The Beyond - Lucio Fulci - 1981

★★★-Gateway to hell in the basement of a hotel movie. “Southern Gothic” as it takes place in New Orleans, though it is directed by an Italian with actors from fucking everywhere. 

Directed by the infamous Lucio Fulci, who was known for treating everyone on set, especially women, like shit. He worked in various genres in a career that spanned nearly five decades. You know, comedy, Spaghetti Westerns, action, so forth. But he garnered a cult following for his giallo and horror flicks, mainly remembered for his “Gates of Hell” trilogy, of which this film is the second. The other two are City of the Living Dead (1980) and The House by the Cemetery (1981). 

The film doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. Dream logic flick. Voiceover makes it make even less sense. 

It's a pretty brutal movie. A child sees her mother killed by acid when going to identify the body of her father. There is a crucifixion, eye trauma (hes known for eye trauma), multiple deaths by acid, a woman whose seeing eye dog saves her from a zombie attack then turns into a zombie and rips out her throat, and a child, the one who watched her mom die, who gets her head blown off in graphic detail. Fulci apparently hated the child, accused her of being a drug addict, and maybe abused her. Harsh. The guy who does the deed had absolutely no hesitation in shooting her in the face, which I applaud. “She was a zombie?”

This male lead, played by one David Warbeck, is a good looking dude. Kind of a cross between Jack Nicholson and Sean Connery. British stage-trained actress Catriona MacColl stars. She is mostly remembered for this trilogy. The actress Cinzia Monreale plays the blind woman. She's remember for her work with Fulci and fellow Italian Joe D'Amato, notably in the film Beyond the Darkness. Her and Fulci famously did not get along. She is a really pretty lady. 

After treading on being a somewhat cerebral movie for the first three/fourths, the movie ends with a full on zombie attack out of nowhere. They go to the hospital which is overrun with zombies from the morgue or these are all patients, it does matter. Then they open a door, descend a staircase, and are back in the basement of the hotel. “Impossible,” they say. Dream logic. 

The end comes when the couple walk into Hell. What did they think would happen? Not great, but I was intrigued. It's grown on me since watching the other night, for sure. Still, not something I'd recommend to anyone off the street. 

Zombie - Lucio Fulci - 1979

★★★★-Imagine The Island of Dr. Moreau except with zombies. That's this movie (released as Zombi 2), which served as a loose sequel to George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead in Italy (released under the title Zombi). Interestingly, there Dawn of the Dead was Dario Argento with a new score by Goblin, who did the truly awesome music for other Argento movies like Deep Red.

Watched this as part of the Lucio Fulci Night on The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs on Shudder. They had composer Fabio Frizzi to play with the house band and tell Fulci stories and give insights to his work on this and the second film in the double feature, The Beyond. They also had the male lead of the film, Ian McCulloch, on to talk about working with Fulci, the director. McCulloch was sort of an embarrassment, not knowing what kind of program he was on and taking himself too seriously. Fulci, from the stories they tell, seemed like a real piece of work. Semi-abusive to the actors and crew, he didn't think you were earning your money unless you getting beat up physically as an actor. But Frizzi had nothing but kind things to say, so there is that. 

The gist of it is that the boat of a scientist thought to be working on a Caribbean island shows up in New York Harbor empty save for a giant, bloated flesh eating zombie. A reporter and the scientist's daughter head down to figure out what is going on. Once there, they find the island plagued by a voodoo curse, which causes the deceased inhabitants to rise as zombies and prey upon the living. You know the drill. 

The movie stars Tisa Farrow (sister of Mia Farrow) plays the daughter, McCulloch the reporter, and Richard Johnson is the Moreau type figure. Didn't know any of them before watching this flick.

Remembered for a couple of things, the film was notorious put on the “video nasty” list in the United Kingdom for one scene in particular involving an actress getting her eye slowly forced into a wood shard. It's pretty brutal. There are several deaths by zombie that are pretty hard to watch, actually. Also a zombie wrestles a real, very large shark, which is just nuts. You can read more about that here.

While low budget with not the best acting, there is a lot of shock that kept me and my female companion on our toes. We squealed with schlocky delight on multiple occasions while watching this flick. Makes it pretty good in my book. 

Dark Glasses - Dario Argento - 2022

★★★★★- Another Nightmare on Film Street challenge movie. This one for Italian films. Argento, the master of Italian horror, has a new film so that was an easy choice. A true return to form for him. Loved it.

Gist is a guy who is out there killing prostitutes. One played by Ilenia Pastorelli, a very pretty lady, loses her sight in a car accident that results when the killer pushes her car into oncoming traffic. Her car hits and orphans a Chinese kid. 

