Door to Silence (1992)

aka Door into Silence

Original title: Le porte del silenzio

Real estate business guy Melvin Devereux (John Savage), is trying to get from New Orleans to his home further South. But from the beginning of his travels he is beset by strange encounters and peculiar occurrences: a mysterious woman (Sandi Schultz) is mysterious towards him, promising a later encounter at a certain crossroads, perhaps for sex, perhaps for something very different indeed. Melvin repeatedly encounters a hearse whose driver seems hell-bent on getting him killed. Worse still, the hearse seems to be carrying the dead body of one Melvin Devereux, husband of Sylvia, like our protagonist is. The swampy byways of Louisiana are either blocked for various reasons, or roads seem to lead into dreams and visions, or simply not where they are supposed to, while the sun never sets above them.

These encounters and more do suggest to Melvin that something very strange is going on, and it’s clear that he eventually arrives on the suspicion the audience has been having right from the start – that he’s dead and trapped in some sort of limbo.

Well, I say the audience has the suspicion, but Lucio Fulci’s final movie doesn’t actually try to surprise its viewers with the truth about Melvin’s state. So, instead of wasting time on diffusion and trickery to surprise us with something we’re not going to be surprised about anyway (the true surprise in a film of this sub-genre would be when the protagonist weren’t dead already), Fulci uses the space and time thus afforded to him to create a mood of the strange and a labyrinth out of wide open spaces. While he’s at it, he adds nods to Southern US folklore as well as classic mythology – which quite often seem to be closely related anyway, just differing in their expression of the state of humanity and life – as a backdrop to Melvin’s slow unravelling. It’s also a road movie, obviously, for there’s little we Europeans like to romanticize more than the tale of anyone going on a journey by car through parts of the USA, even when, as it may be the case here, the journey really runs in circles from death to the very same death again.

It will be rather a matter of taste if this works for any given viewer, I believe. There’s a slowness to the proceedings that may prefigure Slow Horror if you’re of a mind to see it that way, but which can also be read as Fulci dragging out a miniscule plot and a somewhat basic idea to feature length come hell or high water. I, not surprising anyone, belong to the former camp, but then, a film of a guy travelling through the US South (well, at least Louisiana) by car and encountering strangeness and eventual doom there is very much the sort of thing I would go for. Really, if Fulci had replaced the Dixieland on the soundtrack with classic country blues, you might have sold me on the idea the film at hand was indeed made for me, personally.

Apart from the film’s pushing of a lot of my personal buttons, I also like Savage’s performance as a not terribly likeable yet also not horrible man finding himself in a situation nothing could ever have prepared him for and understandably losing it piece by piece and bit by bit. Playing a character who is neither a complete prick nor a nice guy isn’t actually that easy or common. In this case, it also shields the whole film from becoming too much of a Twilight Zone episode, the rather cynical Fulci clearly having no truck with the moral(ising) universe perfected by Rod Serling.

His last movie is also yet another example of Fulci as a director who wasn’t actually too bothered with staying in his comfort zone, genre-wise, not going for gore or aggressive, meaningful illogic as in his most-loved films, but ending his filmography restlessly, trying to make a film he hasn’t done before.

Murder Rock (1984)

aka Murder-Rock: Dancing Death

Original title: Murderock – Uccide a passo di danza

An advanced dancing class of aerobics-style hopping promises the “kids” (that’s what the film calls this group of young women and men in their twenties) getting through the somewhat harsh treatment of former dancing nearly-star Candice Norman (Olga Karlatos getting up to some increasingly phantasmagorical scenery-chewing) a bright future with a big time Broadway company.

Well, as a matter of fact, said company only needs three dancers, a revelation that’s certainly going to lead to a lot of drama once it leaks down to the students. On the plus side, a mysterious killer begins murdering their way through the students, using chloroform and a stylish pin, so someone’s probably gonna end up as default member of the final three, dancing talent or lack thereof notwithstanding.

