Don't Torture a Duckling

Unquestionably, Don't Torture a Duckling (1972) aka Non si sevizia un paperino is one of my top three favorite Lucio Fulci films and not without good reason as the Italian filmmaker, who himself regarded it as his own personal favorite among all the films he had directed, finally found his nefarious niche with the wonderfully wicked work, ultimately eventually earning himself the much deserved title of “Godfather of Gore.” Indeed, a sort of vaguely Pasolini-esque Giallo flick set in a small Southern Italian village revolving around the mysterious death of young prepubescent Catholic boys by a deranged psychopath, Don't Torture a Duckling was the film where the Guido master of the cinematically grotesque demonstrated his subversive eye for gorgeous gore and unhinged ultra-violence. A pre-flesheater flick created before Fulci became an international horror icon for directing Zombi 2 (1979) aka Zombie, Don't Torture a Duckling stands out strikingly among the filmmaker's oeuvre in that it is an innately linear and plot-driven work that lacks the sort of Artaud-inspired onieric essence of his later masterpieces of the macabre like The Beyond (1981) aka L'aldilà and The House by the Cemetery (1981) aka Quella villa accanto al cimitero. Also quite unlike Fulci’s later flicks, Don't Torture a Duckling does not hopelessly pretend to be an American production, but is, in fact, aside from possibly his pre-horror goofy goombah comedies, the director’s most intrinsically and flagrantly Italian work that wallows in the angelic beauty of the Southern Italian countryside and features the sort of ‘anti-Catholic Catholicism’ that only Catholic-indoctrinated Guido filmmakers can pull off. In fact, despite being an imperative and groundbreaking work in Fulci’s career, Don't Torture a Duckling was immediately blacklisted and only received a limited theatrical release (it was not even released in the United States in any format until 2000) due to its uniquely unflattering depiction of the Catholic church and portrayal of Italian peasants as hotheaded hicks with murderously superstitious minds. As far as I am concerned, Don't Torture a Duckling is one of the strangest, greatest, and most artfully assembled Giallo flicks ever made as a work that deserves a place alongside Giulio Questi ‘s Death Laid an Egg (1968) aka La morte ha fatto l'uovo and Silvio Narizzano’s Bloodbath (1979) aka Las flores del vicio aka The Sky Is Falling as a wonderfully wayward work that takes the Guido murder mystery genre into more delightfully deranged territory. A work that unquestionably proves that Fulci was not a no-talent horror hack who merely used buckets of blood and phantasmagoric imagery to hide the fact he was incapable of telling a story with character development and complex plots, Don’t Torture a Duckling is a ‘whodunit’ flick with equal doses of scathing style and substance that leaves the viewers guessing until the very end, thus concluding in an ungodly manner that makes one question whether or not the director was the victim of a sexually repressed priest when he was a child. 

 Bruno, Michele, and Tonino are a troublesome trio of boys who live in the small and isolated Southern Italian village of Accendura and not one of the boys will live long enough to reach puberty and deflower their first girl as a mysterious mad man with an unhealthy obsession with little lads will ultimately brutally murder each one of them. When bad boy Bruno goes missing, the remote village of Accendura has the rare distinction of reaching the national spotlight as a media frenzy occurs that brings the sharp and satirical liberal journalist Andrea Martelli (Tomas Milian) to the area to investigate. Initially, the local village idiot and peeping tom Giuseppe Barra (Vito Passeri) is implicated in the crime after he is found lurking around the body where Bruno is buried. Indeed, while Barra was one the first ones to discover the corpse of Bruno, he did not kill the boy but merely phoned his parents in a patently pathetic attempt to extract an absurdly small ransom. Of course, when the drowned corpse of Bruno’s friend Tonino is found while Barra is imprisoned, it becomes quite obvious that the retarded peeping tom did not commit the killing. When the last of the three boys, Michele, is killed via strangulation after he makes the fatal mistake of sneaking out of his home at night, the townspeople begin to look for a scapegoat for the murders. Of course, the villagers suspect the sexually promiscuous beauty Patrizia (German-American actress Barbara Bouchet)—a scantily clad counter-culture chick from Milan who is laying low after being involved in a drug scandal and who gets off to displaying her unclad tanned body to prepubescent boys, including one of the ones who was killed—as a young local priest, Don Alberto Avallone (Marc Porel), even hints to journalist Martelli that the murders only started to occur after she arrived and defiled the village with her voluptuous presence. Priest Don Alberto also confides in Martelli that he firmly believes loose morals are to blame for the tragic deaths and that he has managed to censor liberal/counter-culture material appearing in the village, stating, “Then something bad happens, and everyone wonders why! So they look for a culprit…and nobody understand that it’s our tolerance that’s to blame…I’m friends with the news vendor, and he won’t sell certain magazines…They don’t even arrive here.” The priest runs a youth group at the church and cons the boys into going to become more involved with god and the church by playing soccer with them. While twink-ish priest Don Alberto is unanimously loved and respected by all the villagers, his reclusive mother Aurelia (Irene Papas) is a strange and mysterious woman who, as Martelli is told by one villager, is  essentially “only tolerated because she is the priest's mother.” Another suspect in the murders is a beautiful yet decidedly dirty black magic witch named La Magiara (Florinda Bolkan) who has a peculiar proclivity for digging up infant skeletons and fiddling with voodoo dolls, including driving pins through three dolls that are ostensibly symbols of the three little lads that were killed. 

