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.

Touch of Death (1988)

 

Director: Lucio Fulci

Screenplay: Lucio Fulci

Cast: Brett Halsey as Lester Parson; Ria De Simone as Alice Shogun; Al Cliver as Randy; Sacha Darwin as Margie MacDonald; Zora Kerova as Virginia Field; Marco Di Stefano as the Tramp

A Night of a Thousand Horror Movies / An Abstract Candidate

[Warning: Spoilers Throughout]

The set-up to Touch of Death would win anyone over as long as they had a strong stomach, or cause him or her to turn the film off if they did not. An older man is shown, when not killing women, cooking pieces of her flesh for TV dinner, then disposing the corpse gorily with a chainsaw. This sounds like the worst nightmare for a moral campaigner, but my first introduction to Touch of Death was weirder, that it is one of the films of Lucio Fulci's own, with those of others, re-contextualised in A Cat in the Brain (1990), his deeply weird meta-commentary on his own work where he was the central character. The chainsaw and subsequent meat grinder dismemberment definitely raises the bar in feeling ill with Fulci gore, even if you know its fake. In itself it already sets off that we are if getting into the absurdity, reminding me in particular of when British band Carcass got to their album Necroticism - Descanting the Insalubrious (1991), which stills plays to the grotesque morbidness of the type of music they helped contribute to, but by that point even in imagining someone turning a victim into glue to huff, you are seeing them parodying the idea of gruesome horror imagery to offend and traumatise audiences. Touch of Death itself, starting from that initial scene, sets itself quickly as a sick hearted comedy with a deeply unconventional trajectory, in which older bachelor and gambler Lester Parson (Brett Halsey) constantly has to pay off debts for an illegal horse racing group, having found a novel way of acquiring the funds needed by skimming the lonely hearts pages for wealthy women. Where things get weird is that, seemingly, Lester has a copycat killer reported on TV claiming his victims and implicating him with each news report. Considering his radio is talking back to him in his own voice, it is not really a spoiler to know he is not a conventional state of mind, but the film takes it in an odder direction.

In general, there are strange entries at this point in Fulci's filmography by the mid eighties even for a director who invested into the nightmarish and dreamlike with his horror films – Conquest (1983) is a border line, the least conventional fantasy film you could ever watch, and Aenigma (1987) springs to mind too – whilst Touch of Death was one of the many films either directed by Fulci or had his brand naming upon it recycled as clips for his truly bizarre, quasi-autobiographical oddity A Cat in the Brain. Made the same year as the infamous Zombi 3 (1988) production where he only finished a large portion of it due to illness, and the team of Claudio Fragasso and Bruno Mattei finished the final film, Touch of Death itself is a strange movie to my surprise in its own way. A perplexing mix of comedy, nasty splatter and his reoccurring obsession with reality slowly ebbing out of grasp as the film continues on, this does stick out among the films before and after. The premise has a dark reality, in that you have the likes of the Honeymoon Killers, couple Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck who targeted real women for money and killed them, but here as played by Brett Halsey, Lester is a foil who, despite getting away with a few murders, also gets a speeding ticket at one point when disposing of a corpse. Halsey is among many actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood and of fifties television productions who, as he got older, started appearing in Italian productions such as their spaghetti westerns, finding himself in his later career in a string of late eighties Fulci films at this time. Even in mind that Italian productions are post-dubbed, his character just in presence here. Whilst looking creepily like a real serial killer would in his conventional dress sense, he also has an absurd aura of a man constantly under strain, far from control. His cat Reginald, even if using human corpses, has better luck just from least having good meals.

The character being a putz really adds something here, the tonal shifts themselves effecting. Most of the narrative, until it builds to Lester's increasing paranoia and his fate being sealed, is the character interacting with a string of various female victims, and in spite of the stereotypical Fulci gore that became synonymous to his work at this point, it is played as a black humoured farce. John Waters springs to mind, for playing up bad taste deliberately. A strange quasi American environment, meant to be Florida but entirely in a nether realm of Italian cinema's interpretation of it, is where we find ourselves, one where Lester is an unapologetic sociopath but in a world which makes him look ridiculous. The illegal horse gambling organisation, ran by an older Caucasian man and a still older Asian man assisting him, who exist in their own world wary of the police, seem like a budget restriction expected from a micro budget horror film, in that they have no fixed office; in context however it adds a weird edge that, having to keep an ear for police helicopters, their lack of fixed location is ridiculous on purpose. Lester's female victims are exaggerations, and even a glamorous actress like Zora Kerova is given pronounced prosthetic disfigurements like a mere birth defect on the top lip or a vague moustache to undercut their appearance. It is not flattering in the slightest, and can be seen as sexist, but in general the film's tone is a peculiar ode to the tasteless in a weird way. The exaggeration of the women for broad comedic effect, the most extreme an opera singer with masochistic streak, is balanced out by Halsey playing a strange, pathetic man himself. Charming enough to woo these women, and played by Halsey with charisma even with the ghostliness of him having to dub himself, but slowly finding that he is even having to run over homeless men trying to blackmail him. Considering he is a man unable to keep hold of money, because he is actually terrible at gambling, it is clear he is about to slip off the deep end.

The realistic advice from the voice, similar to his, on the radio is a clear sign early on not all is what is expected, very early in the film and already showing its hand. That moment was enough to push Touch of Death into the abstract before it went further, becoming more unconventional with how this plays out with a streak of melancholia from this. It is clear the film is entirely from inside the mind of a man losing what sanity he had, the copycat himself in some form, but the dreamlike lack of clarity famous from Fulci taking this to an extreme. One where it can be as argued Lester is already dead or a literal doppelganger situation is actually involved. Everything is unexplained, the grotesque broadness of the female caricatures or the depopulated world of a low budget Italian genre flick, alongside the stranger details. Horse racing commentary constantly in the soundtrack is one of those many unique touches to this film I have not seen many "weird films" do, but it works, at first presumed to be on the radio constantly for Lester, but becomes apparent in being part of his psychosis at it continues.

