Zombie (1979)

Director: Lucio Fulci
Writer(s): Elisa Briganti (and an uncredited Dardano Sacchetti, who asked for his name to be removed following the death of his father shortly before the film's release)
Starring: Tisa Farrow, Ian McCullough, Richard Johnson, Al Cliver, and Auretta Gay

I am usually of the mindset that a movie cannot truly be considered “good” unless it excels in several different technical categories. I mean, really that’s just common sense; a movie with great cinematography but poor everything else should not be rated highly, nor should a movie with a solid soundtrack and little else to offer. The truly great works of art, at least in the film world, are ones where everything comes together to deliver a mesmerizing all-around experience, one that can delight your audio/visual senses in equal measures.

But Lucio Fulci’s Zombie is one of the few films I’ve seen that shatters that whole ideal; come to think of it, it is the kind of film that shatters the whole idea of “critique” altogether. It is an ugly film in many ways, with visuals that revel in drab colors and a storyline that focuses on a poverty-stricken island where the villagers are being killed off by a mysterious plague…one that also happens to bring the dead back to life. It gets much use out of an old, grungy church-turned-hospital, which is slowly filling up with dying and diseased villagers, the only sounds that of dozens of flies hovering around the victims. Just seeing the setting enough is almost nauseating, the griminess of the locales adding a sense of scope and urgency, while also working as a direct contradiction to the (mostly) clean, (apparently) sterile hospitals that we often take for granted in the United States.

It doesn’t do much right, at least not in the way of what we would normally think of as “technical standards”: the acting, which is kind of hard to take at face value thanks to the dubbing, seems mediocre at generous best; the cinematography is straightforward but rarely anything more than average; the story gives the illusion that it was thrown together solely as a shaky foundation for which to throw in as much gore and bloodshed as possible, which probably isn’t just an illusion.

And that discardable plot starts off with an abandoned boat surfacing in New York. When the Coast Guard goes to investigate, they find more than they bargained for: a zombie, who attacks and kills one of the men, before getting shot off the ship by the other. A newspaper catches wind of this, and assigns a reporter, Peter West (played by Ian McCullough), to start following this story. The reporter catches a young woman, Anne Bowles (Tisa Farrow, sister of Mia, who retired from acting in the ‘80s to be a nurse in Vermont), as she is being interrogated by police; it would seem that the boat belonged to her father, whom she hadn’t seen or heard from in months.

So Peter and Anne team up to find out what happened to her father, who last she heard, was going to a small Caribbean island called Matul. They happen to catch two American tourists, Brian Hull (Al Cliver) and Susan Barrett (Auretta Gay), just before they depart on a two-month tour of the islands (based on a tip from a taxi driver, who apparently knows everything that is happening in his city at any given moment), and talk them into allowing them to tag along.

As is standard in these films, it turns out the island is so small that it doesn’t appear on any maps, but they manage to find it anyway. Also standard is that Susan and Brian just plan on dropping off Peter and Amy, then continuing on their own way, but are forced to join them when the boat is damaged. Couldn’t see that one coming! It is around this time that we are treated to one of the film’s most (in)famous scenes, in which an underwater zombie squares off against a bloodthirsty shark. It’s poorly edited and comes off as rather clumsy, but it still works, simply because there hasn’t been anything like it in the annals of cinema (so noteworthy is this scene that Microsoft used it in a television advertisement for one of their tablets).

They meet up with Dr. Menard (Richard Johnson, who was an actor, along with Ian McCulloch, at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the early ‘60s, where the two first met), a doctor who is trying to figure out what is causing the dead on the island to rise. It turns out that the doctor had worked with Anne’s father, who eventually passed away from the island’s disease. There we go…the whole main mystery of the movie is solved, which now allows the film to focus entirely on zombie grue and gore!

And the gore is exactly what Zombie gets very, very right, which shouldn’t be too unexpected given the fact those have always been a Fulci standard. But what elevates them into another stratosphere is just how amazing a vast majority of the effects look even today: the infamous “eye scene” is agonizing in its gradual build-up, but just when we think it’s going to cut away, it does the unthinkable, by getting in even closer to show us every little graphic detail. It was a stomach-churning sequence in 1979, and it’s a stomach-churning sequence now; that it has lost none of its power to shock is a huge compliment almost forty years later.

