Tag: Lucio Fulci

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Cinematic heroes 5: Richard Johnson

 

© Variety Film / Variety Distribution

 

Richard Johnson, who died in 2015 at the age of 87, was a busy and much-admired theatrical actor whose stage CV included Pericles Prince of Tyre, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Cymbeline, Twelfth Night and Antony and Cleopatra and who could boast that he’d worked with stage directors as distinguished as Tony Richardson and Peter Hall.

 

From the 1970s on, he was also a popular guest star on TV shows on both sides of the Atlantic, so that, for instance, he appeared in Hart to Hart (1979), Magnum P.I. (1981 & 83) and Murder, She Wrote (1987) in the USA and in Tales of the Unexpected (1980, 81 & 82), Dempsey and Makepeace (1986) and the inevitable Midsomer Murders (1999 & 2007) in the UK.  Indeed, it was on television that I first saw Johnson, guest-starring in a 1975 episode of Gerry Anderson’s silly but stylish science-fiction show Space: 1999.  He played the astronaut husband of series regular Dr Helena Russell (Barbara Bain), who’s been transformed into anti-matter.  Even back then, at 10 years old, I found Bain’s character so dull and humourless that this didn’t surprise me.  Being married to her would transform anyone into anti-matter.

 

However, it’s for his film work that I’ll remember him – never more so than for his performance as the main male character, Dr John Markway, in Robert Wise’s spooky-house classic The Haunting (1963).  I think The Haunting is one of the scariest films ever made.  In fact, both Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese are on record as saying that it’s the scariest film ever made.  The fact that The Haunting is based on a terrific novel, 1959’s The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, doesn’t do it any harm, either.

 

The initially smooth and charming Dr Markway investigates strange phenomena in an old, rambling and supposedly haunted house with a group of helpers – the young man who’s inheriting the place (Russ Tamblyn), a psychic (Claire Bloom) and a lonely oddball called Eleanor Vance (Julie Harris), in whom the house’s supernatural forces start taking an interest.  Markway’s wife – Lois Maxwell, who was Miss Moneypenny in the first 14 James Bond movies – also turns up at the premises when things are getting properly scary, which the now-unnerved doctor isn’t happy about.

 

© Argyle Enterprises / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

Director Robert Wise understood that the most frightening things are things we don’t see and are left to our imaginations; because what we are capable of imagining in our mind’s-eye is far worse than anything a special-effects or make-up artist can conjure up onscreen.  So, in The Haunting, we hear rather than see.  The film’s characters find themselves reacting to all manner of weird and disturbing noises made by mysterious somethings off screen.  Wise’s sound editors played these noises aloud while Johnson and his co-stars were filming their scenes, which added to the rattled authenticity of their performances.

 

In addition, Johnson’s Markway gets to utter the iconic line: “Look, I know the supernatural is something that isn’t supposed to happen, but it does happen.”  These words impressed Rob Zombie so  much that he and his band White Zombie sampled them on the 1995 song Super–Charger Heaven.  (The song also features Christopher Lee from 1976’s To the Devil a Daughter snarling, “It is not heresy and I will not recant!”)

 

Needless to say, when Hollywood got around to remaking The Haunting in 1999 with action-movie director Jan de Bont at the helm, the result was dire.  It abandoned Robert Wise’s ultra-creepy, suggest-don’t-show approach and relied instead on a crass welter of computer-generated special effects.  I hate it even more than I hate the 2006 remake of The Wicker Man with Nicholas Cage.

 

Elsewhere, Richard Johnson’s film biography contains an interesting what-if.  In the early 1960s, when Sean Connery was known only as a bit-part actor, former body builder and former Edinburgh milkman, Johnson turned down the opportunity to play James Bond.  Terence Young, who was lined up to direct the first Bond movie, 1962’s Dr No, approached him, but Johnson didn’t like the idea of being stuck playing the same character in a long contract.

 

However, later, Johnson played Bulldog Drummond, a British literary action-hero who’d inspired Ian Fleming when he started writing the Bond novels in the early 1950s.  He was Drummond in two movies, Deadlier than the Male (1967) and Some Girls Do (1969), both directed by Ralph Thomas.  Ironically, the films are far more influenced by James Bond’s cinematic franchise, massively popular by then, than they are by the original Bulldog Drummond books, which were written from 1920 to 1937 by H.C. McNeile (‘Sapper’) and from 1938 to 1954 by Gerald Fairlie.  The books portrayed Drummond as an English gent with combat experience from World War I and, frankly, some very racist views of foreigners, having adventures in an upper-crust world of country houses, servants and vintage motorcars.

 

© Greater Films Ltd / Rank Film Distributors

 

I’ve seen Deadlier than the Male and, because I read a few Bulldog Drummond books in my boyhood, I find it fascinatingly peculiar if nothing else.  It transfers Drummond to a glamorous Swinging Sixties setting populated with luxurious islands, private jets, yachts, speedboats, brassy music, bikinis, dolly-birds and gadgets (like giant, computer-controlled chessmen).  At least, that’s ‘glamorous’ as far as its less-than-Bond-sized budget allows.  Its chief gimmick is Elke Sommer and Sylvia Koscina as a pair of voluptuous, presumably sapphic assassins who go about their deadly work with a kooky cheerfulness.  “Goodbye, Mr Bridgenorth!” they cry as they tip a victim (played by future 1970s British sitcom-star Leonard Rossiter) off a high building.  Mr Kidd and Mr Wint did this schtick more amusingly in 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever.  Johnson is serviceable as Drummond, but seems bemused by the proceedings.  It’s not among his most memorable performances.

 

Incidentally, in 1951, Johnson’s second-ever film appearance had been an uncredited one as a ‘Control Tower Operator’ in an old-school Bulldog Drummond movie.  This was Calling Bulldog Drummond, featuring Walter Pidgeon in the title role.

 

Johnson’s other 1960s movies include Michael Anderson’s Operation Crossbow (1964), a surprisingly downbeat World War II action-adventure movie in which he plays the British minister who sends George Peppard, Tom Courteney and Jeremy Kemp on a suicide mission to sabotage the Nazis’ V1 / V2 rocket project; and Basil Dearden’s epic costume-drama Khartoum (1966), where he’s an aide to Charlton Heston’s General Charles Gordon, locked in conflict with Laurence Olivier’s Muhammad Ahmed in 1880s Sudan.

 

For me, his most interesting 1960s role (apart from The Haunting) is 1966’s La Strega in Amore, or The Witch in Love, a black-and-white Italian movie in which he plays a young man hired by a wealthy, elderly woman (Sarah Ferrati) to catalogue her huge library.  The manner of Johnson’s recruitment is sinister.  First the woman stalks him, then she places in a newspaper a job advertisement that’s so oddly detailed he’s the only person in Rome who can meet its specifications.  Despite his misgivings, Johnson decides to stay in the woman’s luxurious palazzo when he meets her beautiful and alluring daughter (Rosanna Schiffiano).  But the longer he remains with the two women, the more his grip on reality loosens and the stronger the insinuation becomes that mother and daughter are the same person – two versions of la strega, the witch of the title.