That it is played for comedy is a surprise too. Fulci had made comedies early in his career, (fans proclaim that one, The Eroticist (1972), is actually a hidden gem from his filmography), but he was known at this point and still as a serious, nasty director of gore. Unintentional camp which appeared in the late eighties films was one thing, but deliberate humour catches you off guard. Obvious jokes stretched out at length such as Lester struggling to get a body in the boot of his car, due to rigor mortis, stand out when one has seen him direct some of the most gothic and notorious films from the eighties Italian cycle of cinema. One is legitimately a great moment, his attempt to add a Mickey Finn to a potential victim's drink only for it to continually switch which glass belongs to who, but even that scene is violently contrasted against the violent gore that happens afterwards, which adds a punch to this. The gore’s over-the-top actually fits in a sick way for this type of film too, more glaringly fake compared to his early work and with such exaggeration, as even when Fulci has someone hit in the head with a stick, an eye has to pop out. It becomes a heightened wreck of conflicting reactions as a viewer. That Fulci is credited as the sole screenwriter adds a fascinating touch to this film, that this is his interests unedited and leading to this concoction. 

Fulci, bless him, even when background material states the film was undercut by its low budget still managed to make a memorable film in Touch of Death. Its obscurity is not surprising as, compared to the stereotype of his career of lurid horror films, even the gore found here does not off-set that most of it is a melodrama black comedy of a sociopath. The film eventually gains more meat, whilst fascinating before, when you suspect the rug is going to be pulled from under Lester's feet at any moment, helped because Fulci's history of the unexpected always happening in his work adds to this, able to wrong foot the viewer even if it breaks the logic of before. Even the music, which is chintzy, works for the strange humour because it sounds like cartoon music. The tone eventually leads to an ending that can be interpreted in different ways, which is applaudable, Zora Kerova's femme fatale (who yet has that distinct lip disfigurement) a warning of Lester meeting his matched, followed by an emotional conversation with his own shadow for a very unique ending scene. It is kind of twist you would want from Italian genre cinema, and absolutely distinct from Lucio Fulci's filmography as its own quirky surprise.

Abstract Spectrum: Weird/Grotesque/Quirky

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

A Cat in the Brain (1990)

 

Director:  Lucio Fulci

Screenplay: Lucio Fulci, Giovanni Simonelli and Antonio Tentori

Cast: Lucio Fulci as Dr. Lucio Fulci; Brett Halsey as The Monster; Ria De Simone as The Soprano; David L. Thompson as Professor Egon Schwarz; Jeoffrey Kennedy as Inspector Gabrielli; Robert Egon as the Second Monster / Self; Malisa Longo as Katya Schwarz; Shilett Angel as Filippo the Producer

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #179 / An Abstract List Candidate

 

You say that the first manifestations of your illness have been the fear of hamburger and gardeners...

One wonders if all male, Italian filmmakers, or at least prominent ones, have a piece of DNA in their being that draws them to making autobiographical films or ones dissecting their own histories and place as directors. Never would the thought come to mind, at first, that Lucio Fulci, considering his emphasis on horror and genre cinema, would make his own 8½ (1963) like Federico Fellini. Would Dario Argento take a chance at a meta-film if he had the chance? He already did with Tenebrae (1982), a self reflecting giallo about a creator and his work but played as a straight forward film, and there are a surprising amount of self referential films in Italian genre cinema into the eighties like Demons (1985) as well. The difference here is that Fulci explicitly includes himself as Fellini did, breaking the fourth wall. When one considers Lucio Fulci’s work however a little deeper, even if one has only seen a slice of his filmography, his use of dream logic - not a cop-out phrase to describe his less narrative driven films like The Beyond (1981), but the only phrase suitable for films like his which purposely abandon logic and narrative from the beginning of them - is abstract enough for a meta-film to make sense for him and this break to happen.

When it comes to Fulci himself however there is also the factor that this particular film comes from his final films in the late eighties and nineties, a period where there has been a slow and very hesitant series of prods at, due to the lower budgets to his work, the sense of the Italian film industry winding down, and his own health issues increasing. Infamy brings Zombi 3 (Zombie Flesh Eaters 2) (1988) attention, the follow-up to the legendary Zombi (1979), attention especially given when, due to his increasing issue of declining health, Fulci despite finishing most of the film had to bow out as the infamous Bruno Mattei took over. The Devil's Honey (1986), an erotic thriller, gained attention as companies (namely Severin Films) have made it their mission to create Blu-Ray quality releases of even the era of the declining Italian industry¹. Beyond this, this is not a well held time for Fulci, A Cat in the Brain the one film from this era people have glommed onto from later Fulci.

Having seen some of the sources from this film, which re-uses films of his and those he produced they had difficulty selling, the result is peculiar to say the least. Fellini, for all his strange scenes in his career, did not start his 8½ with a clearly obvious cat puppet eating pieces of brain meat scattered around on a floor. The moment immediately starts with a statement of intent, where you throw your arms up in the air and give up any structures to film opposite to Fulci’s style regardless of your final opinion of him. It is a meaningful film for him to have made. Whether he qualifies as an auteur or not who gained immortality, he won it after his 1996 death, and was able to appreciate it somewhat in his lifetime, due to his horror films like Zombi 2.