Ditto that for the slow-motion jugular bite, in which blood flows in slow motion after a woman has her neck bit by a zombie. As usual, Fulci sets the camera in tight, even as the zombie is tearing the flesh away, like he’s daring us to find fault in the effect, and while a second shot a second later does reveal a mass of slightly-miscolored skin (which is clearly the added fake flesh used to pull off the effect), the initial bite is painfully realistic.

Credit for these shots goes to Giannetto de Rossi, who was an effects artist for predominantly Italian films in the ‘60s and ‘70s, with a filmography that alternates between exploitation fare (Emanuelle in America), Westerns (Once Upon a Time in America), and even work with a cinema great (on Fellini’s Casanova, as makeup artist to Donald Sutherland). Eventually, he had a relatively brief career in Hollywood, working with fellow Italian Carlo Rambaldi (who would go on to design the alien heads in Ridley Scott’s Alien) on David Lynch’s Dune, covering the makeup effects for Dragonheart, partnering with Sylvester Stallone for Rambo III and Daylight, and designing the mask for The Man in the Iron Mask.

De Rossi actually pulled double-duty here, as he was also the makeup effects artist—again, this is another area where Zombie shines. The zombies featured here are, quite simply put, some of the greatest ever committed to film. What makes them even more memorable is the amazing attention-to-detail paid to the length of decomposition, something that we would expect would mainly fall on the shoulders of de Rossi himself. The film features both a mysterious disease wiping out members of a village and causing them to return from the dead almost immediately, as well as long-dead Spanish Conquistadors rising from their centuries-long slumber. Realistically, the freshly-dead mainly utilize the actors’ real skin, with some gruesome blood or skin effects to show us that they are zombies; the Conquistadors, on the other hand, are completely made up to look like walking, mummified skeletons. Would it have really made a difference if de Rossi used similar templates for both kinds of zombies? Absolutely not. Nevertheless, it’s an inspired decision that allows de Rossi to show off the breadth of his ridiculous skills as makeup artist.

I would be doing the film a great disservice to not mention the famous score by Fabio Frizzi and Giorgio Casco. Even though the brunt of it can be reduced to just three main cues (the “theme”, a Caribbean-style number, and one utilizing tribal drums), it still somehow manages to be versatile. For example, the main theme is used (for the thousandth time) during the characters’ final showdown at the end, with some of the action timed to the music; when paired with the images, the music actually sounds heroic, and becomes the perfect background accompaniment to their “last stand”. It is also used when the Spanish Conquistadors slowly rise out of their graves, also to strong effect. It became so popular, that Frizzi clearly used it as an inspiration for his own theme to City of the Living Dead, also directed by Fulci.

Zombie is a film that doesn’t really have much to offer its viewer, besides a great soundtrack and excellent special effects, which would normally relegate it to the sea of mediocrity. Yet under Fulci’s direction, the effects are handled with such care and conviction that they don’t just become the focus of the movie, they become the movie itself; everything else takes a backseat to the mayhem. And when those effects not only hold up today, but also manage to put our modern overreliance on obviously-fake computer-generated trickery to shame, then you have that rare gore film that functions both as a throwback to film’s glory days, as well as a shining example of a forty-year-old film that still holds the power to shock and disgust.

RATING: 7/10

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Bay of Blood (1971)

Director: Mario Bava
Writer(s): Bava, Filippo Ottoni, and Giuseppe Zaccariello, from a story by Franco Barberi and Dardano Sacchetti
Starring: Claudine Auger, Luigi Pistilli, Claudio Camaso, and Anna Maria Rosati

Why is this movie better known as Bay of Blood, and not Twitch of the Death Nerve, one of its many alternate titles, and one of the best horror movie names in cinema history? Image Entertainment's 2001 DVD version is the only major release to use that title, but the DVD itself, which is long out-of-print, was maligned for its terrible sound quality (an issue that continues to be a problem, though subsequent releases have gradually improved upon it.)

The lackluster Bay of Blood moniker insists it's nothing more than a tired slasher cliché, a notion that couldn't be further from the truth, if only for two specific reasons: 1.) it's the film that arguably laid the groundwork for the American slasher film, and 2.) it's better than almost all of them that would follow. While the 45 years since its release has eroded away some of the effectiveness of Bay of Blood's gore effects, the focus on its story (as thin as it is), along with director Mario Bava's fiendishly inventive cinematography and unforecasted death scenes, still makes this riveting, required viewing, even today.