The investigating police lieutenant, Borges (Cosimo Cinieri) – given director Lucio Fulci’s love for the arts, I’m pretty sure named after the great writer of the weird –, certainly can see the wish to better oneself as a dancer as a murder motive. However, there’s a lot else going on, from a suit sleeping his way through what appears to be basically all of the dancers, to the jealousy of Candice’s predecessor Margie (Geretta Geretta), doomed to be her replacement’s assistant.

Then there’s the series of curious dreams Candice has in which she is followed by a man she has never seen before (Ray Lovelock) and who is trying to kill her with a stylish pin that looks a lot like the murder weapon. Turns out the guy is real, called George Webb, and in showbusiness, though not terribly successful thanks to some shadiness in his past. Obviously, Candice starts on a relationship with him right away. I can’t see how this could go wrong.

Murder Rock is usually not listed among many people’s favourite Lucio Fulci films, and I was certainly included among that number until my recent revisit of the movie. Now, I’m not quite willing to put it up on the pedestal of one of his very best films, but there is actually a lot to like about this giallo.

Of course, very fitting for a Fulci movie, before you can get to the pleasure you have to go through some pain, namely the film’s first third or so featuring a horrifying number of dance numbers in the aerobics inspired style you’d expect from an fad-conscious Italian movie made in 1984. There’s a lot of sweaty, aggressive swinging of body parts towards the camera, and so much crotch work, as well as crotch-level camera work, that a film whose actual nudity consists of some bare breasts feels wildly sleazy in a somewhat unpleasant way. The music, by Keith Emerson in his Italian soundtrack composer phase, gets appropriately painful in these sequences, but it is also immensely catchy in a way which suggests Fulci and Emerson cackling gleefully at the damage they are doing to innocent brains who only came to witness some crotch shaking and murder.

Eventually, the film does get away from the dancing a little, only returning to it for some actually pretty clever throwbacks to earlier scenes, and to ratchet up the intensity of the killer reveal, the filmmakers clearly having come to the conclusion their audience is now singing about paranoia coming their way without any outward help needed anymore. Once Murder Rock has reached that point, it turns into an often dream-like (in the patented Fulci way) giallo that seems genuinely interested in turning the destructive effects of the incessant striving for fame and glory into a horror movie. Quite a bit of what we see and hear from the characters may have little to do with realistic human psychology but works rather well to hammer away at that theme with the help of a cast of characters where not a single non-cop member isn’t in some way, shape or form obsessed with and damaged by becoming successful. Which is quite the thing to witness in a crotch-shake heavy movie called Murder Rock.

Curiously enough for a director and a genre not known for logical consistency but fitting to the rest of the script, even the plotting is not as weird as it first seems. In fact, a lot of what feels like a series of plot holes in the first acts does make perfect sense once we get to the reveal of our killer, the film simply playing fair with its audience like a proper, old-fashioned mystery would. Imagine Agathe Christie with more leotards and aerobics. Of course, the plot makes sense in the melodramatically heightened world the film takes place in rather than by the rules of real world logic, but who watching a Fulci movie would want it any other way?

A final way in which Murder Rock plays against expectations is a choice of murder method that basically completely blocks Fulci from doing any of his at this point in his career patented gloopy gore stuff at all, suggesting a director interested in doing things a bit differently this time around. The quality of the murder scenes demonstrates rather well that Fulci could have gone completely gore-less if he had wanted and still would have been able to make proper horror movies, but clearly, the great man couldn’t resist the lure of a good eye mutilation forever.

In short: The Psychic (1977)

Original title: Sette notte in nero

Ever since she saw the death of her mother in a vision when she was a child, Virginia (Jennifer O’Neill) has had powers of clairvoyance. For a time, she had been working with parapsychologist Luca (Marc Porel) to understand her gift, but that project fizzled out when she married rich Francesco Ducci (Gianni Garko).

