Lucio Fulci

(In French, On Cable TV, November 2020) A big flash of bright colour and crazy imagery, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin is classic giallo, bright red blood and subjective unreality boosting an already twisted script of murder and insanity. That probably sounds like praise, but anyone’s reaction is likely to vary considerably: while the result can be more interesting than staider thrillers of the time, it’s not hard to feel as if this is writer-director Lucio Fulci simply throwing as much crazy stuff at the screen (including gutted dogs) in the hope that something will stick no matter if it makes sense. Of course, giallo works more on senses than sense: it’s about the experience of watching a film far more than the intellectual aspect of ensuring that all of the parts fit together from a narrative and logical standpoint. In this light, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin is exactly what the viewers ordered: a hallucinatory nightmare of dread and suspense, leading up to a twisty (or maybe anti-twisty) finale. Giallo fans will love it, while non-fans may only appreciate it—but the result is decidedly representative of its subgenre.

(In French, On Cable TV, June 2020) While American horror movies of the early 1980s were too often stuck with knife-wielding psycho slashers, you could look at Europe and often Italy for variety—for better or for worse! Often set in the United States, Italian horror movies went crazy in ways that could be disgusting or entertaining, often in the same movie. In The Beyond’s case, writer-director Lucio Fulci goes to New Orleans in order to deliver a haunted house story that easily bubbles in all directions to include ghouls, a cursed book, sacrifices to a painting, and a portal to hell. Narratively, it’s a mess—a wild mishmash of nightmarish set-pieces loosely strung together along a haunted-hotel premise. It’s not a tight movie nor a very good one (spiders don’t work that way!), but it’s far more interesting than the psycho slasher movies or the era. More care has been spent on the gore effects (including a surprising number of people melting) than the plot, but even with the hooey that doesn’t fit together, The Beyond does create an interesting surprise-bag atmosphere where anything and everything can happen next. Despite a few strong female characters, don’t get attached to any of them—they’re not well developed, and the unusually haunting ending does them no favours. Normally, I wouldn’t like something like The Beyond—too scattered, too gory, too focused on visual shocks than narration. But I happened to see it after too many identical early-1980s American slashers, and it certainly feels more imaginative than other films of the time without quite falling into the nihilistic meanness of some other Italian horror films of the period (specifically the zombie films)—it’s not much, but it’s better.

(In French, On Cable TV, April 2020) While I’m absolutely not a fan of early-1980s Italian horror cinema, I could, if I needed to, watch The House by the Cemetery a second time. It’s still very much an Italian exploitation film, but it’s better than many—starting with how it starts by blending slasher, zombie and Gothic haunted house tropes alongside other just plain weird stuff. The mayhem begins when a family moves into a new house somewhere in New England, and it ends when most of the cast is dead. Frankly, I don’t like it that much—but I like it better than other films of its ilk (and about on par with director Lucio Fulci’s earlier City of the Living Dead and The Beyond) and that should be enough—at least it’s supernatural and not strictly slasher or cannibal-focused. Crazy enough to be fun, restrained enough to pass off its episodes as something like a plot, The House by the Cemetery is Fulci at his most tolerable. No praise intended.

(In French, On Cable TV, April 2020) While Zombi 2 earns a certain place in horror film history due to a convoluted naming origin (originally intended by director Lucio Fulci to be a sequel to a Romero film, then produced as a standalone) and by being among the first wave of grindhouse zombie movies, it doesn’t have much to offer to casual viewers nowadays—yes, of course, there’s the ultra-gory violence of this and the Italian zombie film subgenre it helped inspire, but that’s more of interest to the gore-hound contingent. The rest… not so much. The story takes us to the Caribbean for a face-off with classic voodoo zombies, but Shark versus zombie? Eh, whatever. That it inspired Zombie Holocaust is not something to be proud of. While I’ll acknowledge that Zombi 2 is not as awful as many of the later films in its corner of the movie universe and that the practical effects are not bad for 1979, that’s very faint and reluctant praise.