by ·Comments Off on The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982, Peter Greenaway)

It has some drowning, and some numbers, but I guess Greenaway hadn’t ramped up to his full obsession with categorizing and enumerating things (or perhaps he was taking a break – I haven’t seen earlier feature The Falls yet). Fox Lorber did a lousy job with the DVD, but some of the nice candlelight photography and PG-esque controlled compositions came through. I enjoyed it, though it’s not as sneaky a mystery or as delightful a script as it thinks.

Neville with Mrs. Herbert:

Mr. Neville is the titular draughtsman, hired to draw architectural sketches of the Herbert gardens while the master is away. But will the master ever return, or has he met with misadventure? As part of Neville’s fee, he gets to have his way with Mrs. Herbert, while her daughter makes a separate sexual agreement with Neville, suspected by her snobbish German husband Mr. Talmann. Any sense of suspense fizzles out as everything becomes increasingly obvious (young Mrs. Talmann is trying to get Neville to father her child, since her husband is impotent – and yes, Mr. Herbert has been killed). Everyone is trying to frame everyone else, but the grand loser is Neville, set upon at the end by the society types, who cut out his eyes then drown him in the same pool where Herbert was found.

Mr. and Mrs. Talmann:

As usual with British period society comedies, most of the fun is in the bitchy cleverness of the sniping dialogue. Not the only movie Greenaway has made about finding murderous evidence in a painting – isn’t that what the recent Nightwatching & Rembrandt J’Accuse were about? Perhaps PG was traumatized by a youthful viewing of Blow-Up. I also liked the camoflaged naked guy creeping around the garden (doesn’t seem like a realistic occupation – maybe he is independently wealthy)

The director would go on to bigger and better things, but his cast would not. Neville was Anthony Higgins (Merchant/Ivory’s Quartet), currently in something called Malice in Wonderland. Mr. Talmann (my favorite for most naturally wearing the ludicrous period clothes/wigs) was Hugh Fraser, not German at all, appears in Agatha Christie TV series. His wife: Anne-Louise Lambert (Picnic at Hanging Rock), her mother: Janet Suzman (apartheid movie A Dry White Season), and the wicked estate lawyer who works out the contracts was Neil Cunningham of Jarman’s The Tempest.

by ·Comments Off on Orson Welles: One-Man Band (1995, Vassili Silovic)

A catalog-style entry for…

Initiated by Shadowplay

Not just a late film, but a whole compendium of late films: a catalogue of works by Orson Welles during his last twenty years, assembled with stylish fun by Silovic and Oja Kodar, very entertaining and informative. All these years I’ve read Jonathan Rosenbaum championing the late, unreleased works of Welles, I still haven’t been clamoring to see them – I figured I’ve got enough things to watch. But now that I’ve had a taste, the clamoring begins.

It starts, naturally, with magic and stage shows – this wonderful bit of duck hypnosis which I played again and again.

Then Orson’s 1975 acceptance speech for his AFI lifetime achievement award, at which he presented scenes from The Other Side of the Wind.

P. Bog as actor:

Oja introduces herself, says she wants to combat the public opinion that Orson idly spent his time doing voiceovers and liquor commercials, but she only fuels the opinion that he couldn’t finish projects at the end because he was easily distracted by newer, shinier projects. Sure, some of it was sheer bad luck, mostly finance-related, but also the negatives of Merchant of Venice going missing.

That unlabeled can holds the original cut of Ambersons:

Scenes from Filming The Trial are shown, a good opportunity for Welles to speak for himself out of character (or, more accurately, in character as himself).

Oja discusses the great trailer for F For Fake (his final completed feature) and shows half of the trailer, then rifles through paintings and sketches he made.

Monologue readings from Moby Dick: filmed solo performance of select scenes before water-shadowed backdrops. Supposedly the rushes have been edited together and screened in Germany and New York. Please feel free to send them here next.

Don Quixote, which he spent 30 years trying to complete. I haven’t seen Jesus Franco’s version, but despite all the public whining about it, it’s probably better than nothing. Franco had no access to some of the footage, which has since aired on television (and therefore on youtube).

A Winston Churchill-related comedy sketch piece in silhouette, and an embarrassing bit at a hammy tailor shop – these are possibly part of the compilation piece known as London, also edited in Germany. I wonder if the Germans would care to release a DVD.