 

© Arco Films / Cidif

 

Italian cinema was awash at the time with full-blooded, gothic horror movies, but director Damiano Damiani ploughs his own furrow with La Strega in Amore, making it dreamy rather than macabre and creating something that wouldn’t seem out-of-place in an arthouse cinema.  Unfortunately, the film’s premise doesn’t justify its one-hour-49-minute running time and it could have been a half-hour shorter.  Still, after seeing Johnson play fairly upright and decent characters, it’s interesting to see him in this playing a vain bastard, somebody you partly feel is getting what he deserves.  And after the languid, arty build-up, the film’s nasty climax delivers a jolt.

 

In 1975, Johnson not only starred in, but also wrote the original story for the forgotten thriller Hennessy, directed by Don Sharpe.  This is perhaps the first film inspired by Northern Ireland’s Troubles, which’d erupted in 1969.  It’s about an IRA explosives expert (Rod Steiger) who, after the British Army kills his wife and child, decides to blow up the state opening of the British parliament, destroying both the government and the Queen.  Johnson gives an endearing performance as the weary, dishevelled policeman trying to stop him.

 

Hennessy is patchy but has an impressive cast that also includes Lee Remick, Trevor Howard, Eric Porter, a young Patrick Stewart and an even-younger Patsy Kensit (playing Steiger’s doomed daughter).  The final scenes in the House of Commons, featuring the Queen, landed the filmmakers in trouble because they used real footage that Buckingham Palace had authorised without knowing it would end up in a film.  Also, at the time, the film’s subject-matter was extremely sensitive.  As a result, its British cinematic release was almost non-existent.

 

© Hennessy Film Productions / American International Pictures

 

Presumably because The Haunting had put him on the radar of horror filmmakers, Johnson continued to appear in scary movies during the 1970s and 1980s. These included Ovidio G. Assonitis and Roberto Piazzoli’s Beyond the Door (1974), Massimo Dallimano’s The Cursed Medallion (1975), Pete Walker’s The Comeback (1978), Sergio Martino’s Island of the Fishermen and The Great Alligator River (both 1979), and Don Sharpe’s What Waits Below (1984).  He was also in Roy Ward Baker’s kiddie-orientated The Monster Club (1981).  This was the ninth and final horror-anthology movie made by American (but British-based) producer Milton Subotsky.  By my calculations, Subotsky’s nine anthologies contain a total of 37 stories.  The Vampires, the one featuring Johnson in The Monster Club, is possibly the worst of all 37.  You feel like banging your head against the nearest hard surface at the story’s punchline, when the bloodsucking Johnson reveals he’s escaped destruction at the hands of some vampire-hunters thanks to a ‘stake-proof vest’.

 

In 1979, 16 years after The Haunting, Johnson played another doctor, a medical one, in a very different sort of horror movie.  This was the Italian film Zombie Flesh Eaters, directed by the legendary Lucio Fulci.  He was Dr Menard, the weary, dishevelled – by this time Johnson was good at doing ‘weary and dishevelled’ – but stoical GP on a remote Caribbean island trying to deal with an epidemic of reanimated, hungry cadavers.  The movie is both gleefully gory and lovably schlocky, with its highlights including a once-seen-never-forgotten underwater battle between a shark and a zombie.  Despite this, Johnson gives it his all.  He spouts the less-than-epic dialogue with as much earnestness as he would doing Shakespeare.

 

Financial pressures meant Johnson wasn’t able to retire and he continued working until his death.  According to his Wikipedia entry, he said in a 2000 interview he was “constantly worried where the next job was coming from,” but then quipped: “At least at my age the opposition gets less and less because they keep dying.”  His 21st century roles included ones in Simon West’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), Woody Allen’s Scoop (2006), Mark Herman’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008) and Tom Browne’s acclaimed Radiator (2014).

 

Also in his later years, after Lucio Fulci had become a cult figure and Zombie Flesh Eaters had become something of a camp classic, Johnson was invited to horror movie conventions to discuss his experiences making the film.  A serious Shakespearean actor he may have been, but he always sounded gracious and affectionate towards Fulci.  He was even complimentary about the film’s most notorious moment, wherein his character’s wife gets grabbed by the hair and dragged through a freshly-smashed hole in a door by a rotting zombie arm.  In the process, in loving close-up, she gets a big splint of wood protruding from the hole embedded in her eye – this was surely what cemented Zombie Flesh Eaters’ place on Britain’s list of banned ‘video nasties’ in the 1980s.  According to the journalist Tristan Bishop, an 80-something Johnson enthused to him at one convention, “That spike in the eyeball scene!  Wasn’t that genius?  So cinematic!”

 

Clearly, Richard Johnson was a man who enjoyed his work.

 

© Argyle Enterprises / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

© Variety Film / Variety Distribution

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The power of Friedkin compels you! (Part 1)

 

From wikipedia.org / © Guillem Medina

 

I was very young when a film made by William Friedkin, the great American director who died earlier this month, first unsettled me.  I was about eight or nine years old when I learnt that the BBC was going to show his 1968 movie The Night They Raided Minsky’s one evening.  The TV listings in the newspaper assured me this was a comedy film, starring the zany performer Norman Wisdom, who could best be described as Britain’s answer to the USA’s Jerry Lewis.  When I was eight or nine, I absolutely loved Norman Wisdom.  I adored the knockabout slapstick he specialised in and the gormless man-child persona he affected for his roles.  You couldn’t dissuade me from my belief that such efforts as The Bulldog Breed (1960), in which Norman joins the Royal Navy and ends up being launched into outer space in an experimental rocket, or The Early Bird (1965), in which Norman plays a humble milkman who takes on and outwits a ruthless dairy corporation that’s trying to muscle in on his milk-delivery patch, were the best movies ever.

 

Thus, I was rather perturbed when I sat down to watch The Night They Raided Minsky’s and discovered it wasn’t a typical Norman Wisdom vehicle.  Rather than a knockabout comedy, it was a nostalgic, bitter-sweet film about knockabout comedy, as it was enacted in American burlesque theatres in the 1920s.  It was also, I realised to my horror, a bit risqué.  It told the story of a naïve Amish girl (Britt Ekland) who runs away to the big city, tries to fulfil her dream of making a career onstage, and ultimately but accidentally invents the striptease routine. Every time the film featured a boob gag, I’d nervously look over my shoulder in case my parents had entered the room.