He certainly has the personal voice, a nihilistic one which, regardless if he was pushed into making some films of lesser quality, and to add long and extended gore scenes to others, could be heard in all the films I’ve seen. (Arguably The Beyond, even with its quirks, manages to transcend into an honest-to-God horror masterpiece.) Even in A Cat in the Brain, you cannot argue against it being a Fulci film. The thing to bear in mind however is that he once made westerns, made comedies and giallos, not just films with splatter, something which comes into play here. We admire The Beyond and it's like, but he made just horror films continually after a while, even if he did do one or two hyper violent exceptions. (Conquest (1983), his sword and sandals film, has to be seen to be believed). That would be something that stuck in the back of his mind, even if he would enjoy his reputation.

Now here, his version of himself, he cannot even order a steak without thinking of a gore scene he directed. Replicating the frustrations with his career he may have actually had, Fulci plays himself, the director Lucio Fulci, as he find the gory horror films he is making and his ordinary life are blurring together. Unfortunately the psychiatrist he goes to, Egon Swharz, to heal his condition is a psychopath with plans to use Fulci’s illness to cover his serial murders. In context it is absurd, as it leads to footage from the likes of Touch of Death (1988), a sequence of an older man cooking a piece of a death woman's thigh, eating it, and then disposing the body by feeding it to the pigs. My thoughts of the film comes now with a greater knowledge of the films of Fulci's, particularly as Touch of Death is a bizarre film you barely scratch the surface of in this form, which makes this creative choice even more strange on paper to have done. The premise however, whilst it paints broad brushes on the issue of whether horror films innately corrupt people, and could be seen as problematic, is also something to take seriously.

We argue, to protect art, that the myth of horror and violence innately corrupting people is problematic. It is on both sides a subject that can be too broadly argued, without considering the complexity of human behaviour, how a person's psychology, their mental state and upbringing, are factors as much as any object being an accidental trigger. Even the real villain here, Swharz, explicitly says he wants to use that myth to use Fulci as a scapegoat, triggering gore hallucinations in him. I take the stance that an object cannot really be evil unless the supernatural was real, but I am aware of the complexity and case-by-case you have to tackle this in that mind. My thoughts went to Mortal Kombat returning to the film, not the original scandals of the first games, when they were two dimensional and cheesy in their gore, but the story behind the production of Mortal Kombat 11 (2019).

In that case, seeing the fully retendered "Fatalities" of the 2010s, where matches can end in killing you opponents, even a staunch defender of horror and transgressive are like myself felt they were too realistic and gross for my own being in terms of being healthy horrific content. The thought that came to mind was not that a player might be corrupted by this violence, but an article that came out which exposed how a developer on this sequel developed PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder)² creating the game; in that case, the issue is not the corrupting influence of playing a violent, realistic looking video game, but the creators spending so much time researching real images of violence, and trying to replicate it, that it took a psychological toll. A Cat in the Brain is so ridiculous, and with gore that is unrealistic and exaggerated, that it could not a serious comparison to a sad, real life case which causes one to think carefully about this subject, even as a staunch defender of all art, but Fulci did touch on a subject here that, ironically, would be an issue to consider even if in an entirely different artistic medium, in regards to the creators themselves.  

This in itself could easily be accused by horror fans, wishing to defend the genre, as a cheap thought to consider as they are different cases, but it is worth having. The other difference is that A Cat in the Brain, whether the humour actually works or not, is with a wink and a very weird sense of dark humour too, initially with Fulci being put off some meat dishes as an unfortunate result of having worked on such gore scenes earlier in the day, or being woken up from a nap by a chainsaw, unfortunate too when you have filmed a scene involving a chainsaw. The latter is something that must at least be a moment horror creators could have sympathise for, at least whenever trying to come up with something new many have wandered through a DIY store looking for something that has not been used yet onscreen.

When I first watched A Cat In The Brain, it was a surprise, a cascading reel of gruesome murder sets pieces, filmed for the film or taken from other sources, that goes from the sickly humorous, the disgusting and at least one that rifts on one of the most famous murder sequences in cinema in a more excessive interpretation. At first, it riffs on Fulci’s cinema, the frustrations of his filmmaking, and parodying it too as with one scene, knowingly referencing his obsession with eyeball trauma, where he has to deal with false eye prosthetics not up to his standards.  Then things start to become more erratic; with a penchant for wearing raincoat macks in his kill sprees, Swharz is a merely tangential catalyst to push Fulci, and ourselves, into hallucinatory scenes of debauchery and violence as Fulci the character slowly starts to become more and more unrevealed mentally. Decapitations, cannibalism, chainsaws, rotting corpses, and in terms of the non-gory hallucinations, even a sinful Nazi orgy amongst other things make up the running time, all nasty in tone and, even if some of the effects are clearly fake, the watery ickiness of many of them by their own would be enough to make some viewers turn green in the face.

Large portions of the film, when this transpires, are new scenes of Swharz on his killing sprees, or Fulci in continuous hallucinations which cut to pre-existing footage. As a result, the film really becomes repetitive, a string of set pieces, without a sense of connection, with decreasing impact until I became numbed by it all completely. On one hand, this could be argued to have a deliberate effect, to be so intense it becomes desensitising, but also it is numbing to a detriment. The constant gore does become too much but not in distaste, instead without meaning to it. It neither is really retrospective either; there is a profoundness of Fulci in his own fog for one scene, profound as heavy fog machine use is a trademark of his, but beyond this it is a film with a structure you have to struggle with.

The production values of the film will put off some viewers used to his earlier work if they are not prepared for this later era, the odd sense that this looks like a TV movie undercut when you wonder whether something this violent would be broadcast on Italian television in the 1990s, flatly put together, aside from some of the gore scenes and moments where Fulci’s trademark fog effects is included³. I have softened to this considerably in knowledge of the budgets he had, and my taste in cinema sympathises with no budget productions, but it will not help people used to the atmosphere of his famous work how stark this movie is. In another context, like Touch of Death, it could have overcome this if the tone's weirdness matched the production for example. Say what you think about the wavering quality of some of his films, but even his obtuse entry Conquest, which I have already mentioned, has an atmosphere even if it may have been filmed in a rock quarry, something far more memorable than most genre films. A Cat in the Brain's look is so matter-of-fact it really jars against the repetitious tone using footage from other films with other production values.

