Census Bloodbath: Dance Dance Dance Till You're Dead

Year: 1984

Director: Lucio Fulci

Cast: Olga Karlatos, Ray Lovelock, Claudio Cassinelli

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Plot: Murder-Rock: Dancing Death follows a dance company training at the *checks notes* Arts for Living Center in New York City run by Candice (Olga Karlatos). The best dancers are being murdered one by one with a massive hatpin shoved straight into their hearts, so Lt. Borges (Cosimo Cinieri of Fulci's previous slasher effort The New York Ripper) is on the case.

Analysis: Among the well-known Italian horror directors of the '70s and '80s, Fulci is perhaps the most inconsistent. Sometimes he could deliver a gorgeous, disgusting fever dream like The Beyond. And other times he would rest on his laurels and deliver a sleepy, autopilot picture like The Black Cat. Usually he would stab out an eye or two while he was at it, but he was constantly crossing the line between art and trash rather than gradually backsliding from one to the other like certain Dario Argentos I won't mention.

I will give Fulci this. He seems to be really trying to make Murder-Rock artful, to the point that certain moments are mimicking the best scenes and aesthetic impulses of Suspiria. One particularly effective moment is achieved just in the sound mix, when the panting of a strung-out dancer gets mixed way higher than the music she's dancing to. There is also some excellent set design (the white tiled hallway of the locker room is something to behold), a gorgeous opening shot of the New York skyline in front of a deep purple sky, and a few shot setups that really made me perk up and pay attention. One in particular, with the camera tracking along as a body bag is being wheeled down a hallway past the watching faces of the dancers, is stunning and unlike anything I've ever seen in a slasher.

Unfortunately, his aesthetic ambition seems to be hampered by his ability. Or at least, he didn't have the appropriate equipment to make his vision happen. Even some of the best sequences are lit too harshly, with lens flares that would make J.J. Abrams' eyes roll back into his head. Most of the time the characters are lit from behind or above in a manner that completely obliterates their faces, and the motif of flashing lights is both preposterous (for some reason, the police carry around a panel of flashing lights to shine onto the body) and profoundly ugly.

Really, Fulci has ended up somewhere far closer to Stripped to Kill than Suspiria, only without the female gaze making the dance scenes tolerable at all. Now, I'm always partial to any film where I see a choreographer listed in the credits, but this dancing is terrible. It has all the intensity of Showgirls with all the precision of The Apple. The music that accompanies the frequent, extended dance sequences ranges from amusingly shitty (the uptempo disco track "Are the Streets to Blame" is an excellent slice of cheese) to ear-scrapingly abysmal (the opening theme "Tonight is The Night" sounds like "(I've Had) The Time of My Life" by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes went to Hell and got laryngitis).

And while the killer's M.O. is appropriately sleazy and horrifying for a Fulci flick, it also leads to an extreme lack of variety, to the point that some of the kills in the second half of the film take place onscreen because Fulci probably figured you got the picture by that point. The kill to dance sequence ratio was already off, but this severe drop-off makes the second and third acts a real slog. When the best thing about your movie about dancing and stabbing is the title font, you know something has gone horribly wrong. Murder-Rock is certainly less stultifying than The Black Cat and more artful than The New York Ripper, but it's just not enough of everything that it clearly wants to be.

Killer: Candice Norman (Olga Karlatos)

Final Girl: N/A

Best Kill: The opening heart-piercing kill is the one that luxuriates the most in how goddamn disturbing that particular M.O. really is.

Sign of the Times: If you listen to even a single second of the wall-to-wall music used in this film, you'd be able to carbon date the exact month of 1984 this came out.

Scariest Moment: When Janice comes home to a supposedly empty apartment, she spots a still-smoking cigarette in her ashtray.

Weirdest Moment: The film randomly cuts to the dancer Jill babysitting a kid in a wheelchair who shows her a slideshow of dead bugs

Champion Dialogue: "You're gonna grit your teeth and dance, even when your friend dies."