 

Needless to say, since then, my opinion of Norman Wisdom’s oeuvre has been revised, downwards.  I’ve also managed to see The Night They Raided Minsky’s again, at an age when I no longer found it baffling and was able to appreciate its tone and subject matter.  It’s not great, but it’s likeable and benefits from a marvellous cast: Ekland, Elliott Gould, Jason Robards, Forest Tucker, Harry Andrews, Denholm Elliott, Joseph Wiseman and Bert Lahr, who’d played the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz (1939).  In the film’s final images, Lahr is shown ruefully treading the boards of the now-deserted theatre, after the titular police raid, with the implication that as far as burlesque is concerned, this is the end of an era.  (It was also the end, alas, for Lahr, who died of cancer during production.)  And, credit where it’s due, Wisdom is pretty good in the movie too.

 

© Tandem Productions / United Artists

 

The Night They Raided Minsky’s was film number three on William Friedkin’s CV and was a credible third film for a director in his early thirties.  Mind you, based on it, you’d hardly predict the stunning commercial and critical success that awaited him in the next decade.

 

Half-a-dozen years later, I was also unsettled by the second Friedkin movie I saw, 1977’s Sorcerer, shown on TV while I was a typical teenager, i.e., I saw myself as hardened, cynical and incapable of being fazed by anything.  Sorcerer made an impression because it did faze me.

 

A remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953), it tells the story of four dregs of humanity – a Mexican hitman (Francisco Rabal), a Palestinian terrorist (Hamidou Benmessaoud), a French businessman fleeing fraud charges (Bruno Cremer) and an Irish-American crook who has the Mafia after him (Roy Scheider) – hired to drive two ramshackle trucks carrying two loads of volatile explosives across a natural assault course of overgrown jungle paths, rocky mountain-trails and decrepit rope bridges.  The explosives, ancient sticks of dynamite so decayed they’ve started to leak their prime ingredient, nitroglycerin, are needed to extinguish a fire that’s consuming an oil well in a remote part of South America.

 

I was rattled by Sorcerer because I wasn’t prepared for how brutal, cynical and hard-as-nails it was.  From its unflinching images of accident victims – bloodied ones after the getaway car Schneider and his gang are using crashes in New Jersey, charred ones after the initial explosion at the oil well – to the squalor of the village from which the four men set out on their ultra-dangerous mission – mud, shacks, chickens, feral dogs, feral policemen, Big-Brother-type political posters bearing the features of the local military dictator, barefoot kids whose only function is to mindlessly chase after the jeeps that occasionally rumble through the place, sordid bars where the only thing missing is the author Malcolm Lowry sitting on a barstool, getting sozzled on tequila – to everything that nature flings against them during their nightmarish odyssey – torrential rain, sweltering heat, choking vegetation, raging torrents, treacherous quicksand and toppled trees – Sorcerer knocked me for six.  And ladled over that is the film’s relentless nihilism, which makes it plain there’s going to be no happy endings for anyone.  Teenaged kid, Sorcerer seemed to tell me, you still have some growing up to do!

 

© Universal Pictures / Paramount Pictures

 

The film’s master set-piece, of course, is the sequence where the quartet have to get their trucks across a falling-apart rope bridge, above a swollen river, during a mini-hurricane – which at one point sends a fallen tree scudding along the water and crashing into them.  Appropriately, this provides the vertiginous image that appears on Sorcerer’s poster.  The film’s stunt coordinator was the Bud Ekins, who’d doubled for Steve McQueen during the climactic motorbike chase in The Great Escape (1963), though I’ve read that the cast did many of the stunts themselves.  There’s also a pulsing, needling soundtrack by German prog-rock band Tangerine Dream, which Friedkin wisely refrains from overusing.

 

On its release, Sorcerer was a financial disaster – coming out at the same time as a wee film called Star Wars (1977) probably didn’t help – and received a critical drubbing.  Leading the charge was Britain’s notoriously prissy, reactionary whinging-film-critic-in-chief Leslie Halliwell, who lamented, “Why anyone should have wanted to spend twenty million dollars on a remake of The Wages of Fear, do it badly and give it a misleading title is anybody’s guess.  The result is dire.”  Happily, Sorcerer had now been re-evaluated and is recognised as one of the very best American action-thrillers of the 1970s.

 

Roy Scheider turned up again in the next William Friedkin movie I encountered, 1971’s The French Connection, the one that put him on the map and won him a Best Director Oscar.  Lauded for its grittiness, as exemplified by Gene Hackman (who bagged an Oscar too) in the lead role of rumpled and rowdy detective Eddie ‘Popeye’ Doyle, The French Connection manages to have its cake and eat it – for while it oozes with authentic, documentary-style 1970s New York grime and sleaze, it also serves up some classic, if hardly realistic, action set-pieces.  Most notable of these is the legendary chase between a car and an elevated train, which Friedkin filmed without proper permission.  The sequence also necessitated the head of the New York Transit Authority being bribed so that one of their trains could be ‘borrowed’.  Indeed, it sounds like Friedkin indulged in the same sort of ‘guerilla filmmaking’ that nine years later Lucio Fulci did when he shot the New York parts of his horror opus Zombie Flesh Eaters (1980) – he’d have his crew turn up in city locations, start filming and then run like hell when the police appeared.  (There. I’ve just mentioned William Friedkin in the same sentence as Lucio Fulci.  The famously cantankerous Friedkin would hate me for that.)

 

Incidentally, classic though The French Connection is, I think its sequel, John Frankenheimer’s imaginatively titled French Connection II (1975), is equally good.  This sees Doyle pursue Alain Charnier, the smooth French drug-mastermind of the original film (who was played by Fernando Rey, actually a Spaniard), back to Marseille.  This leads to culture clashes galore.  Predictably and hilariously, Doyle shows zero diplomacy while dealing with the locals, including the exasperated Marseille police force.  He’s surely the most boorish American to ever descend upon France – well, until 2018, when Donald Trump rocked up there for the 100th anniversary of the Armistice at the end of World War One.

 

© Philip D’Antoni Productions / 20th Century Fox

 

Stay tuned for the second instalment of this entry, when I talk about my experiences of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), Cruising (1980) and Killer Joe (2011)! 

 

Cue Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells…

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Yellow cinema (Part 2)

 

© Rizzoli Film / Seda Spettacoli / Cineriz

 

Continuing my list of favourite giallo movies – a giallo being an Italian “horror-thriller hybrid”, mostly made in the 1970s, “wherein a group of people, usually affluent and beautiful, get despatched by a mysterious killer (identity revealed only in the closing moments) stabbing, slashing and hacking his or her way through them for some unlikely reason.  The results are often Italian films at their most glamorous, stylish, violent, ridiculous and politically incorrect.”

 

All the Colours of the Dark (1972)

Like the stereotypical London bus, you spend all day waiting for a London-set giallo and then two arrive at once.  Hot on the heels of Lucio Fulci’s A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971) came All the Colours of the Dark, directed by Sergio Martino who, though not as acclaimed as Fulci, Mario Bava or Dario Argento, is to my mind the fourth master of the genre.

