Carnography

Absurd (1981)

Here's some advice. Don't schedule a carpet fitting the same week as getting a Smart Meter fitted in your home, and only weeks after getting a complete house cleaning (which went so terribly, terribly wrong to boot). Don't do all this especially in the same month as you're trying to do 31 horror movie reviews, as you'll quickly realise that there are going to be some double review days in your future. It's all really quite absurd... which leads cunningly into today's review, Absurd (see what I did there?) - also known as Antropophagus 2, Monster Hunter, The Grim Reaper 2, Horrible and (for some reason) Zombie 6: Monster Hunter.

A priest chases a man through a wooded area until the man tries to climb a set of railings and ends up disembowelling himself, spilling his guts on the doorstep of a nearby house. The man is taken to hospital and operated on; he recovers remarkably quickly and escapes, killing a nurse with a medical drill along the way. The priest who was chasing him explains that the man, Mikos Stenopolis, was experimented on by the Vatican and has been given regenerative abilities; unfortunately, he was also driven insane and is now a homicidal maniac, and the priest is seeking to stop him and kill him via the only method that will work - "destroy[ing] the cerebral mass". Meanwhile, at the home that Mikos turned up at, the Bennetts are preparing to go to a nearby friend's house to watch the Super Bowl. Their daughter Katya is confined to bed and in traction due to a deviation in her spine, and her nurse Emily is due to stay the night to take care of her but gets delayed because of events at the hospital. The babysitter Peggy taunts the family's young son Willy by telling him that the man at the door was the Bogeyman and that he will eat Willy if he misbehaves, not knowing that Mikos is making his way back to the house with murderous intent...

From looking at some of the alternative titles of Absurd, you might think that it has some sort of connection with Anthropophagus, that 1980s film about a cannibal with a dreaded skin disease running amok on a Greek island, and you'd be half-right. Director of both, Joe D'Amato (here under the pseudonym Peter Newton) wanted to make a direct sequel to Anthropophagus and asked George Eastman to take part. Eastman, however, didn't want to do a sequel and agreed to only act; however, when he saw the script he felt it was so bad he decided to re-write it into "one of those American thrillers, Halloween style" (and did so under the name John Cart). And like Halloween it is, what with the stalking killer and references to "the Bogeyman" and even a stand-in for Dr Loomis chasing the killer throughout the film. Of course, it's not actually set at Halloween, lest they be accused of taking imitation a step too far - instead it's set on Super Bowl weekend, which also gives the opportunity for lots of filler scenes with a group of people dressed up far too well for watching a game on TV and snacking on pasta.

Absurd is also quite the who's who of Italian exploitation cinema. As well as George Eastman/Luigi Montefiori as Mikos, we have Annie Belle (The House on the Edge of the Park) as the quite saintly nurse Emily, Charles Borromel (one of the dubbing voices in Don't Torture a Duckling), an uncredited Michele Soavi (Stagefright) and Edward Purdom (Don't Open Till Christmas), just to mention a few. If I was playing Italian exploitation bingo, I think I'd have easily won with this film. Just about the only thing missing is Bob from The House by the Cemetary or Manhattan Baby in the role of Willy - instead, we get a dark curly-haired moppet for the cast to have to try and rescue, although he is still dubbed by an adult trying to do a child's voice.

For the most part, Absurd is pretty uninspired as far as early-era slashers go, not really bringing anything original to the table. The exception to this is the character and arc of daughter Katya, who spends the first two-thirds of the film confined to bed, and strapped down to boot. the scenes when she is desperately attempting to unstrap and unhook herself from the bed and traction machine as Mikos chases Willy and Emily around the house are really quite tense considering what they are (someone trying to undo leather belts without being able to see them), and when she inevitably becomes the Final Girl and has to face down Mikos she is really quite resourceful, using a drawing compass, loud music and eventually the axe from a convenient suit of armour to great effect.

Absurd was one of the "video nasties" in the UK, as one of the DPP's 39 titles successfully prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. While the film is full of heads being drilled, heads being bisected by butcher saws and heads being impaled with pickaxes, the scene that most probably got it into trouble is the one where Emily is caught by the killer and has her head forced into a gas oven which is then turned on. We then get to watch as, over several minutes, her face is slowly cooked by the heat - with the camera "inside" the oven for that nice close-up view. It's hard to explain that away as anything other than an exercise in torturing a woman for the enjoyment of the audience and goes on for far longer than is necessary.