 Eventually, proletarian witch Magiara is arrested for the murders and when she is brought to the police station, she proudly proclaims she is responsible for killing the three boys as she seems to assume her voodoo doll excursions were successful. While Magiara is cleared of the charges after a police officer provides her with an alibi, she ultimately meets a grizzly end when a group of superstitious villagers decide to take matters into their own hands and brutally beat the would-be-witch an inch away from her life after spotting her in the local graveyard. While succumbing to her wounds, Magiara attempts to flag down passing cars but is ignored as if she is mere rodent road kill, ultimately dying on the side of the road. The next day, another boy is killed via drowning and posh druggy princess Patrizia’s fancy gold-plated cigarette lighter is found at the scene, thus implicating her in the crime, but luckily she has an alibi as she was buying some dope at the time of the murder. Naturally, Martelli and Patrizia, being the most cosmopolitan and ‘progressive’ people investigating the boy murders, decide to team up and solve the mystery themselves. After learning that priest Don Alberto has a retarded six-year-old sister with a perverse, peculiar proclivity for dismembering her dolls, including Donald Duck dolls (hence, the title Don’t Torture a Duckling), Martelli comes to the conclusion that the girl has witnessed the murders and is merely imitating what she saw. Ultimately, Martelli and Patrizia conclude that either Don Alberto or his mother is responsible for the murders. Although Don Alberto’s sister and mother disappear, Martelli and Patrizia later track down the mother, who is semi-conscious after taking a beat from her unholy holy son, in a medieval shack. Don Alberto begs Martelli to stop her perturbed priest from killing her daughter. Luckily, Martelli catches Don Alberto right before he throws his sister off a cliff. Martelli and Don Alberto get in a small brawl and the wussy journalist manages to trip up the pussy priest, who falls off the cliff head first, and ultimately smashes his skulls against the rocks as he plunges to his violent yet fitting death as a fallen disciple of Christ. As to why he committed the crazed killings of the young boys that he proclaimed to love so much and devoted his life to, Martelli states, “They grow up…They feel the stirrings of the flesh. They fall into the arms of sin. We must stop them. Sin that God easily forgives, yes…But what of tomorrow? What sordid acts will they commit? What sins will they enact when they no longer come to confession? Then they will be really dead. Dead forever.” Indeed, maybe if Patrizia had not gotten busted for snorting coke in Milan and sought exile in the small Sicilian village, then all the senseless deaths could have been prevented. 

 Described by Lucio Fucli’s contemporary and Giallo maestro Dario Argento as, “One of Lucio Fulci's best films and a superb Giallo!,” Don't Torture a Duckling certainly managed to bring new lunatic lifeblood to a fiercely formulaic genre as a work that manages to reconcile the celluloid blasphemy of Alberto Cavallone (indeed, it is a great incidental irony that the killer priest’s name is “Alberto Avallone”) with the thrilling crime-drama of Fernando Di Leo and the atmospheric Guido Giallo greatness of Argento. A socially scathing work that depicts Sicily as a quasi-medieval shithole populated by superstitious lynch mobs, pernicious priests of the homicidal (and possibly pedophiliac) sort, and a rather large population of retards, Don't Torture a Duckling is ultimately no less hateful, if not more personally so, in its depiction of rural Southern rednecks than the anti-Heimat films of German New Cinema and popular Hollywood movies like John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), thereupon also making it one of Fulci’s most socio-politically penetrating works. Personally, I am glad that Fulci eventually dropped the socialpolitical pretenses yet, admittedly, it does not reach intolerable nor obnoxious extremes in Don't Torture a Duckling, in part due to the fact that ‘progressive’ Patrizia is portrayed as a cunty cocktease who gets off to pseudo-seducing preteen boys and does not do much aside from drugs and sunbathing.  Also, unlike the degenerates in Hollywood, who merely make crude and preposterous caricatures of rednecks and other people they are afraid of, Fulci's hatred is clearly personal and thus more authentic. Featuring an unflattering portrait of a Catholic village that could have most certainly inspired Cavallone’s absurdist masterpiece Man, Woman and Beast (1977) aka L'uomo, la donna e la bestia - Spell (Dolce mattatoio) and easily one of the creepiest and most bizarre portrayals of a priest in cinema history, Don't Torture a Duckling is certainly a masterpiece of its genre that also, like the greatest works of the genre, transcends said genre. Including a totally complimentary score from Riz Ortolani (Goodbye Uncle Tom aka Addio Zio Tom, Cannibal Holocaust) and alluring landscapes scenes of the Sicilian countryside that recall the films of Pasolini, Don't Torture a Duckling is, in my less than humble opinion, the ultimate Guido Giallo film as a curious cinematic cocktail of what dagos do best cinematically: sex, death, crime, politics, and religion.  Although a pure assumption, I think it is safe to say after watching Don't Torture a Duckling and The House by the Cemetery that maestro Fulci had an unhappy childhood, but thank god he did or otherwise the world would otherwise not have what is probably the greatest killer priest movie ever made.

-Ty E

Martin (1976)

The older I get, the less tolerant I am regarding the films of ‘the people's horror auteur’ George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead), as nothing seems less cinematically unappetizing to me than ‘socially conscious’ left-wing horror films, which the iconic horror filmmaker is almost singlehandedly responsible for sinisterly spawning like an out-of-control monster as if it was one of his filmic zombies. Indeed, it has been nearly three decades since Romero even made a halfway decent film, with the troubled production Day of the Dead (1985) being the last film that he made that I could stomach without feeling like I was being bombarded with populist leftist celluloid flesheater feces of the superlatively superficially satirical sort. In fact, as far as I am concerned, Night of the Living Dead (1968), Martin (1976), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Knightriders (1981), Creepshow (1982), and Day of the Dead (1985) are the only Romero flicks that did not make me feel totally embarrassed by Romero’s calculating cinematic counter-culture redundancies. The director’s closest thing to an ‘arthouse’ flick aside from his totally unwatchable early celluloid abortions—There’s Always Vanilla (1971) and Hungry Wives (1972) aka Season of the Witch—Martin aka George A. Romero's Martin aka Wampyr is also probably Romero’s most artistically and intellectually ambitious celluloid to date. In fact, Romero himself regards Martin as his personal favorite of his own films, which is a notable sentiment on his part considering he could easily cop-out and name one of his most popular and influential works like Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead as his fave. Although I would not describe it as his greatest film, Martin is certainly Romero's most subversive and ‘interesting’ work as a vampire flick that delicately deconstructs and distorts, mischievously molests, and radically reinvents the horror subgenre it pays a sort of reluctant homage to. Indeed, as a vampire flick that is lacking in romanticism and is mostly aesthetically revolting, decidedly dreary, and ultimately quite cynical, Martin is a rare bloodsucker flick for both people that love and loathe the subgenre. Clearly influencing homocore poof Bruce LaBruce zombie flicks Otto; or Up with Dead People (2008) and L.A. Zombie (2010) in its teasing thematic ambiguity in regard as to whether the protagonist is actually a member of the undead or not, Martin is a strikingly singular vampire flick in that the bloodsucking lead is a patently pathetic and decidedly dorky zit-faced teenage turd who could not even glamour a blind midget with Down syndrome if he tried, thus opting for drugging them college frat boy style instead and feeding on them while they are unconscious, thus taking all of the fun out of being a vampire. Featuring a vampire who, instead of living in an ancient castle, squats at the humble home of his granduncle—a pissed and perturbed yet articulate old fart who suffers from a murderous case of Sanguivoriphobia—in the postindustrial wasteland that is Pittsburgh, PA, Martin is probably the only bloodsucker movie where the vampire is a delusional fellow who has no fangs and slits his victim’s wrists with a razor so as to slurp up their vital fluids. A demystifying depiction of a degenerate pseudo-Dracula that simultaneously portrays Catholic ‘true believers’ as the most pernicious of perverted minds and a murderous teenager as misunderstood and angst-ridden young man who is a nasty and nihilistic product of his spiritually backwards background, Martin—arguably more than any other films of the horror subgenre—if nothing else cinematically significant, manages to suck all of the life out of the vampire mythos. 