Body Count: 6

Susan has her heart pierced with a hatpin.

DeeDee the Bird has her heart pierced with a hatpin.

Janice is killed offscreen.

Jill is killed offscreen.

Gloria has her heart pierced with a hatpin.

Candice has her heart pierced with a hatpin.

TL;DR: Murder-Rock: Dancing Death is a bland slasher that attempts to doll itself up as an aesthetically interesting giallo.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 851

Census Bloodbath: Cats Take Orders From No One (Capsule Review)

Year: 1981

Director: Lucio Fulci

Cast: Patrick Magee, Mimsy Farmer, David Warbeck

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Plot: Freely adapted from the Edgar Allen Poe short story of the same name, The Black Cat follows the medium Robert Miles (Patrick Magee), whose murderous instincts are channeled through a hypnotic black cat who is simultaneously his tool and his nemesis. As people around town begin to die one by one, Scotland Yard Inspector Gorley (David Warbeck of Formula for a Murder) enlists the help of visiting American photographer Jill Trevers (Mimsy Farmer of Body Count) to help him get to the bottom of this strange web of mystical intrigue. 

Analysis: When you're approaching a Lucio Fulci movie that came out in the same era as The Beyond and The New York Ripper, you make sure you're strapped in. Unfortunately for you, if you have chosen The Black Cat, you're more in danger of choking yourself on your seatbelt than garnering any excitement from the film itself. It's definitely an "off" moment for Fulci, whose directorial style is sleepy and dreamlike in his best films, but becomes tedious as hell in his worst.

I will say that his methodical pacing really hammers home the death sequences in this film, which are usually accidents that happen around or because of the titular feline. Watching someone, say, asphyxiate on gas while their mouth begins to foam or have the flesh melt off their body in a house fire is one thing. Watching it happen in languorous stretches of film that make you feel trapped in the frame and forced to reckon with their prolonged suffering is another thing. Unfortunately, the deaths are few and far between. They also aren't redeemed by the presence of a satisfying villain, because there is no real "slasher" figure causing all the mayhem we see here.

That slow pace fails to elevate any other part of the movie, unfortunately. That's not to say it's not all very well-mounted and pretty. The lighting and cinematography are perfectly bucolic and dreamlike. And in one case, a piece of set design is even breathtaking, when a potential villain escapes into an attic with a wall decorated in a swirling curlicue pattern. And Fulci continues to prove he has an obsession with eyes even when he's not jamming huge pieces of wood into them, with evocative closeups of humans and cats staring into the camera. 

However, the overbooked nonsense of the plot and the vacant acting of British people dubbing Italian actors require a lot more energy than they're given. It's a deathly dull slog through anything that isn't a kill, and because of the "was it an accident?" nature of the kills themselves, they don't offer enough variety to spice up their rare appearances in the first place. There isn't a lot in this film to justify its existence, less so because Italian horror has already received the most perfect adaptation of "The Black Cat" it was ever going to get, in Sergio Martine's 1972 film Your Vice is a Locked Room, and Only I Have the Key. If you're considering a double bill of that and The Black Cat, you'd frankly be much better served by just watching Your Vice twice.

Killer: Prof. Robert Miles (Patrick Magee)

Final Girl: Jill Trevers (Mimsy Farmer)

Best Kill: None of these kills really deliver in the way that only Fulci knows how to, so I'll nominate a non-kill gore moment when the cat attacks Miles and slashes stigmata onto the palms of his hands.

Sign of the Times: Jill's bleached blonde Junie B. Jones haircut.

Scariest Moment: Miles starts babbling in panic as he uses one of Maureen's possessions to channel her last moments.

Weirdest Moment: The film briefly goes full Exorcist when Miles tries to kill the cat, and Jill's bed starts shaking around and floating.

Champion Dialogue: "Could've been worse. Could've been a case of chicken wrestling."

Body Count: 5

1. Ferguson dies in a car crash.
2. Maureen and 
3. Stan asphyxiate from a gas leak in an airtight room.
4. Drunk falls from a great height and is impaled on a spike.
5. Mrs. Grayson falls out of a window while burning to death.

