Conquest (1983)

No, you do not need glasses.
The whole fucking movie is shot like this.

A Lucio Fulci sword and sorcery film? Sign me the fuck up! On paper it sounds like the best thing ever, but there are few things holding it back and it's not just because there aren't any fucking swords. Firstly, don't be fooled by the nunchuck-wielding Conan wannabe on the cover, the hero of the movie is actually this leather-clad wiener named Ilias (Andrea Occhipinti from The New York Ripper). As the movie opens he is being lectured by a bunch of toga-wearing beardos on a misty, soft-focus beach. A man gives him a longbow and then tells him that long ago a hero named Cronos was able to use it to fire laser arrows. Ilias asks "It was magic, wasn't it?" which I thought was a reasonable assumption but according to this guy it was a sign he had become a man. After some more rambling prophecy and vague words of wisdom, he is sent away to a strange, distant land to fulfill his ill-defined destiny.

This mysterious land is home to an evil Sorceress named Ocron, who rules over the six or seven peasants with an iron fist. Despite the fact that the peasants are all wrapped in furs she likes to walk around completely naked save for a g-string and a feather boa, not that I'm complaining. She also wears a metal mask that conceals her entire head, but I immediately recognised those breasts as belonging to Sabrina Siani (2020: Texas Gladiators). In her employ she has an army of wolf men (at first I thought they were just furries, but there is some mild articulation in their masks to suggest they are actually werewolves) and S&M masked henchmen. I say army even though there's only half a dozen or so but since there's only a handful of peasants, it works out pretty well. At first she seems like a pretty cool boss, at the end of a hard day slaughtering the innocent she lets you hit the crack pipe with her and then watch her writhe around naked and covered in snakes. If you fuck up, however, she'll torture you or roast you over some hot coals. So like any job there's some good and bad.

During one of her drug orgies she has a strange vision, a faceless man shooting her with a magic bow and arrow, so she sends out her soldiers to kill him. In Ilias' his first battle against them he puts in an utterly pathetic attempt to fight them off (he only thought to bring about four arrows). Luckily this muscled, long-haired dude leaps into the fray and starts whipping ass with a mace while our hero lies face down in the mud. He is named Mace and carries a mark on his forehead that means he is a friend to no man, probably because they all make fun of his generic name. Instead he has developed a kinship with all animals, but don't think he'll show you any mercy if you are a wolf man. I guess if you wear pants you are fair game.

His Conan-meets-Beastmaster philosophy has some interesting loopholes, though. For instance, he uses Ilias' bow and arrow to kill an innocent hunter and then steals his boar and eats it for dinner. When Ilias protests he replies "Hey, I didn't kill it." He uses the same excuse later when he steals a sheep to impress some hot cave women. Plus, despite his supposed hatred of all mankind he immediately takes a shining towards Ilias and saves his life on multiple occasions. He even lets him bone his girlfriend's sister. He's a man of contradictions. I like that.

We've discussed tits but another important part of sword and sorcery and indeed any of Fulci's films are the over-the-top gore effects. The highlight is early in the film when a couple of wolf men attack a naked cavewoman. They grab her by the ankles and pry her legs apart, so I braced myself for some old-fashioned barbarian gang rape, but instead the two wolf men keep on pulling at her legs until they tear her in half. Then they take her severed head back to Ocron so she can crack that baby open and eat out the brains. Apart from that there's several decapitations, brain splatterings and messy impalements, but nothing too outlandish.

Another typical Fulci scene is when Ilias gets stung by some poisonous quills, fired off-screen from an creature that is neither seen nor mentioned. As our hero lies there unconscious (again) Fulci documents every oozing, bursting pustule in gratuitous close-up while Mace battles swamp zombies to find a magical plant that will cure him. He also fights this guy named Zora that Ocron had conjured into the body of her pet wolf. He takes several forms in the film, but usually it's a guy in a cool outfit that resembles a Chinese jade burial suit. Ocron makes a deal that if he kills Ilias' then he can have her body forever. He's pretty eager, especially since you know she's probably got a hare lip or some shit under that mask. Although I guess he's completely covered in plate armour, so he can't really judge.

After being cured Ilias decides to pack it in and go home (quitter!) and Mace is captured by some cool-looking chirping mummies and crucified. Ilias decides to come back just as Mace, still mounted on his cross, is being dumped into the ocean. It's pretty funny because Ilias doesn't even try to save him, he has to get rescued by a couple of friendly dolphins like fucking Aquaman. I guess Ilias must have become a man somewhere along the way (I didn't notice) because suddenly there is an eclipse and Ilias starts using his bow to fire magic blue lasers, like that ranger guy from Dungeons and Dragons cartoon. They can split into multiple arrows, curve around corners and do all sorts of cool shit.

