Kelly WandItalian Horror Movies (An overview)
December 27th 2006 04:38
Just as with Spaghetti Westerns, Spaghetti splatter falls into those over used categories: the good, the bad and the ugly. Okay. I’ll be honest with you. There isn’t a whole lot of space left in the bad category, the good have plenty of room to stretch their legs and ugliness is pretty much the whole point here.
The best directors working in the genre have always filled their work with the feel of a dream. The worst directors have mistaken this as a justification for not employing a decent script writer… or any script writer. The quality of acting is scarcely of concern as the piss poor job of dubbing is guaranteed to put off virtually any viewer.
Worst still, these films were often hacked down by distributors for a variety of reasons not all having to do with content. You do have to sell popcorn at the drive in and you don’t want those double bills keeping the staff up too late. When it came to video releases, haphazard pan and scan transfers often left you wondering where the action was.
The cinematic crimes didn’t end there. The casual viewer might recognise extracts from Mario Bava’s “Lisa and the Devil” in the film “House of Exorcism” if they can bear to sit through the latter. The former isn’t exactly high art but you’ll think it is compared to the hack job done by American distributors in the name of cashing in on “The Exorcist”. A similar favour was bestowed on “Zombie Holocaust” for its release as “Dr Butcher MD”. (Did they really think that was a better title?)
In the past, these films have been lionised by gore hounds based on what we can only describe now as fifth rate special effects. Glossy magazines waxed lyrically about recipes for artificial vomit and thirty ways to fill a condom (with fake blood). Film classification boards the world over were shocked, disgusted and dismayed at the effects these straight to video nasty candidates would have on the delicate little minds forced to watch them by crack smoking parents. Films were banned and fingers pointed. Western civilisation teetered on the brink of annihilation. There was, of course, something disturbing about dipping rubber hand puppets in vasoline and tomato sauce and having them poke out of various body cavities. Along with duets from Kylie and Jason and beat ‘em up games on your Commodore 64, popular culture in the Eighties was a dangerous place to be living.
Times change. With the mall rats hooked on CGI, what place is there for latex chests stuffed with pig entrails? Thanks however to the miracle of DVD, you can enjoy a lost era uncut and in widescreen.
But why do I like them? I guess it is because they are just so damn operatic. I got hooked by seeing Dario Argento’s “Suspiria” in a theatre with the volume cranked up so high that the rafters seemed to shake sympathetically. I was once told that, if you make a film with great pictures but poor sound, you have produced crap. If, on the other hand, you make poor pictures but provide great sound, you have produced art.
“Suspiria” had fantastic sound (provided by the band Goblin) and images that put the Grand back into Guignol. Full of elaborate set pieces and intricate camera work, the film picked you up and ran with you. It was fantastic. I had thought that nothing could be any better than John Carpenter’s “Halloween”. I was wrong. I was left speechless, a poor dumb child at the fair wanting to ride the roller-coaster one more time.
Well, there would be more roller-coasters but few as splendid as the first.
If you want to place the finger of blame anywhere, Italian horror started with Mario Bava. Whilst there were horror films before, it was “Black Sunday” that planted its feet firmly in the mud and said look at me. I am different. I have an identity.
Obviously, the producers were trying to catch some of the money that was flowing into the coffers of Britain’s Hammer and Amicus studios. These gothic but (for their time) gory productions had actually made some headway into the American market place and the money men wanted in. “Black Sunday” has a similar aesthetic to Amicus’ “City of the Living Dead” but all similarities ended when the townsfolk picked up a spiked mask and nailed it onto Barbara Steele’s face. Mario Bava had looked up from his cards and said “I’ll see your raise and I’ll raise you another… thousand.”
Bava was back the following year with “Blood and Black Lace” – a film that opened the doorway to the slasher genre. You know the rules. Insane killer, set piece murders, point of view camera work and pounding score. Okay, the pounding score in this one isn’t quite as pounding as the scores that would follow but you hear the sound of a pattern emerging. Bava’s colour wash lighting would also make its mark on generations of film makers. Rather than being a supernatural thriller, this film relies on gory kills (most of which you won’t have seen because they were removed from the original international release).