With tailors Charles Gray (of Dearden’s Man in the Moon and a couple of Bond movies) and Jonathan Lynn (director of Clue, My Cousin Vinny):

A trailer for The Deep, a thriller set on a couple of boats in the middle of the ocean, featuring Jeanne Moreau.

Footage shot for Merchant of Venice. The film was almost completed when part of it went missing.

A desperately lonely-looking Welles performing the missing monologue outdoors on a windy evening.

“I think acting is like sculpture, in other words it’s what you take away from yourself to reveal the truth of what you’re doing that makes a performance … There is no such thing as becoming another character by putting on a lot of makeup.” – spoken by Welles, but similar to what Renoir says in that short with Gisele Braunberger.

More projects: The Orson Welles Show (featuring The Muppets, and available on video):

The Dreamers, which I know little about:

Overall a very useful little doc, which unsurprisingly got me fired up to watch more Welles movies (and to finally read that recent Welles book by Rosenbaum). Unfortunately my follow-up feature, Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles, was much less enlightening.

Afterwards I scouted around online, having a Late-Welles scavenger hunt. I came up with a couple interesting bits. First, a piece of Vienna, as it aired on the Arte channel – a segment of the 1969 One Man Band project. Seems like an unexceptional travelogue, featuring a man who feeds birds, a montage of quick zoom-ins on different cakes (also shown in the Silovic/Kodar doc). A caped and hatted Orson walks through the city scenery, visits a ferris wheel and comments on the Third Man soundtrack, then he and Mickey Rooney perform a magic trick with Senta Berger (of Major Dundee, The Terror of Dr. Mabuse).

Ten minutes of silent screen tests and still photography in preparation for Merchant of Venice, compiled by the Italians – not especially enlightening except to get another look at those long-nosed Eyes Wide Shut masks. I wonder how these tests got out while the film itself remains under wraps:

by ·1 Comment

Another entry for…

Initiated by Shadowplay

There’s classic Jimmy Stewart (The Philadelphia Story, Shop Around the Corner and those Capra flicks), mid-life Hitchcock/Preminger Jimmy Stewart, and the ripe-for-retirement late Jimmy Stewart of Airport ’77 and The Magic of Lassie. But this film stands alone in featuring a post-retirement Jimmy Stewart.

IMDB trivia page says:

James Stewart said that he and his wife were vacationing at a game preserve in Kenya when they came across the filmmakers shooting this picture. He said he was persuaded to make a short appearance, speaking a few lines, because he thought it would help to promote wildlife conservation. “Never did understand what it [the film] was all about”, he said. “I did it on a whim.”

Jimmy Stewart feeds a hawk

And he does only speak a few lines, but that makes him a pretty major character in a movie where nobody speaks more than a few lines. Early on, the filmmakers announce their intention to feature a narrative, introducing a man (Philip Sayer of a couple British miniseries, who managed to die eight years before Stewart) in search of help after his plane crashes in the desert, but then they let us watch a girl named Maya romp with wild animals for another thirty minutes before anything else happens. Worryingly, the slender story wasn’t improvised by some actors who stumbled into a wildlife shoot, as it seems to have been, but was rather written by Hana’s old collaborator, legendary avant-garde filmmaker Terayama Shuji (Grass Labyrinth, Emperor Tomato Ketchup). Also worryingly, the “special effect” used to show Sayer’s plane crashing into a tree seemed to have been achieved by actually crashing a plane into a tree. It’s hard to tell if the dialogue was improvised, or if it was written for children, or if everything got simplified because of language barriers: a Japanese crew in Kenya with American, British and Italian lead actors, plus “Kathy” as Maya, no idea where she’s from.

(to be read flatly with a vague smile, revealing no emotion)
“Grandfather, the zebras and the gazelles are having babies again.”
“Ah, that means you’ll have a lot more friends now.”
“Yes, I have so many animal friends now, and I’ve got you, grandfather.”

But enough about story and dialogue. The filmmakers don’t care about it, so why should we? If you remove your expectations of “a Jimmy Stewart movie” or even “a decent film that makes a lick of sense,” it has its own pleasures. Stewart and his granddaughter Maya live in a thatched house with no doors or windows (a rhino wanders inside at one point) and spend their days playing with the wildlife and caring for their adopted pets, including a monkey and a grey thing I don’t even know what to call (they named it Tiki), which makes a “sknt!” noise that cannot be real. These two pets are treated as major characters. We get a better sense of Tiki’s personality than Jimmy Stewart’s (notice I don’t use his character name – I’m not sure that he has one). And I could think of worse ways to spend two hours than watching the beautiful Maya prance about, intercut with wonderfully shot Kenyan nature footage.

