortable with some.  It is still an impressively done work though, most likely worthy of repeat views to grasp more fully.

POSSESSION
(1981)
Dir - Andrzej Żuławski
Overall: GOOD

The only English-speaking film from Polish filmmaker Andrzej Żuławski, Possession can be seen as one of the most strangely intense horror movies ever made about a marriage coming to an end.  Written by Żuławski and American novelist Frederic Tuten, shot in West Germany, and precisely inspired by the director's recent divorce from actress Malgorzata Braunek, the film morphs into an increasingly disturbing and increasingly strange exaggeration of the guilt, confusion, and obsessive desperation felt and then materialized by a crippling marital partnership.  Almost laughable at times in its over the top abstractness, the fact that it is all played incredibly straight as an arthouse movie may be completely lacking in intended humor, but it also makes for a dizzying, strange tone.  It is not just the absurdly horrific events that transpire, but the performances are all levels of unorthodox.  Every character regularly seems in a wide-eyed daze as they compulsively cannot sit still, asking and answering horribly upsetting questions at a breakneck pace.  While Sam Neil is quite excellent, it is really Isabelle Adjani who deserves top honors for her recklessly unhinged performance of a violently befuddled adulteress, one of the best such portrayals in screen history really. 

AMERICAN GOTHIC
(1988)
Dir - John Hough
Overall: MEH

This Canadian/British co-production by John Hough's is a schlocky, somewhat lame-brained mess.  Rather pedestrian in concept, American Gothic is another in the "held against their will by an evil Bible-quoting family" line of horror films and it does nothing to elevate the already stale sub-genre.  Following a predictable structure up until it embraces its tongue-in-cheek silliness by going with a more implausible final act, one's only chance of enjoyment is to sit back and find unintentionally amusing attributes.  To be fair, the movie has a generous amount of them.  As the elderly couple who does not believe in non-married folk sleeping in the same bed and still think the Charleston dance is what the kids are into these days, Rod Steiger and Yvonne De Carlo ham it up to the tilt and give funny enough "Eh, it's a paycheck" performances.  Their senior citizen aged children who behave like eight-year olds are less creepy and more just dumb and unsympathetic.  Same goes for the dipshit "normal" characters who find themselves at the mercy of the textbook disturbing family, though at least one of them has a horrific mullet that deserves a standing ovation of its own.  Nothing in the film is clever, including all of the kills which are just kind of brutal and random.  An easy pass all around.

1980s Foreign Horror Part Eight

DE LIFT
(1983)
Dir - Dick Maas
Overall: MEH

Killer machinery is always unstable footing for a horror movie premise and Dutch director Dick Maas' De Lift, (The Lift), is a clear example of such a problem.  The concept alone of a malevolent elevator is laughable of course which makes the movie's mostly straight-faced tone fail to provide any properly frightening moments.  Instead, it is a solid contender for one of the least scary horror movies ever made.  It is also incredibly boring.  To flesh out the running time, Maas has a mechanic spend his free time tracking people down and trying to get to the bottom of what could be causing so many accidents in the high-end building complex.  What else is there to do really then wait for the title "monster" to decide to murder someone or simply stop working so its passengers pass out from heat exhaustion?  Even though most of the time the elevator runs just fine, including at the end when the main guy whose especially convinced that it is dangerous just takes a ride in it anyway.  Speaking of malfunctioning equipment, either telephones work different in Amsterdam or they forgot to add the ringing sound effect as characters multiple times pick up the receiver and just start talking to whoever called them.  Whatever.  Moving on.

MEMOIRS OF A SINNER
(1986)
Dir - Wojciech Jerzy Has
Overall: GOOD

This adaptation of James Hogg's novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Killer by Polish filmmaker Wojciech Jerzy Has is a deliberately paced, surreal exercise in internal struggles between Christian-fed values of good and evil.  Memoirs of a Sinner, (Osobisty pamiętnik grzesznika przez niego samego spisany), is a part-horror film in mood; one which occasionally becomes intoxicatingly fitting with eerie music and fog-laden cinematography.  The opening scene of a cemetery full of corpses rising up from their graves at dusk and embarking on a candlelit procession is less cliche-ridden zombie movie fare and more of a curious, ethereal beginning that sets the tone for the rest of the movie.  Has embellishes in a number of long takes throughout which are visually grand and impressive, though they also tend to extend the running time a bit too long than is perhaps necessary.  The dialog is mostly philosophical and though it is not necessarily cryptic in nature, it is less a routine, point A to point B story .  Instead, it is ambiguous in its message or lack thereof which involves a disturbed man who justifies his vile deeds against those whom he sees as already damned.  While the pacing is cumbersome at times, it is a beautiful film with enough haunting imagery to keep one intrigued.