The plot is threadbare, but somehow more advanced than most films of its ilk: Countess Federica is an old, wheelchair-bound woman, who owns a large amount of valuable bayfront property. As the film opens, she is sullenly wheeling through her bedroom, stopping only to stare sorrowfully out her rainy window, before she is confronted by an unseen killer, who wraps a rope around her neck, and kicks her wheelchair out from under her, leaving her to asphyxiate under her own weight. The camera pans up, revealing the killer, an older mustachioed man who takes off his gloves, and leaves a suicide note explaining that she can't take it any more. He is about to move the corpse, when he himself is dispatched, stabbed several times by a different unseen killer.

With this one scene, we can tell we are watching a master of his craft once again reinventing the wheel: Director Mario Bava is said to have “invented” the Italian giallo, with films like The Evil Eye (aka The Girl Who Knew Too Much) and Blood and Black Lace. With Bay of Blood, he not only created the American slasher, but has somehow managed to avoid the future cliches that would plague the slasher, while simultaneously leaving enough of them intact to leave DNA evidence all over the subgenre. We have nude women skinny-dipping, and having sex before getting killed; there's a random car full of partying young adults that merely show up with the sole purpose of adding to the body count; there are graphic, violent deaths that would later become a staple of horror cinema; all of the common things we have come to expect from watching horror franchises like Friday the 13th, and the Halloween series, is here in full force (Friday the 13th Part II even went so far as to directly lift two deaths from this film).

But it's not necessarily what's here, but what's missing that makes Bay of Blood such a fascinating 84 minutes: the deaths are rarely foreshadowed with tacky soundtrack cues, meaning they are often sudden, and shocking; Bava foregoes the typical atmosphere by having a majority of the action take place during the day; and there isn't a single masked killer, but rather a series of killers, all trying to off the competition to become rightful heir to “the bay”. There's even a baffling “twist” ending that manages to be both moronic, and fitting, paving the way for a startlingly upbeat final theme song.

Speaking of themes, the soundtrack was composed by prolific Italian composer Stelvio Cipriani who hits on some fantastic themes here, while avoiding the cliches of most similar releases: The cue leading to the opening murder is jarringly beautiful, foreshadowing none of the dark events to come; likewise, some of the violent aftermaths of the murders feature orchestral sections that work in direct contrast to the violence, making them more haunting than they should be. There is, of course, the camp typical of Italian horror soundtracks (there always seems to be at least one cheesy track in all of them), but none of them feel out of place; at its best, it's an outstanding score, while in lesser moments, it's merely a good one.

Following the intro, we meet the bizarre residents living in “the bay”, who all either stand to gain or lose something from the sudden death of the Countess: There's Simon, a man who lives off the creatures he catches in the bay, and who may be hiding a family secret; Frank Venture, a real estate agent who notices the demand such property could fetch; his secretary/lover Laura, who feels abandoned by his sudden leaving for the bay; Paolo, an entomologist who spends his days catching bugs and torturing them in the name of science; and his wife, Anna, who puts too much of her stock in Tarot cards and mysticism. Rounding out the cast of would-be killers is Renata, the estranged daughter of the mustachioed man killed in the opening scene, and her husband, Albert; the two of them arrive later to claim the bay for themselves, where they find—like everyone else—that it won't be that easy.

Then there are the four teenagers who show up and make everything even more difficult. They break into Ventura's empty cottage to steal liquor and party, but soon find out that they are victims of circumstance, when they are killed simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. These deaths, which occur in rapid fashion, are probably the most memorable kills contained herein; a couple also stand as being some of my favorite deaths in any movie. The buildup is also fantastic, with one of the teenagers running from a killer that only she can see, while tribal drums set up a frantic tension missing from the rest of the film; it proves that, when inspired, there was nothing that Bava couldn't do.

I'm not sure that I would consider Bay of Blood to be even in the top 5 things Bava ever did—it lacks depth and often becomes repetitive--but it's easily one of my favorite slasher movies. I've stated before that I get bored of the same ol' stuff all the time, so the sight of masked killers stalking oversexed teenagers for 90 minutes gets incredibly old. That's partly where the ingenuity of Bay of Blood lies—it kills its teens in under five minutes—somehow making a four-decade old film one of the more interesting subversions on the very subgenre that it helped to create.