While her husband is away on business in London – the couple live in Italy – Virginia has another vision, concerning a murdered woman bricked in behind a wall. She realizes that the place where the body is hidden is a country house belonging to her husband that’s pretty much abandoned and dilapidated. Pretending to go on a bit of redecoration spree, she breaks down the wall from her vision. Behind it is indeed the corpse of a woman. As the police quickly find out, the dead is a former girlfriend of Francesco’s, making him a rather hot suspect in what is quite obviously a murder case. He quickly lands behind bars, and it is up to Virginia to follow other clues from her vision to save him.

Quite a few people – I’m not an always an exception - tend to reduce the body of work of Lucio Fulci to a couple of masterpieces and a load of crap that is supposed to have come after, but if you do that, you tend to ignore quite a few good to great movies, like this supernatural giallo and its sibling in Poe-nods made around the same time, The Black Cat.

The Psychic is a particularly interesting film because it shows that Fulci could work inside the realms of logic if he wanted too, here presenting a mystery that, if you’re willing to accept the psychic angle, makes rather a lot of sense. Despite the script like most of the things Fulci did at this time being co-written by Fulci’s brother in dislike of logic, Dardano Sacchetti, there’s a clear throughline to everything going on here, with discernible human motivations and reactions. Why, you might call this a traditionally well-plotted movie without blushing.

Unlike Fulci’s earlier giallos, this one seems particularly inspired by Hitchcock and his ideas about suspense, following that kind of structure very well, leaving this a film that still feels surprisingly exciting even once you’ve figured out where it is going. It also goes to show that you can make a suspenseful film that still has a murky, dream-like atmosphere; it also demonstrates that you can create such an atmosphere even in a film whose plot is comparatively (this is still a giallo about a psychic) down to earth.

For modern thriller tastes, this is probably still a somewhat slow film, but to my eyes, the film’s slow-ish pace is a perfect fit for a tale of the slow unravelling of a horrible truth, and of someone unwittingly becoming an accomplice in their own destruction.

Some Ideas About The House by the Cemetery (1981)

Original title: Quella villa accanto al cimitero

Because doing a plot synopsis of this particular film without describing it scene by scene would be even less coherent than the film itself, and instead of reading a description of every single scene of a film, one should simply watch the damn movie, I’ll present some scattered thoughts about one of my very favourite movies.

It is very much worth watching, anyhow, even though Cemetery is usually described as the least of director Lucio Fulci’s trilogy (at least in mood) of films consisting – of course – of this, City of the Living Dead and The Beyond. It’s probably even less digestible for anyone coming to a horror film expecting a sensible plot, conventional narrative or storytelling than the other two films, because its great strangenesses in plot and structure are rather going at the audience as its villain, the delightfully/absurdly/hilariously named Dr Freudstein is at his victims. Riddle me this, for example: does our “hero” (heh) Norman Boyle know he is moving his family into Freudstein’s house? If he doesn’t, how can he still not know this after his wife (the always delightful Catriona MacColl) has found a tomb with the Freudstein name in their parlour? If he does know, why the hell does he seem so genuinely surprised by it later on? Like half of the characters here, Norman acts as if he was going by one base of facts in one moment and by the exact opposite one in the next.

Or take that babysitter – what is her deal exactly? Why does she clean up the leftovers of one of Freudstein’s kills when her death scene makes clear she isn’t in league with him? Add to this particular set of confusions about her, when the film early on seems to suggest she might be a ghost or some sort of revived manikin. She definitely acts bizarrely throughout her lifespan in the film. I could go on and on with this, because there’s really no single character in the film whose acts suggest the coherent whole we expect of a movie character.


But I believe it is exactly Fulci’s purpose here to populate the film with characters that don’t make sense and by this rob his audience of all the security that comes with stable structures like character arcs and proper (or even fake) human psychology, setting us adrift in a world where everybody’s goals and personalities change in inexplicable ways. Thus, House by the Cemetery is less focussed on dragging the audience and the characters into the world of Fulci’s Beyond by dissolving their senses of time, place, and human anatomy as the other two films in the trilogy are (though there’s of course a bit of that, too), and more about finding the uncanny in the lack of a human core most narratives insist on.

