Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned

When it comes to vigilante movies, one of the reasons that the original Death Wish is so effective is that it starts off at a recognizable human place. I do not agree with the conclusions that the movie reaches (that owning a gun will solve all your problems and that we should be allowed to murder criminals indiscriminately) but I appreciate that it has a level of grit to ground its depiction of New York as a crime-ridden hellscape in some form of reality, and that it does the legwork to plausibly evolve its protagonist from avowed pacifist to cold-blooded instrument of righteous violence. Of course, once that movie laid the groundwork of selling its genre, the sequels could shift away from those elements and focus on the exploitative elements that get asses in seats. By the third movie, the series had become practically a reflex of unhinged violence, cheerfully dishing scene after scene of increasingly contrived action and turning the inner cities into a warzone.

As vigilante thrillers expanded in other directions, you saw some of that same slipping away from reality. Class of 1984 presents an inner city school where an earnest new teacher ends up waging war against a vicious gang that dominates the school, yet with its vantage point occupied by an adult, the hysteria is grounded in something recognizable. Savage Streets does away with adults almost entirely, and its characters seem transported from a sinister alternate dimension where the teenagers all look at least thirty, dance with skeletons while waiting for science class to start, freely light up in the presence of school staff and get into fights in the showers while wearing leather pants. (During this scene, while the heroine fights another girl, two completely unrelated characters fight in the nude on the side. Perhaps they wanted to fit in?) The opening sequence, wherein a character steps out of his parents' home and promptly swaps his Harrington for a leather jacket to show us the no good piece of **** he is, attempts to link this to a Helen Lovejoy kind of hysteria ("Won't somebody please think of the children?"), but the effect is less than convincing. The only recognizable human character in sight is a deaf mute played by Linnea Quigley, who perhaps because she has no dialogue, behaves something like an actual teenager. She's the most sympathetic, and as a result of genre demands, is brutally gang raped by four punks. Like other such scenes in this genre, it is quite unpleasant, but I do think Quigley, a reliably vivacious presence elsewhere, is effective in selling this scene and her character's poignancy.

The movie is less moving but still entertainingly ridiculous when it shows the punks' other misdeeds, like when they repeatedly hassle a teenage deadbeat for overdue coke money and when they throw another girl, soon to be married with her wedding dress in hand, off an overpass. Bad news for them, the sister of the deaf mute girl and friend of the deceased is Linda Blair, who after finding little help from the adults in her life, takes the law into her own hands and exacts bloody vengeance. The movie doesn't sell the psychology of this transformation all that convincingly, but the limited sympathy of authority figures and lack of sympathetic males does seem grounded in some kind of emotional reality. Blair gets a suiting up sequence similar to the Schwarzenegger and Stallone vehicles of the era (her outfit and weapon of choice being a black jumpsuit and switchblade, respectively), and proceeds to dispatch the wrongdoers in a neat reversal of the stalk-and-slash sequences common in horror movies. (Like in Death Wish II, the film's appropriation of slasher movie tropes emphasizes the moralizing quality of the violence.) The movie never feels truly sleazy like certain other movies of the era (its tenuous grasp on reality and suburban milieu give it a grime tourist quality), but Blair is forceful in the central role and the movie dishes out its schlocky pleasures with plenty of energy.

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Given the sleazy subject matter, I was surprised by the amount of warmth in Angel. This is a movie about a child prostitute whose friends are murdered by a serial killer, yet in delivering these salacious elements, the movie achieves an impressive level of dramatic weight. There's a surprising amount of attention devoted to the social dynamic on the street, between the prostitutes and the other performers, including a Charlie Chaplin impersonator and a kindly old cowboy played by Rory Calhoun. These characters are likable individuals with real personalities who form something of a family with the heroine played by Donna Wilkes. Even more surprisingly, the movie does a respectable job with its LGBT characters, including an old trans prostitute played by Dick Shawn and a lesbian landlady played by Susan Tyrell. Are they broadly drawn? Yes, but the movie shows a welcome amount of compassion toward them - they're a source of some humour but not the butt of the joke. You get the sense that Hollywood Boulevard isn't just a hive of scum and villainy like the premise would suggest, but a living, breathing community. A good amount of credit goes to the cinematography by Andrew Davis, who is no great visual stylist but brings some of the same feel for location that would distinguish Code of Silence, which he directed the following year. His work is particularly gripping in the climactic chase, where his reliance on handheld gives the action an almost vérité quality.

