What the Fulci?!

DVD Review: THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY (QUELLA VILLA ACCANTO AL CIMITERO)
18 – 82mins – 1981
Story by: Elisa Livia Briganti
Screenplay by: Dardano Sacchetti, Giorgio Mariuzzo and Lucio Fulci
Directed by: Lucio Fulci
Starring: Catriona MacColl, Paolo Malco, Giovanni Frezza, Ania Pieroni, Silvia Collatina, Giovanni De Nava, Dagmar Lassander, Teresa Rossi Passante
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Well... it makes a modicum more sense than City of the Living Dead (reviewed HERE), but that doesn't mean that this final instalment in Italian cult director Lucio Fulci's "Gates of Hell" trilogy is a better film. Sadly, The House by the Cemetery seems like a more amateur effort and less adventurous endeavour than superior predecessor The Beyond (reviewed HERE); and it doesn't even have as many splatter-stuffed set pieces to fall back on, with the characters spending what feels like half the slimline runtime calling out each other's names!

That isn't to say that when the claret runs it doesn't gush unreservedly (just check out the rabid bat scene for proof of that), but the hack n' slash sequences are fewer and further between in this haunted house oddity. Medical researcher Dr. Norman Boyle (Malco) relocates to the creepy graveyard-adjacent abode, reluctantly accompanied by his anxiety-prone wife (MacColl), and frightfully dubbed son, Bob (Frezza). However, the creaky old mansion hides many dark secrets, including the zombified corpse of the maaaaad scientist, Dr. Freudstein (De Nava), who must feast on the flesh of the living to remain in his undead state.

Fulci isn't exactly renowned for his narrative coherence, but even with a plot as low-key as House's, still it is plagued by plot holes: Bob sees the spirit of Mae (Collatina), Freudstein's daughter, who warns him not to enter the cursed house, yet this friendly ghost does nothing to stem the horror except animate a beheaded mannequin (Pieroni) to be the child's live-in babysitter (despite his mother being at home the entire time)!! Whether as a red herring or simply to facilitate his eye fetish, Fulci demonizes Ann (as the babysitter is known) with frequent ocular close-ups and inferences that she is in line with the evil undead doc; until she gets beheaded. Again.

Furthermore, as Norman's research leads him to make shocking discoveries into Freudstein's unlawful history, he inexplicably burns the damning evidence rather than using it to help his cause!! What possible reason could he have for destroying the truth when his own family are in jeopardy? Freudstein's prolonged existence, also, feels like horror merely for horror's sake, with no reason given for his afterlife rages. He doesn't even leave the cellar for Fulci's sake!

Couple these narrative aggravations with less skilled direction and a modest story which is half-baked at best, and while you may not have the trilogy's worst effort, it says a lot about a cult horror film when the scariest thing in it is the terrible dubbing of a little boy's voice!


In a CR@B Shell: A lame finale after The Beyond delivered an epic middle chapter, The House by the Cemetery stretches a short story-sized script into a feature film yet doesn't bother to flesh out the fretful ruminating with more gore – and there's only one potato-headed zombie!! Romero's crown as “Grandfather of the Dead” was never in doubt.
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Hotel Paranorma

Blu Review: THE BEYOND (E TU VIVAI NEL TERRORE - L'ALDILÀ)
18 – 87mins – 1981
Story by: Dardano Sacchetti
Screenplay by: Dardano Sacchetti, Giorgio Mariuzzo and Lucio Fulci
Directed by: Lucio Fulci
Starring: Catriona MacColl, David Warbeck, Sarah Keller, Antione Saint-John, Veronica Lazar, Anthony Flees
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Talk about irony: no sooner had I finished ripping Lucio Fulci's 1980 zombie abomination City of the Living Dead a new (hell) hole (you can read my rant HERE), then LoveFilm whisked me the second film in his unholy trinity as if it were a high priority on my rental list (it wasn't). I wasn't much looking forward to diving back into this kooky director's diverse oeuvre *quite* so soon, but for all its thematic similarities to its predecessor, The Beyond is actually a surprisingly steep step up in all regards.

Heroine of the original, Catriona MacColl, returns again (as she does in part three, The House By The Cemetery, also. Yes, that's on my LoveFilm list too!), albeit in a completely unrelated role. Here she plays Liza Merril, a woman who has inherited a long-deserted hotel in Louisiana, completely oblivious to its unholy history: it was built over one of the seven cursed gateways to Hell. Bummer.

Despite numerous supernatural “accidents” (all involving major blood loss, body disfiguring, eye-piercing, and – on more than one occasion – acid burning) and countless ominous warnings from a shuddersome blind woman (Keller) to keep the hell away from the ghostly guest house, Liza is undeterred in her renovation project – until the dead start to walk the Earth.

Of course, yet again, it's all an elaborate excuse to splash the red stuff and feed the director's ocular fetish in ever-more distastefully sickening scenarios, but the smaller character base and simplified linear plot means events feel more cohesive and purposeful to the journey's end rather than incomprehensible abstract diversions from logic as they did in the hopelessly disjointed City.

A black and white prologue set in 1927 revealing the unlocking of the gateway and subsequent mob crucifixion of the painter responsible is wonderfully artistic in a B-movie pastiche sense, working well as a framing device which is counterbalanced by the protagonist's belated arrival in “The Beyond” at the film's futile but open-ended climax; an epically atmospheric swirling mountainous landscape of dead bodies soundtracked by the shrieks of the eternally tortured.

For a film billed as a “zombie horror” it must be noted that the shuffling stiffs don't actually show up en mass until five minutes from the end, but don't let that deter you; there are plenty more unrestrained paranormal atrocities to keep horror nuts happy – including a bonkers scene in which (for reasons completely unclear) a concussed man (Anthony Flees) is attacked by a clutch of tarantulas which proceed to sting his face and bite his flesh! It's a monstrously visionary notion which would have been all the more terrifying if half the arachnids hadn't been laughably puppeteered props! Still, half the fun of these vintage cult oddities is chuckling at the cheese...


In a CR@B Shell: Despite being produced just a year after City, The Beyond feels like the work of a far more experienced director; the script is sharper, the scares more complimentary to the narrative and the ghastly effects more polished (well, except the spiders). I still think he's barmy, but perhaps I was too hasty in writing Fulci off...?
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