TL;DR: The Black Cat is gorgeous, but the story doesn't have enough oomph to wake up Fulci's sleepy direction.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 726

Census Bloodbath: Duck And Cover

Year: 1982

Director: Lucio Fulci

Cast: Jack Hedley, Almanta Suska, Howard Ross 

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

The giallo genre that dominated the Italian horror landscape in the 70's may have given way to the slashers in America when the 80's rolled around, but were those exploitation filmmakers just supposed to go away after that? I don't think so, honey. The Italian genre directors knew how to adapt and survive into any new wave of cinema, and gore maestro Lucio Fulci was preeminent among them. After the slasher dam burst with the flood of films following Friday the 13th, Fulci built himself a raft called The New York Ripper, and... well, it sure is a Lucio Fulci joint.

Hope you're not a fan of women making it safely through movies!

The New York Ripper tells the sordid tale of a killer using his trusty switchblade to carve his way through the women of New York's night life. Lieutenant Fred Williams (Jack Hedley of For Your Eyes Only) is on the case, teaming up with professor of psychology Dr. Paul Davis (Paolo Malco of that same year's The Scorpion with Two Tails - coming soon!) to profile the killer and track him down. 

That's really about it for plot. Otherwise we follow random victims of the Ripper through their daily lives until they do or don't get ripped. The most important of these are Fay Majors (Almanta Keller), who narrowly escapes an attack on the subway, causing her to interrupt her training for the Olympics - if you know what event she's training for, you have better ears than I do; her physicist boyfriend Peter Bunch (Andrew Painter), who always seems to have somewhere to be whenever the Ripper is around; and Jane Forrester Lodge (Alexandra Delli Colli), a kinky woman who has an open relationship with her husband and gets her rocks off at live sex shows in a cream-colored fedora. 

In other words, she's awesome.

Oh, did I mention the killer quacks like a duck while he's murdering his victims? That seems like it's probably important. Yes, in every scene he's doing a half-decent Donald Duck impression. And yes, this is extremely terrifying. I had heard about this element going in and fully expected it to be laughable, but I was dead wrong. The manic quacking combined with brutal, bloody violence is uncanny as all hell, and my spine wanted to curl right out of my body every time it happened.

Fulci's films are famous for their use of nightmare logic, an argument that I usually assume people adopt to defend his frequently inept editing, stilted dialogue, and sound design. But whether or not it's intentional, the way his scenes lose control and start to degrade (sometimes outright eschewing continuity and/or the laws of physics) right as the horror and - yes - the quacking kick it up to 11 packs a powerful, disorienting punch.

I'm actually much more inclined to believe that his twisted logic is intentional, because there are a great many scenes explicitly designed to knock you off kilter, even in little moments. Take the sequence where the killer makes a late night phone call to Lt. Williams, who is in bed with a woman we assume to be his wife. It's not until minutes later that it's revealed she's a prostitute who he frequently meets. Does it make sense that these people would be in a full deep slumber together*? Of course not! But it all serves the fact that every single one of these characters has a stake in the city's nightlife, twisting our expectations along the way.

*Come to think of it, every couple that has sex in this movie falls into an immediate deep sleep like they pricked their finger on a magic spinning wheel.

In addition to being surprisingly chilling, The New York Ripper provides buckets and buckets of the expected Lucio Fulci grue. Normally when I'm taking notes on a slasher film, the description of a kill will looking something like this "*Nancy is impaled on antlers." Well, for each and every murder scene here I had to keep adding note after note until it practically became a full fledged paragraph.

This movie is brutal to the women who populate it, putting them through the ringer, smashing that ringer with a sledgehammer, and building a new ringer out of shards of their own bones before putting them through that. The slasher genre (especially the Italian flavor) has a lot to answer for RE: the way it treats beautiful women, but I've gone into that a million times before. So all I will say is that the kills are grotesque, scuzzy, fabulously rendered, and hold off on the trademark Lucio Fulci eye trauma just enough that you think he might not even do it this time.