THE BRAIN
(1988)
Dir - Edward Hunt
Overall:  MEH

A wildly silly, cheap schlock-fest from Canada, The Brain has many hallmarks of craptacular cinema.  Several of the actors turn in embarrassing performances, Edward Hunt's direction is laughably inept at times, the script is pure nonsense, and the title monster is a cheap, slimy mess.  Thankfully, the amatuer-hour presentation does not bleed too much into the pacing at least which besides a middle act eventually getting bogged down by chase scenes, is kept brisk.  Another sleeze-ball, hammy performance from Re-Animator's David Gale certainly helps as well, though sadly he is a bit underused.  Many of the set pieces involve elaborate hallucinations where floppy, rubber tentacles choke people or on the lighter end of the spectrum, make teddy bears start moving and women's clothes disappear while they are holding an apple.  Sodium also plays a critical role, which is indeed a bizarre sentence to write.  While its attempts at mass-hypnosis creepiness kind of fall flat amidst all of the other lame-brained, (har, har), production qualities, for the most part the movie lays into its dumbness enough to make it consistently easy to laugh at.  It is trash, but it is trash with a much needed, good amount of eye-winking towards its audience.

1980s British Horror Part Five

INSEMINOID

(1981)

Dir - Norman J. Warren

Overall: MEH

This D-grade Alien-adjacent rip-off from sexploitation director Norman J. Warren is plagued by a number of elements, all of them related primarily to its measly budget being rather noticeable.  Bland, overly-lit art direction, uninspired cinematography; the only atmosphere slammed home is a cheap one which enhances the lousy sets and costume design.  Performance wise, the somewhat recognizable, British cast is comparatively fine alongside two, American add-ons, (Robin Clarke and Jennifer Ashley), who are just laughably terrible.  The script was penned by the husband and wife team of Nick and Gloria Myley, (both of whom worked with Warren before on 1976's Satan's Slave), but it may as well have been written by any office temp under the gun at Roger Corman's office.  In fact the whole of Inseminoid, (Horror Planet), comes off as a rushed, cliche-ridden sci-fi Corman production even if that is not  technically what it is, several of which such movies were still similarly being made at the time and are indistinguishable from what is present here.  It all further gives the movie a generic, lackluster quality which is really only to be appreciated by B-movie junkies who enjoy laughing at such low-rent nonsense.

 

THE SENDER

(1982)

Dir - Roger Christian

Overall: GOOD

The trippy, mostly well made psychological horror outing The Sender from Roger Christian, (who also had the severe misfortune of being behind the lens on Battlefield Earth eighteen years later, poor guy), served as his full-length directorial debut.  Having previously worked as an art director, set decorator, and second unit director on iconic sci-fi such as Star Wars,  Alien, and Return of the Jedi, (as well as making the short film Black Angel which was shown along with The Empire Strikes Back in select theaters), he has an eye for staging memorable, hallucination scenes and building the proper level of unexplained tension around them.  As is often common, usually these moments are more arbitrary than scary and might make the movie unintentionally silly for some viewers.  Christian deserves credit though for maintaining the right, serious tone, never letting the film divulge into calculated camp when it easily could have.  The cast, though not A-list, is persistently strong, with Željko Ivanek and Shirley Knight working ideally as a mysterious, psychically creepy mother and son duo at the center of such oddness.