The film also does unfortunately cause me to think of the accusations of misogyny at Fulci, entirely by accident due to most of the pre-existing footage, and the new footage of Swharz's murders, always being female victims, baring a child on a tricycle getting his head carved off with a chainsaw. I will say this is accidental as, more of a misanthropist, Fulci's male characters got it as bad with drills to the head and fake looking spiders eating faces off in his filmography. It is a film like The New York Ripper (1982), a divisive film in his career, which raises the concerns, or a scene of sexual violence in his one poliziotteschi film Contraband (1980) which does a disservice. I see in this film, alongside the nudity, more the unfortunate habit, even if unintentional, of always falling back of female victims in horror which rightly gets questioned by feminists, even if completely without thought of any maliciousness from male creators. An accidental bias which presumes horror looks and plays this way, the same way Argento put his foot in his mouth, quoting Edgar Allen Poe, of the most poetic thing being a beautiful woman dying.  

And yet, I will return to A Cat in the Brain, and will find something in it, beyond even being a diehard fan of Lucio Fulci over and over, and that will be the thing to bar in mind. I can be so negative about this film, and will argue there are films in his last years - Touch of Evil, Zombi 3 and Aenigma (1987) - that are much more rewarding as lurid and weird horror flicks. But, I will have even a perverse fondness for this fascinating, batshit creation of his. Things like a strangely engaging (and jaunty) version of Edvard Grieg’s In The Hall Of The Mountain King on pan flute repeated as Swharz's stalking scenes, or Fulci running a man over in his car despite the fact man could have just stepped off the dirt road, have a funniness to them which is not ironic and cruel. Fulci completely severs the tightrope between being a serious look at his psyche and in revelling in the violent set pieces, like the case is for some of his great films, but rather than what I once thought of this, that it was a lightly lame and egotistic dissection of himself that is eventually pushed away in favour of the set pieces, it is a film made when you have little resources to make a Beyond with a sense of whimsy to it I find charming.

A weird thing to say, yes, but even in a film where a pool ball is shot into someone's body like a pocket, I found the film whimsical. Fulci himself, in his warm hunter's jacket, looks like a beloved uncle needing a hug, and even if the structure is such a huge negative creative decision, there is a meaning to him throwing himself through a barrage of this material, finally leaving it unscathed. The anticlimax, where the villain is punished off-screen, is actually inspired even by accident when you have sat through all the gore of before. It also at least, whilst I am glad this was not his final film, has an ending which redeems the whole project and, if it had been his last, would have been a wonderful one. Starting with a piece of gore and a twist, Fulci himself sails peacefully of into the horizon, content and on a vacation, on a boat called Perversity. That, even if most people would not find it sane to say unless you were a horror fan or an admirer of Fulci, is a beautiful little moment, even in its awkwardness, to have left his career on.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Chaotic/Grotesque/Quirky/Ramshackle

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

======

1) Even Cruel Jaws (1995), Bruno Mattei's television film which "borrowed" footage from the Jaws franchise and even another Italian Jaws cash-in The Last Shark (1981).

2) A link to the article HERE from Kotaku

3) Fulci did make television movies in the late eighties, including The Sweet House of Horrors (1989), which were too violent for Italian television.

The Sweet House of Horror (1989)

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Director: Lucio Fulci

Screenplay: Lucio Fulci, Vincenzo Mannino and Gigliola Battaglini

Cast: Jean-Christophe Brétignière as Carlo; Cinzia Monreale as Marcia; Lubka Lenzi as Mary Valdi; Lino Salemme as Guido; Franco Diogene as Mr. Coby; Vernon Dobtcheff as The Exorcist; Giuliano Gensini as Marco; Ilary Blasi as Sarah; Dante Fioretti as Father O'Toole; Pascal Persiano as Roberto Valdi

As expected for a late period Fulci film, this has gore, kicking off with a thief who is discovered in a heterosexual couple's home deciding to silence them in particularly nasty ways, even involving eyeball trauma.

You'd not expect a Fulci film to have a tone closer to a family film after that however, in which their orphaned children, living with their uncle and aunt in the same house, stay in contact with the ghosts of their parents. That certainly leaves the film a difficult one to market, which it proved to be - The Sweet House of Horror was originally part of a planned four part TV anthology of feature length films, two made by Fulci (the second The House of Clocks (1989)) and two by Umberto Lenzi. All of them were deemed inappropriate to show on Italian television and weren't even released in Italian until the 2000s. They did however get worldwide release, as two shot on 16mm films, possibly why we got the benefit of Fulci's two getting UK releases through Vipco, an infamous company who held a banner aloft for Video Nasties in the 90s VHS, lurid TV ads late at night on the Sci-Fi Channel when I was growing up, and films with some exceptions now getting Blu-Ray releases which could even be VHS rips on DVD depending on the title.

The Sweet House of Horror also comes from the last period in Fulci's career before his 1996 death, in which even to the bizarre films he made before in horror, his cinema got stranger and much more difficult to pin down as his late period from the late eighties to nineties when they were not held considerably well at all. This was when A Cat in the Brain (1990) was released, in which he made a meta-film about himself being influenced by the gory horror films he was making using clips from his and others' work from the time. The tone is perfectly encapsulated by the funeral scene, in which the kids, two moppets who could be irritating to many, are sad their father and mother are dead but have been allowed to chew bubblegum throughout and mock the aging priest for his rambling in the sermon. From there they will have to go against a real estate man, mainly by tormenting him and breaking his leg with psychic stair manipulation powers, and a Rasputin-like medium, all whilst the film has this whimsical tone about them hanging around their parent's ghosts despite the tone suggesting Henry James ' The Turn of the Screw at first.