Don't worry, he does.

Ripper is one of those slashers that takes the grimy, run down streets of early 80's New York City and turns that aesthetic into a meat grinder of horror that makes you want to take a shower afterward. As in, it would make a great double feature with Maniac. These kills aren't fun. They're horrible, which is I guess a good thing, because they're supposed to be. It's just a rough watch sometimes. I suppose it all has to do with tone. There is a queasily realistic shot involving a razor blade and a nipple that is genuinely upsetting, the polar opposite of the transparently, almost charmingly exploitative scene in the daffy Bloody Moon where a knife goes straight through a woman's back and sticks out of her breast. I suppose there's room for both of these in the horror landscape, but Ripper takes the sleazy grindhouse approach rather than the... whatever the hell Jess Franco was doing in Bloody Moon.

At any rate, it accomplishes what it sets out to do: horrify. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie doesn't work quite so well, even on its own terms. For one thing, it is an absolute failure as a police procedural whodunit. 

I've already expressed my distaste for police-centric slashers, because they don't allow us to spend enough time with the potential victims that we really get a sense of their character or begin to care about them. But The New York Ripper is an absolute mess on top of that, forgetting to introduce major suspects or red herrings until the halfway mark, in scenes that act like we've already met these people half a dozen times before. It also fabulously mishandles its own tone, choosing to end on a maudlin bit of sentiment that had only been set up ten minutes before in one of the film's most narratively confusing, sloppily edited sequences. 

It's the Winchester Mystery House of movie scripts. Characters show up, are given names and personality traits, then never appear again. Crucial details (including the major decision to reveal that Dr. Davis is gay) arise and are immediately forgotten. And certain beautiful images (my favorite being a woman's reflection in a turning doorknob) are surrounded by a dreadful mire of repetitive, gloomy guerrilla photography.

I would only recommend The New York Ripper to people who know exactly what they're getting themselves into and are willing to subject themselves to it. Taken on its own terms, I'd say it's a pretty darn good exploitation offering, but it's not the type of movie I rush to rewatch or recommend. I'd say if you've seen Maniac and The Beyond and had the stomach for both of them, then this might just be the movie for you. That's a very small sliver of a Venn Diagram, but there's plenty of people who fit it, so if that's you, have a ball!

I guess I'd like to end this review with a small discussion of Dr. Davis' homosexuality, which is revealed in a purposeless scene of him buying a male nudie magazine. I'm almost entirely certain that this was included in the film to show that he is a "pervert" and position him as a murder suspect because he's a wild and crazy guy who would eschew the delights of female flesh. But it never gets brought up, and he's allowed to be a smart, capable person and survive the film. So that's still pretty damn good representation for 1982, just saying.

Killer: [Peter Bunch (Andrew Painter)]

Final Girl: Fay Majors (Almanta Keller), once she finally shows up

Best Kill: This is one of those sleazy movies where it doesn't feel right to reward the murders, but in terms of special effects, Kitty's death by razor (including it slicing through her nipple and eye) holds up stomach-churningly well.

Sign of the Times: A victim's landlady recalls the exact time she last saw her alive because Dallas had just come on.

Scariest Moment: Fay is sitting in an empty movie theater and a man starts violently grabbing at her crotch from beneath the seat.

Weirdest Moment: Jane visits a restaurant and one of the patrons pleasures her under the table with his bare foot for a loooooong time.

Champion Dialogue: "Well well well, if it isn't the big chief person himself."

Body Count: 6

1. Rosie is slashed.
2. Live Sex Show Lady is stabbed in the gut with a broken bottle.
3. Jane is sliced up the abdomen.
4. Kitty is mutilated with a razor.
5. Mickey is suffocated with a plastic bag offscreen.
6. Peter is shot in the face.