Tiki and his monkey friend:

But if Maya’s playful solo scenes recall the early Pocahontas scenes in Malick’s The New World (unfortunately set to what sounded like electro-symphonic versions of Abba songs), the effect is lost when she opens her mouth. It’s very possibly the directors’ fault (you never know), but she and Sayer and his fiancee Eleonora Vallone sure come out looking like lousy actors. Stewart, however, gets showcase scenes for his acting skills – a couple of raging anger moments, and a climactic emotional story told to Sayer about the accidental death of his son, Maya’s father, in a mine explosion. He also really comes to life, with a warm glow in his eyes revealing the depths of his love for nature, during a short speech about dung beetles. Since Stewart isn’t in the movie long enough to get to know him, these scenes don’t mesh well with his other personas in the film (benevolent nature-loving grandfather/mean old curmudgeon), lending credence to Stewart’s claim that he never understood the plot.

An actor, acting:

Oh yeah, the plot. So, since Sayer has amnesia after his plane crash, there’s nowhere he needs to be, so decides to stay with the hot (but chaste in a children’s-movie way) Maya, gaining the family’s trust by braving a snake-cutaway to rescue some cute creature from a hole it had fallen into, and comforting Maya after Jimmy Stewart’s easily-predicted death (actually I thought it was just as likely he’d wander off set and return to his vacation as stay long enough to shoot the death scene). Then, over an hour into the movie it switches to unsubtitled Japanese and I’m lost for a while. Lions behead some gazelles, tens of wildebeest and zebras drown on-camera in a horrible flood (making me pray it was not a children’s movie), some guy is killing “koala birds” with explosives, and there is a montage of animals yawning. Then rich fancy-girl Erika, the fiancee of the crash victim, sets out in her own plane to find him. Sayer somehow gets caught in a brush fire and a native (the movie calls them “the nomads”) walks him out safely. Erika catches up with the young couple and shoots Sayer with a dart gun in frustration when he won’t join her, then pisses off, leaving him in peace with Maya.

Erika at left, with the worst jumpsuit/upholstery combination in human history:

The movie doesn’t have a wildly good reputation online. J. Sharp:

With this overly precious would-be epic the director seems to be so cowed by his subject, the raw beauty of the Kenyan savannah and its denizens, that the end result resembles little more than a protracted holiday slide-show display. … It seems strange that Hani seems so content to dwell on such superficial trimmings, not only given his impressive track record in the 60s, but also that he’d previously been in Kenya to film The Song of Bwana Toshi shortly after the country had achieved independence from Britain. Bwana Toshi had dealt with the cross-cultural encounters of a Japanese geological engineer with the local community in which he is sent to work, and at least addressed such issues as expatriate-local relationships and the misunderstandings that arise due to the cross-purposes of the parties involved. In Africa Story there’s barely a black face in sight.

This was last fiction film to date by Susumu Hani, a Japanese New Wave director of the 50’s and 60’s. Co-director Simon Trevor specializes in camerawork for films shot in Africa – he worked on Gorillas in the Mist, White Hunter Black Heart and Out of Africa.

Midnight Eye has the scoop:

Susumu Hani’s career began with documentaries about youth and shifted into pseudo-documentary dramas, climaxing with Nanami, one of the greatest masterpieces of Japanese film. Although his work proves he had a profound understanding of human psychology, Hani was becoming increasingly disillusioned with humanity, which may explain why he abandoned human subjects in favor of making nature documentaries for NHK. It’s best to keep that in mind while watching this film, because at this late stage in his career, Hani seems to be completely uninterested in human drama. Instead of focusing on developing the characters, Hani chooses to simply incorporate more nature footage than the story will allow.

The vertical lines were supposed to be slimming:

by ·Comments Off on History of the World, part 1 (1981, Mel Brooks)

What was initially announced as Auteur Completion Month is now the longer-term Auteur Completion Project (because it can’t be “completion” if I give up when the month changes). I don’t especially aim to watch everything Mel Brooks has been involved with (never saw Dracula: Dead and Loving It because his previous two were so bad) but I noticed that his one classic-era comedy feature (oops, besides The Twelve Chairs) I’d never seen was the one Jonathan Rosenbaum placed on his 1000 favorite movies list. And now that I’ve seen it, I must conclude that it was a half-remembered nostalgic favorite for JR, not one that received much recent, critical thought.