Bava would continue to return to themes of murder and gothic horror until his death twenty years later. “Baron Blood”, “Twitch of the Death Nerve”, “Shock” and “Kill Baby Kill” are all worth seeing. Whilst these films aren’t the classics they are often touted as, they are visually stylish and far from boring.
In the nineteen sixties, lurid pulp fiction was popular in Italy. Initially printed on cheap yellow paper, they were called giallos. Soon, the book shelves were filled with books whose blood stained pages were wrapped in the brightest of yellow covers. It wasn’t long before film makers started bringing the conventions of this genre to the screen.
Umberto Lenzi was there with “Kiss me, Kill Me” but it was Dario Argento’s animal themed giallos that really took off. “The Bird with the Crystal Plumage”, “Cat’o’Nine Tales” and “Four Flies on Grey Velvet” are fantastic movies. Boasting grotesque set pieces and Ennio Morricone soundtracks, “Bird” and “Cat” are compulsory viewing for anyone with an interest in this genre. There is a sequence in a lift shaft at the end of “Cat” that amazingly guarantees a wince from viewers.
Unfortunately, I haven’t seen “Four Flies” since it was briefly revived to accommodate star Michael Brandon’s brush with fame in the UK television series “Dempsey and Makepeace”. This is a situation that it is likely to continue because Paramount Pictures hold the rights to it and aren’t letting go of them or releasing it themselves. Even back then I, saw it on television in pan and scan and, even though I remember enjoying it, I should hold back my comments until someone releases the widescreen DVD.
Soon, everyone was releasing giallos. Lucio Fulci did “Woman in a Lizard’s Skin” and Antonio Margheriti did “Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye”. One may sense a desperate need to include an animal name at all costs but (to my knowledge) nobody made “Death is a Dog’s Dinner”. I’m sure it must have been suggested at one of the many power lunches that threw out such proposed titles. Italian exploitation cinema has never felt any shame about the flogging of a dead horse (or a rabid zombie horse for that matter). Some may think this is criticism but I actually applaud this give-it-a-go spirit. Some barrels need scraping and the weirder this stuff gets, the better. “Seven Deaths in a Cat’s Eye”, for example, is quite a pedestrian movie (like Agatha Christie with added gore - except in cut versions) until you reach the absurd revelation of who the murderer is. We had had all the usual red herrings: the insane son, the scheming mother and the man in the truly pathetic gorilla suit but these had failed to pan out. Even the butler didn’t do it. Without any previous hints, in the dying minutes the murderer reveals himself with a speech that amounts to “I’m the only one left so it must be me because I’m your long lost step cousin three times removed.” I laughed myself sick. This may not have been the director’s intention.
After taking a career swerve to make the historical drama “Five Days in Milan”, Argento returned with – if not his masterpiece – certainly his finest giallo. “Deep Red” is like his previous giallos amped up to eleven and given a rock soundtrack by Italian band Goblin. This is a hugely influential film. Certainly, John Carpenter was watching when he thought about Halloween. If you ever see a film called “Eyes of Laura Mars”, check it out. Carpenter wrote the script clearly under the influence of Italian giallos. In his hands, it would have been a great film but the script was handed to director Irwin Kershner who clearly had never seen “Deep Red” and demanded rewrites to “fix it up”.
Argento also met Daria Nicolodi whilst making “Deep Red” and this would have a profound effect on him. Together, they dreamed up the idea of “Suspiria” which – as I have mentioned – is the high water mark of Italian Horror. It has been one of Argento’s few sidesteps into the supernatural.