RATING: 7.5/10

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Demons (1985)

Director: Lamberto Bava
Writer(s): Bava, Dario Argento, Dardano Sacchetti, and Franco Ferrini, from a story by Sacchetti
Starring: Urbano Barberini, Natasha Hovey, Karl Zinny, and Fiore Argento

It can be amazing how the human mind can evolve over time.  Naturally, we outgrow certain things, like our propensity to play with tiny cars or dolls; that’s not really the part that’s confusing.  I’m focused more on how certain memories—not just from childhood, but from any earlier point in life—can remain held in such high regard for so many years, but upon revisiting that memory, it can take a complete 180-degree turn in a matter of minutes.

Exhibit A: Lamberto Bava’s Demons, a movie which I had nothing but fond memories of from my teenage years.  Now, even in my young naïveté, I was always aware that this was a bad movie.  There’s no real way to deny that; the characters are so ignorant that they don’t even resemble actual humans, the dialogue is atrocious, and the plot is half-assed and pointless.  But there’s one area where the movie excels, and that’s in the special effects department.  I always remembered that the demons looked cool, and the gore effects were strong.

Revisiting it today (and showing it to my wife for the first time) was one of those times when nostalgia felt like it stabbed me in the back; as bad as I knew the movie was going to be, it was even worse.  Don’t get me wrong: Demons can be a very entertaining movie.  It might be for all the wrong reasons—it feels like you’re watching a joke that everyone is in on except the filmmakers—but at the very least, it’s not boring.  Well, not at first.  The characters are so inept that there are many classic nuggets of unintentional hilarity, which help to hold your attention until the demons come, and the killings start.

This isn’t one of those movies where a plot discussion is even necessary, but here goes: Cheryl (the beautiful Natasha Hovey) is given a random movie ticket by a bizarre, mute stranger.  Frightened by the ordeal, she does what any other normal person would do:  request another ticket for her friend, Kathy.  The ticket has nothing but the name of the theater on it (the Metropol), which no one has ever heard of.  Not to be off-put by such a small mystery, like how a huge theater gets put up in the middle of a very busy city essentially overnight, Cheryl enthusiastically talks Kathy into going with her.

We get a wide cast of stereotypical characters, though none of them really belong.  Like a pimp with two of his hoes, one of whom just has to try on a decorative metal mask and nick her face, and a blind man, who apparently enjoys going to movies so he can annoy the people around him when he constantly requests his daughter to describe everything that’s happening on the screen.  Once the movie-within-a-movie begins, we get our first glimpse of the similarities between it, and the action inside the theater:  It’s every bit as poorly written and acted.  Then, a short while later, we catch a glimpse of another resemblance to the two movies: What’s happening on the screen, is very similar to the events happening in the theater itself!  It all starts when a character in the movie nicks his face on a metal mask that they find in the tomb of Nostradamus (?).  Uh oh, sound familiar?  One of the pimp’s hoes cut her face on a metal mask outside of the theater, too!

This turns her into a demon.  I’m not quite sure how, and neither are the writers (characters go from thinking it’s the movie, to the theater itself, before abandoning any interest into what’s causing it shortly thereafter), but I guess it really doesn’t matter, because for a little while, we get some much-needed gore!  As remembered, the effects really are great, as are the makeup effects.  The demons look appropriately threatening and aggressive, and we are treated to such scenes as a woman being scalped, and a man getting his eyes gouged out.

The only problem is that the movie just keeps going on, and on, and the characters only get dumber and dumber.  For example, the survivors spend several minutes tearing up the seats in the theater, and using them to block any way in, hoping they can hide out until help comes.  Then one character simply hears a noise on the other side of a door, and is somehow not only convinced that it is someone that’s come to help them, but easily manages to convince everyone else.  Whoops!  Turns out it wasn’t a police officer or friendly person after all, but a group of demons!  Oh well.  It was a simple misunderstanding that could have happened to anyone.