Up until know I was wondering why we are stuck with this dork instead of the awesome Mace. Well, I guess the four (!) writers must have thought so too, because pretty soon after the two of them escape Ilias gets kidnapped and decapitated by some of Ocron's wolf men. Wow, I sure wasn't expecting that. Zora tries to claim on their deal and you'd think decapitating him would have been enough, but now she starts talking some bullshit about how he had slain his body but not his soul. He probably dodged a bullet, though, turns out that under her mask she's the worst butter face ever (I'd still do her).

The rest of the film progresses pretty much the way you'd expect. Mace finds Ilias' headless corpse, burns it on a funeral pyre and then rubs the ashes all over himself, imbuing him with Ilias' spirit so he can use his magic laser bow to get revenge on Ocron. He shoots her with a blue laser she and Zora both turn into wolves and run off into the sunset together. Then the movie then ruins my assumptions of historical legitimacy by claiming that "Any reference to persons or events is coincidental".

There isn't much of a plot, the movie just kind of drifts along amiably with some weird unexplained shit happening every so often. Lots of boring traveling, mostly implied since most of the film looks like it was shot in somebody's backyard. It it has a few good things going for it, though. There's a throbbing Claudio Simonetti soundtrack and the dubbing is surprisingly good. The costumes and set design are a delicious mixture of inspired and cheesy and there's a fair bit of gore and nudity. Unfortunately, and this is one of my major gripes with the film, you can't actually see any of it properly for all the smoke and haze and darkness and soft-focus lenses. I know Fulci likes his dream logic and fog machines, but it's fucking intolerable here. Why would you have Sabrina Siani show her tits for an entire movie and then obscure them with fog? What an asshole. If you can put up with that though (just pretend you have glaucoma) this is a pretty decent Conan rip-off.

Don't Torture a Duckling (1972)

"Which way to the Sonny Bono lookalike contest?"

So, now that I've reviewed New York Ripper, it's time to review the other Lucio Fulci giallo in which a toy duck is a vital clue to the identity of the killer. Aside from that detail, however, the two films couldn't be more different. They were made almost ten years apart, and as such they represent rather different periods in his career. Those expecting the gory excess of his post-Zombie films may be bitterly disappointed, but everyone else will find this a solid, suspenseful giallo.

Like any good film, it begins with two fat, old hookers heading to a remote abandoned house to meet their customers. Three boys are loitering nearby and they couldn't be more excited, one of them enthusiastically describing their "tits like watermelons and huge rears". They like 'em big up that way I guess. Unfortunately, our budding chubby chasers are beaten to the prime peepin' spot by Giuseppe, the village idiot. After Giuseppe is discovered by an irate john, the boys tease him until he chases them off and threatens to kill them.

His death-threats proved to be rather ill-timed, because the next day one of the boys turns up dead and now Giuseppe is the prime suspect. Adding to suspicion is Giuseppe's claim that when he found the boy he was already dead, he just buried the body and tried to extort some kidnapping money from the boys parents. As you do. Through some bizarre logic, the psychologist suspects that Giuseppe is innocent and he is proven right when another body shows up. The police have their work cut out for them, since the village's major export appears to be red herrings.

There's Patrizia (Barbara Bouchet), a rich girl who has come to the village to wait until some drug charges in Milan blow over. Her hobbies include driving around in her car for hours and hours, for no other reason than to make her look suspicious. She's got a thing for young boys, and I mean young. She teases one with her nude indoor sunbathing, and calls him up for an underage booty call. Suspect behaviour at the best of times, but made moreso when the boys she teases turn up dead.

Could it be Maciara (Florina Balkan) the crazy-eyed woman who is always playing with voodoo dolls and carting around a baby skeleton (long story)? When the police finally track her down she confesses to the murders, but it's thrown out when she claims to have killed them with black magic. After she goes into a bout of over-acting so severe that she has an epileptic seizure, they decide it's best to let her go. She doesn't enjoy her freedom for long though. The next morning a foursome of superstitious local yokels subject her to a brutal chain-whipping that manages to top the chain-whipping scene in The Beyond, especially since it's set to funk music.

There's the local witch doctor who hands out lotions and potions to superstitious locals (choice quote: "Only St. Benedict or St. Mark know that. Excuse me, I gotta take a crap.") There's the kindly young priest (maybe too kindly) who looks after the young boys and enforces a village-wide ban on dirty magazines, forcing young boys to spy on fat hookers. Plus the priest's mother looks pretty suspicious. Every character in this film has a few skeletons in their closet (in Mariaca's case, a baby skeleton), no wonder they have such a hard time discovering the identity of the killer.