Viewing Itallian horror as the passing of a torch from Bava to Argento with many an imitator grabbing their coat tails for a ride is an easy overview to make. There are, however, other ways to view the phenomenon. In the Nineteen Sixties, the mondo movies series had become an effective money earner for producer Gualtiero Jacopetti. Starting with “Mondo Cane” in 1963, these “shockumentaries” involved going to various parts of the world and seeing people do weird shit.
As the sixties turned into the seventies, audiences began to fall of for these films. Television was catching up with anthropological documentary making and nothing stacked up to seeing real people have their real brains blown out on the evening news. (News coverage of wars was not so micro-managed at the time).
Upping the ante, director Umberto Lenzi was offered a chance to take the Mondo style of movies, turn them into fictional narratives and add special effects gore. “Man from Deep River” was a big hit with the drive in crowd as it spawned the Cannibal sub-genre. The early parts of these movies are filled with third world people casually catching animals, opening them up and eating them in good Mondo Cane documentary fashion. When the grand climax occurs and they switch to humans, there is a lot of added gusto scripted from an overdose of Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead”.
“Eaten Alive”, “Jungle Apocalypse”, “Cannibal Apocalypse”, “Cannibal Ferox” and many others would follow in these well chewed footsteps. Perhaps only “Cannibal Holocaust” is worth seeing as it is a superior piece of movie making and hugely influential on “The Blair Witch Project”.
Both of these horror strands would soon be bought together as Dario Argento went on to produce George Romero’s “Zombies: Dawn of the Dead”. In the end, two cuts of this film were produced. Romero’s familiar version has a little bit of humour and less Goblin soundtrack than Argento’s European version (entitled Zombi). Romero’s version is gorier but Argento’s soundtrack driven version makes you clutch your seat that little bit harder.
The Zombie craze had hit Italy. It wasn’t long before “Zombi 2” hit the screen. Internationally released as “Zombie Flesh Eaters”, director Lucio Fulci claimed to seek inspiration from Jacques Tourneur’s “I Walked with a Zombie” and return the zombies to their Caribbean home. Well, you’d be hard pressed finding any similarities between Tourneur’s occult reworking of Jane Eyre and this flesh chomping, eye poking blood bath. Looking suspiciously like a cannibal movie with grey make-up, “Zombie Flesh Eaters” still succeeds in being a tremendously effective horror film.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the inevitable “Zombie 3”. Originally directed by Fulci when his health was in decline, he handed the studio a fifty five minute movie and they were none too happy. They sent in Bruno Mattei and (an uncredited) Claudio Fragesso to finish the job and, whilst the end result is movie length, you are left begging for the fifty five minute cut if only so as not to waste another half hour of your life. There has been some kind of military experiment with the dead. The government thinks they have it all under control but some infected birds spread the zombie plague.
Claudio Fragesso got a special reward for his “Zombie 3” diligence and that was the poison chalice of “Zombie 4: After Death”. Having seen an interview where Claudio demonstrates his enthusiasm for the project by shrugging his shoulders and yawning, I’ll spare you my thoughts on the subject. Suffice it to say that we are once again in Voodoo curse territory.
“Zombie 5: Killing Birds” is also interesting but fairly unwatchable. Directed by Claudo Lattanzi and Joe D’Amato, it has some tremendously effective sequences (the first five minutes are fantastic) but a whole lot of crap. It is also rather short on Zombies with a climax that borrows on the theme of “The Evil Dead” or, should I say, it tries to borrow. Consider this a franchise well and truly buried without any hope of resurrection through either voodoo curse or military experiment.
There had been other zombie movies along the way like “Zombie Holocaust” and “Burial Ground”. “Holocaust” had originally been intended to be “Zombie 3” but there was some falling out between producers. It ended up getting some ridiculous extra footage inserted and being released as “Doctor Butcher MD”.
Umberto Lenzi made the quite spectacular “Nightmare City”. He claims it is not a zombie film as it is about people effected by radiation. Strong environmental themes and plenty of action make this one of the genre’s stand out films. Lenzi would later make “Black Demons”. This zombie film essentially tells the story of dead slaves returning to reap havoc on the descendants of their oppressors. This is a theme that Lenzi has used as sub text in many of his Cannibal movies – the horror as a revenge for imperialism. Unfortunately, these themes are addressed somewhat clumsily but – hey – at least the guy is trying to say something.
