LUCIO FULCI: An Appreciation of the Italian Grandfather of Gore

Lucio Fulci would have turned 87 today. And while most gorehounds discovered his work thanks to his Golden Age of Gore that features such classics as ZOMBIE, THE GATES OF HELL and THE BEYOND, his lengthy career in Italian cinema stretches far beyond the genre in which he's frequently pigeonholed. A slightly different version of this appreciation of Fulci appeared in issue #24 of the late, lamented music/wrestling/smut/movie mag Carbon 14. 

Is it sad that I attach more sentiment to my memories of Lucio Fulci – The Italian Grandfather of Gore – than I do to my own ancestors? I suppose it isn't surprising when you consider their respective roles in my upbringing. All my grandparents were dead by the time I was a teenager, right around the time Grampy Lucio took my hand and guided me through his world of grindhouse cinema.

At the drive-in we sat in our lawn chairs, sipped cheap beer and watched GATES OF HELL (aka CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD) as John Morghen got a drill through the head for being creepy, slow-witted and trusting. We cut classes at Drexel to venture to the Budco Midtown for something called SEVEN DOORS OF DEATH (aka THE BEYOND) which featured sinister spiders, nasty zombies, and another of Lucio's trademark head-scratcher endings. Good times, good times. And I haven't even mentioned the hours spent watching – and re-watching – flicks like ZOMBIE, HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY, MANHATTAN BABY and NEW YORK RIPPER.

But recently, something interesting has happened – I've discovered another side of Grampy Lucio. It's like flipping through your grandparents' photo album and realizing that the loose-looking flapper or the Zoot-suited hoodlum is actually the kindly old soul who bakes pies for holiday dinners or took you to the fishing hole for a lesson in baiting a hook.

Despite a filmography that's top-heavy with juicy, paint-the-screen-red titles like those mentioned above, Fulci was quite the cinematic chameleon. After toiling as a screenwriter and assistant director on a number of Italian comedies, he began his directorial career with THE THIEVES (1959) a flop that drove him into a succession of musical comedies, a genre that had become a worldwide sensation thanks to Elvis, Frankie and Annette. The influence of the early days of the James Bond series can even be seen in the mid-Sixties spy flick 002 OPERATION MOON, which can be found under numerous alternate titles like MOST SECRET AGENTS, OH! THOSE MOST SECRET AGENTS and WORST SECRET AGENTS.

Sergio Leone's landmark Spaghetti Western A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964) may have been responsible for MASSCARE TIME (1966) a Franco Nero vehicle that represented Fulci's first foray into that genre.

As the swinging sixties came to a close, the director tackled one of his most complex and intricate tales, a thriller called ONE ON TOP OF THE OTHER (1969, aka PERVERSION STORY). Having been raised on a steady diet of Alfred Hitchcock and Brian DePalma, it became apparent – after a ferociously upbeat jazz-scored credit sequence – that this would be a sinister tale of murder and misplaced accusations. It's got it all – the sick wife, the creepy sister-in-law, the two medications that if switched could prove fatal, the glory-hog doctor/anti-hero, and so on.

Once our victim checks out and signs start pointing to the handsome doc, Fulci kicks it into "innocent man wrongly accused" overdrive and we're left to ponder a number of questions as the story unfolds. Who's the hot blonde doppelganger doing the striptease on the motorcycle? Why is that guy shadowing our hero? Am I gonna get some Euro-lesbian action or WHAT?!

ONE ON TOP is actually one of those rare instance where I wish the flick was longer. Things are going along nicely with Fulci delivering an involving thriller despite some wooden acting and convoluted scenes. And then BLAM! It's like there's 45 minutes missing! Suddenly, our good doctor is on death row, it's getting near gas chamber time, the culprits appear to have gotten away with murder and then twists are layered on top of surprises... all delivered by a newsman talking into a microphone! It's like a comedy sketch where they've run out of money and just tell you what happens rather than show it.

Fulci's 1970s output jumped all over the cinematic map, ping-ponging between thrillers (LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN) and Dario Argento-influenced giallos (DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING and the haunting THE PSYCHIC) to westerns (FOUR GUNMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE) and horror comedies in the wake of YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (DRACULA IN THE PROVINCES).