 

Amazon UK

Amazon US

Don't Torture a Duckling (1972)

It's been a while since we've done a giallo on this blog, hasn't it? Yes, Dressed to Kill certainly had some giallo elements, between its black-gloved killer and its very stylish imagery, but I'm talking a proper Italian giallo. And I just so happen to have one by Lucio Fulci, of all people, from way back in the 70s when the giallo was king. So before I say "giallo" too many times so that the word starts to lose all meaning for me, let's take a look at Don't Torture a Duckling (also known as Non si sevizia un paperino and Don't Torture Donald Duck - that's the literal Italian translation, according to the IMDB).

In the small, isolated Italian village of Accendura, someone is murdering the young boys of the village. The suspects for these crimes include Giuseppe, the local peeping tom and village idiot; a Gypsy woman known as La Magiara (who the audience has already seen performing voodoo-esque rituals with wax dolls and pins); and Patrizia, the daughter of a wealthy man who has come to the town after being involved in a drugs scandal in Milan and is considered a "slut" by most of the village because of her provocative dress and flirtatious behaviour. As young boys continue to die, Patrizia and a journalist arrived in the village to cover the story, Andrea Martelli, team up to investigate the murders in a parallel investigation to the village police chief. But will they be able to discover the murderer's identity before anyone else is killed in the village?

If you come to Don't Torture a Duckling expecting levels of gore on par with Lucio Fulci's other works, you might come away being disappointed as the film is actually quite restrained. The murders of the young boys, for example, are for the most part quite restrained, with them mostly being strangled to death. There's certainly no eye-gouging or enucleation. that's not to say that there's no gore whatsoever in the film, as there are two scenes that are very Fulci - one involving someone being whipped to death with chains and the other involving a character falling from a cliff and getting their face torn off on every jagged rock they hit on the way down. But for the most part, Don't Torture a Duckling focuses more on the whodunit, police procedural and suspense aspects of the giallo - as well as the problems of religion and superstition in small communities.

It's the latter topics that actually got the film in some controversy when it was first released in 1972. Because of its criticism of the Catholic Church, Don't Torture a Duckling was actually blacklisted and was not even released in the US until 2000 when Anchor Bay got hold of the rights and finally gave it a full release. As well as the religious aspect, the film also treads some... interesting ground with its depiction of young boys attempting to spy on couples having sex. In a couple of other scenes, Patrizia teasingly flirts with two of the future victims, once while completely naked (and gosh, Barbara Bouchet is an attractive woman in this film).

Don't Torture a Duckling is beautifully shot, and Fulci himself considered it to be his personal favourite of all the films he made in his career. There are lots of long, distant shots of people walking alone in the Italian countryside, emphasising the isolation of the village and the people despite it being close to an apparently busy highway. The highlight of the film, I think, is the aforementioned scene where a character is beaten with chains though. The characters involved all move so slowly, as though it's all happening in a dream, and it's set to two radically different pieces of music - a rock and roll tune and a slower, more haunting melody that both play on a car radio as the events of the scene take place.

As I mentioned above, Don't Torture a Duckling is perhaps slower-paced than some of Fulci's other, better-known works, and that might put some viewers off. The film is much more about atmosphere than action and gory effects (although, as I said, there are some in the film if you need that itch scratched. It looks at some controversial topics that are still relevant today, and it does so in a thoughtful, not cheap, way. And by the end of the film, even the literal Italian translation of the title makes sense.

 

Amazon UK

Amazon US

Contamination (1980)

Italian cinema of the 70s and 80s was great - although to be fair, the Italian cinema of today could also be great, but I don't think I've seen any so we'll focus on the decades I know. It was great because it was almost always shot on a low budget, on a limited timeframe, in a language not all of the cast could even speak, and it was probably ripping off - sorry, taking inspiration from - a big-budget American film that had come out in the previous year or so. It's the kind of thing that you think just shouldn't work, and while often it doesn't, when it does it can be either a hidden masterpiece or an unintentional comedy. I'll leave you to guess which of the three categories Contamination falls into.

A cargo ship enters the New York harbour without any radio contact between the crew and the authorities. A small team boards the ship and finds it apparently deserted at first - until they find the crew all dead and horribly mutilated. They also find the ship's cargo, which is allegedly boxes of coffee from South America, but in reality is dozens upon dozens of strange green egg-like objects, which grow and pulse when they get warm. One of these eggs bursts, showering most of the team with goo that promptly makes their torsos explode. Colonel Stella Holmes arrives to take charge of the situation, along with the sole survivor of the team investigating the ship, a police officer called Arris. They determine that the eggs are of alien origin and must have come from Mars - something they had been warned about by one of the astronauts from the last manned mission to Mars who saw something there he couldn't explain, but was laughed out of the service upon his return and treated as crazy. After recruiting the understandably still-bitter Commander Hubbard, the trio head to South America to investigate the place where the "coffee" came from and try to get to the truth of where the eggs came from and what they're being used for...

