Special Halloween Episode!
The Beyond:
- I had completely forgotten about the spider segment and your rather sizable case of arachnophobia, so while this is Filmjitsu – and this probably is the most flat-out low-blow I could have leveled at you – I didn’t mean to hit you so hard where it hurts! Somehow, I think it was karma getting you back on this one – maybe for Brainscan or Cats.
- What was up with the goddamn ADR in this movie?? The actors were English-Speaking and yet it’s dubbed worse than most foreign language films!
- Rumor is that the film didn’t actually have a screenplay and that Fulci worked from a three-page treatment in pulling the story together. I think that shows as it really doesn’t make sense.
- How are you with the long, uncut gore segments here? It’s both impressive and shockingly inept just how long some of these scenes go on. The torture and subsequent acid melting of the painter at the beginning of the film runs three minutes, but feels like twenty. Similarly, the two-minute acid bath that the random widowed-mother character, as witnessed by her horrified daughter, felt like it took most of my adult life to endure. And then, yeah, there’s the goddamn spiders which seemed to be eating that one minor character longer than he had appeared alive onscreen. It’s clear to me why the movie was made and what was of interest, but I have to ask still… WHY? Why is this a thing?
- If the length of the scenes isn’t enough, how about the zooming in on bubbling flesh or gushing blood. What’s the deal with this?
- Howzabout that service dog eating the face off its blind girl master? Yikes!
- Is this the goriest movie – or perhaps if not the goriest, the most cruel – that you have ever seen? I’m unsure I’ve seen many more vicious than this one. Nor have I seen many – if any – as obtuse and straight-up nonsensical.
- It is the second film in Fulci’s “Gates of Hell” trilogy after City of the Living Dead (1980), and was followed by The House by the Cemetery (1981). Any plans to catch the rest of the movies so you can call yourself a completist? And what do we think of these filmmaker trilogies? Romero had his “Dead” movies, Carpenter had his Apocalypse Trilogy {The Thing, Prince of Darkness, In The Mouth of Madness) and Argento has his Three Mothers trilogy. ( Suspiria, Inferno and Mother of Tears.) What do you think of this idea of filmmaker thematic trilogies?
- I don’t love Italian gore flicks all that much. But I love Italian disco/prog rock scores – Black Emmanuel’s Groove is one of my favorite soundtrack compilations of all time and it features Nico Fidenco’s wild compositions for Joe D’Amato’s Emmanuel movies from the 70’s starring Laura Gemser. Weirdly, Fabio Frizzi, the composer of “The Beyond’s” wacky music score, was the maestro behind 1976’s “Teenage Emmanuel,” which starred Annie Belle as the title character and, later, she would play “White Emmanuelle” to Gemser’s “Black Emmanuelle” in, you guessed it: “Black Emmanuelle White Emmanuelle.” It makes me wish there was a companion complilation called “White Emmanuel’s Groove,” but I doubt that would sound a great.
- These Italian composers would partner up with filmmakers, so you had Frizzi with Fulci, Fidenco with D’Amato, the rock band Goblin with Argento, Pino Donaggio with DePalma (an Italian-American, but whatevs) and of course Ennio Morricone with Sergio Leone. It’s kind of neat to note too that both Nico Fidenco and Pino Donaggio were pop music stars before they became composers. Story is, actually, that Donaggio was spotted by a “stoned” casting director in Venice while working on Nicolas Roeg’s “Don’t Look Now” and that he convinced director Nicholas Roeg that the man had descended from the skies over Venice to compose the score for the movie. I’m not sure if that’s a true story or not, but Roeg’s certainly weird enough for it be and “Don’t Look Now” is Donaggio’s first score…
Bottom Five Gore Effects
My approach – gore so bad it just pulls you out of a scene. So in many respects, some of these choices are actually good scenes and in good movies, but the effects simply don’t work. And the better the movie, as such, the worse the bad FX have on things in contrast. I didn’t go after effects in low-budget movies – let’s face it, those movies are handicapped and I feel like picking on something like “The Evil Dead” for fake-looking body-melting is mean-spirited. Yeah, it’s dumb-looking, but it’s also fun and very creative. So that and lots of fake practical effects that don’t fully convince – say that crawling head-spider in Carpenter’s “The Thing” get a pass from me.
Deep Blue Sea (1999)
Dir. Renny Harlan – Samuel L. Jackson gets eaten by a CGI shark and it’s worse looking than a video game. That said, man is it ever a great scene and surprising as Hell. It’s almost fast enough not to suck, but truthfully, it’s the surest sign that the early success of Harlan’s career had given way to camp.
The Midnight Meat Train (2008)
Dir. Ryûhei Kitamura. The gore isn’t the worst thing about The Midnight Meat Train – that would be Brooke Shields playing this “power gallery owner” in the most cringe-inducing Boss Bitch way you can imagine – but man, the gore doesn’t help matters any. While I applaud the film’s director, Ryûhei Kitamura, for some imaginative and inventive kill sequences in this, his American Filmmaking debut, the reliance on CGI specifically for slow-motion blood, brain and eyeball splatter, simply pulls you right out of the movie. The kills feel overly stylized and very, very fake which is really too bad because the concepts behind the violence are pretty fun, if a bit squirm inducing (the decapitated lady’s POV of her own body twitching is either a high point or a low point depending on your tastes.) Bradley Cooper is pretty damn boring here and I can help but feel like Kitamura, who directed the hyper-violent action-fest “Versus” from 2000, couldn’t have done better.
