Only now does it occur to me... MACABRE (1980)

Only now does it occur to me... what would happen if Lamberto "son of Mario" Bava took inspiration from Tennessee Williams to make his own Southern Gothic Italotrash horror saga? And what if all he actually remembered from Tennessee Williams was the ghoulishly nutty finale of SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER? And what if the lead character was, for some reason, named "Robert Duval," just one letter's separation from the iconic actor? Well we don't have to wonder about any of this, because we have... MACABRE.

Based on a true story, yeah, okay.

I'm gonna tell ya right off the bat––this review will be full of spoilers. And I don't feel bad about that because there's nothing in this movie that feels "motivated." It's a collection of crazy things that happen without dramatic rhyme or reason. You do you, Lamberto. And for my Italo-Horror enthusiasts, let me tell you that this is way closer to "bottom-tier Fulci" or Joe D'Amato than Mario Bava or Dario Argento. The two movies of which it reminds me the most are probably BUIO OMEGA and CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Within the first twelve minutes, we have some of the sleaziest saxophone and worst child dubbing in the history of Italian film, which is absolutely an achievement. We have an unhappy woman stumbling around in heels and DYNASTY dresses (CITY OF WOMEN and XTRO's Bernice Stegers)

who is having an affair with a guy named Fred. This upsets her––aforementioned, poorly dubbed––daughter (Veronica Zinny)

who acts out by smoking a bunch of cigarettes and drowning her little brother in a bathtub.

The unsighted landlord, Robert Duval (Stanko Molnar, doing some of the best/worst/offensive blind 'schmacting' I have ever seen) 

lazily assembles brass instruments while awkwardly listening to extramarital sex with, uh, "ZATOICHI-esque augmented hearing."

When mom receives the phone call that her son has drowned, she rushes to the hospital with her lover but, unfortunately, they get in a car accident in which Fred is decapitated.

This is already more melodrama than I can shake a stick at and we're fewer than fifteen minutes into this bad boy! Madness, absolute madness.

Mom soon builds a Hobby Lobby shrine to her ex-lover

which I think would get maybe a C+ at my science fair. Comically, she has included his credit cards among the dead man's relics. 

The next hour is where this film really bogs down. She moves into the blind man's boarding house and there's a whole lot of lame tension building about the source of the orgasmic noises coming from her room, where she is the sole occupant. Much hay is made about this mystery.

This was mostly shot in a studio in Italy, but the crew traveled to New Orleans (for three days) to shoot exteriors. This is a nice documentary look at the city in 1979, and visually impressive in some instances:

but usually Lamberto Bava is out here making sure he got his money's worth out of those expensive shoot dates. Generally speaking, every time someone goes from point A to point B, we she them open the car door, get out, slam the car door,

 

walk up to the gate, unlatch the gate, mess around with the gate, open the gate,

 

relatch the gate, walk up to the stoop,

ring the doorbell, wait around for the door to be answered, etc.

It's pretty spectacular, actually, though indicative of how bogged down this movie gets in its middle hour.

Anyway, the secret is finally revealed: mom has apparently been masturbating, nightly, with Fred's severed head.

I really like the placement of the ice tray there. I feel like the thinking was "how's the audience gonna know it's a freezer if there's no ice tray?," but instead you're left with even more questions, like "I get that somebody who masturbates with a severed head every night is not very squeamish about hygiene, but does she really not care when she gets hairs in the cubes?"  

 

 Really goin' to town, I wonder if they used this clip in the Oscar reel

The beauty of all of this is that I've excised no great subtext or rationale; Bava presents it more like: "hey, she loved the guy, so obviously she would love... his head."

This all leads to Robert Duval discovering her secret, whereupon the severed head gains the power of flight and bites him on the neck until he dies!

It is my belief that this scene inspired  ZOMBI 3's greatest moment (a film by Bruno Mattei, Claudio Fragasso, and Lucio Fulci), one I have described as "The Ol' Zombie Head in the Fridge." 

Though the flying severed head in that context at least makes a little more sense because it's in a zombie movie. Later, this ground would be revisited by Michele Soavi in CEMETERY MAN (1994).

 Anyway. MACABRE, ladies and gentlemen.

Only now does it occur to me... PERVERSION STORY (1969)

Only now does it occur to me... that Lucio Fulci staged one of the most outré striptease numbers to ever appear in a third-rate VERTIGO remake.