Lucio Fulci did, however, produce some of his finest work between Zombie 2 and 3. His “Gates of Hell” films like “The Beyond” and “The City of the Living Dead” both have much to be said for them. “The Beyond” is without doubt the highlight of his career. It is a film that slips quickly into a nightmare from which one does not awake. It ends even more mysteriously than it begins.
Fulci also made the notorious “New York Ripper”. This film is effective and does have its fans. Unfortunately, it is a little too misogynistic for my tastes and I would find it difficult to recommend it to anyone. Whilst violence against women is a mainstay of the horror genre, here it is mixed with eroticism and degradation.
Such accusations are frequently levelled at Dario Argento but his work defies gender and also introduced strong female protagonists like Daria Nicolodi in “Deep Red” and Jessica Harper in “Suspiria”. It is perhaps worrying that, as Dario’s relationship with Daria fell into decline, she began to die in increasingly unpleasant ways in his films!
After “Suspiria”, Argento returned with his first mature giallo. “Tenebrae” is a far smarter film than it is given credit for. Here Argento begins to play with his audience’s expectations and their understanding of special effects. An apparent suicide reveals the device we have seen slash up people throughout the film as a gimmick. Like a good magician, Argento then gives us a murder we can’t explain through the trickery he just revealed.
He then made the “Suspiria” sequel “Inferno”. “Opera” is probably his most baroque film. Everything about it is large but the flagrant theft of its ending from Thomas Harris’ “Red Dragon” is a bit of a let down. One of my favourite Argento films is “Phenomenon” but try to avoid the butchered cut down version retitled “Creepers”. This is a wonderful fairy tale of a movie that many Argento fans dismiss out of hand.
Argento continues to make films. “Sleepless” is a further undermining of the giallo genre. Rather than the amateur sleuths solving the puzzle, the killer is unmasked through the most dreary of police methods – an idea that had openly been mocked as absurd earlier in the picture. “Sleepless” asks what place the giallo form has in a world of DNA testing and police special units.
Often described as “The Italian Hitchcock”, Argento has always been far more out of control and surreal. His recent “Do you Like Hitchcock” is well worth a watch as Argento takes his razor wit to the conventions of Hitchcock’s work and still manages to lay effective tribute. His episode in “The Masters of Horror” series is also a highlight of many highlights.
Argento also went on to produce the “Demons” films directed by Lamberto Bava, the son of Mario. Dismissed as characterless Gremlins rip offs by some critics (I don’t remember Gremlins being like this!), in the initial instalment a cinema audience is transformed into demonic flesh eating monsters by the film they are watching. All good clean bloody fun but nothing terribly memorable. The sequel shows what happens when the killer film is shown on television. The third sequel took a different turn and was renamed and given further rewrites. It became “The Church”, a film that shames its predecessors.
Lamberto Bava went on to make a very wonderful film called “The Ogre” which is full of fairy tale charm and great visual style. American distributors felt an overwhelming desire to call it “Demons 3” just to confuse things further. It also shames its predecessors.
Look, I’ll be honest with you; there are a handful of great films out there that you should see. There is also a lot of dross out there in the Italian back catalogue. However, even “Zombies 4” or “The Other Side” have their charms. “The Other Side”, for example, has a great score by Goblin pilfered from their non-soundtrack work. This dross is also highly addictive. Like z-grade fifties monster movies, you know you are watching crap but you can’t keep your eyes off the screen.