Movies like this tend to be a bit conservative in that the police are shown to be a stabilizing force, sometimes painting over the antagonistic relationship they've had with sex workers in real life, but again the movie deserves some credit for making its sympathetic cop character kind of an *******. Yes, he cares, but he's not someone the heroine can readily go to for help. Perhaps unintentionally, it shows the limitations of sympathetic outsiders to this world, in showing a brief yet completely unhelpful visit from a concerned teacher, whose attitude towards the heroine's LGBT friends comes off as entitled and condescending. After Savage Streets, this is the second movie I watched in a row that tries to link the ugly realities of the street with the comfortable domestic existence enjoyed by its assumed target audience, and specifically its impact on children (in the words of Helen Lovejoy... *wrings hands*).

Like that movie this is clumsy in making the connection, although the attempts to pass the cast off as teenagers are less egregious here. Wilkes looks with pigtails a little bit like what Steve Buscemi looks like with a baseball cap turned backwards, and her level of agency feels a bit implausible given her character's age, but she sells this about as well as it can be and turns in a pretty likable performance on the whole. There's also a kid who looks like Poindexter from Revenge of the Nerds and a couple of douchebags, one of whom wears a blazer despite the school not having a uniform, who antagonize the heroine. (The heroine wears a blazer as well, complete with gold buttons. Blazers seem to have been more popular among high schoolers in the '80s than the 2000s when I was of that age. Also beads. Between this and Savage Streets I've seen enough ****ing beads for a lifetime.) I did appreciate in delivering the skin quotient, it at least didn't excessively sexualize the heroine (it gets in a few superfluous shower scenes for that purpose), and has a welcome twist on the perfunctory rape scene you think it's setting up.

And of course, the movie wouldn't be very much fun if it didn't have a good villain, and the one here is a real sick ****. The movie lets you know what a sick **** he is almost right away. We see him stab a raw egg and drink the yolk while staring at a picture of his mother. He even eats the eggshells. What kind of a sick **** would do that? His own mother? And then we see him scrubbing himself with a sponge while his junk is facing an uncovered window? What if somebody sees? This ****ing sicko probably doesn't even care. And later we see him shaving his own head with a switchblade. Does he even own a razor? Probably, that's how ****ed up he is. The picture of the mother is likely the movie's attempt to draw a parallel between him and the heroine's own domestic situation, but given that he's mostly a blank slate (aside from the murders and ****ed up personal habits), it doesn't really land. But that's ultimately to the movie's benefit, as the movie's reframing of the slasher movie template keeps us firmly on the heroine's side as the bodies pile up. Not great by any means, but I was pleasantly surprised by how invested I was in this.

It's definitely my second favourite Dick Shawn performance after The Producers.


(I've only seen those two movies with him.)

You haven't seen Mad Mad Mad Mad World? It's a little dated, but it has moments.

Given that I have a soft spot for Rat Race, I probably should give it a go at some point, but I'll need to find the energy for a three hour comedy. The only times this year I've really tackled longer movies has been when I've had days off from work.

I don't know about you, but I envy those cool enough to shave with a ****ing switchblade. I 'd never have the patience. I like my five-bladers.

Same here, my man. Shaving with a switchblade just seems like an accident waiting to happen.

That's it, I'm digging up some Fulci write-ups.


(The Zombie review is from a few years ago, FYI, despite a reference to a then recent viewing. The City one is from last year and the Demonia is from this year.)