 A would-be-Dracula wuss of a young man named Martin Mathias (John Amplas) is on a train heading from Indianapolis to Pittsburgh and since he is somewhat insane, he believes he is a vampire of sorts, so he injects some poor young lady with a debilitating dose of dope, slits her wrist, feeds on her blood, and leaves her to bleed out. Awkward as an ugly duckling on PCP, Martin is far from a suave bloodsucker and almost bungles his deranged date with the sexy stranger on the train. When Martin arrives in Pittsburgh, he is less than warmly greeted by an old man with a Lithuanian accent who looks like Colonel Sanders. Of course, the man, whose real name is Tateh Cuda (Lincoln Maazel), does not sell fried chicken (though he does own a butcher shop!) and despite his animosity towards the young man, he is Martin's granduncle. For whatever reason, crazed Cuda believes Martin is a true blue vampire and treats him as such, calling his nephew “Nosferatu” and covering his home with garlic and crucifixes. Since Martin’s family dropped dead and Cuda is his closest living relative, the boy bloodsucker has no choice but to stay with the mystical-minded maniac of a man who believes he is a supernatural creature from hell. Paradoxically, while Martin does his damnedest to prove to Uncle Cuda that he is not a vampire, fiddling with garlic and stating things like “There's no real magic... ever,” Martin has seemingly schizophrenic visions, which are depicted in luscious monochrome black-and-white, of himself engaged in imaginary classic Gothic vampire horror scenarios that ultimately involve him killing and sucking the blood of beauteous young women.  In one of these scenarios, Martin quasi-homosexually kills and drinks the blood of a man outside, yet hallucinates he is inside an old castle draining the blood of a young beauty in her bed. Believing that he is an 84-year-old bloodsucking creature of the night, Martin is playing a most dangerous game that could very potentially get him killed as his medieval-minded uncle has made the ultimatum to him that if he discovers he kills someone, he will personally drive a stake through his Nosferatu nephew's cold black heart. In between working at Cuda's butcher shop as a delivery boy and stalking unsuspecting young ladies, Martin calls into a radio DJ under the alias of “The Count” to set the truth straight regarding vampires (rationalizing there is no “magic stuff” as an excuse for his lack of fangs and hypnotic powers) and asking advice regarding ‘female trouble.’ Naturally, with his delivery job, Martin comes in contact with a number of sexually repressed women, but being quasi-autistic, he is incapable of asserting himself, despite the fact that a lonely lady named Mrs. Abbie Santini (Elyane Nadeau) is practically begging him to jump her bones. When Martin finally gets the balls to seduce Santini, he begins a lurid love affair with her that dries up his thirst for blood. After losing control and attempting to drain two bums of their blood, Martin is almost caught by the cops and experiences a temporary sense of relief, but, rather unfortunately, Santini, an alcoholic who is depressed by the fact that she is infertile and will never have children, ironically commits suicide with a straight razor and uncle Cuda blames his nephew for her death. Irked that his granddaughter Christine (Romero’s ex-wife Christine Forrest) has moved out of the family home and that no one shares his superstitious beliefs, Cuda keeps his word and drives a stake through Martin’s heart, ironically killing the boy for the one murder he did not actually commit. 

 With the original cut, which is now presumed lost, being at an epic length of 2 hours 45 minutes, Martin as it exists today is certainly not the film it was originally meant to be, yet it still manages to be one Romero’s most provocative and penetrating cinematic works, even if it is a rather amateurishly directed work riddled with accidental ‘jump cuts,’ outmoded wardrobes and mostly horrendous acting and forgettable actors. Set in an aesthetically revolting world of pollution-ridden factories as opposed to foggy ruined castles, nihilism as opposed to spirituality, and pansy proletarian blood-licking posers as opposed to aristocratic bloodsuckers, Martin is a modernist vampire flick where alienation, social and urban decay, mental illness, melancholy, the breakup of the nuclear family, and drug addiction is rampant and rightfully so as a truly and classically 'American' horror film that depicts the land of the free and home of the brave as it really is; a culturally and spiritually vacant multicultural nightmare plagued by vice and identity-crisis-stricken loner losers like antihero Martin. Undoubtedly, the antihero of Martin is a product of his zeitgeist and environment as an introverted psycho whose only source of solace is escaping into an imaginary world of suavely dressed bloodsuckers. Indeed, it is only when Martin starts a romantic relationship that his sanity begins to somewhat reach equilibrium, but ultimately he is a lost cause whose decidedly debilitating mental derangement wins in the end, so, in a sense, his death via a stake in the heart is a fitting way for the boy to go out. Aside from possibly Jonathan (1970) directed by German auteur Hans W. Geißendörfer and The Addiction (1995) directed by drug-addled American McGuido Abel Ferrara—both of which undoubtedly being better directed and more aesthetically pleasing works to Romero's revisionist vampire flick—Martin is indeed the greatest modern vampire flick. Not unlike David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), albeit in a less esoteric and artful way, Martin portrays post-civil rights urban Pennsylvania as a revolting postindustrial nightmare with a degenerating populous suffering from depression, alienation, and sexual dysfunction, thereupon one of only a handful of American vampire flicks that rises above the level of tasteless trash. Featuring a quasi-autistic lead whose MILF girlfriend backhandedly compliments him by saying, “That’s why you’re so nice to be around…you don’t have opinions” thus underscoring the lack of true personality many young American males suffer from, Martin is more relevant today than when it was first released, even if it is rather aesthetically outmoded affair, but then again, that is an innate trademark of George A. Romero’s greatest films. 