There are no prizes for guessing which blockbuster movie Contamination is taking its inspiration from. Director Luigi Cozzi was told by his producer to make an Italian version of Ridley Scott's Alien, but because of a much smaller budget it came out like this - set on Earth and with considerably less extravagant set dressing (although they do manage a couple of scenes of a Martian cave that looks like a huge mouth and gullet). It's clear that most of the budget went on the effects to make the alien eggs, which are suitably slimy and unpleasant-looking, and on the torso explosions of the victims of the egg goo. Those scenes are also presented in slow-motion, as if seeing someone's chest explode outward and spread viscera is somehow worse when viewed at half speed, but they are cleverly shot, especially in the way that everyone who dies this way is wearing bulky or baggy clothing, the better to hide the equipment used (and in a couple of cases reuse the same footage because several people are wearing identical white jumpsuits). However, these gory deaths only happen at the beginning and very end of the film, leaving the rest of the movie feeling like it could almost be a crime drama about drug smuggling - ironic when you realise that it was these gory scenes that got the film classed as one of the DPP's video nasties and banned in the UK for some years.

There is one other good effect in the film, and that's the giant Martian cyclops overseeing the whole egg operation. Again, he's suitably slimy and alien-looking to be effectively gross, and in fact wouldn't have looked out of place on the set of Invaders From Mars. The only problem is that he wasn't able to move because of mechanical problems, and so just sits there luring victims very slowly to him with a single flashlight eye, before killing them with a "Give Uncle Scrotor a hug!" move.

I have to assume that the low budget also meant that some of the script had to be cut out, as there are some pretty big plot holes to be had in this movie. How did the crew of the cargo ship all die, when there were no traces of the eggs around them and they were all found in the mess hall, far away from the cargo bay? If heat triggers the eggs to "hatch", why destroy them with flamethrowers as Colonel Holmes orders in one scene? And if the villain of the piece has a psychic connection to all the eggs and feels pain when each one is destroyed, then how come his brains didn't just leak out of his head when the warehouse full of eggs gets torched by the afore-mentioned flamethrowers? Ah, but it's spaghetti splatter - such things aren't supposed to be pondered. Instead just sit back and enjoy the cheese. And if you can't do that, enjoy the Goblin score instead.

Amazon UK

Amazon US

 

Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979)

We haven't had a zombie film on here for a while, have we? And I mean actual zombies; not rabid-but-alive people erroneously labelled as zombies; not animal zombies whose bite turns humans into mutated zombies; and a whole movie about them, not just having them shoehorned in to please an international market. Although Lucio Fulci is still involved with this one. Yes, it's time for another of the more infamous of the video nasties - Zombie Flesh Eaters (aka Zombi[e] 2; Island Of The Flesh Eaters; Zombie; Zombie 2: The Dead Are Among Us; and Island Of The Living Dead - and those are just the English language titles).

A boat drifts into New York harbour; it's seemingly abandoned except for the morbidly obese zombie stumbling around on board who takes a bite out of one of the police officers sent to investigate before getting shot and tumbling into the water. The boat belonged to a Dr Bowles, but he is nowhere to be found - so his daughter Ann and reporter Peter West decide to do their own investigation and head off to the Caribbean island of Matul, where Ann's father was last heard from. Along the way, they meet up with two tourists with a boat, Brian and Susan, and all four go to Matul together. There they discover that the dead on the island are returning to life, allegedly because of a strange new disease but there are suggestions of voodoo being the cause from the locals. The four of them then find themselves fighting to survive against an onslaught of zombies long enough to escape the island...

Zombie Flesh Eaters is best-known for two scenes in particular: a scene where a zombie and a shark have an underwater fight over which of them gets to eat a half-naked Susan; and a scene in which a screaming woman slowly has her head pulled forward until her eye is impaled on a large splinter of wood in loving close-up (which then snaps off while still embedded deeply in her eye, just to add insult to injury). The former scene leaves you no doubt thinking, "What a bloody brave stuntman that was,"; while the latter scene was most likely the reason the film ended up on the DPP's video nasties list - violence to eyes was always a great big no-no for them.

Not that the eyeball impalement is the only scene of gore in the movie, of course. Throats are ripped out; chunks of flesh are torn from arms, and when zombies are killed they don't just fall over - their heads explode and their bodies collapse into piles of sloppy, decaying miasma as whatever is animating their corpses stops working. The zombie makeup effects are particularly gruesome as well, as zombies look like they're decaying and rotting away as they stumble around, and at one point a graveyard of conquistadores digs their way up from underground (although we'll not question how 300-year-old bodies can still have flesh and skin on them). Zombie Flesh Eaters is a bloody, messy zombie film that deserves praise for its special make-up effects if nothing else.