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These films at this point are difficult to define for their genre in Fulci's career*, particularly as the film is clearly meant to be a whimsical supernatural drama but there's the horror trademarks of his still pronounced throughout, looking like a film of the director's at the time right down to the obsession with fake fog on the set, to the gore which is only a couple of times but has his trademark. That, even if incredibly fake, that arguably makes it more disgusting and unsettling in how prolonged and pornographic his gaze at it is against the fake texture of the practical effects. Which is definitely out of place in the tone, where a lot of the film is also clearly meant to play off as comedic or charming - an attempt by the owners to leave the house leads to the car floating in the air with its wheels spinning, a practical effect I will admit I wonder how they pulled off, to the delight of the kids when the car's turned back. Even when the kids try to communicate to the dead and use black magic, in trick and treat costumes, it's meant to be light. But the presentation is incredibly jarring.

Tonally coming off like it is originally going to be the ghosts corrupting the children, its instead something curiously odder with the English dub having a sloppier air to it than usual in Italian genre cinema. Beyond this, there is a lot of tangents that are dishevelled in placement furtger. The theft responsible for the original murders does reappear, leading to an Omen-like scenario where Fulci returns to the dog-on-human violence. The buffoonish real estate agent, a complete caricature, is utter hateable but the malice the kids show, permanently damaging one of his legs, raises a lot of questions alongside the fact one of his only really defining properties is that he's overweight and obnoxious. Even our Rasputin-like medium, the true villain of the piece, is only introduced near the end trying to cast the ghosts out, screaming over the top proclamations as he does.

The result isn't an accessible film in Lucio Fulci's filmography at all, only for the diehard fans to which I am one of them. I liked the film, found entertainment in it, but in lieu to the fact that it's a curiosity, its source as a TV film that wasn't even premiered on television as they were planned to be adding to its weirdness. The film is still, in spite of the English dub, to the usual quality of this type of Italian genre film from the period, which in the eighties always had a bit of cheesy exaggeration to it, something of a perverse charm in how (in another scene I would like to know how it was executed) the ghosts appear to their children in bed as lit flames. The film altogether is peculiar to say the least, sometimes an unintentional joy, other times a head scratcher. And the surprise is knowing there were many more films like this and, even before his final period, films like City of the Living Dead (1980) were already weird; he was dabbling in this even in his seventies work with the likes of A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971), making this a fascinating progression when a genre to hang around his work disappeared entirely. (Try watching Conquest (1983), his sole swords and fantasy film, for an example of where genre gets distorted into his vision rather than the other way around). This is admittedly not a good place to start for this late era, but for me, it was an interesting experience to say the least.

Abstract Spectrum: Tonal Whiplash/Whimsical

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None):  None

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* Touch of Death (1988), which I've covered on the blog and had footage used in A Cat in the Brain, was an incredibly weird film I do actually recommend tracking down from this era.

Touch of Death (1988)

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Director: Lucio Fulci

Screenplay: Lucio Fulci

Cast: Brett Halsey as Lester Parson; Ria De Simone as Alice Shogun; Al Cliver as Randy; Sacha Darwin as Margie MacDonald; Zora Kerova as Virginia Field; Marco Di Stefano as the Tramp

[Warning: Spoilers Throughout]

Synopsis: Older bachelor and gambler Lester Parson (Brett Halsey), constantly having to pay off debts for an illegal horse racing group, has a novel way of acquiring the funds needed. Dating wealthy women from the Lonely Hearts adverts in newspapers, wooing them so they take out all their money in a form easy for him to horde, and then kill them. Things are not what they originally seem for Lester, however, when a copycat killer is reported on TV claiming his victims and implicating him with each news report.

I didn't expect to be covering Touch of Death, one of the later Lucio Fulci films from after 1985 until the end of his career which were once more obscure. There are strange entries at this point in his filmography - Aenigma (1987) springs to mind, whilst Touch of Death was one of the many films either directed by Fulci or had his brand naming upon it recycled as clips for his truly bizarre, quasi-autobiographical oddity A Cat in the Brain (1990). Touch of Death itself, made the same year as the infamous Zombi 3 (1988) production where he only finished a large portion of it due to illness and the team of Claudio Fragasso and Bruno Mattei finished the final film, is a strange movie to my surprise. A perplexing mix of comedy, nasty splatter and his reoccurring obsession with reality slowly ebbing out of grasp as the film continues on.

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The tonal shifts are themselves effecting. Most of the narrative, until it builds to Lester's increasing paranoia and his fate being sealed, is the character interacting with a string of various female victims. Most of the film is also, in spite of the stereotypical Fulci gore that became synonymous to his work at this point, played as a black humoured farce. John Waters springs to mind, even if a failed comparison, for playing up bad taste deliberately. A strange quasi American environment, meant to be Florida but entirely in a netherrealm of Italian cinema's interpretation of it, one where Lester is an unapologetic sociopath but his female victims are exaggerations or even a glamorous actress like Zora Kerova having pronounced prosthetic disfigurements like a mere birth defect on the top lip or a vague moustache to undercut their appearance. Not flattering in the slightest, and can be seen as sexist, but in general the film's tone is a peculiar ode to the tasteless in a weird way. The exaggeration of the women for broad comedic effect, the most extreme an opera singer with masochistic streak, is balanced out by American actor Brett Halsey playing a strange, pathetic man himself. Charming enough to woo these women, and played by Halsey with charisma even with the ghostliness of him having to dub himself, but a man unable to keep hold of money and about to slip off the deep end.