PAPERHOUSE

(1988)

Dir - Bernard Rose

Overall: MEH

 

Based on the novel Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr, (which also served as the basis for a 70s, children's television show called Escape Into Night), Bernard Rose's Paperhouse has some interesting, dark, and imaginary concepts at play as well as generally pleasing visuals, yet it suffers from some annoying attributes.  Most prominently, its main child protagonist is a thoroughly obnoxious, rude brat who lies and talks back to her mother and basically everyone she meets, yet the film endlessly tries to garnish sympathy for her from the viewer.  The sprightly, cheerful keyboard score incessantly plays through scenes it has no business playing through and along with the final act seemingly overstaying its welcome a bit, it all forces an air of sentimentality that becomes overbearing at times.  Beautifully shot by cinematographer Mike Southon, the film works best when it lingers in its dream world, only briefly becoming nightmarish yet effectively so.  To be fair though, it is not a proper horror film to begin with, but more of a contemporary-set fantasy that sprinkles a few otherworldly ideas into it via a child's somewhat troubled imagination.

1980s British Horror Part Four

THE GODSEND

(1980)

Dir - Gabrielle Beaumont

Overall: MEH

 

The non-television, full-length debut from Gabrielle Beaumont, The Godsend follows a long tradition of evil child movies such as The Bad Seed, Village of the Damned, or most obviously The Omen.  Based off of the novel of the same name by Bernard Taylor, the fact that no one believes for a solitary second that the innocent looking, platinum blonde demon brat is the one causing any mischief whatsoever for so long is rather ridiculous and annoying.  Considering she was birthed in their house by a creepy, random woman who then immediately disappeared to begin with, (Angela Pleasence looking as unsettling as ever), these dipshit parents just blame whatever other child was around.  They also continue to leave all of them unsupervised on the regular, even after more than one of them begins dropping like flies when said evil, adopted spawn is always around when things go south.  You would think that the death of just a single offspring would be enough to turn even the most inept parents into helicopter ones, but that is where this story proves you wrong. With any sympathy let alone plausibility for the central characters null and void then, the movie laboriously struggles with its own flawed lack of logic for most of its running time.  It is miserable and stupid, about all there is to it really.

THE BRIDE

(1985)

Dir - Franc Roddam

Overall: GOOD

Sometimes it is nice just to have a, well, nice ending.  This ambitious, off-shoot adaptation, (or continuation more accurately), of Mary Shelley's landmark novel Frankenstein picks up near the end of the book and presents a remarkably different chain of events than what took place not only in the original, written work, but also every film version since.  It is so different in fact that it pulls of the tricky feat of standing on its own amongst the well-cinematized source material. Taken on its own grounds as it should be then, Franc Roddam's The Bride is only a slightly flawed film with redeemable qualities in spades.  For one, the presentation of the Monster, (a heavily made-up Clancy Brown), is given substantial screen time and leans almost entirely into his gentle, misunderstood nature.  In this context, Frankenstein's creation is given a chance to at least attempt some semblance of a "normal" life, growing as a benevolent character far more than he possibly ever had before.  The film's themes of feminist empowerment, bigotry, and the questionable ethics of class systems are rudimentary presented, but by bouncing between the increasingly interlocking adventures of the Monster and his would-be mate, Roddam balances such things without letting the somewhat hefty length feel that way.  Lastly, for his part as the god-playing Barron, Sting is a bit underwritten, but he ultimately makes for an adequately evil, Peter Cushing-esque doctor.

BLACK RAINBOW

(1989)

Dir - Mike Hodges

Overall: MEH

 

Shot in South and North Carolina with an entirely American cast, Black Rainbow from British filmmaker Mike Hodges, (Get Carter, Flash Gordon), plays somewhat like a supernaturally-tinged Elmer Gantry.  Jason Robards is quite strong as an emotionally abusive, alcoholic father who continues to coax his medium daughter into performing her traveling clairvoyant "scam", as is Tom Hulce as a skeptical reporter with a Southern drawl at his disposal.  In the lead, Rosanna Arquette is unfortunately kind of uneven, though a lot of that has to due with her underwritten character.  While the plotting is rather straightforward, the story itself treads murky waters.  Hodges' ideas could have possibly worked if the tone more consistently matched the weirdness, but the cookie-cutter/TV movie presentation instead undermines them.  It is a frustrating mess that becomes arbitrarily unfocused, particularly by the ending which offers no satisfying payoff to the mystical mumbo jumbo happenings that kicked everything into motion in the first place.  With many of the characters behaving somewhat randomly, there being no real humor, and certainly no scares or even suspense, it is a poor effort for whatever it may have been trying to achieve.