The film in question is PERVERSION STORY (a.k.a., ONE ON TOP OF THE OTHER), a clumsy, proto-giallo, trashtastic reimagining of Hitchcock's classic. It's even set in San Francisco (though, it must be said that when Fulci films in America, i.e., THE NEW YORK RIPPER, MANHATTAN BABY, he can make even the most iconic American locales feel extraordinarily Italian in flavor). The scene in question is meant to be the equivalent of "Jimmy Stewart spotting Kim Novak again as 'Judy the Shopgirl,' post-fall." It's set at a strip club on Montgomery Street, and depicts the poor man's Bardot (Marisa Mell, of DANGER: DIABOLIK) in a snow leopard-print tracksuit lounging on a motorcycle:

then stripping down to reveal a preponderance of stickers advertising European car races (such as Le Mans):

 and ultimately providing the punchline (?) of a bizarro, googly-eyed codpiece:

all while the poor man's Alain Delon (Jean Sorel, of BELLE DU JOUR) looks on, completely horrified and entranced.

It's a particular avant-garde highlight in a film which includes such beautifully wacky Italo-dialogue as "You just dropped in for a few BUMPS and GRINDS? Or maybe a few... KICKS?!" and "Bye, girls, I'm gonna go see a Mickey Mouse flick!" God bless you, Lucio Fulci.

Only now does it occur to me... THE BLACK CAT (1981)

Only now does it occur to me... that Lucio Fulci's THE BLACK CAT is one of the most compartmentalized films of all time, bizarre in its dissociation even for Fulci, an assemblage of isolated parts that come to approach abstract art. If you were to see individual clips out of context, your descriptions might resemble the fable of the blind men and the elephant.

A good 10% of THE BLACK CAT is roaming cat POV. This is to be expected, as it's an Italian horror movie from the 1980s called THE BLACK CAT. If Fulci had directed ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, at least 10% of it would have been bird POV.

But being as it's an Italian horror film with POV and black cats, obviously the cats are going to be doing some murdering. And so about 5% of the film is a disembodied cat paw being dragged across human flesh.

It's a feat of puppetry, the likes of which we would never see again at least until the appearance of Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog.

This ain't CAT'S EYE, but about 15% of the movie is cat eyeball closeups. We don't really get the classic Fulci trauma-shot, but practically every cat attack is preceded by EXTREME CLOSEUP: HUMAN EYEBALLS, EXTREME CLOSEUP: CAT EYEBALL, EXTREME CLOSEUP: HUMAN EYEBALLS, EXTREME CLOSEUP: CAT EYEBALL, CLOSEUP: CAT FLUNG AT HUMAN EYEBALLS. You feel like you're watching one of the duels in a Sergio Leone film, except with cats instead of Clint Eastwood.

10% of the movie is "charming-but-spooky English small town" atmosphere. It feels a bit like STRAW DOGS or AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON.

 

The fog machines are working overtime, in other words.

Now for a downer: 25% of the movie is Mimsy Farmer, looking at things. Looking concerned.

 

Right now, she is concerned by Patrick Magee, pictured on the right.

 

Look, I have nothing against Mimsy Farmer, whether she's nuzzling with Lee Van Cleef in the Italian WILD GEESE rip-off CODE NAME: WILD GEESE or wiggin' out in Argento's FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET. I can never decide if she's unexceptionally inoffensive or inoffensively unexceptional. It's not her fault, though. She's given practically nothing to do and has a compelling set of eyebrows as a scene partner half the time. Which leads me to:

35% of this movie is Patrick Magee eyebrow action. 

 

You may remember him overdoing it in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. If that's the case, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

The eyebrows have been unleashed. Even the cat is powerless.

This is what puts it over the edge. I'm gonna be honest, without Patrick Magee, this would be a contender for Fulci's worst film. As is, it's in the bottom tier, but, can you say no to this face?

If we're going to split hairs, Fulci probably should have called this film THE WILD EYEBROW.

Also, outside of the last five minutes, THE BLACK CAT has nothing to do with Edgar Allan Poe's story. Even the last five minutes are a stretch. If Fulci's THE BLACK CAT is an adaptation of Poe's "The Black Cat," then we might as well say that PLACES IN THE HEART is an adaptation of "The Tell-Tale Heart." But if you want another whacked-out Italian take on the same story with equal amount of cat POV and 100% more Harvey Keitel, I highly recommend Argento's segment of TWO EVIL EYES, which I have to believe is some kind of taunt directed at Fulci. 