He also gets realistic advice from the voice, similar to his, on the radio. That moment was enough to push Touch of Death into the abstract before it went further. It's clear the film is entirely from inside the mind of a man losing what sanity he had, the copycat himself in some form, but the dreamlike lack of clarity famous from Fulci taking this to an extreme. One where it can be as argued Lester is already dead or a literal doppelganger situation is involved. Everything is unexplained, the grotesque broadness of the female caricatures or the depopulated world of a low budget Italian genre flick, alongside the stranger details. The illegal horse gambling group, ran by an older Caucasian man and a still older Asian man, who exist in their own world wary of the police. Horse racing commentary is constantly in the soundtrack, at first presumed to be on the radio constantly for Lester, but becomes apparent in being part of his psychosis at it continues.

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That it's played for comedy is a surprise too. Fulci had made comedies early in his career, (fans proclaim that one, The Eroticist (1972), is actually a hidden gem from his filmography), but he was known at this point and still as a serious, nasty director of gore. Unintentional camp which appeared in the late eighties films was one thing, but deliberate humour catches you off guard. Obvious jokes stretched out at length such as Lester struggling to get a body in the boot of his car. One is legitimately a great moment, his attempt to add a Mickey Finn to a potential victim's drink only for it to continually, but even that scene is violently contrasted against the violent gore that happens afterwards, more glaringly fake compared to his early work and with such exaggeration, that victim losing an eye but still standing, that it becomes a heightened wreck of conflicting reactions as a viewer. That Fulci is credited as the sole screenwriter adds a fascinating touch to this film, that this is his interests unedited and leading to this concoction.  

Fulci, bless him, even when background material states the film was undercut by its low budget still managed to make a memorable film in Touch of Death. Its obscurity is not surprising as, compared to the stereotype of his career of lurid horror films, even the gore found here doesn't off-set that most of it is a melodrama black comedy of a sociopath. The film eventually gains more meat, whilst fascinating before, when you suspect the rug is going to be pulled from under Lester's feet at any moment, helped because Fulci's history of the unexpected always happening, able to wrong foot the viewer even if it breaks the logic of before, is prevalent here too. Even the music, which is chintzy, works for the strange humour because it sounds like cartoon music. The tone eventually leads to an ending that can be interpreted in different ways, which is applaudable, Zora Kerova's femme fatale (who yet has that distinct lip disfigurement) a warning of Lester meeting his matched, followed by an emotional conversation with his own shadow for a very unique ending scene. The kind of twist you'd want from Italian genre cinema.

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Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Quirky/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

Personal Opinion:

A dark horse just in terms of Lucio Fulci's stranger films. Does Touch of Death actually work though? That depends on the viewer, the content and presentation erratic and likely to get varying reactions. For me, there's a lot to like. Fulci is at least going with the premise to its extreme and its memorable as a result.

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Aenigma (1987)

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Director: Lucio Fulci

Screenplay: Lucio Fulci and Giorgio Mariuzzo

Cast: Jared Martin (as Dr. Robert Anderson); Lara Lamberti as Eva Gordon); Ulli Reinthaler (as Jenny Clark); Sophie d'Aulan (as Kim); Jennifer Naud (as Grace O'Neal); Riccardo Acerbi (as Fred Vernon); Kathi Wise (as Virginia Williams); Milijana Zirojevic (as Kathy)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #102

Synopsis: When the daughter of an all-girl school concierge is hit by a car during a cruel prank, leaving her comatose in a hospital, a new student Eva (Lara Lamberti) immediately starts to act strangely. That hospitalised girl Kathy (Milijana Zirojevic), with the help of a mother with supernatural powers, can control Eva with psychic powers that distort reality, using the transfer student as a puppet to gain revenge on all those involved with Kathy's accident and the cruel prank against her.

Late era Lucio Fulci is an area of his career rarely looked upon well and only getting reconsidered now with Blu-Ray restorations. Whenever this point was reached - I'd argue its 1982 with The New York Ripper, a notorious and offensive film for many but still one of his most well known - the films after are viewed with less interest. I love Conquest the year after in 1983, but after that it's a combination of negative critical thought amongst Fulci fans and the lack of availability of the films at points which has not helped them. Honestly, as an unapologetic Italian genre film fan who even now loves the crass and dumb entries, there's a cut off period where the lowering budget and TV's death grip on the Italian entertainment industry was slowly suffocating the country's wonderful genre boom from the sixties to the early eighties. The late eighties has some gasps of kitsch joy, but for the few films which stood out critically - Opera (1987) to Cemetery Man (1994) - the Italian genre film industry was dying painfully, symbolically shown in some way when Fulci himself finally died  in 1996. The extras for 88 Films releases in the UK - even outdoing Arrow Video in documenting this period with the directors, production technicians and actors from the period - have started to paint for me a fascinating chronology of this period in Italian genre cinema, sandwiched between optimism (Joe D'Amato starting up Filmirage) and the grim foregone conclusion of the industry. Fulci himself, as the industry was trying to survive, had to cope as much with his declining health, and considering how uncomfortably thin he is in his Alfred Hitchcock-like cameo in Aenigma, it's not a surprise to learn a year later in Zombi 3 (1988) he could only complete part of a film shot in the Philippines where the heat effected his ill health significantly.  

The films themselves? So far from the Fulci films of the late eighties, kitsch schlock of erratic qualities concluding with A Cat in the Brain (1990), made from clips from existing films from the "Lucio Fulci Presents" series, a group of horror productions including two directed by Fulci himself, alongside new footage for a truly weird meta movie. However, as someone who has come to love Italian genre cinema, even the late eighties films now have a compelling nature to them, stuck between the last gasps of artistry and absolutely enjoyment vulgarity. They are a curious drug to take - between the eighties perms and gaudy colour - not for everyone but strangely addictive. Fulci's own films, as a fan who thinks he exists as his own singular figure above many other Italian genre directors, also possess virtues if you're willing the panhandle through their absurdities. Especially in the context of the kind of terrible, cheap films made nowadays on video, the late eighties films are still a significant notch higher in quality that you can still appreciate.  