She eventually goes to visit the kid in an orphanage. He escapes and they make a deal. He’ll be her guide if she lets him stay there. Eventually, they get to tracking down the killer to get their revenge.

Like what they have going on here, the female lead and the Chinese kid. That is until the kid calls the killer thinking it's a cop the killer murders cop. By the by, this features a lot of incompetent Italian cops. You don't say, right? Anyway, the kid tells the killer where they are hiding out. Spoiler. Kids are fucking stupid. 

This all leads to a cool scene where her and the kid work together to try to shoot the killer. 

Another cool scene comes when Pastorelli’s character gets lost in the woods and feels her way to a building. Once there, she accidentally turns the lights on and has to get them off before the killer shows.

It becomes clear at one point that Argento doesn't know much/anything about snakes.

Great dog movie. Good girl. Also, it is a positive portrayal of sex work. That’s sweet. Like Dressed to Kill, but not transphobic.

Blood and Black Lace is the greatest movie of all time

Blood and Black Lace. "The sight of beauty makes him lose control of himself, so he kills." "Listen here, you little idiot." What a delicious flick this is. Full of luscious, vivid colors, that aspect is reminiscent of the old Batman series (had to be shot with the same film), except extremely dark and violent. The clothing, the colors, the beautiful people, the architecture, the way the film is shot--all beautiful. A total feast for the eyes. 

Gist is that a model for a lux Italian fashion house where everyone is on coke is strangled by a masked killer (obvious visual inspiration for DC's the Question and Rorschach from The Watchmen). When her diary shows up, it turns out everyone has something to hide, and models start turning up dead. Everyone is a suspect, including the fashion house owner (who looks like Julia Fox) and her lover. Also, not to give too much away, the ending is wild. 

If the violence wasn't so over the top, it might be a good movie to trip to, if you are so inclined. But it's too brutal for all that, IMO. For example, of the film, critic Chuck Bowen of Slant Magazine wrote: 

Thematically, Blood and Black Lace offers the giallo an irresolvable obsession with female violation that's simultaneously cruel and heartfelt. Here, the murders are understood to reflect a debasement that suggests a furthering of the debasement of modelling, a suggestion that's literalized by the killer's placement of the bodies in hideous poses [...] This thematic is complicated further by the identity of the killer, who reflects the fashion industry's self-loathing and self-consumption, driven by a mixture of profound self-interest and neurosis that would be enormously influential to the subgenre at large. In a giallo, a woman's worst enemy is often a woman driven to shirk the chains of status quo that shackle her. 

So, yeah, the debasement of women is not really a place I want to go whilst out of my mind. 

This is a must-watch if you want to delve into the world of giallo ("yellow" in Italian) cinema.  Blood and Black Lace is credited as being one of the first of the genre. The film created some of the tropes that giallo is known for. Shit like exaggerated color, killer POV, women getting slapped in the face, extravagant set pieces, red phones, mannequins and harps, and the killer wearing black gloves. 

The word "giallo" comes from Italian crime/thriller novels Il Giallo Mondadori known for their distinctive yellow covers. You can think of the genre as highly stylized blends of murder mysteries and proto slashers. A lot of their DNA comes from Agatha Christie novels that they were just ripping off. If you are familiar with the spaghetti western genre that was coming out of Italy at about the same time, it is similar in that it takes a popular genre and repurposes it with post-war Italian fears and sensibilities whilst upping the sex and violence. 

Directed by one Mario Bava, who repeatedly defied convention with his use of wild, saturated color. In those days, color was used exclusively for comedies and musicals. Thrillers such as this were typically done in black and white. See Diabolique, Night Train, Psycho, The Hitch-hiker, so forth. The use of color is actually integral to the film, which Bava color-codes, linking each character and killing to a specific hue. 

For example, the character of Isabella, whose murder opens the film, wears a red coat and has red fingernail polish. We also keep coming back to her red diary, which survives her and calls back to her killing as a beautiful MacGuffin. It is generally accepted that this is an homage to Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Masque of the Red Death," set in an allegorical series of colored rooms. Bava was highly influential in this regard. Fellow giallo director Dario Argento (Deep Red, Inferno, Suspiria, Tenebrae) also uses vivid pops of color in his wonderful films. For a nice source on the genre, check out the blog The Giallo Files. 

Overall, the film is super fun with great a score with insane use of color. Extremely underappreciated, it created its own genre, which is pretty dope, like Scream did with self-aware horror. Favorite scene is when the roommate puts the diary in her purse and it individually cuts to all the usual suspects staring at the bag, breathing heavy and sweating.