-Ty E

Gunnar Goes Comfortable

Undoubtedly, contemporary Scandinavia is littered with tons of degenerate and ethno-masochistic cinematic works depicting a pathologically perturbed people who are addicted to Weltschmerz, existential crisis, nihilism, spiritual emptiness, xenophilia, meaningless sex, and pill-popping, but probably no other film from the deracinated Nordic lands depicts these many miserable untermensch things in a more flagrant and personal manner than the autobiographical documentary Gunnar Goes Comfortable (2003) aka Gunnar Goes Comfortable – A Personal Inquiry directed by Norwegian documentarian Gunnar Hall Jensen (Cathedral, Gunnar Goes God). A darkly comedic doc that features a lifetime’s worth of home movies edited down to just over 70 minutes, Gunnar Goes Comfortable documents the confused life of angst-ridden auteur Gunnar Jensen; an alcohol, depression and diabetes-addled Norwegian narcissist, borderline psychopath, and 37-year-old man-child of the sometimes majorly moronic sort who makes a Hesse-inspired pilgrimage to India in the decidedly desperate hope that he can find peace with his majorly discombobulated mind, body, and soul. Featuring ambient footage of Gunnar burning his cock with a space heater, hanging out in a morgue with the corpse of the father he never knew, crying constantly like a little girl for seemingly no reason, deriving a grand delight in dumping his girlfriend (who he has been cheating on), and proudly showing off the naked body of his new pregnant wife, among various other things that no sane person would film themselves doing, Gunnar Goes Comfortable is as creepily candid as a colonoscopy as a sort of artfully edited celluloid defecation of the morbidly depressed director’s lifelong fear and failure as the bastard son of an unloving ship captain whose emotionally-shattered mother used him as an emotional punching bag. A sort of wayward and wacky window into the perturbed psyche of a modern day middle-class Norwegian man living in a soulless socialist democracy, Gunnar Goes Comfortable depicts an exceedingly emasculated and eccentric fellow who would love nothing more than to kill his masochistic mind and personality, even if these are pretty much the only thing he cares about and bothers to discuss. Describing his first orgasm as having felt like he was “bleeding to death” and studying the misanthropic dipsomaniac literature of alcoholic Aryan-American author Charles Bukowski as a sad and senseless substitute for a living and breathing father figure, Gunnar still managed to have an inkling of the Faustian man in his soul as his restlessness led him to a spiritual pilgrimage that, although causing him to hit rock bottom with a beer can in one hand and and insulin needle in the other, ultimately leading him to realize that the grass is always greener on the other side and to just accept his shitty personality and mixed up mind. 

 As Gunnar states at the beginning of Gunnar Goes Comfortable, “It all started with a feeling of being scared. Then my father left me and my mother forever. Mom never got over it. She got sick.” Indeed, apparently Gunnar’s mom got so sick that she suffered “massive menstruations” and he was no different, ultimately developing a debilitating form of diabetes at a young age that would contribute to him not only being a physical cripple, but an emotional one as well. When discovering how he ran through a glass window as a wee lad, Gunnar—a major (sado)masochist who wallows in pain and suffering—has no problem admitting that he, “actually felt good being injured” and continued to seek solace in similar self-destructive behavior. When Gunnar grew up to be an adult man-child he realized that he would need to do dangerous activities to balance out his fear-stricken mind, ultimately opting for jumping off bridges, speeding on long, windy mountain roads and whatnot. Determined to be a ‘messianic auteur,’ Gunnar became a filmmaker, making nonsensical films, including a black-and-black noir-ish arthouse flick featuring men defecating on toilets in a pseudo-Lynchian manner, that he himself would more or less describe as being as messed up as his mind, but eventually he sold-out and began making goofy commercials to financially support himself. Including footage of his one-time hero Charles Bukowski stating, “The further I am from the human race the better I feel,” Gunnar made the wise decision to make a pilgrimage to India—the second most populated country in the world—to do a bit of soulseeking. On top of confiding in the crackpot texts of superlatively pseudo-scientific crazed kosher psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to learn better masturbation techniques (which he films himself practicing) and getting over his self-described ambivalence regarding women and pleasure, Gunnar studied under a fellow rootless Norwegian named ‘Vasant Swaha’; a racial Nordic turned pseudo-Indian Hindi mystic. Although he freely admits he has no idea what Swaha is talking about when he speaks of metaphysical mumbo jumbo, Gunnar learns from his master that his personality creates so much pain and misery because, “it’s false” and that “your whole life is built around the personality…that means everything is false.” Of course, neither Gunnar nor Swaha seem to realize the adopting an alien religion and form of dress is also ‘false.’ 

 In terms of other heroes, Gunnar lists Japanese far-right novelist Yukio Mishima at the top, describing him as the “ultimate encounter with self-control,” as a gay man who created a virtual martial empire of art and who took his life into his owns hand, quite literally, annihilating himself at the height of his physical and artistic prowess. Due to the fact that he also suffered a less than ideal childhood involving nagging and repressive women and had next to nil father figures (Mishima spent his early childhood as a virtual slave of his pseudo-aristocratic grandmother), Gunnar sees Mishima as a father figure, even going so far as glorifying the novelist’s ritual suicide by seppuku after a failed coup d'état as the “ultimate piece of masculine art.”  If anything is for sure while watching Gunnar Goes Comfortable, it is that hero Gunnar is far too self-absorbed, ill-restrained, cowardly, and totally lacking in the capacity to commit to following through with something as serious and permanent as suicide, let alone leading a coup d'état with his own privately trained army, thus he must keep grudgingly treading on with his loser life. Gunnar also theorizes that he would have been a staunch Hitlerite had he been a Teutonic teen during the Third Reich era because, like many of those boys of that time whose fathers had been killed during World War I, he was looking for a father figure and someone like Uncle Adolf would have filled that void. Needless to say, Gunnar did not obtain many new insights in India and eventually went home to Norway to take respectable employment as someone who dubs bad movies from English to Norwegian, but luckily the neglectful father he never knew drops dead, thus creating a new sense of closure in his life. In what is easily the most morbid and disturbing scene of Gunnar Goes Comfortable, the hysterical hero goes to the morgue and films himself seemingly fake crying at the bedside of his estranged father’s corpse in what is probably the longest and most intimate moment they ever spent together. Proudly admitting he never thought about his father ever again after his degenerate date with his dead daddy’s corpse, Gunnar finally realizes his deep love for his mommy, stating although he has tried to avoid her for 25 years, he now misses her, realizing her love for him was stronger than her 'fucked up personality.' In the end, things seem to work themselves out for Gunnar as he marries a single mother with a handicapped child and even has a son of his own with her, thus thankfully continuing the cycle of post-Viking Nordic misery. 