In the end the rather abstract title makes slightly more sense, as the final clue comes in the form of a decapitated Donald Duck doll. The doll belongs to a small mute girl who is, according to the priest, "not a moron, if that's what you're thinking. She's retarded." They conclude that the little girl witnessed the killings and is therefore imitating them with her dolls. A pretty dubious logical leap if you ask me (one of many in this film), but it turns out they are right.

The hero of the piece is a nosy reporter (there's always got to be one in a giallo) named Andrea Martelli (Tomas Milian) who has come to the village to investigate the killings. He disappears from the film for long stretches, so it can be easy to forget he's even around, but we know he's the hero because he teams up with Patrizia in the end and engages in a climatic, cliff-side fistfight with the killer. When the killer makes his fatal plunge down the side of cliff, his (paper mache) face scrapes down the side of the cliff in slow motion. It's pretty cool.

Don't Torture a Duckling is far more coherent and thickly plotted Fulci's later films. It's also genuinely creepy, he paints the small village as a place of suspicion and superstition and it seems like every character in the film could be capable of the crimes. Like most Italian films from that era, a lot of acting is ruined by dodgy dubbing, but special mention must be made of Florinda Balkan, who puts in a pretty amazing performance as the bugnuts crazy Maciara (she also played the titular character in the classic nunsploitation flick Flavia the Heretic).

This film wasn't well received when it first opened. It's negative portrayal of small village mentality and the church didn't sit well with some Italian film-goers. Consequently, the film has been a little hard to find outside of Italy until recently. That's a shame. Although the incomprehensible, blood-soaked excess of his later films is fun to watch, it's given Fulci a reputation as a B (or even C) movie hack. Watching this film reminded me that when he shows a little restraint, Fulci knows how to direct the shit out of a film.

The New York Ripper (1982)

My bedroom during high school.

I don't know what Fulci has against ducks. If it were geese I can understand, they are evil waterfowl straight from Satan's lake of fire, but what could you possibly have against ducks? So far Fulci has made two duck-themed giallos, which is probably two more than any other director. The first is Don't Torture a Duckling (1972), where a Donald Duck doll figures into the identity of the killer (the film is also known under the totally awesome title Don't Torture Donald Duck). The New York Ripper was made ten years later, and here the killer likes to ring up his victims and taunt them using quacking noises.

The film starts as pretty much every murder-mystery starts. Some overly-enthusiastic guy throws a stick for his dog, but the stupid pooch returns with a severed appendage instead. We know it's a Fulci film, though, because the credits sequence is shown over a freeze-framed close-up of the grody rotten hand, complete with happy music.

Put in charge of the investigation is Lt. Fred Williams (Jack Hedley), an old guy in a Columbo trenchcoat. When he's not on the clock he spends his time (and money) with a prostitute named Kitty (Daniela Dora from City of the Living Dead). He's a big spender too... from the looks of things he's paying for the full night. Meanwhile the body count starts to rack up. A clumsy cyclist in tiny red shorts in takes a trip on a ferry, but the killer catches her defacing some asshole's windshield with her lipstick (she got as far as "SHIT") and graphically guts her while making quacking noises.

Williams hooks up with an arrogant psychology professor named Dr. Paul Davis (Paolo Malco from House by the Cemetery) who seems to spend all his time playing with a computerized chess board, which was probably totally boss back in 1982. He's not particularly helpful, he just spouts the standard psychobabble that we all knew anyway, but one point he picks up a male nudie mag from a newsstand (Blueboy, if you're interested, though he did consider Honcho, both for research purposes, no doubt), which in a giallo is a surefire sign that he's a crazed deviant, but nothing ever comes of it.

Meanwhile we are introduced to a few characters, one of whom may or may not be the killer. There's a Greek gigolo named Mickey with three fingers on one hand, who decides to take in a live sex show. You'd think he'd have seen enough of that kind of thing with his day job, but the marquee lists the show as "SEXtacular", "SEXsational" and "SEXciting", which is pretty impressive. Also in the audience is a hot woman in a hat and trenchcoat, who whips out a tape recorder and starts fondling it while masturbating, just like I do when I watch Steven Seagal films. She is Jane Forrester Lodge (Alexandra Delli Colli, last seen naked and painted with pretty flowers in Zombie Holocaust) a rich married woman with a penchant for freaky sex. Anyway, when the sex performer goes backstage after the show, she gets a broken bottle to the genitals by our quacking killer.