In Italy, George Romero' Dawn of the Dead was released as Zombi[e], and so when Zombie Flesh Eaters came out the year later it was called Zombi[e] 2 in Italy, to make it seem as though it was a sequel to Romero's film. (Just to confuse matters, as you can see above it was also called Zombie in some markets.) The beginning and ending scenes in New York were shot as an afterthought, in another attempt to connect the two films together, although the way the narrative plays out it would make Zombie Flesh Eaters more of a prequel than a sequel to Dawn of the Dead, as it implies that the events of the former were the cause of the events of the latter. There's also the throwaway line from one character that has a certain familiarity to it: "The father of my father always say when the earth spit out the dead they will come back to suck the blood of the living." Apparently, the script for Zombie Flesh Eaters was written before Dawn of the Dead came out, but I suspect a few lines were tweaked to reference the film during filming, just as scenes were added to link the two together. (I do hope everyone is taking notes here; there might be a test at the end...) In another marketing scheme that only seemed to happen in the 60s and 70s and with some of the more infamous films, vomit bags were actually handed out in cinemas for any of the audience who couldn't take the violence and gore.

Zombie Flesh Eaters might not have the strongest plot, but it doesn't really need one, as people aren't watching it for the storyline. They're there for the gore, and it delivers that in buckets (also the exploitation shots, where the film manages to find two places to fit some gratuitous female nudity in). It plays to its strengths and manages to come away as a success, as well as one of the video nasties that rightly deserves to be remembered for more than just its inclusion on that list.

 

Related articles

Nightmare City (1980)

The House By The Cemetery (1981)

Manhattan Baby (1982)

The Beyond (1981)

Another Lucio Fulci movie, another entry on the "Video Nasties" list. Whatever else you might think of the man, you have to admit that he had a real talent for pissing off the British censors. The Beyond was also part of Fulci's "Death Trilogy" as well - the other two parts being the previously-reviewed The House By The Cemetery and City Of The Living Dead.

In New Orleans, Liza Merril is renovating the dilapidated hotel she has just inherited - a hotel which we see  in a prologue was home to an artist and warlock named Shvyke who was killed by a lynch mob in 1927. This lynch mob was a particularly zealous one - they whip Shvyke with chains, nail him to a wall and then apply some quick lime to his face to finish him off. In the present day, the renovations are running into a few problems - bells keep ringing in empty rooms, a ghost causes one of the workmen to fall from the scaffolding and seriously injure himself, and the plumber who comes to fix a leak in the basement gets killed by a zombie instead. It turns out that the hotel is actually built on one of the seven gateways to Hell; Shvyke had been guarding it before his untimely demise and now Hell is escaping into our world. With the help of a local doctor, Liza tries to solve the mystery of what is going on with the hotel and close the gate to Hell before it is too late...

Also known as Seven Doors of Death (for obvious plot-related reasons), The Beyond continues with the three-related coincidences by also being Fulci's third entry on the DPP list, as well as being his third film starring Catriona MacColl (who was in all three of the "Death" trilogy movies). The film most likely ended up on the video nasties list because of the scenes where Shvyke is tortured and killed during the prologue, and possibly a later scene involving a tarantula attack (which would have had me clinging to the ceiling except that closeups reveal the spiders to be obviously and laughably animatronic). Those scenes are far from the only scenes of gore in the film, of course - disfigured zombies stumble about, heads explode like they're made of porcelain and pools of foaming acid dissolve faces as they expand across the floor. 

Now, I have something of a soft spot for The Beyond, as it was one of the first Fulci films I ever saw, plus it's got zombies which is always a win for me. However, even I can't deny that the film has problems. Its biggest problem is that its plot seems hastily stitched together, and feels in parts that it was thought up as an afterthought after they came up with the gory setpieces mentioned above - the tarantula scene is a primary example of that. The whole scenario is ridiculously contrived, it makes even less sense than the average horror death scene, and it isn't even referenced in the film afterwards. There's also a Cthulhu reference from out of nowhere - the book of Eibon is featured throughout the film as being a key to everything that is going on. Eibon was a sorcerer created by author Clark Ashton Smith as part of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos - but nothing else in the film can really be seen as Cthulhu-related. The big zombie scene was also added to the film because of the craze for zombies at the time, rather than for any plot-related purposes.