Starts off unpromisingly, with a jokey Orson Welles voiceover (the year before Slapstick; maybe the great man should’ve hired an agent) and a hokey caveman sketch starring 50’s comedian Sid Caesar (whose last movie to date was Stuart Gordon’s The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit). Catalog of human innovation (“the first artist… the first art critic!”) like one of those punny water-treading late Tex Avery shorts, or a sub-Mr. Show sketch (“man’s greatest achievement: the wheelbarrow”).

Some biblical business follows (including my favorite gag, the 15… 10 Commandments). Next: waaay too much time (over half the movie?) spent in Rome running away from Emperor Dom DeLuise, Empress Madeline Khan and 50’s comedian Shecky Greene.

L-R: possibly Ron Carey (Silent Movie, High Anxiety), maybe Mary-Margaret Humes (of an upcoming Michael Madsen/Roddy Piper horror film), definitely Gregory Hines (in his first film), and grimacingly Mel Brooks. I didn’t take very good notes.

Making up for the overlong Roman piece is an extended, extravagant musical version of the Spanish Inquisition, which could’ve stood on its own as a great short film. By now, narrator Welles has wandered away from the movie, off to film some Moby Dick closeups of himself.

Then Brooks is King Louis XVI of France, and also the piss-bucket boy chosen to replace him in event of a revolution. He helps the daughter of a deranged, imprisoned Spike Milligan free her father and… hell, I can’t remember the storyline, but it involves Harvey Korman (Lord Love a Duck, voice of the Great Gazoo on The Flintstones) as a character named Count De Monet, and in my second favorite joke of the movie, Brooks tries to run down a forced-perspective hallway.

Bunuel did it first:

“Coming attractions” finale features a cute Jews In Space trailer, a premonition of Spaceballs.

Cameos by Moon Over Parador director Paul Mazursky, Diner director Barry Levinson, Hugh Hefner as himself, freshly Oscar-nominated John Hurt as Jesus, Jackie Mason, and an uncredited Bea Arthur.

by ·Comments Off on Permanent Vacation (1980, Jim Jarmusch)

“This is my story, or, part of it.”

Yes, there’s a narrator, and it’s in color – two unexpected things from a Jarmusch film. Follows Allie (Chris Parker) for a few days as he bums around New York meeting a few characters and ultimately decides to leave. A practice run for Stranger Than Paradise, with Jarmusch exhibiting plenty of his spare urban cinematography.

Leila:

Allie lives with Leila, but will quietly leave her at the end. At least she’s forewarned, as he tells her his “born on a train” philosophy. Allie meets crazed Vietnam vet Richard Boes (he had small parts in JJ’s next five films), visits his mentally ailing mother in a hospital, spies on a woman being vocal behind her apartment, converses with Frankie Faison (one of the three curbside shit-talkers in Do The Right Thing) at a theater playing an anachronistic Nick Ray film, then steals a car from a clueless woman (my favorite scene) and fences it.

Allie with mother:

Frankie:

He ends up at the pier, about to flee to Paris for a change of scenery. First he runs into another disaffected young man, a Parisian who fled for New York – a cheerful example of Jarmusch’s dry sense of humor.

I don’t know for sure that this is Sara Driver below, since two women are credited as “nurse.” She worked on most of Jarmusch’s movies, pulling two titles (production manager and assistant director) on this one. Funny enough, Driver was in the Times the day after I watched this, since a quality print of her long-lost first film You Are Not I was just discovered in Tangier.

Jarmusch, from 1980-81 interviews:

The story was inspired by how Chris actually lives his life … About half the things that happen to him in the film actually occurred to him, and the other half I made up for him. I thought up situations and placed him in them. … It’s more about accidental connections that move the audience than about dramatic action.
…
The question is how to treat social problems. A lot of people criticize my film politically; they say it’s an art film, it’s harmless, and does not take a clear stand. But whenever I watch a film – even if I almost completely agree with its political aims – it will still lose my interest as soon as I notice that the conclusions are self-evident, because then there is nothing left to discover.

by ·Comments Off on Q: The Winged Serpent (1982, Larry Cohen)

“Maybe his head just got loose and fell off.”