Later a young woman named Fay Majors has an encounter with the Greek dude on the subway, but when she escapes onto the street she is attacked by the duck-obsessed killer. Luckily she escapes with only a leg injury, but while unconscious she had a dream that it was her boyfriend Peter that attacked her, so maybe he is the killer. Or maybe he isn't. Or maybe he is. Apparently she an Olympic hopeful, but they don't say what event. Hopefully it's not track and field, because she put in a pretty poor effort running from the killer.

Typical of the genre, all of these different characters manage to interact with each other in various extremely coincidental and convenient ways considering they are in a city of 7 million people. Mrs. Lodge has a sexual encounter with Mickey which ends with her getting knifed in the hallway. Mickey breaks into Fay's house while she's recuperating from her injury but she's rescued by Peter before he can finish the job. Eventually the cast is whittled down to a small enough size that Lt. Williams can make a pretty good (but wrong) guess. They bust into the supposed killer's abandoned apartment, which is filled with nudie mags (and large framed photos of himself naked), so I guess the professor was onto something.

Although all the murders are graphic and bloody, the most graphic one is when the killer fools the cops with a walkie-talkie and a pay phone and slices up Kitty the prostitute with a razor blade. There's a closeup of him slicing up her nipple and eyeball. It's a Fulci film, they've got to put some ocular trauma in there somewhere. I think it's in his contract.

You might have noticed that there's a lot of nudity and sleazy sex in this film. Hell, at one point Mrs Lodge goes to a dive bar frequented by hoods in frighteningly tight pants and gets masturbated under the table by some dude's smelly feet (gross!). Weirdly, all this sex doesn't tie into the plot or the killer's motive at all. The motive is pretty boring actually, and yeah, it involves a toy duck this time as well. Typically in giallos there's some sort of psycho-sexual aspect to the killings, but here there's no thematic elements to tie it to. Why, you might even say Fulci was being a little gratuitous (heavens, no!).

This movie was banned in quite a few places upon it's release. It's not any more gory than his horror films (probably less actually), but it's not dreamy and fantastic, it's got a gritty, realistic edge to it. I guess you could compare it to Maniac. Like that film, there's some pretty sweet shots of 42nd street and I had fun spotting all the films on the cinema marquees. Other than that it's bad acting, bad dubbing, bad dialog, but's it a pretty good showcase for gory setpieces. If you only have to see one Donald Duck related slasher this year, see Don't Torture a Duckling, but if you want to see two then this one should fit the bill. Get it, duck, bill? Ah, forget it.

The Beyond (1981)

No! Bad dog! No biscuit!

The renovation of an old property is always full of surprises. Who knows what you'll discover? Rising damp, termite damage, even the occasional gateway to Hell. Our hapless renovator in this case is Liza Merril (Catriona MacColl), a big city gal who has come to Louisana with the hopes of reopening the crappy old hotel she has inherited from her rich uncle.

The story of the creepy hotel dates back to 1927, when everything was sepia toned and men wore hats and suits even when administering mob justice. Some painter in room 36 named Shweik has been giving everyone the heebie-jeebies with his creepy paintings, so a lynch mob pulls out some chains and goes Passion of the Christ on his ass. As if that wasn't enough, they drag him down to the basement, crucify him, douse him in quicklime and wall him up. The title music starts playing as the quicklime slowly melts his head, an effect which Fulci must have really loved because he uses it again later.

Unfortunately, the hotel was built on one of the seven gates to Hell, and their act of vigilantism opened it right up, ready for any curious zombie to go wandering in. I don't know why there are seven gates or where the other six are, but I'm sure it's all documented in the Book of Eibon, a musty old tome that some weird blind girl named Emily (Cinzia Monreale from Beyond the Darkness) reads from during the opening scene.

Liza's renovation plans get off to a poor start when a contractor gets spooked and takes a nose-dive off the scaffolding. After the hunky Dr MacCabe (David Warbeck) carts away the injured contractor, Joe the Plumber (no, not that Joe the Plumber, this guy is much more hairy) shows up to take care of the flooded basement. In his search for the mysterious leak he uncovers a hidden underground chamber and gets his eyes gouged out by Shweik, now a crusty old zombie. Also, a guy who goes to find the floor plans for the hotel falls of a ladder and gets his face eaten off by tarantulas. He finds something pretty shocking in the plans, but I don't know what because they're never referred to again.

If all this weren't enough to derail the renovation plans, the house also comes with two useless weirdos, Arthur and Martha. Much like Ann the babysitter in House by the Cemetery, they don't serve much purpose except to act weird and then die gruesomely. Martha dies while cleaning a bathtub that is full of muddy water. When she drains it she discovers that a zombie is hiding in it and I guess he's pretty serious about his bathtime privacy because he impales her head on a big nail.