The success of 1979's ZOMBIE – which established Fulci as the premier Italian gore film director – was due in large part to the success of George Romero's landmark DAWN OF THE DEAD (1977). Produced in association with the legendary Argento, Romero's flick ignited Italy's Spaghetti Splatter industry and ushered in the grisly gorefests that would keep grindhouse fans and drive-in patrons glued to their seats for years to come.

But that didn't stop Fulci from detouring into strange and unexpected territory. 1980's CONTRABAND pulls back on the gore reins while setting up a tale of naïve smugglers who resist influences to get them involved in the drug trade. Fabio Testi stars as Luka, a family man/smuggler who enjoys a good life while throwing cops off his trail with exploding boats loaded with rubber dummies.

When a shadowy underworld figure known as The Margliese starts applying pressure to the heads of the crime families, Fulci shines and the flick perks up. There's an uncomfortable sequence where a chick gets her head set on fire for trying to pass bad drugs and when the villains kidnap Luka's wife the body count rises, double crosses ensue, surprise revelations are, um, revealed and the master paints the screen red in the gory shootout finale. Occasionally confusing but frequently entertaining, CONTRABAND is an unexpected crime-thriller with enough action and sadistic gore to keep viewers interested.

The period after CONTRABAND represents Fulci's landmark era of horror cinema. CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD (1980) would be a "greatest hits" reel for most directors of the time and 1981's THE BEYOND is one of the most haunting (and gory) masterpieces of horror cinema. While HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY (1981) is no match for the genius of THE BEYOND, it's still an effective and creepy take on haunted houses – with a zombie thrown in for old times sake. MANHATTAN BABY and NEW YORK RIPPER (both 1982) veered into the then-popular slasher genre but received limited distribution and lukewarm receptions at the time.

Between 1983 and 1984, Fulci helmed two more out-of-left-field projects: the futuristic actioner THE NEW GLADIATORS and the sword-and-sci-fi "epic" CONQUEST. Though they would represent his last efforts outside the horror genre, both flicks are intriguing and entertaining in their own way.

Pre-dating Governor Schwarzenegger's THE RUNNING MAN by several years, THE NEW GLADIATORS mines the fertile post-apocalypse genre for a tale that mixes equal parts social commentary and barbaric sports flicks like DEATHRACE 2000 and ROLLERBALL. Due to slipping television ratings, the World Broadcasting System has resurrected the idea of gladiators for 'The Battle of the Damned'. In a nutshell, a dozen convicted killers battle it out with the survivor receiving their freedom.

To goose the ratings, Cortez (the guy running the whole shebang) decides that he needs a people's champion. So, they hire Drake (played by Jared Martin, later seen on the syndicated 'War of the Worlds' )... a pasty-faced, sunken-chest ween we're supposed to believe is the world's greatest 'Death Bike' champ. He's in prison for the murder of the guys that offed his young bride. Along for the ride is Fred "The Hammer" Williamson, who (I hope) amassed a small fortune acting in these things.

As expected, 'The Battle of The Damned' is the flick's price-of-admission highlight – competitors get gouged, set on fire, decapitated (in loving Fulci slow-mo) and generally abused. Like THE RUNNING MAN, THE NEW GLADIATORS features a mission to knock out a satellite, a maniacal man in charge, framed competitors, a "people's champion" and more.

While NEW GLADIATORS lets Fulci deliver social commentary with the bloodletting, CONQUEST is nothing but a good-time genre-splicing mish-mash that will either entertain or enrage you. Grafting snippets of the sword-and-sandal genre (think CONAN) with a certain well-known space opera, CONQUEST has it all. If by "all" you mean: a bevy of chimp/wolf creatures that are like the third cousin of Chewbacca, twice removed; female actresses that are either topless, covered in blood, drawn and quartered, or all of the above; cascades of blood; a couple decapitations; and, who can forget the "arrows" that appear to have been created by scratching the negative with a paper clip!

Fulci would direct a baker's dozen of theatrical and TV flicks – give or take – after these final non-horror outings, though none met with the acclaim of THE BEYOND and ZOMBIE. In March of 1996, just weeks before beginning pre-production on THE WAX MASK (eventually helmed by effects guru Sergio Stivaletti), Fulci died as a result of a diabetic attack.