 While essentially saying everything he has to say about his depressing life with the documentary, Gunnar followed up Gunnar Goes Comfortable with a quasi-sequel of sorts entitled Gunnar Goes God (2010), which takes a less intimate and Hebraic humor inspired approach to things. Indeed, while Gunnar is a now a happily married father with two cars, a nice scenic home with a luxurious landscape, and a four compartment refrigerator, in Gunnar Goes God the filmmaker has a spiritual cramp of sorts and decides to take his film crew to Egypt to the oldest Christian monastery where, not unsurprisingly, he does not really learn anything about the void in his soul. Undoubtedly, compared to his first documentary, Gunnar Goes God seems like a halfhearted attempt of conspicuously contrived self-parody of the superficial softcore sort, as a man who has finally ‘gone comfortable’ enough to take on a bourgeois novelty of investigating god and life itself. Indeed, in its own way, Gunnar Goes Comfortable is a minor masterpiece of merrily macabre personal filmmaking as a keenly kaleidoscopic collage of one borderline psychopath’s perturbing personality and how he comes to terms to accepting said positively perturbed personality. Considering Gunnar’s less than artistic personal favorite films, which are featured throughout the documentary and include The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), Mad Max (1979), First Blood (1982), and RoboCop (1987), and seeming lack of artistic pretensions, Gunnar Goes Comfortable is a shockingly artfully assembled and even strangely ethereal work that takes the viewer on a jaded journey that they will never forget, whether they want to or not. Featuring an eclectic soundtrack, including songs from Sigur Ros, D.A.F. (Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft), Creedence Clearwater Revival, Grandaddy, and Will Oldham, among various others, Gunnar Goes Comfortable is, aside from the music and occasional film clip, an unadulterated ‘auteur piece’ in the truest sense as an embarrassingly incriminating personal portrait of a messed up mensch who is simultaneously ridiculously narcissistic yet pathologically self-denigrating. A sort of Norwegian equivalent to Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation (2003), except way less gay, hysterical, and spastically directed, Gunnar Goes Comfortable is a highly personalized depiction of the spiritual and psychological degeneration of the Viking man who, instead of a conqueror lands, has adopted xenophilia and is making pilgrimages to the third world to ‘find himself,’ which he naturally did not. Easily the most unintentionally humorous documentary I have ever seen as a work that even makes Timothy Treadwell of Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005) seem sane by comparison, Gunnar Goes Comfortable is a film that proves that for at least once in director Gunnar Hall Jensen's life, his nauseating narcissism and general mental illness have been given a creative and even productive outlet, even if he screwed up a couple lives in the process.

-Ty E

Rape on the Moor

 Although completely unknown outside of German-speaking nations, the Heimatfilm (“homeland-film”)—a mystical Teutonic film genre typically filmed outdoors in rural settings with a somewhat sentimental tone centering around old fashioned morals, tight knit families, and a quasi-völkisch and mystical infatuation with nature—was quite a popular film genre in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria from about the late 1940s to the early 1970s as the only popular kraut film style that followed in the footsteps of films from the Third Reich era, so it should be no surprise that a number of filmmakers of German New Cinema, including Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Herzog, Herbert Achternbusch, and even Rainer Werner Fassbinder, started a fashionable anti-Heimatfilm genre that was somewhat trendy during the late-1960s/early-1970s depicting the Germanic countryside as an absurdly backward place full of bloodthirsty lynch mobs, racist and fag-bashing rednecks, an uneducated and superstitious general populous, and smelly cow turds and mutilated animal corpses. Of course, the far-leftist filmmakers of German New Cinema were not the first people to play with and distort the conventions of the Heimatfilm genre, as demonstrated by the little known (at least anywhere outside of Germany and Austria) and criminally neglected gothic horror Heimat film Rape on the Moor (1952) aka Rosen blühen auf dem Heidegrab aka Roses Bloom on the Grave in the Meadow aka Dorothee written and directed by German auteur Hans H. König (The Little Town Will Go to Sleep, Jägerblut). While only a film director for about a half a decade (he would later work as a TV writer before disappearing entirely), Hans H. König managed to subvert and tweak many conventions of the Heimat genre, while sticking to the general plot structure where a good guy and bad guy fight over a girl, with the good guy winning in the end and everyone ends up living happily ever. Indeed, whilst Rape on the Moor essentially follows the typical Heimat plot structure, including the standard romantic subtext, the film does not conclude on a positively positive note as a fiercely foreboding cinematic work that depicts how some things, including boorish rapist kidnappers, that stay the same in the Teutonic countryside are not exactly the most ideal, but nonetheless unavoidable, sort of like cancer. Set in a small Nordic North German village (the film was shot in Bremen (Worpswede Teufelsmoor) and Diepholz (Wietingsmoor)), Rape on the Moor depicts how history has a way of repeating itself when the old Germanic legend of a young beauty named Wilhelmina, who disappeared in a marsh after she was raped by a Swedish soldier during the Thirty Years' War, is eerily repeated in the modern day when a husky hoghead of a man who will not take no for an answer becomes morbidly infatuated with a young girl who wants nothing to do with him. Featuring swamp scenes that look like a peasant’s take on those featured in F.W. Murnau’s post-expressionist masterpiece Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) and a sexually predatory villain who is sort of the proletarian equivalent of the bulky bastard baron featured in Effi Briest (1974) directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Rape on the Moor acts as a sort of celluloid missing link between the pre-Nazi ‘grandfather generation’ and the filmmakers of German New cinema. 