However, I think the film is still good. The ending in particular is both surprising and bleak, as Liza and Dr. McCabe find themselves trapped in hell, which turns out to be the painting that Shvyke was working on at the start of the film - Chekov's painting in action. There's also a lot of creepiness and shock moments throughout, such as Liza's realisation that one mysterious character doesn't make any noise when she runs, or the scene where a young girl has to try to escape the foaming acid puddle of death in the morgue. The film contains several of Fulci's trademarks, such as his fascination with extreme close-ups of eyes and sudden exaggerated sound effects, and for fans of Fulci's work it's definitely a must-see. However, it's also not on the same par as some of Fulci's previous works, and a lot of its modern notoriety comes more from its status as "previously banned" rather than its own merits.

  

Related articles

Movie Review - The New York Ripper (1982)

Zombie Creeping Flesh (1980)

Time for the tale of the worst purchase decision I ever made. Over a decade ago, I saw that the former banned 'video nasty' Zombie Creeping Flesh (aka Hell of the Living Dead, Virus and Zombi 4) was unbanned and available on DVD. So I bought it for £20, purely because it was a zombie film and a video nasty. And what a mistake that turned out out to be, because the movie turned out to be one of the worst I have ever seen, which is really saying something.

Somewhere in Papua New Guinea a secret research laboratory is working on the top secret project Operation: Sweet Death. It all goes horribly wrong (or perhaps right, considering the project name...) when a chemical leak causes first rats and then humans to die, then reanimate as ravenous flesh-eating zombies. A SWAT team is sent in to find out what has happened at the laboratory and contain it, and they end up meeting and joining forces with a pretty female reporter and her cameraman who were also in the country trying to investigate Operation: Sweet Death, and the group have to fight their way through New Guinea as it becomes overrun by zombies.

Oh boy. Where to begin? Zombie Creeping Flesh was directed by "Vincent Dawn", which was a pseudonym for Bruno Mattei - he of Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 infamy (and more besides). The "Vincent Dawn" nom de plume was a name Mattei used whenever he made a movie featuring zombies, it seems, but it has particular notability here because Zombie Creeping Flesh is trying to be Dawn of the Dead (the 1978 version, of course) so badly it hurts. From the SWAT team clearly meant to evoke memories of Peter and Roger from Romero's film (and the SWAT team stays in those blue boilersuits for the entire film), to the music that has pretty much just been ripped whole cloth from Dawn of the Dead, to the movie's ending scenes that are clearly trying to imply that Zombie Creeping Flesh is some sort of prequel to Dawn of the Dead... The Italian film industry's tendency in the 1970s and 80s to make their own versions of western blockbusters to the point where the films were given their own genre name ("spaghetti" westerns et al), but it has rarely been so blatant as it was here.

And the movie itself is not good. Not good at all. Well, the zombie and gore effects aren't really that bad at all, to give them their due. But as for everything else... The plot is ridiculous (the secret behind Operation: Sweet Death is that it was created to solve the Third World hunger crisis by making everyone in those countries eat each other? Really?); the film is full of stock footage from several mondo films - and most of it doesn't fit the film's setting anyway; and so on. There are just too many stupidly ridiculous moment in the film to properly list them all, but they include: the bit where the pretty female reporter has to wander around topless for a while to gain the trust of a native tribe; the bit where one of the SWAT team decides to put on a lime green tutu and dance around while searching a house for zombies (and there are no prizes for guessing what happens to him); and there's the bit where an African (or perhaps from Papua New Guinea itself - the film never goes so far as to identify anything) UN delegate gives an impassioned speech about how the Western countries have destroyed his country with these events... to an almost completely empty debate hall. And then, just to top it all off, when he is finished the British delegate replies simply, "Well, we'll continue this tomorrow." That, of course, also ties in with both the racial commentary threaded through the film, as well as the more uncomfortable instances of racism that would also surface in the jungle cannibal films of the time (in this case, the most notable examples being that nearly every zombie is black and the protagonists are all white; and the aforementioned scene where a white woman strips down to meet with a primitive tribe who treat her with a mixture of undue fascination and near-worship).

If I'm completely fair I guess I can say I've seen worse films, although I never paid quite so much for the displeasure. And I suppose Zombie Creeping Flesh is the kind of film that would lend itself well to a MSTing. Get some friends round, get the beverages of your choice and settle down for an unintentionally hilarious film.

 

Related articles

Movie Review - Zombi 3 (1988)

Nightmare City (1980)

The Church (1989)

This movie confuses me, on several levels. I'd been aware of it for many years and wanted to see it for just as long (mainly due to a single image I'd seen of the film of bodies piled on one another until they looked just like a horned head), but it was very difficult to track down. Then a few weeks ago I finally found somewhere to watch it, and the accompanying info informed me that it was considered a "sequel" to Demons and Demons 2. Well I like those films, so I went into The Church looking forward to it even more. And then the film seemed to have very little to do with the previous two Demons films, in both style and plot, which left me feeling distinctly unfulfilled (the cinematic equivalent of blue balls, perhaps?). And now IMDB tells me that it's not a sequel to the Demons films but Wikipedia says that it is, and in the end I'm just left feeling cheated that I didn't get to see a demon horse.