Eventually Liza runs into blind weirdo Emily and her seeing-eye dog, and Emily gives her the usual cryptic warnings that blind people give in this kinds of films. Leave the hotel, it's evil etc. It's revealed that Emily may or may not be a ghost, but I guess her dog isn't because when Emily is accosted by zombies she gets her dog to attack them until they go away. I was ready to indict him into the hall of heroic horror film dogs like Nanook from Lost Boys or Beast from The Hills Have Eyes, but then he ruins it by turning on his owner and tearing out her throat and ear.

Back at the hospital morgue, Dr. MacCabe examines the bodies of both Joe the Plumber and Schweik. Dr. Harris (holy crap, it's Al Cliver, from 2020: Texas Gladiators and Endgame) decides to hook Shweik up to what appears to be a heart monitor (although they claim it's some sort of brainwave scanner). Who knows why, but he looks pretty dejected when nothing happens and leaves the room. If only he'd stayed a few minutes longer he could have seen the oscilloscope spring to life.

It's about now that Joe's wife and daughter wander into the morgue to dress up his corpse in his Sunday best. I guess they were too cheap to pay a funeral director. Joe's wife leaves her daughter outside, but when she enters the surgery she gets knocked over somehow and, in what is surely the result of poor OH&S practices, a huge bottle of acid tips over and pours all over her face. When her daughter comes wandering in she sits staring at her mother's melting face for a few minutes before rushing to escape the pool of bloody foam that threatens to ruin her new shoes. Unfortunately she wanders right into the freezer room which is full of zombies. She survives somehow, although she goes blind and later turns into a zombie and Dr. MacCabe shoots her in the head. Long story.

Liza ends up teaming up with Dr. MacCabe. They form a partnership where she has visions and freaks out while he shows up just in time to belittle her and be condescending. Dr. MacCabe finds the book of Eibon, and while it doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know, it does cause a big storm (in the basement) that sends them rushing to Dr MacCabe's hospital. By this stage it seems the gate to hell has let loose a whole bunch of zombies and the last ten minutes of the film is spent with these two idiots trying to escape all the zombies that are wandering around. Unfortunately neither of them have seen a zombie film because even after expending dozens of rounds and killing maybe half a dozen zombies with headshots he still doesn't get it. All of a sudden they find themselves in a weird endless ocean with bodies stacked up everywhere like stinky legos, just like in Shweik's creepy paintings. A voice drones on about an "ocean of darkness" like we are supposed to know what the hell that is supposed to mean, and the film ends.

It's typical Fulci, in that the pacing is off and nothing makes any sense. The script doesn't help either, but it's written by Dardano Sacchetti and he had three other films to write that year so cut him a break. However, this film is probably the most successful in creating a weird dreamlike atmosphere. I could kind of see it before in House by the Cemetery and City of the Living Dead, but now that I've seen The Beyond (considered his masterpiece), I think I finally get it. Out of his classic trilogy of supernatural horror films, this one is by far the best.

City of the Living Dead (1980)

Bob (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) is bored to death

City of the Living Dead is another film in Lucio Fulci's "zombie trilogy". Like his other films, it eschews traditional storytelling for an atmosphere of dread and gory setpieces, a technique that would be further refined in his next offering, The Beyond.

The film opens in New York, where are bunch of fun-loving occultists are trying to have a chat with the spirit world. During the seance, Maria (Katriona MacColl, from House by the Cemetery) has a vision of a priest hanging himself in the sleepy town of Dunwich (the fictional town featured in many of H.P. Lovecraft's stories). In doing so, he has left the gate to hell open and a bunch of zombies have walked in and tracked mud all over the the house. If it isn't shut by All Saint's Day, it'll stay open forever. Well, that's just great! After her vision, Mary has a psychic seizure and dies of shock.

This kind of movie wouldn't be complete without a nosy reporter, this time taking the form of the cigar chomping Peter Bell (Christopher George) . When he visits Mary's grave the next day, he hears screams coming from inside the coffin! He grabs a pick-axe and starts laying into it, almost trepanning Mary in the process (I like to think he thought she was a zombie and was trying to kill her). After an exposition-heavy visit to the psychic from the seance, they decide to drive to Dunwich and see if they can close the gate to hell, maybe put some of those self-closing hinges on it.

Meanwhile, strange things are going on in Dunwich. Smoke-spewing cracks are opening up in walls, windows and mirrors are spontaneously exploding, walls are bleeding etc. The undead are walking around with no regard for local loitering laws. Actually, in this film the zombies behave more like ghosts, appearing and disappearing at will. The zombie priest uses his teleportation ability to spy on some teenagers making out. His disapproving glare has a detrimental effect on the girl... she starts crying blood and then barfs up all her internal organs. I did the same thing when my mother walked in on me masturbating. He then grabs a handful of the guys head and tears out a chunk of his brain matter.