Shitty scat-singing pianist turned incompetent diamond thief Jimmy Quinn stumbles across the nest of a winged monster that has been terrorizing New York, snatching up rooftop sunbathers and window washers, and tries to use this knowledge for profit. As in God Told Me To, Cohen shines in picking up crowd scenes seemingly out in public and not on a closed set. I like that Cohen casts skilled but unattractive actors – lead cop David Carradine (Kill Bill, Boxcar Bertha) and thief Michael Moriarty (The Stuff, Pick Me Up) don’t seem much like movie leading men, but they’re perfect for this story.

Moriarty is dwarfed by the city:

Murderous cultist takes a volunteer:

Moriarty is the fascinatingly doomed, black center of the movie, on the run from his partners in the jewel heist he botched, but Carradine and his partner Richard “Shaft” Roundtree kill time trying to solve a series of grotesque murders, apparently committed by a cult trying to appease the beast. I have to question the skills of the investigators when Moriarty is brought into the station for beating a security guard who works at the top of the Chrysler building, and they continue to bargain with Moriarty, offering him a million (which he never gets) to tell them which tall building hosts the monster. Besides that little plot hole, it’s a pretty great movie.

“I can’t imagine that the monster would want to kill YOU, Richard Roundtree.”

The monster, just after crushing Richard Roundtree’s spine and dropping him 200 stories:

by ·Comments Off on I, Madman (1989, Tibor Takács)

“Both books were non-fiction, Malcolm insisted… claims they were confessions.”

I like a movie that reminds me of In the Mouth of Madness. I also like 80’s children’s horror flick The Gate and its sequel, and this was made by the same team (though we have evidence that the director has since fallen straight off the quality charts). And it’s from the writer of Nightmare on Elm Street 2 (one of the good ones). So I should have loved this – and I did, even if I can see why it’s not enjoying the same reputation as Lost Boys and The Monster Squad these days.

Jenny Wright (the top-billed woman in Young Guns 2, which is to say she’s eighteenth-billed overall) plays scatterbrained bookseller Virginia, who is recently obsessed with obscure horror writer Malcolm Brand. She reads his first book, which features a murderous troll creature locked in a crate, losing herself in the book as creatively shown by the film – the transitions between real and fantasy are well done. I was more surprised that she seems to have a happy, comfortable relationship with her cop boyfriend Richard (Clayton Rohner of The Relic, April Fool’s Day), unusual for a movie.

Caught them both staring into space:

Things heat up when she finds the author’s second book, and the murders within spring to life as she reads. Randall Cook, an effects animator who worked on The Gate, The Thing, Ghostbusters, Puppet Masters 2 and 4 and other movies I used to watch on cable all the time, and therefore a major influence on my childhood dreams and the continued existence of SHOCKtober, plays the mad doctor/book author wearing a beret, a cape, some serious facial disfigurement makeup, and a mask that would please Leatherface during the last 15 minutes.

Virginia has some friends, who are, naturally, doomed to sacrified before Randy’s desire for reconstructive surgery – more Eyes Without a Face than Texas Chainsaw Massacre. An actress in her theater group loses her scalp and pretty long hair (I hadn’t thought of Randy’s baldness as a gruesome disfigurement), her friend Lenny loses his nice Italian nose, her patient bookshop coworker Mona loses her lips (a killer’s gotta have luscious lips) and I’m not sure what he wants from the pianist across the street from her apartment. Virginia skips ahead in the book to see who the next victims will be, but the cops dismiss her as a crank. When the predictable showdown between herself (with a late-arriving Richard) and Randy arrives, she unleashes the beastie from the first book (which looks suspiciously like The Gate goblins on a larger scale) for a few great minutes of stop-motion which justify everything that has come before. Brand finally turns into book pages and flutters away. Mick Garris totally ripped this off for his TV episode Valerie on the Stairs, figuring that nobody would notice – gotcha, Mick.

See also: Shadowplay

by ·Comments Off on The House by the Cemetery (1981, Lucio Fulci)

“The smell of the rooms… terrifies me.”

I should have known not to get too comfortable with Italian horror. After I unexpectedly loved City of the Living Dead, I ran out to get another Lucio Fulci movie. Can’t go wrong with this one, part of a trilogy with CotLD and The Beyond (which I remember enjoying a decade ago), right? Another bunch of nobodies getting inventively slaughtered by mysterious undead beings while all of humanity is threatened by something evil and inexplicable? But it was just a stupid haunted house movie full of detestable actors.