TL;DR: The New York Ripper is disgusting and sleazy, but that's exactly what it aims to be.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1592

Popcorn Kernels: Dead Islands

Now that I’ve finally whittled down my backlog to nothing, I’m free to be a movie glutton once more, necessitating another set of mini reviews. These two pieces are about island-set zombie films, both screened for Zombie History Month on the Scream 101 podcast.

The Serpent and the Rainbow (Listen to the Scream 101 episode here.)

Year: 1988

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Bill Pullman, Cathy Tyson, Zakes Mokae

Run Time: 1 hour 38 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Dennis Alan is sent to Haiti to search for a drug that supposedly brings the dead back to life and gets himself embroiled in voodoo rituals and wicked politics along the way.

And thus continues my unstructured marathon to fill in the gaps of my Wes Craven viewing following his tragic passing. The Serpent and the Rainbow is one of the biggest titles I had not yet seen (the film community isn’t exactly clamoring to reclaim Cursed), and it’s one I missed due to a chronic disinterest in the subject matter. My first exposure to cinematic voodoo was I Walked with a Zombie, a stultifying affair that did not leave me slavering for more. However, I’m happy to say that my experience this time around was exceedingly pleasant.

Another factor that made me dubious was the fact that Craven didn’t write the script himself, something that only seemed to work with the Scream movies. That may have been the case, but this material (including the nonfiction book it was based on) is so compatible with his sensibilities that it’s no mystery why he chose to pursue it. The film was hobbled by an immensely difficult production (while the final product was a Wes Craven movie, the behind-the-scenes struggles could have made a great Hitchcock thriller), but it’s just as idiosyncratic as any of the director’s 80’s flicks.

The Serpent and the Rainbow has one of the loosest narratives in Craven’s career (remember this is the man who wrote Shocker), but this allows him to work at a level of pure style that’s undeniably effective. His obsession with nightmares continues full force here, but his “rubber reality” is far less intrusive than it had been in his non-Freddy flicks (not to throw Shocker under the bus again, but…). It arises organically from the material, steeped in mysticism and illicit drug use as it is, providing a stunningly eerie atmosphere and some of his best imagery ever. One nightmare sequence, which features Bill Pullman trapped in a coffin that’s slowly filing with blood, is a masterpiece of dream logic that’s as visually arresting and viscerally intense as anything in A Nightmare on Elm Street.

The scenes set in reality are hardly less jarring. Two violent moments are particularly stomach-churning (let’s just say Bill Pullman’s family jewels are put on display in a bad part of town), and a third act collision between the upper-crust white world of Boston and voodoo principles is a gleefully dark spectacle that calls to mind the best of Sam Raimi.

Moments like these peppers the film, making up for the near total lack of a plot with their boundlessly creative saging. You see, thanks to behind-the-scenes shenanigans, The Serpent and the Rainbow has some gaping narrative holes that are papered over with an intrusive Blade Runner Director’s Cut-esque voiceover. It’s like the missing jigsaw pieces of the film are filled in with random bits from the Maltese Falcon puzzle. There are definitely some solid themes present, including a Craven trademark – science vs. faith – but the film’s structure is less Empire State Building and more Leaning Tower of Pisa.

These plot flaws crop up especially during the rushed finale, when the truly menacing political tyranny/voodoo master morphs into a dime store Freddy Krueger and is defeated pretty much instantly by some deus ex stupida faux-mystical nonsense. As you can see, the film is far from perfect, but as a gallery for a talented cinematic mind working at full steam, it’s tremendously effective. Imagery from The Serpent and the Rainbow will stick with me forever, even as the actual story has already faded to a miniscule blip on my mind’s horizon.

Rating: 7/10

Zombie (Listen to the Scream 101 episode here.)

Year: 1979
Director: Lucio Fulci
Cast: Tisa Farrow, Ian McCulloch, Richard Johnson
Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Anne Bowles is distraught when her father’s boat washes up in the New York harbor. She teams up with a reporter and two vacationers to find the island where he disappeared, whereupon they are attacked by a plague of zombies.