While the very mention of his name conjures up images of flesh-eating zombies, sharp implements to the head and visions of the afterlife, don't let Lucio Fulci's rep as the Grandfather of Italian Gore fool you. Check out the surprising and unique cinematic detours that dot his impressive filmography.

Lucio Fulci's NEW YORK RIPPER (1982)

I hadn't watched Lucio Fulci's NEW YORK RIPPER in about 25 years. (Which pains me to write not just because that's too damn long between viewings but also because it reminds me how old I'm getting!) But after a recent discussion with some pals about favorite Fulci flicks and giallos I realized I was long overdue for a reappraisal and – thanks to Netflix's instant streaming service – could watch the widescreen print in the cozy confines of my office. Do we live in a great world or what?

RIPPER opens in memorable fashion with a man and his dog walking along the New York riverbank – playing a game of "fetch" that's just waiting to turn ugly in the Spaghetti Splatter maestro's hands. Sure enough it's not long before the pooch has retrieved a grotesque, moldy, decaying hand from the underbrush and brought it to his master's attention.

And "FREEZE!" as Fulci displays the credits over the rotting piece of human garbage dangling from the canine's mouth. It's a directorial and editing flourish that seems particularly fitting since RIPPER paints a grimy and gross portrait of New York City in its pre-Disneyfication days of the early 1980s. Neon lights pulsate as they hawk sex shows and the last gasp of grindhouse horror, action and exploitation as Lt. Fred Williams (Jack Hedley) deals with the bodies that are piling up thanks to the duck-voiced "Ripper" who is slashing and mutilating the bodies of beautiful women and leaving them strewn about the city like garbage.

With few leads at his disposal and pressure coming from the Chief (director Fulci in a pleasant cameo) the police turn to Dr. Paul Davis (HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY's Paolo Malco) in the hope that he can help profile the killer and narrow the search. When Olympic hopeful (?!) Fay Majors (Almanta Keller) survives an attack by the killer she puts cops on the trail of a deformed Times Square gigolo named Mickey Scellenda (Howard Ross) who has been seen with more than one of the Ripper's intended victims.

Experienced giallo watchers will be quick to figure out that Scellenda – while a perfect suspect thanks to his predator's eyes and rough manner – isn't Williams' man, which puts the cops and the viewer back at square one. Despite having watched the film 20+ years ago I still found myself second, third and fourth guessing my choice of killer, not unlike my first viewing back when RIPPER came out on VHS via Vidmark all those years ago.

Though I initially left RIPPER off my list of Top 5 Fulci Flicks, my recent viewing is causing me to seriously reassess my choices. Quite frankly, while I love GATES OF HELL for its "Fulci Highlight Reel" feel and THE BEYOND never fails to creep me out while it entertains, NEW YORK RIPPER represents the best of both worlds of the Splatter Maestro.

Visually, it's Fulci at his most restrained, keeping the trademark Fulci Zoom largely in check and using the colorful New York City locations to full effect. Storywise, the tale of the quacking Ripper is a giallo classic, as we're served up a rich stew of suspects, clues and red herrings... all of which kept me guessing right till the end. And, if it's sleaze you want, Fulci never flinches – whether it's a live nude sex show turning on a slumming rich broad (who also gets "toed" in one of the flick's most harrowing scenes), close-up scenes of the Ripper plying his trade on the body of a beautiful victim, or a bloody conclusion that puts an exclamation point on Fulci's horror career.

NEW YORK RIPPER was the end of an impressive five-year run that also includes THE PSYCHIC, CONTRABAND, ZOMBIE, GATES OF HELL, THE BEYOND and HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY. Though flicks like MANHATTAN BABY, CONQUEST, MURDER ROCK and THE NEW GLADIATORS would follow, none – for me, at least – would reach the same dizzying heights of his late 70s/early 80s output than ends with RIPPER.

Do yourself a favor and check out the widescreen version currently available on disc or streaming at Netflix. It's like seeing the film for the first time all over again!

