I Bet Dr. Freudstein's Retainer Fee is Just OUTRAGEOUS.

246) House by the Cemetery (1981) Dir: Lucio Fulci Date Released: March 1, 1984 Date Seen: August 3, 2012 Rating: 3/5

The direction of this mostly brain-dead chiller, a haunted house flick whose barely teased-out subtext is much more interesting than its basic plot, is everything to me. And I don't just mean the way that Fulci over-uses extreme close-ups of twitching, in-dire-need-of-a-wax eyebrows. Or the way Fulci's animated camera snakes around the titular house. Or even Fulci's perverse sense of humor. Or the sadistically decisive way people die in his films!

Well, maybe it's largely this latter point. When people die in a Fulci film, it's as if a big, sweaty, fat, hairy authorial hand has descended from on-high and is almost fatally stabbing His victims with his big honking Authorial Index Finger. "You," the voice seems to say. "You die violently!"

Anyway, it's probably a combination of these things. As with many Italian horror films I kinda like in spite of myself, House by the Cemetery is threadbare material made better by a director with a modicum of personality and ghoulish wit. Here, that's because Fulci has put his id on the screen. In fact, it's obvious that Fulci does not know how, once you get him going, to stop putting his id on the screen. I've always liked that about his films and that's probably why I want to devote a little time (maybe a chapter or so) to him in particular in my book-that-will-never-become-a-book-because-I-do-not-have-the-time-and-energy-but-I'm-trying-ma-I'm-trying-somebody-give-an-advance-please-and-a-book-deal-oh-god-why. 

So yeah, I like it. Dumb as dirt and not that good and the print was lousy and it had Dutch subtitles and the audio mix was teh pitz for the first two reels and I'm jealous that Gavin Smith got to introduce the film and I didn't and stuff. But I like it.

RV!: The New York Ripper (1982)

RV!: The New York Ripper (1982) Dir: Lucio Fulci Date Released (VHS): March 1987 Date Seen: October 27, 2011 Rating: 4.25/5

Love this'n even more the second go-around. I wrote this introduction for when it screened at the Spectacle Theater in Williamsburg. My intros have since become more...improvised. Ad-libbed, I mean. Still, I wonder how this reads...maybe better in print than read aloud. You decide.

The movie you’re about to see was designed to fuck with you. It’s a nightmarish Hitchcockian homage with glancing sight gags that skewer the very possibility ofpsycho-analyzing a person based on their actions. It’s also a great companion piece to De Palma’s notorious and, until recently, long-unavailable Dressed to Kill, which was made in 1980, two years before Fulci directed The New York Ripper. One of the first lines in this film is an unshaved, derelict-looking guy asking his dog if he wants to play fetch: “Here, you wanna get some exercise? Ooh, my balls.” Ooh, my balls. Ahehehe yeah.

Right from this opening scene, you can tell that Fulci is going to throw as many MacGuffins and red herring clues as possible. The dog, while playing fetch, brings a hand back to his master. That hand doesn’t seem important but it is. Or at least, it will be once it’s revealed who it belongs to later in the film.

31 Days of Horror

400) Alligator (1980) Dir: Lewis Teague Date Released: July 2, 1980 Date Seen: October 2, 2011 Rating: 3.75/5

401) Crawlspace (1986) Dir: David Schmoeller Date Released: May 21, 1986 Date Seen: October 2, 2011 Rating: 3.75/5

405) Dead Alive (1992) Dir: Peter Jackson Date Released: February 12, 1993 Date Seen: October 4, 2011 Rating: 3.5/5

409) A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971) Dir: Lucio Fulci Date Released: March 20, 1973 Date Seen: October 7, 2011 Rating: 3.25/5

410) Dracula 2000 (2000) Dir: Patrick Lussier Date Released: December 22, 2000 Date Seen: October 8, 2011 Rating: 2.75/5

411) Messiah of Evil (1973) Dir: Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz Date Released: XX 1973 Date Seen: October 9, 2011 Rating: 3.75/5

412) Kill Baby, Kill (1966) Dir: Mario Bava Date Released: October 8, 1968 Date Seen: October 9, 2011 Rating: 4/5

70) Don't Torture a Duckling (1972), 71) All the Colors of the Dark (1973)