And because I can't plug this enough, if psychotic cat attacks are your jam, you're doing yourself a disservice if you've not seen Ngai Kai Lam's THE CAT.

Sean Gill's "Consider the Duckling (A Poem for Lucio Fulci)" in Sein und Werden

My latest poem, "Consider the Duckling (A Poem for Lucio Fulci)," may be read online in the Fall, "Giallo"-themed issue of the British literary magazine Sein und Werden. It is likely the first-ever poem to tackle Fulci's well-documented obsession with ducks.

Only now does it occur to me... A CAT IN THE BRAIN

Only now does it occur to me... that I know now what it's like to live a day in the life of Italotrash Art-Horror director Lucio Fulci.

The circumstances by which I know this involve a latter-day film of his called A CAT IN THE BRAIN, a self-reflexive meta-fantasia that stars Lucio Fulci as... himself.  He is revealed to look kind of like that uncle of yours who never married and wears horn-rimmed glasses on a cord around his neck and sometimes traps you in freaky chats at the family BBQ that begin amusingly enough but evolve into the conversational equivalent of kidnapping.

Ready for his closeup

Fulci wanders Rome while directing his latest picture and has a series of hallucinations; a guy chainsawing a tree begins chainsawing a corpse, steak tartare becomes a cannibalistic entrée, housecats chew on brains, et cetera, et cetera.  You know.

That is one angry cat puppet.

Anyway, aficionados of Fulci's oeuvre will find much of this to be interesting (I suspect the casual fan will not), though overall it has the feel of a sitcom "clip show"––there's not much plot connecting the various gore moments.  (Actually, it's not that varied––it's mostly decapitations.  From the point at which I said aloud 'wow, that is a substantial number of decapitations in one movie' and began tallying them, I counted fourteen.  Which means that there are more than fourteen.

One of shall we say a substantial number of decapitations.

There's also a murderous psychiatrist running around who kinda looks like Sigmund Freud, but that's neither here nor there.
 
 "Now you have a... DEAD-ipus complex!"  ––unfortunately, not an actual line from the movie

Also, I find it incredible that this film was made in 1990––between the fashion and the film stock, my movie radar would have placed it somewhere between 1978 and 1983.

In any event, here are some things that I learned about Fulci's day-to-day life, as depicted in this movie.

#1. Fulci loves flannel almost as much as he loves eye trauma.

Lookin' sharp, Lucio!

He loves it at four-star restaurants, and he loves it on set at Cinecittá Studios.  He just loves it.

Note: Fulci does not say "Cut," but "Stop!"  (of course it doesn't matter because he's dubbed from the original Italian)

#2.  But he still really loves eye trauma.  Here he is wrangling a whole bunch of sheep eyeballs (makes sense).


#3. The ladies love him.  I'm sure that this account about Fulci by Fulci contains no exaggerations.  Everywhere he goes, young women recognize him

and fantasize about appearing in his films.

He is chased around by fans like he's a Beatle in A HARD DAY'S NIGHT, though I feel like those situations could be alleviated somewhat if he didn't have "DIR. LUCIO FULCI" emblazoned on his front door.

Dear movie gods, please let that detail be true to life.

Later, he cruises around in a yacht called "Perversion"


whilst mackin' on young Italo-babes.  Hoo boy!  (While it might seem like it's not the case, I do believe Fulci has a sense of humor about all of this.)


#4.  Lucio Fulci directs orgies exactly like you think he'd direct orgies.




#5.  Finally, I kept wondering if we'd see the interior of Fulci's home.  How well did he do for himself directing incomprehensibly dreamlike art-horror flicks?

When we see it, I suppose we can say he did pretty well, carving out a comfortable upper-middle class existence.  In American terms, I'd say that directing NEW YORK RIPPER and CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD probably is economically equivalent to owning, say, a Dick's Sporting Goods franchise?

Also, for the record, before he died, Fulci accused Wes Craven of taking his inspiration for NEW NIGHTMARE from A CAT IN THE BRAIN (probably a stretch), but perhaps Fulci is indirectly responsible for the wave of self-reflexive 90s horror including SCREAM, HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION, HELLRAISER: HELLWORLD, and the like.