Conquest (1983)

"Any reference to persons or events is purely coincidental!" (taken from the closing credits, and oh so very true).

Somewhere on a relatively civilized island in Heavy Metal magazine stoneage fantasy land, a young guy named Ilias (Andrea Occhipinti) says goodbye to his elders. He's going into the outside world to do various undefined heroic deeds, a plan that has the elder's full encouragemant (probably because they want to get rid of Ilias and his single facial expression). They even give him a potentially magic bow that will not do anything magical for much of the movie, until it starts to shoot blue laserbeams after he has proven his heroism by running away and returning.

After he has crossed the ocean, Ilias soon crosses paths with the minions of the witch Ocron (Sabrina Siani). Ocron rules her part of stoneage land with an iron hand, or however the hands of someone who is naked except for a golden mask and some crotch cloth and who masturbates with snakes when she is not eating the brains of virgins are called.

Be it as it may, the witch dreams of being killed by a faceless man with a bow, and so orders her henchmen to hunt down the one who possesses this technological wonder.

So Ilias has to do his best fighting against Ocron's henchcreatures - the shaggy people, the dudes with helmets and the evil Wookies. His best isn't much, though, and he wouldn't make it more than twenty minutes into the plot (I use the word loosely) if not for the help of a certain Mace (Jorge Rivero), supposedly the enemy of every man, yet still nice and helpful to Ilias and with a part-time family tucked away in some cave. He's so nice, he's even willing to share his woman with Ilias! It is so romantic.

Together, Mace and Ilias are going to stroll through stoneage fantasy land, fight a little against zombies and cobweb people and minions and do character stuff that doesn't make sense, until they'll finally decide to face up to Ocron's naked breasts.

Conquest, Lucio Fulci's trip into sword and sorcery land, isn't one of his best films. Its main problem lies in the fact that Fulci's strengths as a director were never in delivering the kind of excitement or action that would be helpful when making a sword and sorcery film. Our Lucio was always the man for slow, slow pacing, dream-like moods, gore and completely weird shit. He provides these four things in copious amounts here, but hides much of it behind layers and layers of fog that make watching the movie something of a chore. The dry ice machines were certainly working overtime when Fulci made Conquest, so much so that a re-titling into The Fog, Part 2 would be all too well deserved.

Fulci fans like me won't avoid a film just because it's boring, slow and so foggily shot that the viewer will have difficulty making out much of what's going on of course, and you could argue that Conquest is quite a fun time - if you are able to adapt your expectations and don't watch it as a fantasy adventure but as a part of Fulci's body of work that's only nominally in a different genre than his best films and in truth part of the genre known as "the Fulci film".

If you manage to do this, you'll be confronted with some wonderously freakish monsters like the cobweb people and a merry amount of gore, including a woman being ripped apart and many loving close-up shots of oozing bumps, all set to a partially recycled Claudio Simonetti soundtrack.

One could also argue that the script - in its own elliptical and illogical way - does some rather clever and ironic things with the dreaded "Hero's Journey" formula (against which I'll surely write a rant filled with excessive cursing and violent fantasies about George Lucas in the future), especially with regards to the (closeted gay if I've ever seen one) relationship of Ilias and Mace and the identity of the hero who finally slays the witch. On the other hand, you could use the same ideas and moments to call the script lazy and stupid.

It's just a very peculiar film, bound to leave most viewers unsatisfied through its dubious pacing and foggy visuals, but fascinating enough for lovers of weird Italian shit and/or Lucio Fulci.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,sword and sorcery,lucio fulci,reviews,fantasy,mexican movies

The New Gladiators (1984)

The future looks dire. In the year of 2072, Earth is in a dubious state. The bloodthirsty masses are entertained and kept in their place by the beauty of violent TV shows. No other show can beat the ratings of market leader "Killbike".