I watched Zombie 3 a few weeks ago and actually kind of enjoyed it. But then I started going back through my Letterboxd ratings and saw that I gave Zombie 2 (or Zombie) 1.5 out of 5 stars. And I figured that there’s no way in hell what’s supposedly one of Lucio Fulci’s best movies is worse than something he thought was so ****ty he tried to get his name off it. And I’d been listening a fair bit to Impetigo’s Ultimo Mondo Cannibale, a 44-minute slab of catchy as hell riffs, gruesome gargled lyrics and splatter movie samples, and surprise, surprise, there was a clip from Zombie before one of the songs. So I figured it was about time to revisit it and see if my opinion changed at all. Either it turned out to be better than I remembered and I benefited from seeing a good movie, or it was still actually terrible and I could smugly pat myself on the back for having been right the whole time. Either way, it seemed like a win-win proposition.

Turns out I won. In that it I enjoyed it a lot more than the first time around. I still wouldn’t place it as Fulci’s best and I think it still has issues, but it’s a pretty effective zombie movie that has some pretty strong atmosphere and one very good performance. One reason is that I’ve realized after the dubious pleasures of such fare as Nightmare City and Burial Ground that there’s a decent amount of actual craftsmanship in Zombie (the way I realized after Missing in Action that Rambo: First Blood Part II might be a better made movie than I initially gave it credit for), but there’s also a matter of experience. Zombie was one of the first Italian horror movies I’d seen that wasn’t directed by Dario Argento, and at the time I don’t think I was really prepared for Fulci’s style, which admittedly is more uneven than Argento’s. Fulci like Argento knows how to use shadow and framing to create striking scares, but much of the movie is set in broad daylight and outdoors, limiting the opportunities to put those tools to use. He knows how to make gore unsettling, but the splatter in his movies isn’t always artful, and it isn’t really here. And his movies don’t quite have the same narrative thrust as Argento’s, who knows how to lock us into the perspective of an audience surrogate and take us along for a tense, thrilling ride, while Fulci at his best uses incoherence and logic gaps to weave together a free-associative nightmare.

Some of these are tools that work really interestingly in the context of the supernatural horror of The Beyond and City of the Living Dead (the films which cemented by Fulci appreciation) but don’t inherently lend themselves well to the straightforward horror, and as Fulci’s first real splatter film, you can see him working out how to apply these tools in this context. Obviously the gore works in the expected way, graphic and nauseating as it should be, if without the frisson of an unexpected supernatural element in those other movies, and the most memorable gore gag, where a woman gets a splinter jammed in her eyeball, is unnerving in its drawn out execution. But in that scene and others you can see him use his usual tools - shadows, shots of eyes, silence - to eke tension out of the grue in a way that almost seems too classy for zombie gut-munching. Fulci had gotten the director’s job on the basis of the gore scenes in Seven Notes in Black and Don’t Torture a Duckling, and while the gore effects in the latter are amusingly the worst part of the movie, he really takes to it here and weaves it into the fabric of the film much more confidently, and it forms the basis of his reputation for his subsequent career.

But contrast that with the sense of atmosphere that runs through the rest of the movie, which is no less effective but an entirely different kind. Fulci and screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti (in their second of seven collaborations) have cited Val Lewton as an influence on this more so than George Romero, whose Dawn of the Dead this was marketed as a sequel to. On this viewing I can see strong shades of I Walked with a Zombie, with its tropical setting and references to Voodoo and colonial history colouring the proceedings. In particular, Fulci’s depiction of the island is much more evocative than I’d initially appreciated, and I like how he uses the environment, the derelict chapel/makeshift hospital and the mass graves to hang over the proceedings a morose, dismal atmosphere. This isn’t just an entertaining zombie movie, but an effectively somber one as well, and the direction of the zombies, who seem to sleepwalk rather than lurch, adds to this feeling. The location also serves the action well, with the decrepitness of chapel/hospital, which makes the house in Night of the Living Dead look secure, adding to the tension when the heroes try to defend it from the oncoming zombie horde during the climax, which, despite some recycled footage of exploding molotov cocktails, is tensely directed with action-adventure flair.

