Joe D’Amato

  • Antropophagus (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2021) Ugh — why am I torturing myself so? Sure, the point of being a cinephile is to learn as much as I can about as many film subgenres as I can, hitting the high points and taking a look at the landmark films. For better or for worse, Italian gore film Antropophagus ended up on some list of noteworthy horror films — best known for being one of those “video nasties”’ banned in the UK, it’s credited by some as marking a turning point of some sort of Italian horror, which would then spend much of the 1980s pushing the limits of on-screen gore. That’s not a legacy to be particularly proud of, but hey — I’m just someone who loathes the stuff. I also suspect that the lurid self-cannibalism poster had something with the film’s reputation and video-club popularity. The actual movie, though, is predictably lame and ugly — much of it has to do with a psychopath cannibal stalking, killing and eating half a dozen tourists unlucky enough to set foot on the wrong island. (One of them is a pregnant woman, so that should give you an idea of how low it’s going to go.)  Oh, it’s put together with some competence for the genre — director Joe D’Amato has enough experience in this kind of stuff. But that’s not much of a compliment. Antropophagus is 90 minutes but feels remarkably longer — fortunately, modern viewers will be able to check their phones whenever it gets interminable.

  • Buio Omega [Beyond the Darkness] (1979)

    Buio Omega [Beyond the Darkness] (1979)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2021) I’m not always a giallo fan, and Beyond the Darkness is another example of why. Director Joe D’Amato here energetically takes up the inherent goriness of the genre and wraps it up in revulsive eroticism, voodoo curses, wild plotting, sadistic characters and other fixtures of the form. It’s all meant to be upsetting to viewers, but you have to wonder who D’Amato is playing for — fans of the subgenre will get what they’re looking for, while anyone unhappy at the ridiculous escalation of gore will simply shrug, stop watching and tell themselves that it’s all the same. There’s plenty of gratuitous violence (the vast majority of it against women, one notes without subtlety), and the amount of sexual content seems higher than usual. But then again, D’Amato did have a solid footing both in horror and pornography. The audiovisual aspect of the production is typically extreme, with vivid colours (usually red), better-than-average visual style and a soundtrack from Goblin all begging for association with better-known work from Argento. I usually prefer giallo when it features supernatural narrative elements, but the ones in Beyond the Darkness are perfunctory at best — it remains, at its core, about humans going terrible things to each other and there’s a hard limit to how much of that I can enjoy. While there’s some occasional dynamism to how D’Amato executes his humdrum script, I found myself more bored than interested by the result. But then again, I’m not always impressed by giallo — Beyond the Darkness is no exception.