This doesn't make the boss of the permanently second placed network WBS (hm, do they have a connection to Warner Brothers?) "your friend Sam" (Giovanni Di Benedetto), who only communicates with his subordinates via video screens, very happy at all.

Friendly Sam orders his second in command Cortez (Claudio Cassinelli) to develop a revolutionary new show that will take the future of television back into the glorious past of entertainment: Gladiatorial combat to the death between convicted killers.

This wonderful idea proceeds well, but the helpful artificial intelligence Junior (who has more to do with the running of the world than the humans have) discovers a fatal flaw in their concept - they need a real hero among their killers to effectively channel audience sympathies. There is no better candidate for this than the "Killbike" champion Drake (Jared Martin).

The trouble is, Drake isn't on death row. But Junior has a plan.

Some time later, Drake's beloved wife is brutally murdered, her killers are shot. Drake, who, as we will find out later, is innocent of the crime, but is sentenced to death anyway. He could of course become a gladiator instead.

When our hero arrives at the training facility for the show, he finds himself the favorite target of their SS-garbed warden Raven (Howard Ross), as well as of some of his own "colleagues" like Kirk (Al Cliver). Only Abdul (Fred Williamson!) is just too damn cool to waste his breathe with stuff like this.

But Drake's natural charisma and his love for nearly suicidal acts in favor of the other gladiators soon win them over.

Which is a good thing when you see that their "training" is a combination of mild brain-washing and physical torture.

Drake is even charming enough to bring technician Sarah (Eleonor Gold) over to his side. With a little research she finds proof for Drake's innocence. Even worse, she finds proof that Junior must have something to do with the frame-up, which should be impossible, since its programming doesn't contain a potential for EVIL.

Disturbed, she visits Junior's inventor Professor Towman (Cosimo Cinieri). Towman has retired from scientific work and now lives, playing the organ, in a ruined church full of computer equipment. He agrees to give her a (beautifully quaint looking) keycard for Junior's inner sanctum. Before he can also give her the codes to reprogram his wayward creation, he is murdered.

At least, Sarah is able to get a little more information from Junior now, none of it very pleasant, though.

Drake and his friends won't be too happy about the fact that the winner of their game is going to be disintegrated.

Fortunately, they all have seen Spartacus, well, make that The Arena and know just what to do.

Many critics will tell you that Lucio Fulci's Eighties work in other genres than horror was completely and absolutely terrible hackwork made by a man totally disinterested in the movies he made.

After watching The New Gladiators, I am not one of them. It's surprising what a neat little piece of Italian SF-action cheese this is. It has everything this kind of film needs: A minimalist score by Riz Ortolani, production design that mixes old Rome, neo-neo-fascism, Blade Runner and Eighties ideas of high tech into a memorable thing of shoddy beauty, unnecessary gore (including a little eye mutilation, of course - it is a Fulci film), Fred Williamson, Al Cliver and Jared Martin as a surprisingly solid, even somewhat sympathetic hero.

Fulci develops at least two quite rousing scenes of male bonding and (of course, again) just ignores the stupidity of parts of the film's backstory and worldbuilding with the correct amount of verve.

It's also amazingly fast-paced for a Fulci film, the action is not brilliantly staged, but competent enough. And I dare you not to laugh or cry out in happiness during the final gladiatorial fight on motorbikes (not that vehicles were in use during training - oh well) including the silliest helmets and ornaments imaginable. Also, two decapitations for the price of one.

What puts The New Gladiators close to my heart is something different, though: It's the honest, if misguided, interest Fulci shows in a thing he normally didn't care about at all: His characters as something like people. Mind you, I am not saying the film works as a character study. But it develops enough motivation for most actions in the film to keep the characters somewhat believable, the most un-Fulci-like thing I have ever seen.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,action,sf,al cliver,lucio fulci,fred williamson,howard ross,jared martin,reviews