Ten Days of Terror!: The House by the Cemetery

Film: The House by the Cemetery( Quella Villa Accanto al Cimitero)
Format: Streaming video from AMC on Fire!

I’ve made no secret of how I approach Italian horror films on this blog. While there are some true standouts like The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, I remain convinced that the majority of Italian horror films come about because the director envisions a particular scene or a couple of scenes and then plans the movie around getting those scenes on camera. Because of this, there are often bizarre plot holes or things that happens specifically because of the need to get to those key scenes. Suspiria is a great example of this. There’s some of that in The House by the Cemetery (or Quella Villa Accanto al Cimitero if you prefer the Italian), but for once, it feels like this might have actually started with at least an elevator pitch of a plot.

We open with the sort of classic slasher movie opening. We have a young woman (Daniela Doria) looking for her boyfriend in a house. She finds him dead and then is quickly dispatched herself. This is the house by the cemetery that is going to be the focus of much of the rest of the film. We switch to New York where we meet the main human characters of the film. These are Norman and Lucy Boyle (Paolo Malco and Catriona MacColl) and their son Bob (Giovanni Frezza), who makes a strong case for the most annoying child in any movie. It’s not so much the kid as the dubbed voice, which can cut glass.

Ten Days of Terror!: Don't Torture a Duckling

Film: Don’t Torture a Duckling
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

I don’t love Italian horror films that much. I always get the feeling, as I have said before, that many Italian horror directors get an idea for a scene or two and then create the entire movie around those scenes. It’s why so many Italian horror movies feel disjointed and like their plots don’t really hold together. That’s actually not the case with Don’t Torture a Duckling (or Non si Sivizia un Paperino if you prefer the Italian). There is an actual plot that kind of makes sense here. It’s just not very good.

We start with a trio of boys around 12 or so teasing the equivalent of the village idiot, who was trying to catch a peek of a couple of men getting it on with a pair of prostitutes. Later, on of the boys at home is told to carry up a drink to the woman staying in their home. This woman is Patrizia (Barbara Bouchet), returned to this small town because she was involved in a drug scandal. She also evidently likes to lay around nude. In what’s going to be one of several disturbing scenes, she more or less asks the boy (remember, he’s about 12) to have sex with her.

All the Scenes at Once!

Films: City of the Living Dead ( Paura Nella Citta Dei Morti Viventi)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

If I live to be 200 years old, I will never understand Italian horror movies in general. Much like I feel that a great deal of anime passes over me because I always feel like there are cultural elements that are assumed I would know and I don’t, Italian horror always leaves me feeling lost I am constantly under the impression that most of the movies come at the plot secondarily at best. So many Italian horror films feel like a series of loosely connected set pieces. The director has a few ideas (“Let’s have a woman literally puke up her guts! Let’s attack people with maggots! Let’s have a guy killed on a drilling lathe!”) and then tries to patch them together in a loose semblance of story. I’ve had that sense before with Italian horror, but never as much as I did with City of the Living Dead (also known as Paura Nella Citta Dei Morti Viventi).

That being the case, I’m not really sure how much sense a plot summary is going to make. At a séance in New York, a medium named Mary (Catriona MacColl) experiences a vision of a priest named Father Thomas (Fabrizio Jovine) hanging himself, which is evidently going to cause an army of the living dead to rise up. Mary collapses and does such a convincing job of this that everyone thinks she’s dead. Eventually, she’ll be saved by journalist Peter Bell (Christopher George) as she is being buried. This, clearly was an early set piece idea of Fulci’s since getting to this point means that Mary was able to convincingly appear dead to multiple doctors, make it through a funeral service, and get to the gravesite in the coffin without being embalmed. Like I said, it’s a series of set pieces that are loosely stitched together regardless of how they might make sense.

Ten Days of Terror!: A Cat in the Brain (Un Gatto el Cervello)

Films: A Cat in the Brain (Un Gatto el Cervello)
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on the new internet machine.

Lewis Black used to do a bit about candy corn. He hates candy corn (as everyone really should), but finds that every year, he approaches it as if the concept is entirely new to him only to rediscover every year how much he doesn’t like it. This is almost exactly my reaction to most Italian horror films. I always desperately want to like them and usually end up disappointed and confused. So it is with A Cat in the Brain (or Un Gatto el Cervello), a film that makes this worse by having a truly great name and at least one poster (the cat looking out of a human skull) that ranks among the greatest of all time. It’s probably asking too much for the film to live up to either of these things, and it really, really doesn’t.

I’ll give this all the credit in the world for creativity, though. A substantial amount of this film was produced in post-production using scenes and clips from previous Lucio Fulci films. In this one, Fulci, playing himself, starts to have real-world visions of some of the atrocities that he is filming. So, he spends the day filming a man hacking up a body with a chainsaw and then cooking and eating part of the corpse. That day, he’s unable to eat meat at lunch and pictures a handyman with a chainsaw suddenly using it on people.

Ten Days of Terror!: Zombie (Zombi 2)

Film: Zombie (Zombi 2)
Format: Internet video on laptop.

How a film gets made and marketed is often almost as interesting as the film itself. In the case of Zombie, Lucio Fulci’s answer to George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, there’s a lot to consider. Is it a sequel? Well, Romero’s film was released in Italy reedited by Dario Argento and with a new score by Argento’s frequent collaborators Goblin under the name Zombi. Fulci’s film was fast-tracked for release the following year and released in Italy as Zombi 2. However, Fulci himself seemed to think it was its own thing. While the idea of reanimated ghouls devouring the living is a common element, Fulci’s zombies are much closer to the Caribbean voodoo zombies of folktales. Sure, these ones eat the living, but they are otherwise similar in manner to those raised by a houngan.

Zombie, like a lot of Italian horror movies, has both the strengths and weaknesses of its genre and that genre specifically in its country of origin. My own experience with a lot of Italian horror movies is that they tend to have some tremendous set pieces and moments that are truly memorable, but often lack in having a coherent plot. Things often seem to happen because they happen and there aren’t always solid connections from one moment in the story to the next.

Off Script: The Beyond

Film: The Beyond(L’aldila; E tu vivrai nel terrore! L’aldila; Seven Doors of Death)
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on The Nook.

Eventually, my wife will cancel our Hulu subscription, something I’ve asked her to do for the past month. Until such time as that happens, though, I’m going to continue to watch movies on it. I was in the mood for something scary today, or at least weird and disturbing. The Beyond seemed like a good choice. This is one of the classic Italian horror films by Lucio Fulci. I know more about Fulci’s work than I’ve seen and I know that 1980s Italian horror tends to be pretty gruesome, so I sat down expecting an entertaining ride, which is what I got, at least in part.

In reality, The Beyond doesn’t make a great deal of sense, but it kind of isn’t supposed to. It’s really just an excuse for a number of really nasty splatter scenes, most of which involve eyes popping out of people’s heads. There is something like a plot here, but it genuinely doesn’t make sense through most of the film. Things happen without much cause and the vast majority of the cast is made up of really dumb people. Again, that’s not a terrible criticism of this film because it’s not a film that anyone watches for the scintillating plot.