MUST SEES
Dario Argento: Cat’o’Nine Tails
Deep Red
Suspiria
Phenomenon
Lucio Fulci: Zombie Flesh Eaters
The Beyond
Mario Bava: Black Sunday
Lamberto Bava: The Ogre
Umberto Lenzi: Nightmare City
Ruggero Deodato: Cannibal Holocaust
Michele Soavi: The Church
Eros Puglielli: Eyes of Crystal
The best directors working in the genre have always filled their work with the feel of a dream. The worst directors have mistaken this as a justification for not employing a decent script writer… or any script writer. The quality of acting is scarcely of concern as the piss poor job of dubbing is guaranteed to put off virtually any viewer.
Worst still, these films were often hacked down by distributors for a variety of reasons not all having to do with content. You do have to sell popcorn at the drive in and you don’t want those double bills keeping the staff up too late. When it came to video releases, haphazard pan and scan transfers often left you wondering where the action was.
The cinematic crimes didn’t end there. The casual viewer might recognise extracts from Mario Bava’s “Lisa and the Devil” in the film “House of Exorcism” if they can bear to sit through the latter. The former isn’t exactly high art but you’ll think it is compared to the hack job done by American distributors in the name of cashing in on “The Exorcist”. A similar favour was bestowed on “Zombie Holocaust” for its release as “Dr Butcher MD”. (Did they really think that was a better title?)
In the past, these films have been lionised by gore hounds based on what we can only describe now as fifth rate special effects. Glossy magazines waxed lyrically about recipes for artificial vomit and thirty ways to fill a condom (with fake blood). Film classification boards the world over were shocked, disgusted and dismayed at the effects these straight to video nasty candidates would have on the delicate little minds forced to watch them by crack smoking parents. Films were banned and fingers pointed. Western civilisation teetered on the brink of annihilation. There was, of course, something disturbing about dipping rubber hand puppets in vasoline and tomato sauce and having them poke out of various body cavities. Along with duets from Kylie and Jason and beat ‘em up games on your Commodore 64, popular culture in the Eighties was a dangerous place to be living.
Times change. With the mall rats hooked on CGI, what place is there for latex chests stuffed with pig entrails? Thanks however to the miracle of DVD, you can enjoy a lost era uncut and in widescreen.
But why do I like them? I guess it is because they are just so damn operatic. I got hooked by seeing Dario Argento’s “Suspiria” in a theatre with the volume cranked up so high that the rafters seemed to shake sympathetically. I was once told that, if you make a film with great pictures but poor sound, you have produced crap. If, on the other hand, you make poor pictures but provide great sound, you have produced art.
“Suspiria” had fantastic sound (provided by the band Goblin) and images that put the Grand back into Guignol. Full of elaborate set pieces and intricate camera work, the film picked you up and ran with you. It was fantastic. I had thought that nothing could be any better than John Carpenter’s “Halloween”. I was wrong. I was left speechless, a poor dumb child at the fair wanting to ride the roller-coaster one more time.
Well, there would be more roller-coasters but few as splendid as the first.
If you want to place the finger of blame anywhere, Italian horror started with Mario Bava. Whilst there were horror films before, it was “Black Sunday” that planted its feet firmly in the mud and said look at me. I am different. I have an identity.
Obviously, the producers were trying to catch some of the money that was flowing into the coffers of Britain’s Hammer and Amicus studios. These gothic but (for their time) gory productions had actually made some headway into the American market place and the money men wanted in. “Black Sunday” has a similar aesthetic to Amicus’ “City of the Living Dead” but all similarities ended when the townsfolk picked up a spiked mask and nailed it onto Barbara Steele’s face. Mario Bava had looked up from his cards and said “I’ll see your raise and I’ll raise you another… thousand.”
Bava was back the following year with “Blood and Black Lace” – a film that opened the doorway to the slasher genre. You know the rules. Insane killer, set piece murders, point of view camera work and pounding score. Okay, the pounding score in this one isn’t quite as pounding as the scores that would follow but you hear the sound of a pattern emerging. Bava’s colour wash lighting would also make its mark on generations of film makers. Rather than being a supernatural thriller, this film relies on gory kills (most of which you won’t have seen because they were removed from the original international release).