Now, the movie isn’t as well paced as some of Fulci’s other work (the pacing had been the main factor in my initial dismissal of the film) and there are a few cases of characters freezing up and waiting to be dispatched by the gore effects, but Fulci gets things off to a strong start with the foreboding of the opening scenes, in which a seemingly empty boat floats into the New York City harbour. The main theme by Fabio Frizzi is also wonderfully atmospheric, although some of the other sections of the score, particularly a jaunty Caribbean-flavoured theme, are a bit on the nose. In terms of the acting, most of the players do a respectable job, but as in my initial viewing, I still feel that Richard Johnson is the standout. He brings a genuine gravitas, weariness and sorrow to the role uncommon in Italian horror, which generally gets most of its personality from the director and frequently dubs away the nuances of performance, and one can feel the psychological toll bearing down on him as he goes about the wretched business of disposing of those afflicted by the zombie outbreak. (Co-star Ian McCulloch must have been taking notes, as he brings a similar weight to his work in Luigi Cozzi’s Contamination the following year.) And yes, while I still don’t think the zombie-vs-shark sequence is an all-time great horror movie scene, I admit that it’s better directed and more tense than I’d initially given it credit for, and the closing images are pretty neat too. Nobody’s right all the time.

While it would be a gross oversimplification of an entire genre, I think you can break horror down into two opposing poles: the implicit and the explicit. The former is the horror of suggestion, what you don’t see but is implied through atmosphere and deliberation. The latter is the horror of what you do see, invoking disgust, repulsion and fear at whatever horrific imagery the film conjures. Really horror exists on the spectrum and films have a bit of both, but most of the time they’ll fall much closer to one side than the other. Val Lewton productions are obvious representatives of the former, with nary a cat person to be spied clearly onscreen in Cat People. The splatter epics of Lucio Fulci lean heavily towards the latter, yet what I find most striking about City of the Living Dead over repeat viewings is how evokes both sides of the spectrum, presenting a most unusual synthesis of competing approaches. (Unsurprisingly, Fulci cited Lewton as an influence on his work.)

Anyone who’s seen a Fulci film knows that he believes in the horror of the explicit, taking relish in serving up scenes of grisly violence in nauseating, horrific detail, which in this film include the vomiting of intestines, heads being drilled and brains being gouged. His films are known some of the most violent ever made, yet that reputation might undersell the power of their delivery, as they derive their impact not just from their gruesomeness but from the strength of the filmmaking both during and around these scenes. The film opens with the foreboding image of a priest hanging himself, an act which has opened the gates of hell and within days will result in some kind of apocalyptic event. A character dies of sheer fright when seeing this in a vision, which can be interpreted as a dare to the audience, yet Fulci understands the power of that opening imagery and returns to it often, weaving that and other motifs, like fog and weeping blood, into the tapestry of ultraviolence that follows.

The gore scenes arrive with little warning, grisly non-sequiturs whose raw power is compounded by the lack of explanation that accompanies them, and the film uses the space between these sequences to build an oppressive sense of dread. This is a horror of which we’ve seen the effects (in disturbingly explicit detail) but grasp little of the ways in which it operates, unsettling us not just with what it can do, but by its refusal to adhere to our logic. Fulci’s films are sometimes described as nightmares, and I think this one best captures the subconscious, free-associative illogic that implies. Coming after Zombie and before The Black Cat and The Beyond, City of the Living Dead feels less lavish in comparison, with its non-scope aspect ratio and smaller-scaled proceedings. (The relatively marginal quality of the production likely explains some of the shortcuts taken, like the abrupt yet effectively uneasy ending, and the score by Fabio Frizzi that feels derivative of Goblin’s Dawn of the Dead score and Frizzi’s own work in Zombie.) Yet it uses that sparseness as a sort of narrative negative space, turning what’s really a handful of characters, some unbelievably graphic gore scenes and a whole lot of fog into sheer apocalyptic terror.