Zombie is both the second Lucio Fulci film I’ve screened for the podcast and the second I’ve seen in my life. Obviously my frame of reference is not vast, but here’s my fast and loose takeaway. The Beyond is better, but Zombie really whet my appetite for further Fulci exploration. One of the first Italian zombie flicks to burst from the gates after the massive success of Dawn of the Dead (recut in Italy by Dario Argento and titled Zombi, hence this unofficial sequel’s Italian title – Zombi 2), Zombie set the precedent for the years of gore and undead mayhem to follow.

Though Zombie doesn’t feature as much of the inimitable Fulci style as his other works, it starts off with a bang- quite literally. The very first shot mimics the end of The Great Train Robbery. A gun is pointed directly at the camera, pausing menacingly before it shoots a covered figure in the head. Before any credits, characters, dialogue, or discernible locations have been introduced, Zombie has already made an indelible mark, proving itself as a violent, jarring movie from the get-go.

Of course, it takes a long time for Zombie to regain that momentum, entering as it does the “setup” part of the first act. In a traditional movie, this is the section where we meet the characters and discover their personalities, goals, and conflicts. In a Fulci movie, it’s where we watch meatbags prepare to head to the place where they are destined to get punctured. Zombie’s setup is a particularly drawn-out one, mindlessly wasting valuable minutes on Fulci’s biggest weakness: characters. Tisa Farrow may have a Mia in her bloodline, but her go-to trick of bulging her eyes and pretending her head is slowly filling with helium does little to offset the stolid blandness of the obviously-too-old male lead Ian McCulloch, whom the movie strains to pretend is a strapping hero type.

However, once the engine revs up after a couple sputtering stalls (including a scene where a zombie fights a shark that defies the laws of movie physics by somehow being kinda boring), Zombie kicks into high gear. The red tempera paint flows freely as the undead rise for a solid half hour of zombie carnage. A siege on a hospital gets a little repetitive, but if there’s one thing you can’t say about Fulci, it’s that he lacks diversity in his violence. We get neck biting, arm ripping, head splitting, and the iconic “splinter through the eye” sequence, which has the weakest effects in the whole film, but by the point they arrive, you have already been sold by the tension and that dazzling shot of the eye in alarmingly close proximity to impalement.

The gore isn’t the vast smorgasbord that The Beyond presents, but if anything the film is even more Italian. The movie literally stops in its tracks for some topless scuba diving, and a showering woman is thoughtfully reflected at all angles by a thoughtfully placed vanity. This is a crass, over-the-top, exploitative husk of a film that occasionally slips into a sort of feverish artistry (a scene where the characters realize they’re camped in a graveyard is a deliciously slow-drip spine tingle, and certain shots –a vertical angle through a boat’s sails, a shaft of light on a wall widening as a door creaks open… - are undeniably suave), and that’s the perfect evocation of the Fulci cinematic philosophy.


Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1335

Popcorn Kernels: Moonage Daydreams

Labyrinth

Year: 1986

Director: Jim Henson

Cast: David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly, Dave Goelz

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

When a young woman accidentally banishes her baby brother to the goblin kingdom, she must work her way through a fantastical labyrinth to save him.

Obviously, Labyrinth made its way into my screening schedule due to the untimely passing of rock icon David Bowie, but it’s also a very appropriate interlude during the midpoint of my Muppet marathon. The last feature film directed by Jim Henson, Labyrinth is one of the final puzzle pieces in a career dedicated to converting the truly bizarre into the mainstream. The narrative of Labyrinth is piecemeal, part Alice in Wonderland, part Wizard of Oz, with the linguistic cunning of The Phantom Tollbooth, but beneath the vignettes of Jennifer Connelly’s journey there’s a dark, intelligent mind pulsing, constantly bursting forth with fresh, nutty ideas.

In the broadest sense, Labyrinth is about growing up and learning to share with/care for another human being. But Labyrinth is also about the poisonous behavior of clinging to material possessions, the unreliability of the rules by which one perceives the universe, and Jim Henson showing off just how devilishly creative he could truly be. The creature designs that erupt across the screen are feverish triumphs of character creation. 