Bava would continue to return to themes of murder and gothic horror until his death twenty years later. “Baron Blood”, “Twitch of the Death Nerve”, “Shock” and “Kill Baby Kill” are all worth seeing. Whilst these films aren’t the classics they are often touted as, they are visually stylish and far from boring.
In the nineteen sixties, lurid pulp fiction was popular in Italy. Initially printed on cheap yellow paper, they were called giallos. Soon, the book shelves were filled with books whose blood stained pages were wrapped in the brightest of yellow covers. It wasn’t long before film makers started bringing the conventions of this genre to the screen.
Umberto Lenzi was there with “Kiss me, Kill Me” but it was Dario Argento’s animal themed giallos that really took off. “The Bird with the Crystal Plumage”, “Cat’o’Nine Tales” and “Four Flies on Grey Velvet” are fantastic movies. Boasting grotesque set pieces and Ennio Morricone soundtracks, “Bird” and “Cat” are compulsory viewing for anyone with an interest in this genre. There is a sequence in a lift shaft at the end of “Cat” that amazingly guarantees a wince from viewers.
Unfortunately, I haven’t seen “Four Flies” since it was briefly revived to accommodate star Michael Brandon’s brush with fame in the UK television series “Dempsey and Makepeace”. This is a situation that it is likely to continue because Paramount Pictures hold the rights to it and aren’t letting go of them or releasing it themselves. Even back then I, saw it on television in pan and scan and, even though I remember enjoying it, I should hold back my comments until someone releases the widescreen DVD.
Soon, everyone was releasing giallos. Lucio Fulci did “Woman in a Lizard’s Skin” and Antonio Margheriti did “Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye”. One may sense a desperate need to include an animal name at all costs but (to my knowledge) nobody made “Death is a Dog’s Dinner”. I’m sure it must have been suggested at one of the many power lunches that threw out such proposed titles. Italian exploitation cinema has never felt any shame about the flogging of a dead horse (or a rabid zombie horse for that matter). Some may think this is criticism but I actually applaud this give-it-a-go spirit. Some barrels need scraping and the weirder this stuff gets, the better. “Seven Deaths in a Cat’s Eye”, for example, is quite a pedestrian movie (like Agatha Christie with added gore - except in cut versions) until you reach the absurd revelation of who the murderer is. We had had all the usual red herrings: the insane son, the scheming mother and the man in the truly pathetic gorilla suit but these had failed to pan out. Even the butler didn’t do it. Without any previous hints, in the dying minutes the murderer reveals himself with a speech that amounts to “I’m the only one left so it must be me because I’m your long lost step cousin three times removed.” I laughed myself sick. This may not have been the director’s intention.
After taking a career swerve to make the historical drama “Five Days in Milan”, Argento returned with – if not his masterpiece – certainly his finest giallo. “Deep Red” is like his previous giallos amped up to eleven and given a rock soundtrack by Italian band Goblin. This is a hugely influential film. Certainly, John Carpenter was watching when he thought about Halloween. If you ever see a film called “Eyes of Laura Mars”, check it out. Carpenter wrote the script clearly under the influence of Italian giallos. In his hands, it would have been a great film but the script was handed to director Irwin Kershner who clearly had never seen “Deep Red” and demanded rewrites to “fix it up”.
Argento also met Daria Nicolodi whilst making “Deep Red” and this would have a profound effect on him. Together, they dreamed up the idea of “Suspiria” which – as I have mentioned – is the high water mark of Italian Horror. It has been one of Argento’s few sidesteps into the supernatural.
Viewing Itallian horror as the passing of a torch from Bava to Argento with many an imitator grabbing their coat tails for a ride is an easy overview to make. There are, however, other ways to view the phenomenon. In the Nineteen Sixties, the mondo movies series had become an effective money earner for producer Gualtiero Jacopetti. Starting with “Mondo Cane” in 1963, these “shockumentaries” involved going to various parts of the world and seeing people do weird shit.