70) Don't Torture a Duckling (1972) Dir: Lucio Fulci Date Released (DVD): May 2000 Date Seen: February 25, 2010 Rating: 3.25/5

71) All the Colors of the Dark (1972) Dir: Sergio Martino Date Released: August 1976 Date Seen: February 26, 2010 Rating: 3.5/5

72) Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972) Dir: Sergio Martino Date Released (DVD): September 2005 Date Seen: February 26, 2010 Rating: 3.5/5

73) Torso (1973) Dir: Sergio Martino Date Released: November 1973 Date Seen: February 26, 2010 Rating: 3/5

74) Deep Red (1975) Dir: Dario Argento Date Released: June 1976 Date Seen: February 27, 2010 Rating: 2.5/5

76) The New York Ripper (1982) Dir: Lucio Fulci Date Released (VHS): March 1987 Date Seen: February 27, 2010 Rating: 4/5

My "More-Selective-Than-It-Seems" Giallo Binge. See me mention them all in my list of "11 Essential Gialli" for Ugo.

RV!: Zombi 2 (1979)

RV!: Zombi 2 (1979) Dir: Lucio Fulci Date Released: July 1980 Date Seen: April 5^th, 2009 Rating: 3.25/5

After recently watching City of the Living Dead (1980), director Lucio Fulci succeeded Zombi 2 (1979) with, I feel like I can appreciate what in the latter film, upon first view, seems like guileless and unintentionally abrupt pacing. Fulci uses that jarring and seemingly slipshod technique to illustrate Elisa Briganti’s screenplay’s fixation on ritual as unthinking action. To put it another way, the horror in Zombi 2 is not in being able to see any of the numerous, gratuitous make-up effects, but in seeing them without warning or explanation. 

Zombi 2 fittingly enough cannibalizes this theme of the zombie as inexplicable terror from George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), a key influence that Fulci acknowledged by claiming that his film was a sequel to Romero’s. In Zombi 2, the only explanation for the zombie outbreak comes from one character’s repetition of Dawn’s evocative but otherwise meaningless explanation about Hell having no more vacancies, which, incidentally, is taken directly from Revelations.* There’s no virus, no experiment gone wrong and no voodoo incantation to make sense of what’s happening. Bad shit just happens.

By chucking logical narrative explanation out the window, Fulci indirectly has justified making his film a loose collection of scenes that start and stop with all the grace of a bumper car. He’s only interested in action, violence and emotional responses as instinctual, automatic responses. In the infamous eye-busting scene, we don’t get to find out what happens to the girl after her cornea’s been raped by a jagged splinter. We’ve already seen that scene’s climax as the body is unfathomably and inexplicably violated. In his (pardon the pun) eyes, Fulci’s Buñuelian homage is justified because it, like the rest of the film, can be there. Intellectually, it makes sense but emotionally, it’s still just a wondrously unsettling bit of post-Hitchcockian bloodletting.

At the same time, Zombi 2’s giddily unfathomable violence makes the film’s final shoot-out, the most exciting part of the film, just a little more boring. As a tableau of violence, Fulci shows us in traditional shot-revere-shot fashion how and why blood gets shed (we see a zombie, then the guy about to blow him away and then the zombie getting blown away). After seeing all that violence come and go out of the blue, sensible action just seems like such a letdown, even if it’s presented in the film’s most consistently paced scene.

*Note: I lied.  

76) City of the Living Dead (1980)

76) City of the Living Dead (1980) Dir: Lucio Fulci Date Released: May 1983 Date Seen: March 21^st, 2009 Rating: 1.75/5

Lucio Fulci’s City of the Living Dead (1980) may be conceptually an interesting stab at visualizing Lovecraftian terrors but never pulls itself together long enough to be much more than a curious precursor to his equally clunky but infinitely more ambitious The Beyond (1981), which he made two films later. The idea of “zombies” appearing out of a hyper-unreal empty, pitch-black nowhere to pull chicken and pig organs out of the scalps of unsuspecting Dunwich residents is kinda cool, but it’s not so fun to watch when it’s this inexpertly filmed, paced, written, visualized, acted, etc. Fabio Frizzi’s soundtrack is neat at times but is ultimately just a weak rehash of his recent earlier Fulci collob, Zombi 2 (1979).