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Technical Quality:

Riffing on Carrie (1976) amongst other films, the late eighties seeps over Aenigma so much that it can be divisive even for fans of The Beyond (1981) and earlier Fulci films. It's amazing how, even outside of Italian horror films to ones from around the world like the US, where the baroque or grounded artistry of a lot of the movies from the early eighties suddenly morphed into neon, aerobics and unisex perms. There's a drastic shift in tone even next to some of cheesier earlier eighties movies coming from Italy when they got to the late eighties, when fads like aerobics get their own scene in Aenigma to the failed attempt to pretend it's set in Boston, USA with its various pop culture posters on the walls. As the hair got noticeably bigger, horror films from various countries, even in the US, started to have a gaudier tone than ones from only a few years earlier, something that can be found in slasher films to Fulci's work over in Italy, all of them still engaging in their colourful camp but an abrupt switch from the more decadent artistry of low budget horror films from before to something more chintzy.

Noticeably, failing to look like it's on American soil, the cold Eastern European architecture especially for the central school actually helps the film immensely rather than hinder it, blending with this late eighties aesthetic with unexpected results. Considering only a year later Fulci partially shot Zombi 3 in the Philippines, and seeing how that film looks so different from this with its jungle locations and sweltering atmosphere, Aenigma at least has its own distinct personality. Being a Yugoslavian co-production, with cast members both from there and other European countries, does stand out against a lot of other Italian horror films, and even if Aenigma is undeniably campy in tone, the more muted colours and all the stark white of the rooms is effective on a low budget, a curious mix of Fulci's gothic films and septic, modernism. There is even some great ambition with use of model buildings, noticeable but leading to aerial shots that not only stand out, particularly for anyone who has sat through A Cat in the Brain from three years later, but emphasises a sense of artificiality that gives Aenigma Fulci's trademark dreamlike quality.

Even the tackier aspects have now becoming charming for me knowing what to expect from these late eighties Italo-genre films. Sadly the English dubbing is more variable in these era of the country's genre filmmaking, as Aenigma also shows audibly, but especially knowing the struggles the industry had to deal with there's an undeniable charm through most of them unless you're truly scraping the barrel. I'd never thought I would see a Lucio Fulci film whose first scene is scored to yacht rock, but it's impossible for me either to hate it. In fact there's an amusing game in just spotting all the licensed figures on the posters in the background and recognising them alone, Tom Cruise making a recurring cameo that, with a strategically used thumbs up after a certain death scene, is actually hilarious even if it was unintentional.

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Abstract Spectrum: Mindbender/Psychotronic

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

A large portion of Aenigma has to be taken, to fully appreciate it, as if viewed through a hazed stupor, one of those cases where frankly, for every good moment, the others have to be viewed for how silly they are, where even cheesy dialogue is part of the strange tone the whole movie has. Also helping is that this is still Fulci which has an illogical nature to its world, redeeming the film immensely. It's only the romantic subplot, where Eva falls in love with Dr. Robert Anderson (Jared Martin), the doctor keeping an eye on Kathy in hospital, when the film does grind to a halt and there's the sense I'd presumed these later Italian films as having of being asinine and flimsy. In truth, even a film that's technical "bad" can still sustain itself, even if for a smaller audience, if it can generate a sustained air of heightened momentum. The problem usually stems from most films deciding instead to put all its eggs in a basket for an emotional drama, like romantic subplots, which aren't well written or compelling. Thankfully Aenigma is more like an odd funhouse of gristly weirdness but you do have to put up with the drama even if you appreciate the gaudier taste to it.

The horror scenes themselves are what makes the film entertaining - in many ways, while it would've been the trait of Fulci's films that'd typecast him negatively in his career for many years, it's how he creates his scenes of terror and gore which make his horror films stand out, dipping the stories with unconventional, dream tones. A film like Aenigma is more a series of them on a loose thread of narrative, making it self-defeating to criticise the film on that level next to more dramatic, serious entries in the genre when Fulci's cinema was constantly lapping into the irrational over the eighties.

Death by snails is the infamous moment of Aenigma, making it a perfect double bill with Juan Piquer Simón's Slugs (1988) in spite of the scene actually being a nude woman being smothered by living escargot on mass, immediately sympathy for the actress gained from having to shoot such an awkward, gross scene for real laid under them. All the deaths, following the lack of rules allowed through Kathy being able to manipulate reality from her hospital bed, follow an elaborate and original way between all  of them. From death by mirror doppelganger to living statues in a museum, even if they have somewhat cheap effects they still stand out for their unnatural qualities. One sequence is actually one of the strongest in Lucio Fulci's career, a person trying to escape a bedroom where a decapitated corpse is only for each door they go through to go back to the original bedroom, firmly entrenching Aenigma in a nightmarish tone for one brief moment, the moment within the film, for all its silliness before and after, that's legitimately well executed and makes the rest of it worth sitting through. That this is also the scene where Tom Cruise's cameo sticks out perfectly just adds to it, making the film's existence worthy for it.

Whether Aenigma is abstract enough to go on the list was to debate, only to remember however that The Black Cat (1981) got on; if it can, Aenigma had to. It's not as surreal as the likes of The Beyond or A Cat in the Brain, those films by various qualities possessing the right mix of atmosphere or absolute weirdness to stand out more. But even with a lesser entry in his career, Fulci's movies always stood out in how more delicately obscurer they were in tone for the better; knowing full well how he would go off script a lot with his films is testament to this, but an even bigger aspect is knowing even here, with complete honesty that Aenigma is ridiculous and exceptionally flawed, there was still the weird magic of his earlier, best work still here.