THE BEYOND (1983)

Editor's Note: I first saw THE BEYOND under the more straightforward title SEVEN DOORS OF DEATH back when it played Philly's Budco Midtown. I had no idea what it was but any flick with a blurb from TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE scribe Kim Henkel was all the convincing I needed. What I saw blew my mind. This wasn't just another heaping helping of Spaghetti Splatter. No, Fulci had concocted something much more, a horrific dreamscape that was about as terrifying as gore cinema at that time could get. It wasn't long before I found out that the film was known – in its uncut version as THE BEYOND – and that a grey market bootleg of the Japanese laserdisc was available. For a price. A price I gladly paid. Fast forward twentysome years and not only is THE BEYOND available, uncut of course, on DVD but Turner Classic Movies is screening it in a week or so. I can't imagine waking up at 2 AM to find robotic flesh-ripping spiders on my tv screen as unearthly howls of "Ebon" wash over me. With that in mind we bring you Louis Fowler's review of this classic slice of Eurotrash horror.

It seems that, since just about everyone in the world of horror is so well aware of THE BEYOND, and, even more appropriately for me, everyone in the world of horror has already written their own opinions about it, that to add mine just seems, well, totally redundant. You might as well title this "Not Another THE BEYOND Review".

Keeping that in mind and having just watch Grindhouse Releasing's reissue, once again it strikes me just how – I need to capitalize this – TOTALLY FUCKING SCARY this movie actually is. I am a thirty year old man and it's one in the morning and I wish I could go sleep in my parents' bed. With the hall light on. With the night-lite on. With a gun, just in case.

Go ahead and laugh. I know that I'm supposed to be jaded and I know that, for most people, there's been scarier stuff released before and since, but, you know, serial killers and slashers and the like have never scared me. No-it's Hell that scares me. A Hell on earth; demons breaking through to our world, slaughtering us on an unholy rampage. Maybe it's the Catholic in me, but Satan, Hell, whatever, is really the only thing in film that truly terrifies me.

But you just can't through the Devil on the screen and expect me to be scared, otherwise THE DEVIL AND MAX DEVLIN would have made me urinate my shorts. Again. No, a truly scary, truly demonic film needs to have an aura, an atmosphere of evil, a sense of unholy dread, surrounding it to accomplish that. An otherworldly feel that has ideas and sequences that give off the impression that you are watching something wholly diabolical on-screen, something that wasn't meant for human eyes. A feeling of ominousness and pure fear that shadows the room when you watch it, causing you to turn the lights on half-way through and jump and any sound your house might make.

THE BEYOND is such a film. This is not some Italian cheese-fest; this isn't a Spaghetti joke. The images that Fulci puts on screen are nightmares-and I'm not talking about the gore. Gore is nothing special. It's the lovingly perverse way that he uses that gore, expelling all hope for the characters embroiled in it, that makes it all work. THE BEYOND is an extraordinarily hopeless film. It's a film that takes place in a world without God's mercy. It's a world that has forgotten God, allowing Hell to encroach and take root.

This loneliness from God and his salvation is pounded home in the final image when our main characters are left alone in a barren eternal wasteland, that I think is supposed to be Hell. It's the most shocking scene in the film and it doesn't have a drop of blood in it. It's the ultimate downer ending: the good guys have not only lost the battle but their souls as well and, because of their failure, have allowed Hell to claim the Earth. Cue credits.

I think the thing that really scares me is the way that Fulci, before I had even seen this film, had accurately captured many images from my own nightmares in this film. The desolate road with water on both sides and no land on the horizon; the way that even though there's light outside the inside of the house is very dark; eyes with no pigment; and a Hell that isn't made up of flame, but dust. Are these common dream images? I've had these images in my head for as long as I can remember; I dreamed them when I was as young as five. To me, this makes the film all the more foreboding.

This is part of Fulci's "Gates of Hell" trilogy, which included THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY and CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD. All three are so totally different than anything Fulci had really done, filled with such a sacrilegious fervor that you get the feeling that something must have had possessed him to create this trilogy, these pitch-perfect visions of Hell so perfectly. Were these the films of a demonic madman with a warning, or merely a vessel of dark visions, like say, a Hieronymus Bosch woodcut put to celluloid? Or, even worse, was it just the work of a guy trying to collect a paycheck?

In the end, we'll probably never know what made Fulci tick. We'll probably never know what was going on in his head to make his celluloid nightmares so potent. But, maybe the more we use them to interpret our own fears, the closer we'll get to an answer. Either way, it's time to get my ass to church.

You can read this review and hundreds more like it at Exploitation Retrospect: The Journal of Junk Culture and Fringe Media.

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