 While strolling down a dirt road on her bike, Dorothee Aden (Ruth Niehaus) is approached by lecherous lurker Dietrich Eschmann (Hermann Schomberg)—a boorish and belligerent beast of a farmer that is as tall and heavyset as he is vulgar and unpleasant, thus making quite the apt person for subduing and assaulting fragile young women—who demands to know why the young debutante is avoiding him. Aside from the fact that Dietrich is a married man and she finds him rather repulsive, Dorothee is in love with a young and promising architect named Ludwig Amelung (Armin Dahlen), who will do anything for the woman he loves, even if he must constantly leave town to attend to his job duties. Dietrich, on the other hand, has a rather miserable marriage with his lonely wife Fiete (Gisela von Collande), so much so that when he tells his beloved “I will kill you,” she simply responds with, “Do it” as if she is longing to be put out of her misery.  Instead of killing Fiete, Dietrich ends up maliciously molesting his wife, thus demonstrating the sadomasochistic nature of their miscarriage of a marriage. Like a pissed puppy with rabies, wherever Dorothee goes, degenerate Dietrich follows, so the little lass describes him rightfully as being “like an animal” and, like a beast, the bloated ogre has virtually nil control over his sexual urges or so he will prove. During a splendid day while roaming the countryside with her Teuton boy toy Ludwig, Dorothee spots two crows and describes them as being, “The souls of Wilhelmina and the Swede.” According to local folklore, during the Thirty Years' War—a time when, according to Dorothee, “one had to be friendly to the strangers who came from the North or South”—a young and beauteous maiden named Wilhelmina made the mistake of leading a Swedish lieutenant through a moor, where he raped her, so as revenge and, “out of the misery and desperation of her heart,” she later led him to the wetlands where they both disappeared into the earth, never to be see again. Undoubtedly,  Dorothee has a sort of metaphysical feeling that she and Wilhelmina are kindred spirits, which proves to be true in the sense that she is soon raped by Dietrich and she seeks revenge by taking him to the moor, with the goal of killing him and herself, albeit things do not turn out as perfect as planned as her loyal lover Ludwig comes to the rescue in the end. Unfortunately, while Ludwig, with the help of a rescue team (who sport what looks like World War I era German helmets), manage to rescue Dorothee from being forever swallowed up by the earth in just in the nick of time, the emotional damage as a result of the rape and near death/suicide/murder experience may have caused irreparable damage that may or may not destroy the two lovers' relationship in the end. Whether Dorothee and Ludwig ever manage to move on with the traumatic events is questionable, thus making the kraut countryside seem like a curious and accursed place plagued by blood, soil, and semen. 

 Although I may be overestimating his love of the Teutons, maybe if he had seen Rape on the Moor and the various other subversive Heimat films directed by Hans H. König, Austrian-Jewish-American cineaste Amos Vogel might have thought twice about describing heimat films as “those insufferable, sentimental "kitsch" prosodies to Fatherland, Soil, and Family,” in his book Film as a Subversive Art (1974). Indeed, Rape on the Moor takes a more unsettling look at völk history and folklore than probably any others of the 300+ Heimat films made during the 1950s as a work ultimately demonstrating that—aside from love, family, spirituality, and nature worship being a part of folk history—lovelorn jealousy, barbarian invasions, and violent sexual pillaging also came into play because for every happy couple there is a desperate and sometimes deranged third person looking to split them apart who is willing to do anything to achieve their aberrant aims. Unlike anti-Heimat films like Hunting Scenes from Bavaria (1969) aka Jagdszenen aus Niederbayern and Der plötzliche Reichtum der armen Leute von Kombach (1971) aka The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach, which portray Teutonic rural areas as backwards hellholes with a borderline retarded populous of the superlatively superstitious sort, Rape on the Moor does not wallow in contempt for the kraut country, but portrays it as a beautiful yet brutal place where both man and nature have the capacity for the most ungodly and unmerciful of atrocities. If Rape on the Moor accomplishes anything that is original that makes it stand out from not just Heimat films but horror cinema as well, it is in depicting the countryside as an oneiric and omnious haunted house/graveyard of sorts that has the propensity for literally possessing its inhabitants, especially the character Dorothee, who is summoned by the moor, whispering “The… moor… is… calling” to herself while in an entranced state of wayward ecstasy.   Sort of the Rebecca (1940) meets Carnival of Souls (1962) of Heimat films, Rape on the Moor is indisputable proof that Teutonic mysticism and Gothic horror can make for an immaculate combo, but rather unfortunately, aside from Niklaus Schilling's killer kaleidoscopic work Nachtschatten (1972) aka Nightshade, I cannot think of another film that has attempted this devilishly delectable celluloid formula.

-Ty E

Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror

Out of all the Italian zombie films I have seen, Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror (1981) aka Le notti del terrore aka Zombie 3 (one of a number of films released under this name!) aka The Zombie Dead aka The Nights of Terror directed by Andrea Bianchi (Strip Nude for Your Killer, Confessions of a Frustrated Housewife) and written by Piero Regnoli (Navajo Joe, Nightmare City) has to be the most innately and inanely idiotic, aesthetically repugnant, morally irredeemable, patently preposterous, and unintentionally entertaining zombie flick ever made, as a rip off of both the films of George A. Romero and Lucio Fulci, as well as the Spanish zombie flick Amando de Ossorio’s Tombs of the Blind Dead (1971). To the minor credit of the film, the special effects for Burial Ground were done by Gino De Rossi who, on top of working on respectable films like The Last Emperor (1987) directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and Casino Royale (2006), created the standout special effects for a number of Guido exploitation flicks, including Cannibal Ferox (1981), but also Lucio Fulci’s Zombie (1979) aka Zombi 2 and City of the Living Dead (1980) aka Paura nella città dei morti viventi, thereupon making this miserable maggot-infested zombie film mandatory viewing for any serious zombiphile. Aside from featuring Fulci-esque zombies with real maggots and worms crawling out of their eye sockets, Burial Ground is probably best remembered for featuring a 26-year-old Italian midget that looks like a more fetus-like version of Dario Argento (incidentally, a workshop featured in the film was also used in Dario Argento's Inferno (1980)) playing the role of a 13-year-old boy with an odious Oedipus complex who has never gotten over his love of suckling on his wanton whore mother’s mature tits. Featuring an intolerably obnoxious cast of Hightalian jet-set degenerates of the imbecilic and lecherous sort, Burial Ground is also a rare distinguished low-class trash celluloid treat in that the voracious cadaverous flesheaters eat the decadent upper-class humans in what amounts to an anti-bourgeois permanent revolution in zombie form. Before the internet made it so that C-grade exploitation films like it were made somewhat readily available, I managed to secure a copy of Burial Ground by chance while still a preteen and I was left in a state of awe by how absurdly amateurish, sleazy, and morally retarded the film was, as if it was a reactionary zombie flick made in petty protest to the superficial civil-rights-saluting of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and the pseudo-Marxist anti-capitalist subtext of Dawn of the Dead (1978). A horrendously hokey and haphazardly assembled horror fest where every single character is dismembered and devoured by cloaked undead cannibals, Burial Ground is a hopeless film with an equally hopeless message of schlocky gloom and doom that never fails to entertain, even if it fails in every single other regard as a sort of Plan 9 from Outer Space of Guido zombie flicks. 