We start with a flashback in which a village of people who may or may not be demons (one of them has a cross-shaped wound on the sole of her foot, but she's the only one we see with that mark) get slaughtered by a group of Tutonic Knights. These knights are in such a hurry to bury the massacred villagers before they can allegedly rise again that when one of their number falls into the burial pit, horse and all, they just bury them along with the rest of the bodies. Jumping to the present day, we find that a large Gothic church has been built on top of the burial pit (apparently to keep the demons from escaping). A new librarian arrives to catalogue the church's old books and scrolls, and discovers the secret in the catacombs of the church - letting the demonic spirits out. Eventually a whole bunch of people get locked inside the church, hallucinations, possessions and general insanity ensues, and it's left to one priest to save the day by finding the secret spot built into the church that will bring it all down before the demons escape.

First of all, if you go into this film thinking it's a direct sequel to Demons and Demons 2 (as I did) then you'll likely come out disappointed that The Church is nowhere near as gorily wet as those two films. There's some gore, yes, and some trippy demonic imagery, certainly, but stylistically it really is nothing like those previous two films. Director Michele Soavi has stated that he didn't want The Church to be connected to the Demons films, even though it was originally written as being connected (he's also not been the most complementary about those films, which makes me feel slightly awkward knowing he was assistant director on the first Demons film and knowing some of his other work of that time period, but he has made a name for himself beyond these films so fair play to him). Instead, it's got a much more nightmare-like quality to it; one part The Devils and one part Rosemary's Baby (certainly by the final act). The lack of overt gore (for the most part) and clawed demons oozing pus roaming the church makes both the characters and the audience question just what is going on and whether it is actually real, meaning that is certainly more of an "intellectual" horror than most of the other films it might find itself alongside.

But the film leaves too many unanswered questions. There's an implication of reincarnation in the plot - we see Asia Argento playing a young girl in both the medieval prologue and the present-day setting - but it's never really referenced or played with in the film other than there. Were the medieval villagers really demons, or did the knights' unjust massacre of them end up sealing their fates and opening the door to the demons? Maybe that's something we're supposed to come to our own conclusions about - The Church certainly isn't setting out to praise the Catholic Church. And my final, personal, complaint - when I saw that horse getting buried alive in the prologue, I was expecting at least a Tombs of the Blind Dead moment with a skeletal horse roaming the church, if not an outright demonic one. And yet all I got were ghostly hoofbeats a few times. I feel like I was cheated out of my Chekov's Demonic Horse, and was that really too much to ask?

 

Related articles

Prince of Darkness (1987)

Stagefright (1987)

Demons 2 (1986)

There are several types of sequel. There's the continuation of events, where you follow the original cast into new adventures. There's the ramping up of events, which takes the original scenario and makes it bigger/more deadly/adds another puppy to the mix. There's the conclusion, which is generally supposed to be the ending of a series (until some studio executive with a hankering for another suck on the cash cow remembers it). In the case of Demons 2, the film falls into more or less the same category as Evil Dead 2 - both a sequel and kind of a remake at the same time. Yes, it's a little confusing.

This time, we're in a tower block instead of a renovated cinema, but there's still quite a few characters from the first film hanging around if you look carefully - the Sylvester Stallone-alike punk is now the security guard, for example, and Tony the Pimp is now Hank the Gym Leader. One of the residents of the tower block, Sally Day, is having her 16th birthday party, but she and several others in the block seem to be more interested in watching a "docudrama" about the threat of the Demons (thus suggesting that the events of the first movie actually happened, and that this movie is set some time after that, when people have somehow sealed off the Demon-infested areas and then gone on with their lives). Things go all pear-shaped, however, when a demon escapes from Sally's TV set into the real world to possess her. She then goes on to attack and transform her party guests, who then go rampaging through the tower block, and... well, you get the picture. Our heroes for the rest of the film are Hannah and George, a heavily-pregnant couple of (apparently) Physics students who have to fight to escape the apartment block and the pack of demons roaming the halls and stairways.