 

Colours features several performers who were regulars in Martino’s movies, including George Hilton, Ivan Rassimov and the droopy-eyed, lushly-haired and slightly feline-featured Algerian-Maltese-Sicilian actress Edwige Fenech, considered by many to be the Queen of Gialli.  Its story is about a woman (Fenech) who, traumatised after a miscarriage, becomes involved with a London-based and apparently murderous Satanic sect.  Thus, it veers towards supernatural territory.  It finally transpires, however, that the killings in the film are part of a non-supernatural conspiracy to relieve her of a family inheritance.  As with A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, Colours is too long and ultimately loses momentum, but Martino orchestrates some impressive scenes along the way.  Surprisingly for a genre fond of beautifying its characters and settings, a Satanic orgy that Fenech finds herself participating in at one point is determinedly unglamorous.  In fact, the gormless-looking, frankly pug-ugly Satanists around her seem to have wandered in from the set of a leery 1970s British sitcom like ITV’s On the Buses (1969-73).

 

© Lea Film / National Cinematografica / C.C. Astro / Interfilm

 

The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972)

Emilio Miraglia’s The Red Queen Kills Seven Times is a cheap and cheerful retread of Mario Bava’s seminal Blood and Black Lace (1964), with another series of murders taking place in a fashion house.  This time, though, the setting is Bavaria, not Rome.  While the plot references the legend of an evil Red Queen who’s said to come back from the dead every 100 years to commit seven murders, the real killer proves to be a human one.  What particularly endears this film to me is the histrionic cackle, supposedly emanating from the Red Queen herself, that we hear on the soundtrack following each murder.  Playing the film’s heroine is German actress Barbara Bouchet, who that same year would appear in the next film on this list.

 

© Phoenix Cinematografica / Cineriz / Cannon Films

 

Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972)

Don’t Torture a Duckling is Lucio Fulci’s other great giallo movie.  Indeed, it’s one of the best things he ever did. It has none of the excess and goofiness of his later horror films and it benefits from its distinctly un-giallo-like setting.  For a change, it doesn’t take place in an affluent urban world inhabited by high-fliers. Duckling is set instead in a rural and backward south Italian village, its separation from modernity symbolised by the nearby highway where traffic rumbles past oblivious to its existence. While Fulci uses the setting to take pot-shots at the institutions of conservative, traditional, Catholic Italy, his cameras make the most of the sumptuous local countryside.

 

That said, 21st-century viewers will be bothered by some early scenes, seemingly played for laughs, which show Bouchet teasing the village’s young boys by brazenly exposing herself to them.  I doubt if Fulci would have entertained the idea of having hero Tomas Milian expose himself to the village’s young girls, but surely Bouchet’s behaviour is just as bad.  It’s a clumsy foreshadowing of the film’s themes, which are the threat an immoral world poses to childhood innocence, and a serial killer’s determination to preserve the innocence of the children around him by any means necessary.

 

© Medusa Distribuzione

 

Torso (1973)

Sergio Martino made several gialli in the early 1970s, but I think All the Colours of the Dark and Torso are his strongest.  Torso is certainly his most troubling.  Even culture-warring, anti-feminist, male-chauvinistic reactionaries will find its plot, wherein a succession of nubile young ladies are ogled by various, creepy men before being murdered by a masked killer, pretty distasteful.

 

Nonetheless, I admire Torso for its audacious shifts in plot and mood.  It begins in traditional giallo fashion with a serial killer stalking the picturesque, historical city of Perugia.  However, when a group of female students decide to avoid becoming the killer’s next victims by leaving Perugia, travelling into some remote countryside and holing up in a mountaintop villa, and the killer, predictably, follows them and lurks stalkily in the undergrowth and darkness outside the villa, it becomes a prototype for the American slasher / body-count horror movies of the 1980s, epitomised by Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980).  And the final 20 minutes see an abrupt change of tone again.  The film’s ‘final girl’ – Suzy Kendall from Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) – wakes up after a long sleep in a bedroom, her leg disabled by an injury and her senses dulled by anaesthetic, and realises she’s sharing the villa with the killer… who isn’t aware of her presence there… yet.  It makes for a splendidly Hitchcockian finale.

 

© Compagnia CInematografica Champion / Interfilm

 

Deep Red (1975)

And now for my favourite giallo ever, Dario Argento’s Deep Red.  This has David Hemmings as a musician who witnesses a murder.  The victim is a psychic who recently claimed to have picked up murderous thoughts from a mysterious somebody in her vicinity – and that somebody evidently decided to silence her before she acquired any clues to his or her identity.  As with the hero of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Hemmings is troubled by the notion that he saw something at the crime scene that is a clue to the culprit’s identity, but can’t figure out exactly what.  And while Hemmings struggles with this, the murders continue and the killer starts to home in on him…

 

Deep Red contains some of the best set-pieces in the history of giallo cinema and some hardly-vital-for-the-plot but disturbingly barmy details, such as a cackling clockwork doll that totters into view just before the killer strikes.  There’s also a baroque, pulsating score by the German prog-rock band Goblin that, in my opinion, just manages to pip the work of Ennio Morricone to earn the title of Greatest Giallo Music Ever.

 

© Rizzoli Film / Seda Spettacoli / Cineriz

 

And Deep Red boasts a wonderful performance by Daria Nicolodi as kooky journalist Gianna Brezzi. For me, Brezzi is up there alongside Jean-Pierre Marielle’s Arrosio in Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) as one of the most memorable characters featured in a giallo.  Nicolodi – who, alas, passed away in 2020 – was married to Argento while he enjoyed his filmmaking heyday during the second half of the 1970s and she made a big contribution to the scripts of his supernatural classics Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980).  I suspect it wasn’t a coincidence that Argento’s movies rapidly went downhill in quality after the mid-1980s, which was when their marriage ended.

 

I love Deep Red, then, but…  It’s evidently not to everyone’s tastes. When I showed it to my partner last year, she professed to finding it ‘dull’ and dismissed Goblin’s soundtrack as being ‘like something from a 1970s disco.’  So that was me told.

 

The House with Laughing Windows (1976)

Like Don’t Torture a Duckling, this film benefits from being set far away from the usual giallo environment of lavish lifestyles, expensive apartments and cosmopolitan cities. Unlike Duckling, it’s set not in the rural south of Italy but in its rural north, in the damp, squelchy lagoon area of Valli di Comacchio in the province of Ferrara.  Pupi Avati’s The House with Laughing Windows has a restorer (Lino Capolicchio) arriving in a village to work on a crumbling fresco in a church and learning that the artist responsible for the work was a madman who got inspiration for his images of martyred saints from torturing and killing people.  When a new wave of murders sweeps the village, it seems that someone is carrying on with the artist’s gruesome traditions. The gloomy, marshy setting helps the film’s atmosphere immeasurably, and its ending is as pessimistic and disturbing as that of Short Night of Glass Dolls (1971) five years earlier.