 A swarthy Professor Ayres (Raimondo Barbieri) who looks like a poor goy’s rabbi has made a major discovery (apparently, he is “the only one who knows the secret”) at an ancient Etruscan crypt he has been rigorously studying and he has invited three couples, who seem to have little interest in ancient history (let alone thinking!) to his quaint mansion to see said magnificent discovery, but he is already dead by the time they have arrived because he has accidentally unleashed a corpse-reanimating curse. Hyper hedonistic and recklessly lecherous jet-set jackasses that seem like a poor Sicilian man’s equivalent to the voracious suicidal eaters of Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe (1973), the Prof’s guests are the last people you would expect to survive a zombie apocalypse and sure enough, they do not, but some of them do put up a fight with the flesheaters in between sniffing wine and having lackluster sex. The most interesting of the couples is fetus-like preteen pervert Michael (played by wily wop midget Peter Bark) and his sub-MILF mommy Evelyn (Mariangela Giordano), who has just gotten married to a weak man (he is the first person aside from the professor to be killed) who does not love his wife nearly as much as his new stepson does. Jealous of any man that courts his mommy dearest, Michael intentionally walks in on his mother while she is sharing carnal knowledge with her new hubby. Luckily for little Mikey, his mother’s new husband is the first one to be made into zombie meat, thus enabling the incestuous boy to keep the matriarch all to himself, at least for a momentary period of time. Of course, Michael is not the only degenerate at the manor as a fellow named James (Simone Mattioli) also demonstrates his love and respect for his girlfriend Leslie (Antonella Antinori) by telling her, “You look just like a little whore but, I like that in a girl.” The youngest couple is Mark (Gianluigi Chirizzi) and Janet (Karin Well), hence probably why they end up living the longest. 

 Rather ridiculously and ultimately hilariously, micro-man Michael unwittingly prophesies the presence of the zombies after smelling an old piece of cloth and pseudo-poetically stating, “Mom, this thing…it smells of death,” as if he found a pair of skidmark-stained zombie underwear. When the zombies attack the mansion, the brilliant couples barricade themselves inside the lavish home in a Romero-esque fashion and despite ostensibly fighting for their lives, they still demand that the maid brings them beverages and whatnot, as if the hordes of flesheaters will retreat in no time. When the maid is killed after a zombie somehow pins her to a window via throwing a knife (!) at her hand (as if the zombie is a world champion dart player) and subsequently decapitating her pretty little head with a scythe, the infantile inhabitants at the house realize they have reached an all-time low in terms of comfort. Michael, on the other hand, seems to be at his most comfortable and confidant as he makes an audacious attempt to seduce his mother by groping her breasts and going down her panties, confessing to her, “Oh Mom, I love you so much. I need to feel you near me. To touch you…When I was a boy, remember? You always held me to your breast. I liked your breasts a lot,” for which he is rightfully rewarded with a slap to the face, thus causing the little fetus boy to run away crying like the little whiny shit momma’s boy that he is. Of course, mother Evelyn later rather regrets denying her son her flesh because not longer after slapping him, she finds Leslie, who is now a flesh-fiending zombie, dining on little Michael's tiny dismembered arm. In the end, the survivors—Mark, Janet, and Evelyn—make their way to an ancient monastery where they discover all of the monks have joined the ranks of the living dead and are devouring human body parts in a seemingly ritualistic fashion. Eventually, Michael, who is now zombified and more hungry for his mother’s flesh than ever, shows up at the monastery, and Evelyn, who suffered more than just a little nervous breakdown after her son's death, wastes no time whipping out her tits for her undead progeny, thus inspiring her creepy cadaver of a son to bite her nipple off. In the end, Mark and Janet also succumb to hordes of horndog zombies and Burial Ground concludes with the ridiculously misspelled quote, “The earth shall tremble…graves shall open…they shall come among the living as messengers of death and there shall be the nights of terror…”  from the so-called (and also misspelled) Prophecy of the Black Spiders, as if attempting to rip off Romero’s Dawn of the Dead with pseudo-theological apocalyptic mumbo jumbo. 

 Featuring marvelously mediocre acting, over-the-hill actresses of the marginally attractive sort, pudgy pussy male actors who manage to be simultaneously fat and skinny (boney arms yet huge guts and fat faces), fetus-like, testosterone-deprived midgets playing creepy children, zonked out zombies whose skulls (which are made of what seems to be cement) are much larger than the average size human head (this might explain why they are more intelligent than the humans), unfitting degenerate jazz music (thankfully this is only played towards the beginning), and a uniquely unhappy ending where every single character is slaughtered by reanimated corpses, Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror is, if nothing else, one of the most unforgettably incompetently directed cinematic works ever made and a true curious cult item of filmic flesheater crap. An incoherent rip-off of an incoherent rip-off, Burial Ground is like George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) meets Fulci’s Zombi 2 (1979) meets Amando de Ossorio’s Tombs of the Blind Dead (1971) as directed by a man who seems to have just as little interest in zombies as Steven Spielberg does when it comes to historical fact. Admittedly, upon first viewing Burial Ground in middle school, I was awe-stricken as I thought it was easily the worst and most radically repugnant film that I had ever seen, yet it has never left me as the sort of cinematic equivalent of a chickenpox scar that one grows to feel a bit nostalgic for as the years pass. Indeed, with its pseudo-eccentric combination of extra-retarded-looking paper mache-like zombies, Guido midget Peter Bark, unattractive females and even more unattractive males, extra-one-dimensional characters, and mostly anti-climatic death scenes, Burial Ground is one of the very few films I would describe as being ‘so bad that it is good’ (typically, when I read or hear someone describe a film this way, I discover the film is pure celluloid shit with no redeeming qualities).  In its depiction of ancient Etruscan and monk zombies killing uncultivated members of the bloated boobeoise, one could argue that Burial Ground acts as a pro-Traditionalist work where the undead ancestors of modern Italians get revenge for the degeneration of Mediterranean kultur and spirituality, but of course, that would be giving director Andrea Bianchi, who is clearly not the most artistically-inclined of ‘auteur’ filmmakers, a bit too much credit; nonetheless, it's a notable sentiment regardless of the creator's true intentions. Either way, Burial Ground makes for a must-see zombie movie simply for poor little Peter Bark's performance in what is easily one of the most eerie yet needless and nonsensical incest scenarios ever depicted in celluloid.