Right, let's get this out of the way first. Remember the deus ex machina of the first film? Well, Demons 2 doesn't go quite as far, but we do still have to check our disbelief at the door when a heavily-pregnant woman in labour climbs onto her boyfriend's back and they absail down the glass-fronted side of a building. Yeah, I know I shouldn't pick at moments like this, especially in a B-movie horror involving demons who can come out of TV sets, but stuff like this just bothers me, okay? There's B-movie absurdity, and there's movie-breaking absurdity, and one of these can totally destroy a movie's flow.

As for the rest of the film... well, it's mostly like the first movie - demons attack people, people transform into demons, repeat as necessary with appropriate amounts of gore. Tony the Pimp/Hank the Gym Leader gets a much bigger role in this movie, organising the survivors into a group to try to fight off the demons and having more success than he did in the first movie (admittedly that's not too hard, all things considered), and there are plenty of gory, splattery kills to go around (including one gym rat who pays the ultimate price for wanting to do just one more set of reps). Demons 2 also takes a brave step in having both a dog and a small child get transformed into demons, rather than having them be rescued by our heroes so they can walk off into the sunrise at the end - in the case of the latter demon, however, they then decided to have a second demon emerge from the child's body like the unholy lovechild of a Gremlin and a Chestburster. Honestly, you probably could have made a child's toy of the resulting demon and sold it alongside Boglins and no-one would have batted an eye.

And that sort of thinking is probably where Demons 2 falters. It remembers all the cool stuff it had in the first movie, and tries to bring all of that back, only better, in the sequel... but misses the mark and ends up more baffling than anything else. There's even a subplot that goes through half the film about four punk teens driving to the party, much like the Sylvester Stallone-alike and his friends... except the subplot is a complete dead end this time, making you suspect it was only put in there so we could listen to some more 80s New Wave/Punk (hey, I'm not complaining). In the end, Demons 2 is a good enough film... but it doesn't live up to the manic carnage of its predecessor, which is a shame.

 

Demons (1985)

As any regular readers might have guessed by now, I often pick up movies solely on the basis of a name or two that I recognise, the way the cover looks, or just the movie's tag line. This generally leads to a wide variety in the actual quality of the movies I end up watching. In the case of Demons, I saw the names Dario Argento and Lamberto Bava and thought, "Hey, what can go wrong?" As it turned out, very little, as this movie turned out to be one of the greatest pieces of gory 80s horror cheese I've ever seen.

Random people are given tickets to a special showing of a new film at a recently renovated cinema, the Metropol. These people include music students Cheryl and Kathy, two young men called George and Ken, a blind man and his guide/daughter, a pimp and two of his girls, and so on. The movie being shown is a particularly gory (although not too good) horror, and the audience's responses are mixed. Things start to go south, however, when one of the pimp's girls who had been playing around with a displayed prop earlier starts to transform - very messily - into a demon, who then sets upon the rest of the audience. People who are injured or killed by the demon become demons themselves, and soon the rapidly dwindling survivors have to fight to survive and to find a way out of the cinema, which has become mysteriously sealed up...

If you go into this movie expecting it to make any sense at all, you're going to go away disappointed. Demons revels in its over-the-topness and near-incomprehensibility. It's one of the very few films I've ever seen which has an actual deus ex machina near the climax of the film, and certainly the only one I've ever seen that has a case of Chekov's motorcycle and katana. It's clearly not meant to be taken seriously - or at least taken as seriously as any number of other 80s slashers. The characters are more characatures than anything as well, especially the iconic Tony the Pimp (I once saw a blog dedicated to him which just posted his lines from the movie, such an impression he made on the audience). But really, all the characters are stereotypes, and stereotypes of what the Italian filmmakers seemed to think Americans were like at that. Demons is quite clearly an Italian film (filmed in Germany) made to appeal and emulate the American horror movie market. One might think that would end up being quite jarring, but I think it adds to the whole high strangeness of the whole movie.

It's certainly front-loaded with big names in Italian ciname. There's Dario Argento, of course, who was the producer as well as involved in the screenplay along with Dardano Sacchetti; the director is Lamberto Bava, son of the great Mario Bava and known for a great many films himself; and the assistant director is Michele Soavi, who went on to direct great things like Stagefright himself afterwards. And the score is full of big names too - Rick Springfield, Nicky Sixx and Billy Idol, just to name a few. Quite honestly, I could watch the film for the music alone sometimes.

As I said above, however, it's not a film that sets out to make all that much sense, however. We talk about "suspension of disbelief" in fiction to say that, if a story can capture human interest enough, the audience will be willing to ignore the "implausibility of the narrative", and holy crap is there a lot of suspension of disbelief in Demons. From the twin ideas of demonic infection that start the whole thing off, to the arrival on the scene of the quartet of punks led by a Sylvester Stallone lookalike, to the film's climactic scenes (mentioned above), the film doesn't so much border on the fantastical as tap dance back and forth across the border and finish with a display of jazz hands. It's also a very "wet" film, full of gore - particularly in the demon transformation scenes, which are genuinely cringe-inducing due to how they're done. So if you're looking for a film that's fun for all the family this probably isn't it, unless your family happens to be the Sawyer family. But it is fun.