From large to small, every monster, goblin, anthropomorphic door knocker, cockney worm, etc., etc., etc. has a personality and a detailed, idiosyncratic look. My personal favorites are the lichen-covered stone “Helping Hands” that guard the oubliette, and the trash ladies who roam the dump with their prized possessions piled on their backs, but every single creature has the potential to be somebody’s favorite for any number of equally sound reasons.

Labyrinth is confidently stylish and almost irritatingly large scale. The goblin battle in the third act somehow manages to wrangle puppets, life size monster suits, Jennifer Connelly, a dog, and rolling boulders all together in a dazzling, balletic display, sometimes all in the same shot. Labyrinth’s is a sumptuously realized world that took meticulous care and boundless creativity to produce, something Henson possessed in spades.

But above all else, Labyrinth is thoroughly weird. This is kind of unavoidable that features David Bowie in a lead role and lets him do the music, but that ain’t even the half of it. It’s a brain-bubbling stew of fantasy iconography, 80’s sludge pop, spontaneous reggae numbers, and Bowie music video interludes. Just like the titular labyrinth itself, it’s impossible to predict what’s around the next corner, which is why it’s pretty much perfect for kids and their frayed attention spans. 

There are moments where I must throw my hands up and admit that I have no idea what’s going on or why (like the totally pointless, nonsensical, masterpiece of a song “Magic Dance”), but whatever the reason, it’s relentlessly captivating stuff.

Rating: 8/10

The Beyond

For our podcast episode about The Beyond (including a lengthy Bowie tribute at the beginning and end), click here.

Year: 1981

Director: Lucio Fulci

Cast: Catriona MacColl, David Warbeck, Cinzia Monreale

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: X

A young woman inherits a Louisiana hotel, only to discoer that it is built over one of the seven entrances to Hell.

If Dario Argento is Italian horror’s Steven Spielberg, Lucio Fulci is its Roland Emmerich. He’s artful in his own way, but he goes straight for the jugular instead of tooling around with wastes of time like prestige, theme, or that bane of cinema, subtlety. In The Beyond, bad things happen because it’s Hell, dammit. Why are you trying to think things through when a man’s face is being pelted with glass?

The Beyond might not have much of a way with words (Or plot. Or logic.), but as a living gallery of excruciating pain, it’s undeniable. Continuing his lifelong vendetta against the human eye (this guy must have Un Chien Andalou as his screensaver… Film student humor!), he finds ever more extravagant ways to gouge, pluck, skewer, and otherwise inconvenience that accursed white orb. And that’s just the bedrock of an elaborately layered system of gore, from bloody falls to crucifixions to freaking tarantulas devouring a face. It’s an 80’s Italian film, so the effects don’t necessarily hold up, but they’re so gruesome that they bypass your brain’s reality cortex and dive straight for the “I’m gonna throw up” lobe.

The Beyond is a breathtaking gonzo gorefest, the ultimate visceral experience that horror filmmaking can provide. Its approach to gore can be easily summed up by one of its scenes, in which a woman is dissolved by acid, a wave of fluid sending her decaying body across the floor as a viscous, red foam. The Beyond is exactly that, an implacable crimson tidal wave threating to overtake you. 

Even amidst all this killing, Fulci never forgets to properly represent Italian horror, stylishly juxtaposing his kill scenes with moments of bucolic serenity, doubling down on the rapid cuts, rack focuses, and extreme close-ups so you’re incapable of forgetting which country is sponsoring this particular nightmare.

My only real issues with The Beyond are its slippery pacing and its climax. The dubiously dubbed dialogue scenes tend to drag like a 2 by 4 nailed to the back of a Hot Wheel car. There’s only so much momentum you can get out of wood. And the third act culminates in a bizarrely shoved-in, molasses-paced zombie sequence that seems like (and is) an ill thought-out studio note. Those two flaws combine with enough heft to knock The Beyond down a peg, but it’s still an exciting, revelatory, deliciously wicked motion picture.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 933