 

© A.M.A. Film / Euro International Films

 

Honourable mentions?  Cat O’ Nine Tails (1971), the middle entry in Dario Argento’s ‘animal’ trilogy, doesn’t have the gusto of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage or Four Flies on Grey Velvet, the films that bookend it, but it’s still worth catching up with. Meanwhile, Argento’s 1980s gialli Tenebrae (1982) and Opera (1987) have their moments but aren’t as involving as his 1970s work – due, I suspect, to their lack of engaging characters.

 

Also of interest are Sergio Martino’s other two gialli, The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh (1971) with Martino regulars Edwige Fenech, George Hilton and Ivan Rassimov, and the fabulously titled Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972) with Fenech and Rassimov, plus Luigi Pistilli from Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood (1971) and Anita Strindberg from Lucio Fulci’s A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin.  Your Vice is memorable for having some of the ghastliest characters to ever appear in a giallo, and for its plot basically being an outrageous reworking of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 short story The Black Cat.  But it’s spoiled by Martino’s inexplicable insertion of a dirt-motorbike race that seems to go on forever.

 

Elsewhere, Fenech and Hilton turn up in the decent, meat-and-two-veg giallo The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972), directed by Giuliano Carnimeo. I have a soft spot too for Umberto Lenzi’s agreeably shonky Spasmo, with music by Ennio Morricone and a cast that includes Suzy Kendall, Ivan Rassimov and Robert Hoffman, star of the fondly remembered French-German children’s series The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1964).  And I can’t possibly finish a piece about giallo movies without mentioning Giulio Questi’s mad 1968 epic Death Laid an Egg, which boldly places its beautiful giallo characters in the glamorous, stylish world of… intensive poultry farming.

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Yellow cinema (Part 1)

 

© International Apollo Films / Les Films Corona / Atlantida Films

 

Not so long ago, I caught up with Edgar Wright’s 2021 movie Last Night in Soho.  I generally liked it, though I thought its first half was more successful than its second.  During the first half the film is very much a fantasy, with a lonely young woman (Thomasin McKenzie), who’s fixated on 1960s British fashion and culture, arriving in unglamorous, modern-day London and falling victim to weird, time-travelling regressions.  These send her back six decades and put her soul in the body of an early-1960s starlet (Angela Joy-Taylor) who’s trying to make her name in Soho, the London district that embodied the era’s combination of carefree glamour and shady decadence.  Halfway through, however, the movie shifts gears.  The 1960s scenes become sourer and darker and the fantasy gives way to horror.  This transition didn’t quite work for me and I ended up feeling the movie was neither fish nor fowl.

 

One thing I thought was cool about Last Night in Soho’s second, macabre half, however, was how Wright invests it with the aesthetics of Italian giallo cinema.  There’s bright, lurid lighting and colours, and swirling camerawork, and lots of splashy, slashy blood and grue.  Wright has obviously studied the works of old giallo maestros like Mario Bava, Sergio Martino, Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento.  And it’s giallo movies that I’d like to spend this entry talking about.

 

What is, or was – because, informed by a certain time, place and set of attitudes, the genre is surely obsolete in 21st century cinema – a giallo movie?

 

Previously on this blog, while I was paying tribute to the late Ennio Morricone, whose music embellished the soundtrack of many a giallo in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I described it as a “staple of traditional Italian cinema” that was a “horror-thriller hybrid wherein a group of people, usually affluent and beautiful, get despatched by a mysterious killer (identity revealed only in the closing moments) stabbing, slashing and hacking his or her way through them for some unlikely reason.  The results are often Italian films at their most glamorous, stylish, violent, ridiculous and politically incorrect.”  Incidentally, the word giallo is Italian for ‘yellow’ and, according to Wikipedia, the cinematic term “derives from a series of cheap paperback mystery and crime thrillers with yellow covers that were popular in Italy.”

 

There follows a list of my favourite gialli.  I should point out that I’m a purist about what constitutes and doesn’t constitute a giallo.  In my mind, the ’killer’ element is important.  It’s got to be a human doing the killing, not a monster or supernatural agency.  So, though I’ve seen other people’s lists of gialli include films like Elio Petri’s A Quiet Place in the Country (1968), Mario Bava’s Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1970) and Lisa and the Devil (1974), Emilio Miraglia’s The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971) and Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980), I’m steering clear of them because their plots contain ghosts, witches, devils and other supernatural elements.  I’m also avoiding Francisco Barilli’s Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974), which isn’t so much supernatural as Kafkaesque-ly strange.  For me, a proper giallo doesn’t contain the impossible.  Just, usually, the highly improbable.

 

Anyway, there’s only one movie to start with…

 

© Emmeni Cinematografica / Les Productions Georges de Beaurgard

 

Blood and Black Lace (1964)

Director Mario Bava was to Italian horror cinema what John Ford was to westerns or Alfred Hitchcock was to suspense movies.  The form would have been utterly different without him.  His splendid 1960s trilogy Black Sunday (1960), Black Sabbath (1964) and Kill, Baby, Kill (1966) indelibly shaped Italy’s tradition of gothic horror shockers.  Black Sabbath and Kill, Baby, Kill were also shot in colour and showcased Bava’s eye for baroque lighting, gorgeous colour palettes and elaborate set design, which proved the frights didn’t have to come at you from a monochrome world of darkness and shadows.  They could come at you from a brightly and lushly phantasmagorical world too.

 

Meanwhile, Blood and Black Lace is an early landmark in giallo films.  Its tale of a series of murders in a Rome fashion house – invariably of young, beautiful models, which meant gialli were open to the charge of misogyny from the very start – created the template for the form.  Moreover, thanks to Bava’s inimitable visual style, it’s a stunning film to watch.  For my money, it’s up there with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) as one of those movies that’s simply a feast for the eyes.

 

© Seda Spettacoli / Titanus / Constantin

 

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)

Blood and Black Lace made the giallo mould, but The Bird with the Crystal Plumage directed by then-new kid on the block Dario Argento – this was his directorial debut – showed that this type of movie could win both popular success and critical acclaim.  It also inspired a glut of gialli in Italy during the early 1970s.  The story begins with a young American (Tony Musante) witnessing a near-deadly attack on a woman in a Rome art gallery – he gets trapped between two glass doors and is unable to run to her aid.  While more violence occurs, seemingly as a result of the attack, he agonises over what he thought he saw.  He can’t put his finger on it, but there was something not quite right about it…  This ‘missing-piece-of-the-jigsaw’ trope became a common one in giallo films.  Providing Bird’s music is the peerless Ennio Morricone, while in the role of Musante’s girlfriend is English actress Suzy Kendall, who would notch up more giallo credits.  She even appeared as ‘special guest screamer’ in 2012’s Berberian Sound Studio, Peter Strickland’s ‘sort of’ tribute to 1970s Italian horror movies.