As the sixties turned into the seventies, audiences began to fall of for these films. Television was catching up with anthropological documentary making and nothing stacked up to seeing real people have their real brains blown out on the evening news. (News coverage of wars was not so micro-managed at the time).
Upping the ante, director Umberto Lenzi was offered a chance to take the Mondo style of movies, turn them into fictional narratives and add special effects gore. “Man from Deep River” was a big hit with the drive in crowd as it spawned the Cannibal sub-genre. The early parts of these movies are filled with third world people casually catching animals, opening them up and eating them in good Mondo Cane documentary fashion. When the grand climax occurs and they switch to humans, there is a lot of added gusto scripted from an overdose of Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead”.
“Eaten Alive”, “Jungle Apocalypse”, “Cannibal Apocalypse”, “Cannibal Ferox” and many others would follow in these well chewed footsteps. Perhaps only “Cannibal Holocaust” is worth seeing as it is a superior piece of movie making and hugely influential on “The Blair Witch Project”.
Both of these horror strands would soon be bought together as Dario Argento went on to produce George Romero’s “Zombies: Dawn of the Dead”. In the end, two cuts of this film were produced. Romero’s familiar version has a little bit of humour and less Goblin soundtrack than Argento’s European version (entitled Zombi). Romero’s version is gorier but Argento’s soundtrack driven version makes you clutch your seat that little bit harder.
The Zombie craze had hit Italy. It wasn’t long before “Zombi 2” hit the screen. Internationally released as “Zombie Flesh Eaters”, director Lucio Fulci claimed to seek inspiration from Jacques Tourneur’s “I Walked with a Zombie” and return the zombies to their Caribbean home. Well, you’d be hard pressed finding any similarities between Tourneur’s occult reworking of Jane Eyre and this flesh chomping, eye poking blood bath. Looking suspiciously like a cannibal movie with grey make-up, “Zombie Flesh Eaters” still succeeds in being a tremendously effective horror film.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the inevitable “Zombie 3”. Originally directed by Fulci when his health was in decline, he handed the studio a fifty five minute movie and they were none too happy. They sent in Bruno Mattei and (an uncredited) Claudio Fragesso to finish the job and, whilst the end result is movie length, you are left begging for the fifty five minute cut if only so as not to waste another half hour of your life. There has been some kind of military experiment with the dead. The government thinks they have it all under control but some infected birds spread the zombie plague.
Claudio Fragesso got a special reward for his “Zombie 3” diligence and that was the poison chalice of “Zombie 4: After Death”. Having seen an interview where Claudio demonstrates his enthusiasm for the project by shrugging his shoulders and yawning, I’ll spare you my thoughts on the subject. Suffice it to say that we are once again in Voodoo curse territory.
“Zombie 5: Killing Birds” is also interesting but fairly unwatchable. Directed by Claudo Lattanzi and Joe D’Amato, it has some tremendously effective sequences (the first five minutes are fantastic) but a whole lot of crap. It is also rather short on Zombies with a climax that borrows on the theme of “The Evil Dead” or, should I say, it tries to borrow. Consider this a franchise well and truly buried without any hope of resurrection through either voodoo curse or military experiment.
There had been other zombie movies along the way like “Zombie Holocaust” and “Burial Ground”. “Holocaust” had originally been intended to be “Zombie 3” but there was some falling out between producers. It ended up getting some ridiculous extra footage inserted and being released as “Doctor Butcher MD”.
Umberto Lenzi made the quite spectacular “Nightmare City”. He claims it is not a zombie film as it is about people effected by radiation. Strong environmental themes and plenty of action make this one of the genre’s stand out films. Lenzi would later make “Black Demons”. This zombie film essentially tells the story of dead slaves returning to reap havoc on the descendants of their oppressors. This is a theme that Lenzi has used as sub text in many of his Cannibal movies – the horror as a revenge for imperialism. Unfortunately, these themes are addressed somewhat clumsily but – hey – at least the guy is trying to say something.