I recently watched a documentary called Fulci for Fake, which, as you can guess, is about the life and career of Lucio Fulci. While the movie is light on clips and features an ungainly framing device, it is fairly illuminating in showing how personal tragedies tied to his work. The death of his wife preceded his move into violent thrillers in the early ‘70s. An accident left his daughter paralyzed right before he made The New York Ripper, which gives what I’d initially considered an unrelentingly vicious movie a certain level of poignancy. Fulci’s career is generally considered to have gone into decline by the latter half of the ‘80s (during which time his health also suffered), with Cat in the Brain representing a sort of last hurrah. I’d perhaps been a bit condescending towards the movie when I saw it a few years ago, but I do admit to having been charmed by its reflexivity and playfulness, and it’s a movie that I think gets better in the context of his career than on its own. But even movies like Aenigma and Touch of Death, which I don’t think are especially beloved, I managed to enjoy, perhaps due to lowered expectations, but the fact was that the technical command and sense of raw terror of his best work was not entirely present in those films.

Now the reason I bring those up is that Demonia, which from what I gather most Fulci fans have no special love for, has certain qualities that are muted in its finished form but are brought into focus when viewed in the context of his career. Perhaps feeling a bit re-energized after Cat in the Brain, Fulci invites comparisons to his two best films with the opening sequences. A flashback to the crucifixion of nuns brings to mind the brutal opening to The Beyond, while a seance recalls the almost cheeky introduction to City of the Living Dead. But where those movies start at the same place and build to an apocalyptic level of dread, Demonia kind of stays at this level all the way through. Individual acts of violence basically remain as individual acts of violence, lacking the energy in presentation or almost free-associative delivery of those earlier films to develop into any kind of atmosphere. Fulci at his best combines a sense of high and low horror in a way that compounds the power of both, but the horror here seems unfortunately literal minded, especially as a decent amount of the kills are basically accidents (two characters are lured by the sound of the nuns’ spirits and fall to their deaths in some already dangerous-looking ruins). Still, there is at least one memorably nasty kill, presented with delivery that should seem clumsy but comes across the film tripping over itself to gross you out, and another that’s endearingly goofy and brings to mind The Black Cat.

The movie was supposed to be a comeback of sorts for Fulci into the theatrical big leagues but alas was banished to direct-to-video, and the generally cheaper looking but not hackish cinematography supports this. Framing is not as razor-sharp as his best work, and the much of the film has that gauzy look that figured prominently during the ‘80s. Yet seeing it in a nice, restored high definition transfer, the nighttime scenes are evocatively lit and give the film a respectable level of atmosphere. The film benefits greatly from being set in a coastal town and what could very well be or at least pass quite convincingly for actual ruins, which add to the film’s ambience and compensate for other weaknesses. As a Torontonian, I can’t help but give it points for featuring characters from a real local university (not my alma mater, but I’ll forgive it) and having one character wear the beloved Canadian brand Roots. And while the lead actress wasn’t particularly good (although she does nail that squinty, curious look necessary for this kind of movie), late Fulci collaborator Brett Halsey makes his character feel convincingly lived in, and it was nice seeing Demons punk Lino Salemme, Fulci regular Al Cliver and Fulci himself make appearances. I often think of the comfort I get from Italian horror movies and their distinct feel, and despite Demonia’s shortcomings, it has those qualities I find endearing in spades.

I watched City of the Living Dead earlier this year and was kind of lukewarm on it as all other elements of it (characters, plot) felt secondary and at the expense of the violence/gore, but I get that the gore is supposed to be the primary element of the film and your review convinced me that I should maybe revisit it to see if I respond better to it.

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IMDb
Letterboxd

Do it! Or I'll sic these bats on you!

I'm immune to your army of bats! The only thing which can get me to crack are spiders. Those things never cease to gross me out.

lol Letterboxd lists Zombie as part of the same series as not just Zombie 3 and 4, but Zombie 5: Killing Birds (which has no zombies until an hour in), Anthropophagus and Absurd (the latter two have no zombies at all).

This is a spider-free zone.


Maggots, however...

Also relevant:

One more for the road: