Manhattan Baby (1982)

 

Director: Lucio Fulci

Screenplay: Elisa Livia Briganti and Dardano Sacchetti

Cast: Christopher Connelly as Professor George Hacker, Laura Lenzi as Emily Hacker, Giovanni Frezza as Tommy Hacker, Brigitta Boccoli as Susie Hacker, Cinzia De Ponti as Jamie Lee, Cosimo Cinieri as Adrian Mercato, Carlo De Mejo as Luke

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Starting in Egypt, a young girl named Susie (Brigitta Boccoli), whilst with her family, is given a talisman by a sinister blind woman, and from here you get one of a few curiosities from Lucio Fulci's career. It is curious to have an Egyptian themed supernatural film appear in his career as, whilst Egyptian iconography would find its way round pop cultural media, in terms of cinema not a lot of films really exist for this trope at some point into the mid-century. Until The Mummy (1999) offered a brief exception, it feels like something never truly in the mainstream of cinema after the early 20th century. An aesthetic usually evoking mummies and pharaohs' curses, unless you are talking about other areas of pop culture like video games to animation where the use of Egyptian iconography feels disconnected from the reality, there is the inherently problematic colonial layers to real Egyptology which may have put people off this. Including the theft of Egypt's ancient history until we had to start giving it all back from the West, this is something which has to be considered alongside the fact that there has never really been many films at all with ancient Egyptian mythology either, just an outsider's perspective. Fulci's film does not even bother with really dealing with the complexities of treating this culture, beginning with Susie's father Professor George Hacker (Christopher Connelly) helping at a dig site. It can be accused of following the demonization of non-Western culture, in how an evil cult within ancient Egyptian history continues its legacy of terror through attacking Susie, but the vague dreamlike nature of this film thankfully neuters this greatly.

There is also the fact that, for most of its length, this is in the same ballpark as Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist from the same year, of a family being terrorised with the children under threat in a New York City apartment complex when Susie brings the talisman home. It is also a work whose obscurity likely comes from the unexpected restraint this has in context of this era of the director's career, not becoming gory except for brief snippets. Barring the brief sight of an Indiana Jones death trap with Fulci violence, the film leaves Egypt to be fully set in New York City, the Egyptian curse only important to allow certain symbolism from the sand to scorpions which Fulci is interesting in depicting. Instead, this is a horror mood piece, one of the more subdued films from this period. Fulci by now was becoming known for his extreme violence in his work, which you can see the contrast to with The New York Ripper (1982) released the same year, one of his most controversial and sleaziest films of his entire career. Instead here, whilst eventually gore comes, there is the built instead seeing that the talisman's aura is also affecting her brother Tommy, Giovanni Frezza a regular (and recognisable) member of Italian genre cinema as that blond child actor, whilst their professor father George spends part of the film blinded by ancient temple lasers.

It gets bloody, but it focuses more on the oneiric tone that films like The Beyond (1980) had entirely. This is still a film where a person is pecked to death by sentient taxidermied birds, but alongside its Egyptian theming, cobras menacing a Manhattan apartment, it feels at a distance from other films of the director's from the time. This thankfully has the woozy mood to compensate for this, with plenty of surreal images transpiring as elevators become possessed and the children's bedroom becomes a portal, spitting the office clown into the Egyptian desert dead on arrival, and ruining the carpet with sand fed by the Nile. Fabio Frizzi really helps with this through the score, adding to this film that does show Fulci's morbid eye for imagery, ending with even subtle images like someone dead partially coming through a bleeding white wall. It definitely feels like a film where, in another's hand, it would have been one of the cheesier films from the Italian genre wave, and it is still a film which could have done with a touch of something else to really grow into something special. Even without this feeling though, it is an idiosyncratic title, one that showed beyond flaws that its director and the production team helped raise it.