 

© Nuova Linea Cinematografica

 

A Bay of Blood (1971)

A Bay of Blood feels like Mario Bava’s grumpy riposte to Argento, who the previous year had made giallo films almost respectable with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.  A Bay of Blood is the polar opposite, a nasty, mean-spirited and ultra-violent effort, surely the most violent thing in Bava’s CV.  It’s about a community of conniving scumbags who murder one another in their desperation to secure an inheritance, which is the expensive property around the titular bay.  Even at the film’s end, when only the last two, husband-and-wife scumbags (Luigi Pistilli and Claudia Auger) remain alive, Bava hits upon a novel way of killing them off too.  What makes A Bay of Blood fascinating is an extended section that’s barely connected with the rest of the film.  Here, a quartet of teenagers break into the mansion at the centre of the murders and are themselves, gratuitously and bloodily, murdered.  This part is less like a giallo and more like a prototype showreel for the ‘slasher’ movies, such as the Friday the 13th ones, that dominated American horror cinema in the 1980s.

 

© Doria G. Film / Dunhill Cinematografica / Jadran Film

 

Short Night of Glass Dolls (1971)

An atypical giallo, Aldo Lado’s Short Night of Glass Dolls benefits from its Prague setting and a plot that features a murderous conspiracy rather than another contrived-killer-on-the-loose scenario.  Downbeat endings aren’t unusual in gialli, but the grim fate that befalls the journalist hero (French actor Jean Sorel) is genuinely affecting and disturbing.  Also in the movie is Ringo Starr’s future missus Barbara Bach, who that same year would appear in a second giallo, Paolo Cavara’s The Black Belly of the Tarantula.  Short Night boasts music from Ennio Morricone too.  As does…

 

Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971)

The final instalment in what would become known as Dario Argento’s ‘animal’ trilogy, which began with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and continued with Cat O’ Nine Tails (made earlier in 1971), Four Flies on Grey Velvet is about a Rome-based rock drummer and his wife, played by Michael Brandon and Mimsy Farmer, another Anglophone actress who became something of a giallo star.  They get involved in a series of murders after the drummer seemingly, unwittingly kills a man who’s been stalking him.

 

© Seda Spettacoli / Universal Productions France

 

One of Four Flies’ pleasures is the wonderful performance by French actor Jean-Pierre Marielle as Gianni Arrioso, a camp, incompetent and tragic private investigator hired by Brandon to figure out what’s going on.  When the inevitable happens and Arrioso gets bumped off by the killer too, the dying PI consoles himself with the thought that at least, for once, he guessed the culprit’s identity correctly: “I was right,” he sighs, “I did it this time.”  In another supporting role, as one of Brandon’s mates, is the great Bud Spencer, taking a break from the spaghetti westerns and comedies he was making at the time with his acting partner Terence Hill.

 

A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971)

Much loved by horror-movie buffs for his schlocky, gory, no-rational-thought-required opuses like Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979), City of the Living Dead (1980) and The Beyond (1981), director Lucio Fulci was, once, a maker of surprisingly stylish gialli.  A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin is also that fascinating beast, a giallo set in London, meaning that life in early 1970s Britain – hardly the most glamorous time or place – is depicted intriguingly, if improbably, through a more fashion-conscious, Mediterranean lens.  Joining the London scenery here is the impeccable, no-nonsense Welsh actor Stanley Baker, playing a police detective investigating the killings that invariably happen.  Meanwhile, there’s more Morricone goodness on the soundtrack.

 

Alas, Lizard suffers from being half-an-hour too long and runs out of steam towards its end.  Nothing in it quite compares with its opening sequences, in which the repressed wife (Florinda Bolkan) of a high-flying lawyer (Jean Sorel again) dreams about fleeing through a packed train, whose passengers then morph into enthusiastic participants in a gigantic hippy orgy being held in the house of her real-life neighbour (Anita Strindberg, another giallo regular).  The saucy dreams climax – ouch! – with a murder, and when a real murder is committed in the real house, we’re left wondering what’s actually dream and reality in Bolkan’s head.

 

Though the film slackens in its later stages, Fulci still manages some memorable moments, such as a set-piece chase through Alexandra Palace in north London, where Bolkan ends up in the building’s roof-space and is swarmed by a disturbed colony of bats; or an unhinged scene set in a high-security sanitorium where she blunders into a laboratory-room full of partly-dissected dogs.  The dogs in the lab scene weren’t real, but the special effects, courtesy of effects-man Carlo Rambaldi (who would later create ET), seemed so realistic by the standards of the time that Fulci got threatened with a prison sentence for animal cruelty.

 

© International Apollo Films / Les Films Corona / Atlantida Films

 

More of my favourite gialli will appear in a future blog-entry!

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The full Fulci

 

From amiddleagedwitch.wordpress.com

 

Today, March 13th, 2021, marks the 25th anniversary of the passing of Italian director Lucio Fulci.  Here’s a reposting of a lengthy treatise I wrote about the mighty Fulci back in 2014.

 

Nowadays, satellite television can beam any subject matter, however adult, into our living rooms.  Thanks to this, the whole family, from grandma and grandpa down to the pre-school infants, can now sit together in front of the TV and enjoy, communally, such splendid sights as the bit in season three of The Walking Dead (2012-13) where Danai Gurira grabs a big jaggy chunk of glass and rams it in extreme close-up into David Morrissey’s eyeball.  Even better, a few minutes later, they can enjoy the sight of David Morrissey, again in extreme close-up, pulling the jaggy glass out of his eyeball.

 

This wasn’t always the case.  Audiences didn’t always have easy access to images of extreme eyeball abuse.  Indeed, three decades ago, a scene where a person got a humongous wooden splint stuck in her eye while being dragged through a hole in a door by a mouldering zombie was enough to cause outrage amongst the powers who decided what British film-fans could and couldn’t watch.  The scene belonged to the 1979 Italian horror movie Zombie Flesh Eaters, directed by the inimitable Italian filmmaker Lucio Fulci.  And it was the gory content of this and movies like it that led to Britain’s Video Nasties scare of the early 1980s.

 

By 1983, the Department of Public Prosecutions, cheered on by the likes of public-morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse and the right-wing British tabloid press, had drawn up a list of 72 films deemed liable to ‘deprave and corrupt’ and thus open to prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act.  39 of the 72 were successfully prosecuted.  The remaining 33 weren’t prosecuted or were subject to unsuccessful prosecutions, but at the time you had little chance of seeing them through legitimate means.

 

Now that the hysteria has long passed, the majority of these films are available in uncut versions in Britain.  A couple of them, like Don’t Go into the Woods (1981) and Contamination (1980), have even suffered the ultimate humiliation.  They’ve been awarded wussy ‘15’ certificates.

 

Among the movies Lucio Fulci directed, two, Zombie Flesh Eaters and 1981’s The House by the Cemetery ended up on the list of 39 prosecuted titles; while a third, 1981’s The Beyond, was on the list of 33 that escaped successful prosecution.  A fourth, 1980’s City of the Living Dead, didn’t make the Nasties list, but British police seized videos of it nonetheless.  A fifth, 1982’s The New York Ripper, wasn’t classified as a Nasty either but still got banned from British cinemas.  For this achievement alone, I think Lucio Fulci deserves respect.