Opens on a mediocre note. A whiny, out-of-sync blond girl is yelling incessantly after her boyfriend Steve, until a knife through the head finally shuts her up. I didn’t hope this would set the pattern for the rest of the movie (people yelling someone else’s name incessantly for an hour then dying uneventfully) but it sure did.

Steve got killed:

I don’t think of five-year-old psychic creepy-eyed Scandinavian children as being named Bob, but this one is. Bob (Giovanni Frezza, who retired at age 12 after appearing in Demons) moves to a small town in Massachusetts (are all Italian horrors set in MA? See also CotLD and Ghosthouse) with his parents, beardy scholar Norman (Paolo Malco of New York Ripper, Escape 2000) and housewife Lucy (Catriona MacColl, lead screamer from the previous movie). Before they even get to the house, an also-creepy girl who may be a ghost tries to warn him not to go inside. But a five-year-old doesn’t have much authority within the family, so they do.

Shrill family:

Norman is picking up the research of a colleague who killed himself while staying in the house. So he’s a writer of some sort… in a house that drives people crazy… with a young psychic son. Very The Shining. But wait, there’s also an apparently evil babysitter straight out of The Omen – odd scene involving May and a decapitated mannequin warns us about her. But it turns out the babysitter (whom I immediately recognized from an early scene in Suspiria) never does anything evil and is eventually slaughtered by the leatherfaced monster in the basement.

Sexy babysitter:

There is some kind of plot intrigue which is never adequately explained. I like that about the Fulci and Argento movies of this era, that they suggest great mysteries and conspiracies of which we only learn small parts. The husband swears he’s never been to this town, but people recognize him. The girl who communicates with young Bob via the Shining roams around with her mom or somebody, staring at things and making vague warnings. And some realtors fret over whether they’ll be able to unload the Freudstein house (what an awesome name) in which the family is staying. I guess that one isn’t much of a conspiracy. Also there are zooms – lots of them. I don’t have a problem with that.

But the plot isn’t what’s important. What’s vital is that Bob seems to do most of the talking, and he is dubbed by an awful woman doing a shrill kid voice. And really, most of the movie is people walking slowly around calling somebody’s name. When anyone is evil, lying, or a ghost they act super obvious about it. And there are crying, whimpering sounds on the soundtrack all the time, even when Bob isn’t on screen. None of this is worth sitting through for a standard haunted-house movie. Admittedly it was still better than Ghosthouse, but if they’d lost Bob it could have been halfway decent instead of just not-altogether-terrible.

Freudstein:

There’s a cellar in the house, which is locked. And the lid to a tomb is in the hallway. “Wait a minute – if there’s a cellar, won’t that tomb just be sitting in the cellar under the hallway,” I thought, and sure enough the dead fellow (Dr. Freudstein: Giovanni de Nava, who played “Joe the Plumber” in Fulci’s The Beyond), looking somewhat like Baghead, is just lumbering around loose in the cellar. Stupid Norman goes on a goose chase to another town looking for Freudstein’s grave (didn’t CotLD also end with people looking for graves?) while the monster, having already stabbed a realtor (Dagmar Lassander, who went on to appear in Devil Fish) and beheaded the babysitter, threatens his family. But he makes it home just in time to prove totally ineffective, and I cheer as Bob gets permanent horrific psychological damage from watching his parents get killed by an undead maniac. Bob himself ends up in another dimension with the ghost girl, so maybe he got killed too, who knows?

Evil Dead connections: there is exposition via audio tape, and once while Lucy is alone, everything in the house starts making noise at once. Also: Bob calls his Curious George doll “Yogi” and someone says the line “I’ve lost all critical perspective!” Bob’s dad wastes some of our time in the library with Carlo De Mejo (surviving hero of City of the Living Dead – he was in Guardian of Hell this same year, which sounds like a better follow-up to CotLD than this turned out to be) and creepy librarian Gianpaolo Saccarola (who played “The gorilla” the next year in an Antonioni film – whether that was a character name or he was wearing a gorilla suit, it could only be a step up from this movie). Old Mary Freudstein (I assume that’s the woman with the little girl), Teresa Passante, had been in a Kirk Douglas flick called Holocaust 2000 which somehow never shows up on Turner Classic Movies.