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Personal Opinion:

Definitely a film for hardcore Fulci fans first, not newcomers to his filmography unless you appreciate late eighties camp greatly. Contrary to negative reviews of it, and a lot of the late eighties Italian horror films, there's still a compelling excess and style to them even with the visibly restricted look Aenigma has. It's not high art even in Fulci's career, where there's actual candidates earlier in his career for great genre films, but having always been warned about his later career after the late eighties being lesser and lesser quality, Aenigma is a higher bar above the expectations even in terms of trashy cinema with personality to it.

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Halloween 31 For 31: The Beyond (1981)

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Director: Lucio Fulci

Screenplay: Dardano Sacchetti, Giorgio Mariuzzo and Lucio Fulci

Cast: Catriona MacColl (as Liza Merril); David Warbeck (as Dr. John McCabe); Cinzia Monreale (as Emily); Antoine Saint-John (as Schweick); Veronica Lazar (as Martha)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #48

To enter the world of The Beyond is to go into one of Lucio Fulci's least conventional horror films. Ironically this is his most well known film yet it is very unconventional, a story of a gateway to Hell under an abandoned hotel but one which slowly jettisons the entirety of logic bit-by-bit as the narrative goes along. Especially when able to view it in a pristine form, it's a deceptively alluring and haunting horror movie, its sepia prologue in 1920s Louisiana, when a sorcerer keeping the gate closed is horribly murdered by a mob, starting the events decade later, evoking a classical horror movie with its pace and music only for the prolonged nailing of hands to a wall and melting with lime to force you to remember this is an ultraviolent Italian film from the eighties. Paradoxically, like many of Fulci's horror films, this manages to be amongst the most lurid of Italian genre cinema at this time, prolonged scenes of sloppy practical effects gore for its own sake, like a Herschell Gordon Lewis shocker, yet amongst the most artistically beautiful from that era too. It confuses one's perception especially as its semblance of plot - an English woman Liza Merril (Catriona MacColl) gaining the cursed hotel by inheritance - becomes infected by the more nightmarish content immediately after a construction worker renovating the hotel falls off a scaffold from fright.  

Many aspects of The Beyond are utterly silly if scrutinised by their own. The "realistic" spiders which crawl out from under a library archive shelf and eat a man's face very slowly. The 'Do Not Entry' sign in the hospital which belies the Louisiana on-location shoot with its palpable sense of dread for the rest of the time. Many things in another content, where there's no clear sense of irrationality as in The Beyond, would be ridiculous but, whether its fully planned out or includes accidents, inside this film they make sense still, Fulci in his films possessing a tone of real nightmares where nothing is entirely in control. Events inexplicably happen, an unconscious body perfectly placed under where a glass of acid will fall slowly on them, the dead in a hospital morgue rising up, and the small snapshots of people in the town the film is set in all eventually disappearing when Liza and doctor John McCabe (David Warbeck), the later dragged into the events around the hotel, find themselves eventually isolated in desolate corridors with only the dead as company.

It's clearly deliberate as much as its the result of Fulci's unconventional directorial style - very volatile and angry on set, a tendency to go off-script completely - an empty road in the middle of real life Louisiana haunting with only a blind woman with her dog, the ghostly Emily (Cinzia Monreale), in sight for Liza to have to stop her car. An occasional distortion of the visual medium which disrupts time clearly shows this, a moment of slow motion of a glass of acid falling out of reality, or when Liza repeats the image of Emily running out of a house over and over again, the film gladly able to break physical logic as it goes along with clear intentions. When the heroes find they've gone through a hospital door and end up back in the water drowned basement of the hotel, it's clear The Beyond is going further than even City of the Living Dead (1980), Fulci's previous film, did in being irrational.

Even as a gory film with prolonged shots of eye trauma and injury, the sense of immense decay and death is far more unsettling, the obvious practical effects in Fulci's films always evoking sickness in a slow burn mood. Fabio Frizzi's score adds a sense of the grandiose to this material but its severely, painfully even, melancholic and depressed; even by the standards of Fulci's nasty films this is nihilistic as the results don't bode well at all for those who try to escape the curse of Hell opening up.

From https://thatwasabitmental.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/beyond3.jpg

Abstract Spectrum: Expressionist; Grotesque; Mindbender; Psychotronic; Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

Likely the extreme of all of Lucio Fulci's career - A Cat In The Brain (1990) is another contender but one of the other spectrum of the bizarre content in Fulci's filmography next to The Beyond as his most dread inducing. Only the second of his unofficial Dead trilogy, the slow grower The House By The Cemetery (1981) capping an incredible triptych of Italian horror films for any director, The Beyond is somehow, when you stop to think about it, a film which manages to get away with countless things that shouldn't work in films (one note characters, silly prosthetic effects, a lack of explanation for what exactly the curse that devours the world is or any sense of its scope) but is entirely disturbing and powerful nonetheless.

The reality of The Beyond, to match City of the Living Dead's teleporting zombies, allows the dead to spring from any place, to rise from bodies of water to slaughter the living, for a ghost to even die again through a horrible moment of man's best friend turning on its owner. In many ways, a feint scent of Lovecraftian horror in its view of irrational horror is here, the hotel only one of seven gates to Hell, but entirely in the realm of religious dogma where anyone can be silenced whether they are by the layers of death under the earth in its own realm.

Personal Opinion:

Even by the standards of Italian genre cinema, and how gonzo it could be, The Beyond manages to be even more unpredictable on multiple viewers, still strange and compelling as a result. What was once a film of acquired taste is now something a lot more special to me. 

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