 

I have a complicated relationship with Fulci.  I doubt if I’ve ever seen more than one or two things he’s directed that I’d classify as good films, but I have to admit that when I encounter a new Fulci title in a DVD store or see one scheduled for broadcast on the Horror Channel, my pulse speeds up.  I get a prickly, sweaty sense of excitement.  I tell myself, I have to see this.  Although the end result is usually the same.  After the damned thing has finished, I sit back and feel a strange combination of bemusement, queasiness and disappointment, while a voice nags at me: “What the hell was that about?”  Although to be fair to Fulci, there’s usually been at least one sequence in the film that’s made me think: “Wow!”

 

Lucio Fulci didn’t find fame, or infamy, in the English-speaking world until the late 1970s, but he’d been a staple of Italian cinema for a long time before.  He started as a scriptwriter, first of all working on the 1954 comedy Un Giorna in Pretura.  In 1959, a dozen film-scripts later, he began directing.  One of his earliest directorial efforts was Ragazzi del Juke-Box, a musical starring the soon-to-be 1960s pin-up Elke Sommer.  During the 1960s and 1970s, Lucio beavered away making comedies and spaghetti westerns.  He also tried his hand at directing giallo movies, those twisted, kinky, violent and macabre Italian variations on the thriller genre: 1969’s Unna Sull’atra, 1971’s A Woman in a Lizard’s Skin and 1972’s Don’t Torture a Duckling.

 

© Medusa Distribuzione

 

Of Fulci’s giallo films, I’ve only seen Don’t Torture a Duckling and it’s surely one of the best things he did.  It has none of the excess and goofiness of his later horror films and it benefits from its distinctly un-giallo-like setting.  While most examples of this sub-genre take place in an affluent urban world inhabited by high-fliers in the creative industries (photographers and fashion models are common), Duckling is set in a rural and backward south Italian village, its separation from modernity symbolised by the nearby highway where traffic rumbles past oblivious to its existence.  While the setting allows Fulci to take pot-shots at the institutions of conservative, traditional Italy, his cameras film the countryside there sumptuously.

 

That said, viewers today will be troubled by some early scenes, seemingly played for humour, which show heroine Barbara Bouchet teasing the village’s young boys by brazenly exposing herself to them.  Imagine if the film had had hero Tomas Milian exposing himself to the village’s young girls.  It’s a clumsy foreshadowing of the film’s themes, which are the threat posed to childhood innocence by an immoral world, and a serial killer’s determination to preserve that innocence by any means necessary.

 

Some commentators have noted that Fulci’s sudden interest in giallo movies, and hence in darker, bloodier material, coincided with the death of his wife Maria, who in 1969 committed suicide after discovering she had cancer.  But the director himself never mentioned a connection between this personal tragedy and the darkening tone of his films.

 

The release of Zombie Flesh Eaters in 1979 saw Fulci plant his flag both in horror-movie territory and in the consciousness of impressionable, sensation-hungry teenagers, as I was then.  The film was a success despite critics slamming it as an inferior cash-in on George A. Romeo’s seminal zombie movie from the previous year, Dawn of the Dead. 

 

© Variety Film  

 

Well, Zombie Flesh Eaters isn’t as good as Dawn of the Dead, but it has an undeniable something about it.  The story kicks off with an un-crewed boat drifting towards New York Harbour while a ravenous zombie lurks in its hold.  Then it shifts to the Caribbean island from which the boat originated, where a full-scale zombie epidemic, possibly scientifically induced, possibly supernatural, is underway.  And at the very end it returns to New York, which has now succumbed to a zombie onslaught too.  The stuff in New York is ropey but the scenes on the Caribbean island, depicted as a cursed, pestilent and windswept hellhole, are wonderfully atmospheric.  A sequence where the protagonists stumble into a ‘conquistadors’ cemetery’ and the graves start disgorging some ancient cadavers is especially hard to forget.

 

But even that scene is surpassed by an earlier one where a female scuba diver flees from the predations of a large shark and hides behind a coral reef; only to discover that on the other side of the reef there lurks – eek! – a soggy underwater zombie.  The shark and the zombie then proceed to fight, in a slow, balletic way.  It’s typical of Fulci’s best sequences in that it manages to be simultaneously bizarre, haunting and totally bonkers.

 

The film is helped by the presence of two British performers, Ian McCulloch and Richard Johnson, who just ignore the absurdities of the situations and dialogue and get on with some proper acting.  I read an interview with McCulloch a while back and he professed himself bemused by Fulci’s filming techniques in New York. These involved the cast and crew turning up at a spot, filming without any licence, and then clearing off as soon as the police appeared.  This might explain the film’s curiously disjointed final image, which shows an army of zombies shuffling along an elevated bridge whilst below the New York rush-hour traffic trundles back and forth as if it’s just a normal evening.

 

The female lead, played by Tisa Farrow, is bloody awful, though.  Tisa is the younger sister of Mia Farrow, and I’ve often wondered what the pair of them talked about when they met up during this period.  “Oh hi, Tisa.  I’m busy making A Wedding with Robert Altman and Death on the Nile with Peter Ustinov.  What are you up to?”  “Well, I’m fighting off a horde of flesh-eating zombies in a conquistadors’ cemetery with Lucio Fulci.”  Mind you, considering what Mia had to endure with Frank Sinatra and Woody Allen, maybe she thought her kid sister had the better deal.

 

Zombie Flesh Eaters is one of my favourite Lucio Fulci movies because it has a story, one where things move from A to B and then to C.  Unfortunately, for his next horror movies, Fulci decided that there’d be a common theme.  Each would take place in a locality that, unknown to the inhabitants, rests on top of a portal to hell.  And if you’re on top of a portal to hell, the laws of physics, of cause and effect, of A leading to B and to C, will be suspended.  All sorts of crazy things will happen.  The dead will rise, furniture will levitate, dogs will go mad, eyeballs will bleed, the sky will rain maggots, demonic winds will blow in your windows and satanic spiders will chew your face off.  But there won’t be anything like a logically sequenced plot.

 

Many film fans have applauded Fulci for doing away with such outdated, bourgeoisie concepts as ‘plots’ in his films, but I have to say I find it a cop-out.  This ‘portal to hell’ stuff was just an excuse for him to make things up as he went along.

 

© Medusa Distribuzione

 

First in this series was 1980’s City of the Living Dead, which centres on strange goings-on in a remote American town that, by bad luck, is built on one of those afore-mentioned portals to hell.  The townspeople are soon falling victim to various forms of supernatural mayhem, which are orchestrated by a ghostly priest and a clutch of zombies who apparently have the power to teleport from one place to another.  City is a shambolic film.  Well, what else can you expect when there’s teleporting zombies in it?  But as usual with Fulci there are scenes that really stick in the memory.  I particularly like one where the protagonists explore some catacombs under the local graveyard, unaware that the cobwebby old cadavers there are stirring into life the moment they pass by.