Brawl In Cell Block 99 (2017)
Dir. S. Craig Zahler. The final shot of Vince Vaughn’s head exploding in this movie just straight-up pissed me off. I get that Zahler likes his gore and violence, but this flick kept trying to pull viewers into caring for Vince Vaughn’s stoic but quick-witted inmate with a heart of gold. But after a while, this thing really started to feel like a less-inventive and less-fun version of “Rikki Oh: The Story of Rikki.” So by the time we get to the very end, despite a late-inning attempt at really trying to tug at our heart strings, the movie devolves into a puerile comic book moment where Vince Vaughn’s head explodes like a lightbulb after a shot from Don Johnson’s hand cannon. Yes, Don Johnson’s hand cannon. I said it because I like saying it. Don. Johnson’s. Hand. Cannon.
Alien (1979)
Dir. Ridley Scott. I’m not hear to bag on “Alien” as I believe, the more I see it – and I’ve seen it about a dozen times – the more I like it. There’s no point in re-hashing the amazing production design, direction, lighting, cinematography, music score and, of course, performances – it has all been said before and you really cannot find fault with any of it. And the creature design and the majority of the special effects is astonishing. The chestbuster? That may be a puppet, but damn, do you ever forget while you are watching it – largely due to Veronica Cartwright’s face and her horrified “Ohhhh GAWD” scream. But man, did they ever – somewhat mystifyingly – screw the pooch with that single shot of Ash’s head after Yaphet Kotto’s Parker places it on the table. Why they paired the fake head shot as a near-Goddamn jump cut to Ian Holm’s obvious head-in-a-table effect is beyond me. Cut away to any one of the four other people in the room for a moment and THEN go back to Holm. But no – they stick with the effect and wow, does it ever fail miserably. In a movie so filled with perfect moments and jaw-dropping craft, how this passed the smell test is beyond me because it’s the equivalent of a cinematic-Taco Bell fart.
Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Dir. George A. Romero – I hate to say this, but Tom Savini failed Romero on this picture in one very, VERY big way. In a movie positively overflowing with gore and with a central premise that requires scenes of outrageous, cannibalistic violence, we get what may well be the worst colored blood in any movie ever. Even Savini has copped to it, saying in interviews that he regets both the color of the zombie’s skin, which he felt was too blue and the near fluorescent color of the blood. It’s like, almost pinkish in scenes and the consistency is more like paint than blood. There’s absolutely no arguing that Savini is among the greats when it comes to make-up FX – the work he did in the original “Friday the 13th” alone earns him a seat next to “The Exorcist’s” Dick Smith and “American Werewolf in London’s” Rick Baker. But my God, did the blood ever look so. very. WRONG. in Dawn of the Dead, a movie that has a lot going for it but, for me at least, is probably the least effective of Romero’s original dead trilogy. I’ve often wondered what it would be like to desaturate and bump up the contrast on “Dawn” and “Day of the Dead” so that all of the movies feel similar. I think it might make them seen more cohesive as a trilogy, but what do I know? All I can say is, while I love watching the bikers at the mall be eviscerated by an undead horde, I cannot help but think each and every time I watch – this should look so much better than it does. If you’re going to hang your hat on something, you’d make sure that whatever it is is mounted to the wall. Otherwise, the whole damn reason for the thing is lost. And for me, that’s what “Dawn of the Dead’s” blood is – a hat on the goddamn filthy floor.
Staff Pick
White Noise (2022)
Dir. Noah Baumbach
What Halloween season is complete without some film enthusiast shooting his mouth off about how truly scary a non-horror movie is and how that movie should be watched alongside more conventional offerings? Consider me that asshole this year as I would like to recommend to y’all a deceptively creepy and bleak, but also very exciting and often funny film from Noah Baumbach who here alternates between channeling Spielberg, Hitchcock, Wes Anderson and perhaps a bit of Joe Dante who, were this a movie about the 1960’s made in the 1980’s, I could have seen direct this. As it is, this is an adaptation of Don Delillo’s 1985 novel of the same name, and while it doesn’t seem quite as obsessed with technology as the novel – based on what I’ve heard as I’ve not read it – this film is certainly obsessed with how we bide our short time while alive on planet Earth. It follow’s an eccentric college lecturer, played in a wonderfully stilted and mannered way by Adam Driver, who is considered THE definitive scholar on Adolf Hitler and whose family and friend circle is populated by a just-as-eccentric cast of weirdos. After a series of increasingly intense and bizarre occurrences place all in harm’s way, not the least of which includes an airborne toxic event caused by a train explosion in Ohio – yes, just like what happened in real life shortly after the movie was released! – the family tries to stay together while dealing with internal friction including drug addiction and infidelity. It doesn’t sound like horror, but there are several sequences where Baumbach proves he’s a master behind the camera, and one sequence in particular which was probably the most unsettling and surprising moment I’ve seen in a movie in quite a long while. So give it a whirl when the gore’s losing it’s lustre and the scares are feeling cheap and uninspired. Sometimes the best scares are the ones you don’t expect at all, buried deep in the heart of a satirical dark comedy.