We are also introduced to a psychiatrist Gerry (Carlo De Mejo), and his patient Sandra (Janet Agren). Gerry's girlfriend Emily (Antonella Interlenghi) has had a fatal visitation from the zombie priest. He shoved a handful of worms in her face, which would be a pretty awesome prank if you were seven years old, but in this case she died of fright. She soon comes back as a zombie and murders her parents.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that Dunwich seems like a fairly ordinary small town, Peter and Mary are having a hell of a time finding the place. We're an hour into the film and they still haven't arrived. Peter claims it was built on the ruins of Salem, but I always thought that Salem was built on the ruins of Salem. Maybe that's why they can't find it?

One character I haven't mentioned, because his subplot is utterly disposable, is Bob (Giovanni Lombardo Radice). He is a creepy, mentally-handicapped pervert, shunned by the local populace, who likes to sit in abandoned buildings and fondle his spontaneously-inflating sex doll. Bob crops up here and there throughout the movie, stumbling upon corpses and seeing ghosts. Bob meets his end not at the hands of the zombies, but that of a local who thinks Bob's been fiddling with his daughter. Poor Bob gets a table drill right through the cranium, and is never mentioned again.

Anyway, eventually Peter and Mary meet up with Gerry and Sandra. Since it wouldn't be a Fulci film without maggots (Fulci's brother must have owned a maggot farm or something), the windows burst open and little fellas start raining in like wriggly little snowflakes. They manage track down the priests tomb, and once inside it's time for the final showdown with the zombie priest. Before he can do his vomit-inducing party trick on Mary, Gerry (the other two having since been killed) anti-climatically runs him through with a stake. All of the zombies burst into flame and they escape.

As they emerge from the tomb, Emily's little brother John-John, flanked by police officers, runs towards them. For unexplained reasons, Mary screams in terror and the film ends.

I'm definitely not the kind of guy who demands a strict, linear narrative with all subplots neatly wrapped up in a red bow. I don't mind if a director fucks with my head a little bit. With Fulci, however, it seems more like just plain incompetence in basic storytelling. There are a lot of Fulci fans out there who romanticise his lackadaisical approach to plot, even comparing him to Dario Argento. I don't think that's a fair comparison. With Argento, the extreme gore is just one operatic element of a stylistic whole. With Fulci the extreme gore is the raison d'etre. Not that I think there's anything necessarily wrong with that.

Anyway, if a girl puking up her own intestines sounds like something you'd want to see, you should see this film. Then seek professional help.

House by the Cemetery (1981)

You will learn to hate this child.

Along with City of the Living Dead and The Beyond, House by Cemetery completed a trilogy of horror films that defined Fulci's style as a horror director. His films' lack of narrative cohesion, elaborately staged set-pieces and bizarre lingering shots give them a surreality, a dreamlike atmosphere where anything could happen. Which is a fancy way of saying that they make no damn sense. Lucio Fulci is a style-over-substance director, and while his films very much fit the exploitation mold, there is enough attention to visual detail and genuinely memorable shots to make his films worth watching. It's still trash, but when it works, it's glorious.

House by the Cemetery opens with a couple of teens who thought the titular house would be a good place for some sweet, sweet lovin'. The guy gets his head split open and his torso pinned to a door with a pair of scissors, while the girl gets a knife through the back of her head and out her mouth. Her body is dragged away by a strange creature.

Meanwhile in New York, Dr Norman Boyle (Paolo Malco, bearded and in tweed and a turtleneck) has agreed to travel up to his colleague Professor Peterson's New England house for six months, in order to complete Peterson's research. Peterson had been conducting research into suicide, but unfortunately he got a little too into his work and killed his mistress and then himself. Accompanying Dr Boyle is his wife Lucy (Catriona MacColl) and their son Bob (Giovanni Frezza). Bob is a blonde, frog-faced urchin who is having visitations from the ghost of a young girl, warning them away from the house. Bob's atrocious and annoying dubbing sinks any chance of the film being taken seriously.

On their arrival both the real estate agent and the library archivist mention Dr Boyle having visited the town before with a little girl, but he has no recollection of doing so. Don't get attached to this plot point because it is henceforth abandoned entirely.

The house has a boarded up cellar (bad sign!) but comes complete with a caterpillar-eyebrowed, live-in babysitter, Ann (Ania Pieroni). Soon after they move in Dr Boyle finds her prying the boards from the basement door in the middle of the night. Rather than ask her what the hell she's doing he gets into a staring competition with her, wins, and goes back to bed.

It's not long before Dr Boyle discovers that the previous owner of the house, Dr Freudstein (heh) was suspended from the Medical Association for "illegal experiments", and Mrs Boyle finds his tomb in the middle of the lounge room floor. Lucy is understandably upset, but Norman claims that there are a lot of indoor tombs in the area because the ground freezes up in winter. This would be a fine excuse if the house wasn't by a cemetery!

Soon after unlocking the cellar door they suffer a protracted attack from a fake-looking bat. After what seems like a good ten minutes, Dr Boyle stabs it to death, spilling far more blood than you would expect to find in a 2 pound mammal. That's the last straw for the Boyles, and they decide to see the real estate agent about finding a new home. Her apathetic assistant promises he will send her by that evening, but I guess they forgot because when she drops by later no-one is home. She gets her leg caught in the newly uncovered tomb and is brutally stabbed to death.

The next morning Ann is cleaning up bloodstains and acting in her typically suspicious manner. I don't know if the blood is from the bat or the real estate agent, but either way Lucy doesn't seem perturbed by it. All of Ann's sinister behaviour, however, amounts to sod all, because later that day she gets herself locked in the basement and her throat slashed not once, not twice, but thrice. Bob almost bites it too, but unfortunately he escapes. When he heads down there with his mother there is no sign of Ann nor the copious amount of blood spilled mere moments ago. This is stupid.

Meanwhile Dr Boyle is trying to find the tomb of Dr Freudstein in the cemetery. The caretaker informs him that it isn't there. Gee, you don't suppose it could have anything to do with the tomb in your living room floor. The one marked Freudstein?!

Anyway, some time later Bob gets trapped in the basement again (stop toying with me, Lucio!) This time, he finds the undead Freudstein and the bodies of the victims he uses to keep himself alive. During the rescue attempt, his parents get themselves locked in the basement too (this happens all the time in this film, have you noticed?) Dr Boyle stabs Freudstein and maggots pour from the wound. Unaffected, Freudstein tears this throat out. The remaining two attempt to escape but Mrs Boyle gets dragged down the stairs, her head audibly thumping on each step. Bob manages to escape just in time (damn it!!) thanks to the help of the little girl. Suddenly the house is back as it was a hundred years ago and Bob and the little girl are led away by Mrs Freudstein to an unknown fate.

After this head-scratcher of an ending, the film finishes with a title card of a barely relevant Henry James quote, but at least it's spelled correctly.

Fulci's films often seem like they were edited by throwing darts at a wall, and this one is no exception. The pacing seems off kilter, and subplots are built up and then never mentioned again. Undiscriminating gorehounds, however, will definitely enjoy this film. The special effects (from Gianetti De Rossi, working previously with Fulci on Zombi 2) are fantastic, but the shots linger just a bit too long, exposing their fakery. Also, Fulci's obsession with eyes reaches a ridiculous height in this film. The characters frequently engage in bizarre staring contests. This film is tolerable when taken as a gory stylistic exercise, but thinking about the plot for more than a few seconds will make your brain hurt.

Zombi 3 (1988)

You expect me to do some sort of "head" pun here, don't you?
Well, screw you. I'm not your dancing monkey.

Despite it's tenuous connection to Zombi, I wouldn't call Zombi 2 a blatant cash-in. Zombi 2 has enough low budget charm and genuinely original moments to stand on it's own two feet. Zombi 3, however, was a naked grab for cash. Lucio Fulci returned as director, but providing the script was legendary hack Claudio Fragasso. Lucio Fulci was reportedly greatly dissatisfied with the script, and when Fulci criticises your narrative cohesion you've really got problems. Eventually Fulci left the project due to frequent arguments with Fragasso, combined with ill health due to the shooting location in the budget-friendly Phillipines. The material that Fulci turned in was well under feature film length, so second unit director Bruno Mattei was asked to help Fragasso complete the film.

Did the mention of that unholy writer/director combo send a mysterious cold chill running up your spine? Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso were a force to be reckoned with during the 70s and 80s, dumping a huge number of low-budget cinematic turd-bombs into the laps of undiscriminating filmgoers. Their films are legendary for their awfulness. It is still unclear which parts of Zombi 3 are attributable to which director, but the finished product is definitely more Mattei than Fulci. This is not a good thing.

Whereas the cause of the zombie outbreak is left to speculation in Zombi and Zombi 2, a cheesy opening sequence in Zombi 3 reveals it as the result of a secret government experiment to revive the dead, unimaginatively named Death 1. For some unexplained reason, a bunch of terrorists steal the cannister during transport and the lone survivor manages to split it open and spill some of the gunk on his hand during his escape. Rather than leave the country or at least get to a hospital, he checks into a hotel before turning into a zombie and chowing down on hotel staff.

Meanwhile the scientists and military types are butting heads, the military gunning for total extermination while the scientists demand more time to find an antidote. The military wins out and the hotel residents are exterminated and the bodies burnt which makes the zombie virus airbourne (Fragasso must have seen Return of the Living Dead).

Elsewhere a group of soldiers are flirting with some chicks in a van when they are attacked by a bunch of zombie birds. One of the girls is pecked to death and the survivors head over to the now abandoned (and covered in vines, for some reason) hotel. They find a box of machine guns in the basement (I guess hotel security take their job very seriously) and they are pretty chuffed even though they haven't seen anything more than some homicidal birds.

One of the fun things about zombie films, or any monster films really, is discovering the rules. How they move, how they act, how they can be killed. The problem with this film is that there is no consistency. Sometimes they'll be creeping along, hands outstretched Romero style, other times they'll be using weapons and busting out martial arts moves. In one scene a self-propelled zombie head busts out of the fridge and flies across the room, while it's body lies in wait in a kitchen cupboard to ambush hungry passersby. In fact, ambushing people seems to be pretty popular with these zombies. Leaping out from on top of buildings, in cupboards, even busting through some random pregnant woman's stomach from under a table... they sure know how to make an entrance. This unforgivable sloppiness makes it a terribly frustrating film to watch.

This film is an explosion of incompetence. Everything about the film is cheap, tacky and sloppy. Even the gore and makeup effects are half-assed. If, like me, you enjoy watching this kind of irredeemable trash you'll probably get a kick out of it, but your idea of the worst film ever made is, say, Catwoman, you're best advised to stay away and avoid finding out just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Zombi 2 (aka Zombie Flesh Eaters) (1979)

Paola (Olga Karlatos) keeps an eye out for zombies

In this film a zombie fights a shark while a half-naked scuba diver looks on in terror. You might as well stop reading here, as that sentence tells you everything you need to know. Zombi (aka Dawn of the Dead) was a huge success in Italy and Zombi 2 was produced the following year as an unofficial sequel. Taking the reins this time was Lucio Fulci. He was already somewhat well-known thanks to a string of giallo films (including the notoriously violent Don't Torture a Duckling), but this was the film that would put him on the map and cement his reputation for extreme gore and graphic violence.

An abandoned yacht is found floating in New York Harbour. Two members of the coastguard investigate and discover a piano covered in noisy worms, a lot of synthesizer music and a big fat zombie. One cop manages to blast it into the water, but not before the other has his jugular torn out in a graphic fashion.

Enter one young woman, Anne (Tisa Farrow). It turns out the boat belonged to her father, who was conducting research on the remote Caribbean island of Matool. So she, along with the requisite nosy reporter Peter West (Ian McCulloch), head off in search of her father, enlisting the help of seafaring couple Brian (Al Cliver) and Susan (Auretta Gay). It is around this time that the legendary shark vs zombie scene occurs, and it really is rather impressive, although I imagine naked scuba diving must chafe quite a bit.

Meanwhile on Matool, Dr. Menard (Richard Johnson) is trying to discover the cause of the zombie outbreak while his wife Paola (Olga Karlatos), fearing zombie attack, tries to convince him to leave. Her fears are well founded, as she is promptly attacked while taking a shower (of course) and her eye is slowly gouged out on a splinter of wood in one of the most notorious scenes in the film.

Soon the number of zombies increase to the point where the doctor's standard practice of wrapping them in a white sheet and blasting them in the head isn't quite going to cut it. Nearly everybody dies and upon the survivors' return to New York they discover that the zombie infection has spread there too and an army of zombies are munching their way through the city. They didn't have shooting permission for this scene, so this amounts to a couple dozen extras shuffling along a bridge as decidedly nonchalant traffic passes by below.

The plot is wafer-thin, but mostly coherent, which is rare for Fulci. The film comes to life largely thanks to the visual effects of Giannetto de Rossi. The zombie makeup is simple (mostly oatmeal paste applied liberally to the face), but very effective and the gore effects are a work of art. The film was very controversial upon it's release. A huge success in it's native Italy, it was severely cut in many other countries and was placed on the list of "Video Nasties" in the UK. Some theatres in the US went the ultra-gimmicky move of handing out barf bags before screenings.

You'd be forgiven to dismiss the film as exploitative trash, as it is exploitative trash. Fulci's lingering close-ups of pulsing wounds are about as sleazy as they come. However, some of the scenes, such as the sheet-wrapped bodies slowly rising up from their slumber, are genuinely eerie. I'd say it is worth watching, especially if you are a fan of zombie films, if only to see what all the fuss was about. But make sure you watch the unrated version.