 

A sequence that all viewers of City remember is one where a girl sits paralysed in a car while the ghostly priest leers in at her and, under his malevolent influence, she starts to vomit up her own entrails.  Lovingly captured on Fulci’s camera, those entrails ooze from her mouth in a slow, slimy mass.  The actress who had the honour of playing this scene was starlet Daniella Doria.  She had to sit before the camera with her mouth crammed full of sheep’s offal, which she then slobbered down her front.  People go on about the pain that Christian Bale inflicts upon himself in his quest for cinematic perfection, starving himself to a skeletal husk for The Machinist (2004) or making his weight balloon to play the slobby hero of American Hustle (2013); but I bet even Bale would draw the line at spewing mouthfuls of cold sheep-guts over himself in a Lucio Fulci movie.

 

Daniella Doria made three subsequent films with Fulci and she died horribly in all of them, via asphyxiation, stabbing and slashing.  “She was one of my favourite actresses,” Fulci reminisced later.  “I killed her so many times.”

 

Many rate the following year’s The Beyond as Fulci’s masterpiece and, indeed, its champions include Quentin Tarantino.  But I have the same problems with it that I have with City of the Living Dead.  There’s no rhyme or reason to it, because the action takes place on top of another of those pesky portals to hell.  Again, though, there are some striking scenes, notably, one where heroine Catriona McColl encounters a spectral figure standing in the middle of a straight, seemingly endless causeway.  The figure is that of a blind woman, played by Cinzia Monreale, who turns out to be a ghost.  Later, though, the blind woman dies when her throat is torn out.  Predictably, Fulci never explains how a ghost, someone who’s already dead, can be killed.

 

© Medusa Distribuzione

 

The Beyond also contains the barmy ‘spiders from hell’ scene, during which a lightning bolt knocks a character off a ladder.  He breaks his back and then lies helplessly while giant spiders emerge from the ether around him, converge and start munching on his face.  The spiders – real tarantulas – look creepy enough as they approach during the long shots; but for the face-nibbling close-ups they become phoney bundles of pipe cleaners that Fulci’s special-effects team probably threw together during the mid-morning tea-break.

 

Another problem is the ending.  It seems that Fulci had intended The Beyond, which takes place in a dilapidated Louisiana hotel, to be a haunted-house movie.  However, his financial backers expected him to make them another money-spinning zombie movie.  I can imagine Fulci’s producer grabbing him one day on the set, after looking at what was already in the can, and waving his arms and ranting in a stereotypical Italian way: “Lucio!  Hey Lucio!  Where-za hell-za zombies?!”  So, although he didn’t want to, poor old Fulci had to insert an incongruous climax into the film where McColl and hero David Warbeck have a shoot-out with a sudden and unexpected bunch of zombies.

 

The final instalment in Fulci’s ‘portals to hell’ series was 1982’s The House by the Cemetery, which has a young family moving into the titular house by the titular cemetery and discovering that they’re sharing it with, down in the basement, something horrible.  But sadly, the film lacks those moments of demented flamboyance that distinguished its two predecessors.

 

Meanwhile, between City of the Living Dead and The Beyond, Fulci tried to do something different.  This was filming a contemporary update of the Edgar Allan Poe story The Black Cat and setting it in England.  I’d hoped that the subject matter would reign in the director’s excesses and impose a little discipline on him.  The focus, after all, isn’t on a portal to hell that makes all things possible, but on a cat.  A pretty evil cat, right enough, but at the end of the day just a cat.

 

Unfortunately, like Fulci’s other films of the period, The Black Cat (1981) suffers from having everything thrown into it bar the kitchen sink.  The cat has somehow picked up subconscious psychic emanations from its owner, who’s a paranormal investigator obsessed with contacting the dead and who’s played by the distinguished Irish actor Patrick Magee.  Imbued with the hatred Magee feels deep down for the untrustworthy yokels who live around him in a rural English village, the cat starts acting out Magee’s suppressed fantasies and starts killing the villagers.

 

© Silenia Cinematografica / Italian International Film

 

But the cat seems to have picked up some other things, including super-intelligence and super-strength, for it can hypnotise its victims, sabotage ventilation systems, set furniture on fire, come back from the dead and even, like those silly zombies in City of the Living Dead, teleport.  You wonder why with all these talents the cat ever bothers to scratch anyone, but it does that too.  Still, the film has a few impressively eerie sequences, such as when Magee totters down to the village graveyard after dark and tests out his new contacting-the-dead wireless equipment.

 

Fulci is remembered for one more ‘major’ horror film, 1982’s The New York Ripper.  A serial killer / slasher effort with a self-explanatory title, this was controversial to say the least and led to him being accused of misogyny.  Even if Britain hadn’t been so jittery at the time about Video Nasties, the fact that it appeared soon after the real-life Yorkshire Ripper killings in northern England probably meant it was never going to get a British cinematic release.  The New York Ripper is a gruelling film and, frankly, a pretty bad one.  The killer’s quirk of performing Donald Duck impersonations during the murders isn’t so much deeply disturbing as deeply stupid.  If nothing else, the film serves as a record of the sleaze and dodginess associated with New York in the 1970s and 1980s.  This, of course, was before the city was cleaned up in the 1990s by its mayor, the totally non-sleazy, non-dodgy Rudy Giuliani

 

Thereafter, Fulci’s output tailed off in both prominence and quality due to a series of misfortunes that included a fall-out with his long-term scriptwriting collaborator Dardano Sacchetti and some serious health problems like hepatitis, cirrhosis and diabetes.  Although ‘quality’ is a subjective concept when you’re discussing his movies anyway.  He soldiered on into the early 1990s, his last directorial effort being the poorly received psychological thriller Door to Silence in 1991.  I’ve watched a single movie from his later years, a 1987 teen-orientated horror film called Aenigma that was apparently filmed in the then-Yugoslavia and is a weak rip-off of Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976) and Richard Franklin’s telekinesis thriller Patrick (1978).  One thing I’ll say about Aenigma is that its death-by-snails sequence has to be seen to be believed.

 

Lucio Fulci died impoverished, sick and alone in Rome in 1996.  At least he had the satisfaction of attending, two months prior to his death, a convention in New York organised by the American horror-movie magazine Fangoria.  Much to his astonishment, since he didn’t appreciate his popularity beyond the shores of Italy, he was mobbed at the convention by thousands of American fans.

 

Funnily enough, Fulci’s films make me think of Gerry Anderson’s sci-fi-puppet TV show from 1964, Stingray.  Each episode of Stingray would open with a voice intoning, “Anything can happen in the next half-hour!”  That line would make a suitable opening for a typical Lucio Fulci movie too: “Anything can happen in the next hour-and-a-half!”  Especially if the film takes place on top of a portal to hell.

 

© Medusa Distribuzione