Final note: the all-American blond shotgun-toting child at the end? Why, that's Bob/Tommy, of The House By The Cemetary and Manhattan Baby infamy! Good to see he's finally got a decent dubbed voice, for his final film appearance...

 

Related articles

Stagefright (1987)

Movie Review - Profondo Rosso (1975)

Movie Review - Suspiria (1977)

Macabre (1980)

Anthropophagus (1980)

Time for another video nasty, and this time it's one of the more infamous ones. Anthropophagus (also known as The Grim Reaper, Anthropophagus The Beast, Anthopophagus (for the OCD spelling crowd), The Savage Island and Zombie 7: Grim Reaper among others, just to confuse anyone trying to catalogue the film) has the dubious honour of having a scene featured on none other than BBC News in the 1980s, where it was described as an actual "snuff film" (it's not, and furthermore, there's no zombies in it either).

After we open by briefly following a German couple and their dog going for a relaxing time on the beach before they are murdered by an unseen person (don't worry, the dog runs off the moment the Zorba the Greek music is replaced by something more sinister), we meet our main characters for the movie; a group of friends heading out for a holiday on a boat where they'll be visiting several Greek islands. They are joined on this trip by Julie, a young woman also heading out to one of the islands to spend time with a couple and their blind daughter, who manages to hitch a ride with them on their boat.

When they get to the island however, they find it almost deserted aside from a woman whose response to the group's arrival in her home is to promptly hang herself, and the blind girl Julie was to be looking after. It turns out that everyone else on the island has been killed and/or eaten by a man who was driven mad after being shipwrecked and being forced to kill and eat his wife and son to survive, after which he decided that cannibalism was the only way to go. He also developed the worst case of psoriasis you'll ever see. The rapidly dwindling survivors then have to fight off the deranged cannibal before he manages to eat all of them too...

The scene that got Anthropophagus on the BBC evening news - as well as almost certainly on the video nasties list - comes around three-quarters of the way through the film, where the cannibal strangles a heavily pregnant woman to death before reaching inside her and pulling out her foetus (actually a skinned rabbit) and taking a big bite of it while the woman's dying husband watches. There are other scenes of gore throughout the film, of varying degrees of quality, but this is almost certainly the scene that caused the DDP to take notice. Well, that and the scene where the dying cannibal attempts to eat his own disemboweled intestines (I'd mark that as a spoiler, but the image is on the box art, for pity's sake).

Unfortunately, if you were to take out the gore scenes that brought the movie to everyone's attention, Anthropophagus is actually a pretty lackluster film that would probably have faded into obscurity if it hadn't been for the DDP list. There are long stretches of film in which very little happens apart from cast members wandering aimlessly around the island or dark houses so that we can have fake jump scares thrown at us (at one point a kitten is literally dropped onto some piano keys in the hopes of giving the audience a cheap scare). When that's not happening, we get shots that feel like they would be more at home in a Greek tourism film. Oh, and there's plenty of day-for-night shots as well, and a shot at the beginning that practically wears a sign saying, "We're ripping off Jaws!". It's generally a pretty low-budget, heavily-padded affair.

And yet... there's the occasional scene that shows surprising depth and talent - the key moment for me is the scene where one character, finding that her tarot cards no longer want to tell her the future and believing that means they are all doomed, sits on the boat and idly tosses the cards into the water several at a time; the camera focussing on the cards as they float away in the sea. It's a deep and even haunting scene that seems somewhat at odds with the generic stalk-and-slash/chomp of the rest of the film.

Anthropophagus was directed by one Joe D'Amato, the notorious pseudonym of Aristide Massaccesi, and written by both him and the film's cannibal star George Eastman (real name Luigi Montefiori). D'Amato is well-known for his prolific catalogue of exploitation, horror and porn, including a large chunk of the Emmanuelle movies, and in the same year that Anthropophagus was made, he and Eastman made the infamous Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (yes, that's hardcore zombie porn). The next year, the two of them worked together on another movie, Porno Holocaust (and I'm sure you don't need to me to tell you what that film was about). I'm adding all this because, apart from the parts I've already mentioned, there's not really much else to say about Anthropophagus, unless you want to address the question of just why our cannibal killer had come down with such a bad skin condition. Was it sunburn? Leprosy? Was he turning into a wendigo? Sadly, I suspect we'll never know.