Lucio Fulci did, however, produce some of his finest work between Zombie 2 and 3. His “Gates of Hell” films like “The Beyond” and “The City of the Living Dead” both have much to be said for them. “The Beyond” is without doubt the highlight of his career. It is a film that slips quickly into a nightmare from which one does not awake. It ends even more mysteriously than it begins.
Fulci also made the notorious “New York Ripper”. This film is effective and does have its fans. Unfortunately, it is a little too misogynistic for my tastes and I would find it difficult to recommend it to anyone. Whilst violence against women is a mainstay of the horror genre, here it is mixed with eroticism and degradation.
Such accusations are frequently levelled at Dario Argento but his work defies gender and also introduced strong female protagonists like Daria Nicolodi in “Deep Red” and Jessica Harper in “Suspiria”. It is perhaps worrying that, as Dario’s relationship with Daria fell into decline, she began to die in increasingly unpleasant ways in his films!
After “Suspiria”, Argento returned with his first mature giallo. “Tenebrae” is a far smarter film than it is given credit for. Here Argento begins to play with his audience’s expectations and their understanding of special effects. An apparent suicide reveals the device we have seen slash up people throughout the film as a gimmick. Like a good magician, Argento then gives us a murder we can’t explain through the trickery he just revealed.
He then made the “Suspiria” sequel “Inferno”. “Opera” is probably his most baroque film. Everything about it is large but the flagrant theft of its ending from Thomas Harris’ “Red Dragon” is a bit of a let down. One of my favourite Argento films is “Phenomenon” but try to avoid the butchered cut down version retitled “Creepers”. This is a wonderful fairy tale of a movie that many Argento fans dismiss out of hand.
Argento continues to make films. “Sleepless” is a further undermining of the giallo genre. Rather than the amateur sleuths solving the puzzle, the killer is unmasked through the most dreary of police methods – an idea that had openly been mocked as absurd earlier in the picture. “Sleepless” asks what place the giallo form has in a world of DNA testing and police special units.
Often described as “The Italian Hitchcock”, Argento has always been far more out of control and surreal. His recent “Do you Like Hitchcock” is well worth a watch as Argento takes his razor wit to the conventions of Hitchcock’s work and still manages to lay effective tribute. His episode in “The Masters of Horror” series is also a highlight of many highlights.
Argento also went on to produce the “Demons” films directed by Lamberto Bava, the son of Mario. Dismissed as characterless Gremlins rip offs by some critics (I don’t remember Gremlins being like this!), in the initial instalment a cinema audience is transformed into demonic flesh eating monsters by the film they are watching. All good clean bloody fun but nothing terribly memorable. The sequel shows what happens when the killer film is shown on television. The third sequel took a different turn and was renamed and given further rewrites. It became “The Church”, a film that shames its predecessors.
Lamberto Bava went on to make a very wonderful film called “The Ogre” which is full of fairy tale charm and great visual style. American distributors felt an overwhelming desire to call it “Demons 3” just to confuse things further. It also shames its predecessors.
Look, I’ll be honest with you; there are a handful of great films out there that you should see. There is also a lot of dross out there in the Italian back catalogue. However, even “Zombies 4” or “The Other Side” have their charms. “The Other Side”, for example, has a great score by Goblin pilfered from their non-soundtrack work. This dross is also highly addictive. Like z-grade fifties monster movies, you know you are watching crap but you can’t keep your eyes off the screen.
MUST SEES
Dario Argento: Cat’o’Nine Tails
Deep Red
Suspiria
Phenomenon
Lucio Fulci: Zombie Flesh Eaters
The Beyond
Mario Bava: Black Sunday
Lamberto Bava: The Ogre
Umberto Lenzi: Nightmare City
Ruggero Deodato: Cannibal Holocaust
Michele Soavi: The Church
Eros Puglielli: Eyes of Crystal
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