It’s just under 90 minutes long, but it felt like two full hours by the time it was done; about ten minutes of that comes courtesy of an ending that needlessly rambles on, merely enforcing a point (and diluting the effect of said point) that it already made completely clear.  It does attempt one final twist (cleverly after it starts rolling credits and we have put our guards down), but it easily could have done the same thing a lot sooner.

I get that old-school Italian horror movies are not known for their intelligence, and just about all of them are shining examples of style over substance.  I enjoy a good number of these films (with Lucio Fulci’s Zombie and Dario Argento’s Suspiria springing immediately to mind), but that doesn’t necessarily mean that all should be given a pass for complete stupidity; when nobody is being killed in graphic ways, Demons manages to get tiresome pretty quickly, and the predictability of its plot, and long, rambling ending, certainly don't do it any favors. 

RECAP: Well, my teenaged memories of this movie didn’t quite live up to those of my 31-year-old self.  Demons is awfully, terribly bad; thankfully, this actually works to its advantage, at least early on in the film.  The dialogue is so completely inane, and the plot so terribly conceived, that the movie almost manages to approach its own brand of genius.  Then the characters get irreconcilably stupider as the movie goes on (and the best character gets killed), and so it goes from being entertaining, to just flat-out frustrating.  The 90-minute run time feels more like two hours as the ending drags on and on, long after making its point, only so it can attempt one more (admittedly cleverly-timed) twist; but the payoff is not worth the wait.  The only legitimate pluses: The special effects, from the gore sequences to the makeup on the demons, are pretty darn good, and there are a couple of excellent sequences of the monsters stalking their prey.  Overall though, I’d say it fell pretty far short of the mark for me.

RATING: 5/10

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The New York Ripper (1982)

Director: Lucio Fulci

Writer(s): Fulci, Dardano Sacchetti, Gianfranco Clerici, and Vincenzo Mannino

Starring:  Jack Hedley, Almanta Suska, Howard Ross, and Andrea Occhipinti

Depending on who you ask, Lucio Fulci’s The New York Ripper has either achieved cult status as one of the director’s best, and most brutal films, or is panned as being a cruel, misogynistic film with little-to-no redeeming qualities.  The former viewpoint is generally shared with fans of Italian horror cinema, or more specifically, the Italian “giallo” film, which is basically the Italian equivalent of the American slasher film; the latter, is shared by virtually every film critic who has seen it.

It is true that just about all of its violence is directed at female characters, and is shown in sometimes cringe-inducing detail; it is actually these qualities that I find most intriguing.  But rather than load the film up with graphic deaths, Fulci lets his foot off the gas about midway through, leading to a long gap between any murders.  And like many Fulci flicks, when there is no blood, it’s painfully boring.  So much so that my wife and I got up to do other things while just allowing this to run as background noise; when that still didn’t lead to anything, I eventually fast-forwarded it to the next violent scene, which mercifully happened to take us to the ending.

Typical of many Italian horror flicks released in the States, The New York Ripper features actors of all nationalities speaking in their native tongues, with all of it overdubbed into English.  While I find it to be an annoying trait (I would rather just have English subtitles), it’s made even moreso by the absolutely terrible dialogue, which is often unintentionally hilarious, although the terrible voice acting certainly didn’t help.  About the only good decision in the sound design is the batshit crazy idea to have the killer talk like a certain popular cartoon duck (?). While it may sound terrible (and for some folks, the execution will be as dumb as it sounds), I thought it was incredibly effective, and was one of the few genuinely brilliant ideas in a movie that is clearly content with achieving mediocrity.

Still, there are enough moments of graphic bloodshed to keep fans of violent cinema entertained for at least a few minutes, with the climactic scene (involving a razor blade and several parts of a woman’s body) being so effective that they are virtually “must see” moments of cinema brutality.  I certainly can’t recommend it as any sort of a classic, even within Fulci’s limited resume, but there might be enough here for gorehounds looking for a quick fix…just don’t expect much more than that.

RECAP:  In the film’s first-half, the misogyny and graphic violence actually combine to create an appropriately menacing atmosphere; one that is helped along by the peculiar decision to have the killer talk like a duck (?).  But by allowing the deaths to stop, and the focus on ‘whodunit’ to take over, all the momentum of the first half is gone, and there’s very little to recommend, beyond the sparse, yet impressive, bursts of violence.

SCORE: 4/10

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