With his pink gun and Curious Yogi, Bob prepares for battle:

by ·Comments Off on City of the Living Dead (1980, Lucio Fulci)

“If those gates are left open it might be the end of humanity.”

So it’s called City of the Living Dead and arrives the year after Zombi 2, a semi-sequel to Night of the Living Dead, so you’d think it’d be a follow-up to that one. But the internet says it’s instead the first part of a trilogy with The Beyond and House by the Cemetery. But I’ve seen all those movies and this doesn’t seem to have anything to do with them. However, it’s one of the best Italian horrors I’ve seen, up there with Suspiria.

In Dunwich (which “was built on the ruins of the original Salem – the village of witches and heresy… and evil”), a priest (Fabrizio Jovine of Fulci’s The Psychic and Contraband) hangs himself in the cemetery, opening a gate to hell. Meanwhile in “New York,” Mary is in a seance circle screaming “I see the dead” until she drops dead herself. I can see why Catriona MacColl was cast as Mary – she’s quite a committed screamer, and unafraid of taking an axe to the face in the name of filmmaking, as we see later when crabby too-good-for-this-movie Christopher George (Enter the Ninja, The Day Santa Claus Cried) hears her screaming and grudgingly rescues her from a coffin. Oh also when the cops are called to the seance circle, a dubbed detective interrogates everyone about drugs while a guy (who is definitely not an actor) stuffed into a cop suit stands awkwardly in the background, all of which I found unaccountably wonderful.

Mary, doing what she does best:

Back to the movie, if the gates of hell are gonna open and we’re gonna have a city of the living dead, we will need lots of victims, so Fulci gives us a bunch of indistinguishably dubbed zombie-fodder characters, along with extreme close-ups on all their eyes.

Future victims Bob and Emily:

Sandra (Janet Agren of Red Sonja, Eaten Alive) is seeing psychiatrist Jerry (Carlo De Mejo of Un homme est mort) when Emily (Antonella Interlenghi of The Birdcage 3) totally barges in without knocking to announce that she has to see Bob (Giovanni Radice of Cannibal Ferox, Cannibal Apocalypse) that night. Bob is the local maladjusted deviant, just the kind of person a young hottie in an Italian horror movie should be hanging out with. But Bob doesn’t kill her, exactly, just pushes her aside to escape when the hanged priest appears and smears wormy grime into her face. Not the coolest death scene in the world, but they make up for it with the coolest death scene in the world, when Daniela Doria (who spent her whole acting career playing victims in Fulci movies) and Michele Soavi (star of Demons 5 & 6, then director of Demons 3 & 4 – oh Italy, you have no respect for sequel continuity) are making out in a car when the priest appears and stares at them until she silently vomits out all her insides while bleeding from the eyes, then grabs the boy and pulls his brains through his skull with her bare hands.

Meanwhile Emily’s dad finds out she’s dead, goes looking for Bob, then drills a hole in his head. Emily later returns as a zombie to haunt and kill her family, but her little brother escapes and meets up with the psychiatrist and the blonde. Oh also there are three guys in a bar who are always afraid of zombies and gates to hell, but never do anything or leave the bar, until they’re finally all killed in the end… I can’t figure if that was supposed to be humor. And an undertaker at “Moriarity and Sons” (got an extra “i” in there) funeral home is eaten by a corpse.

The hanged priest with a handful of wormy grime:

All of our protagonists (Jerry the beardie psychiatrist, blonde Sandra, resurrected Mary and bitter newsman Pete) meet up in the graveyard looking for the dead priest, then an evil wind machine blows a million worms into the window of their hotel room. From the DVD extras I learned that Fulci’s effects looked so good because they were real: he really swung an axe a half-inch from Mary’s face, truly made Daniela Doria vomit up sheep guts, and he sure enough blasted a million worms into a hotel room right into the screaming faces of his stars. In case you didn’t figure it out on your own, crew members also tell us that Fulci hated actors.

The killing method of choice from now on will be squeezing the brains through the skull with one’s bare hands – first dead Emily does Sandra, then dead Sandra does the reporter (yay, he is finally dead).

The beardy psychiatrist (why does he get to be the hero?) stabs the priest in the balls with a cross, then he and Mary climb out of grave. The kid (with two cops) sees and happily runs towards them. They’re happy at first but then Mary is afraid, yells nooo, freeze frame, black tendrils across picture. What was that? What happened?

Movie was partly shot in Savannah, which is exciting to me.