-Ty E

The House by the Cemetery

When I first saw The House by the Cemetery (1981) aka Quella villa accanto al cimitero—the concluding chapter of Italian maestro of mayhem Lucio Fulci’s unofficial abyss-staring ‘Gates of Hell’ trilogy, following City of the Living Dead (1980) aka Paura nella città dei morti viventi and The Beyond (1981) aka L'aldilà—some fifteen or so years ago, I thought it was one of the most shamelessly derivative, conspicuously culturally confused and mongrelized, and nauseatingly nonsensical films I had ever seen and although my opinion has not changed much regarding most these ultimately irrelevant complains, like many of the films directed by the the great goombah “Godfather of Gore,” the cross-subgenre horror flick has grown on me quite considerably, as a sort of Guido exploitation horror equivalent to European arthouse cinema that wallows in stunning schlock and shock. Directed by a man who was highly influenced by crazed French playwright Antonin Artaud’s idea of ‘cruel’ imagery to shock the audience members into action and reaction and who once stated during a general discussion of his works The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery, “my idea was to make an absolute film…there’s no logic to it, just a succession of images,” The House by the Cemetery, like most of Fulci's films, will seem totally incomprehensible to the average American filmgoer and even horror fan, as a work that focuses on audacious aestheticism of the aberrantly atmospheric sort over plot and storyline, thus being a work of 'pure horror' in the truest, at least if one can look past the rather ridiculous dubbing. Of course, considering its flagrant thematic and aesthetic similarities with Frankenstein (1931) directed by James Whale, The Amityville Horror (1979), and The Shining (1980) directed by Stanley Kubrick, as well as Fulci’s admitted influence from the classic British gothic horror flick The Innocents (1961) directed by Jack Clayton, The House by the Cemetery is certainly a film with a plot and storyline, if not a hopelessly holey and haphazard one featuring a sort of degenerate dego dream logic that acts as an innate and ultimately intriguing ingredient of the film that—when everything is said and done—makes it stand strangely apart from the films it so shamelessly rips off. Like most of Fulci’s filmic frightmares, The House by the Cemetery is an undeniably Italian flick with an all Italian cast that pretends to be American, as a Guido gothic horror flick ostensibly set in New England, but feels like it takes place in some ominous otherworldly metaphysical hell of the culturally mongrelized sort. Borrowing conventions from horror subgenres including (but not limited to) psychological horror, haunted house flicks, zombie flicks, teen slasher movies, Poe-esque Gothic/Victorian horror, and Fulci’s own classic celluloid splatter and unhinged ultra-violence, The House by the Cemetery is, if nothing else, a fierce fever dream of the divinely derivative sort that derangedly defecates out virtually every classic convention and cliché of celluloid horror, thus acting as a sort of cinematic link between classic silent horror and senseless splatter cinema. 

 Opening with a topless young babe (Daniela Doria) calling out for her boyfriend, only to receive a knife to the back of her skull that exits through her mouth shortly after discovering her man's mangled body, The House by the Cemetery begins like a pseudo-sexy slasher flick, but soon switches to more traditional horror, albeit with gore galore thrown in between. Little blond boy Bob Boyle (Giovanni Frezzi) has a lot in common with Danny Torrance of The Shining as he can talk to dead people, most specifically a redhaired little girl named Mae Freudstein (Silvia Collatina) who looks like a young Lindsay Lohan and who the little boy first notices in a vintage photograph of an old New England house. Bob’s father Norman (Paolo Malco) is taking his son and wife Lucy (Catriona MacColl) and moving the family from NYC to Boston to the New England house in the photograph, which was previously occupied by his ex-colleague, Dr. Peterson, who went mad whilst living at the home and slaughtered his mistress and subsequently committed suicide, thus making it a rather eerie and senseless place to move, especially for a young family. Upon arriving in New Whitby, Boston, Bob sees his phantom friend Mae across the street and she warns him that both him and his parents are in danger and should have never moved to the curiously quaint and antiquated New England home; when Bob's parents go searching for him, instead of seeing him speaking with Mae, they find him holding a creepy old Hans Bellmer-esque doll, which looks a lot like Mae, and ultimately creeps out the boy’s mother Lucy. Indeed, Norman and wife Lucy suspect something is amiss about the house when the realtor Mrs. Gittelson (Dagmar Lassander) gets offended when one of her fellow employees describes the house as “the Freudstein” as opposed to her preferred name, “Oak Mansion.” Upon arriving at so-called “Oak Mansion,” the Boyles discover the place is in rather poor shape, as if it had not been occupied in decades or even a century, not to mention the fact that the cellar door is nailed/locked shut for whatever reason. In order to uncover more about the history of Oak Mansion, Normal Boyle goes to the local library the next day and learns from the assistant librarian, Daniel Douglas (Giampaolo Saccarola), that his former colleague Peterson conducted dubious research on Oak Mansion, as well as related local disappearances and related demographic materials. Meanwhile, Mae shows Bob the ancient tombstone of her mother Mary Freudstein, claiming that she is not really dead nor buried there. Most disturbingly, mother Lucy discovers the tomb of a certain “Jacob Tess Freudstein” built into the floor of Oak Mansion and her husband Norman tries to calm her fears by correctly claiming that it was not uncommon for people to be buried inside of their homes as the cold New England winters made it possible for people to be buried in the ground. Of course, Norman’s own nerves are shocked when he finally is able to open the cellar door, where he is brutally bitten by a rather fake looking vampire bat, so the family tries to move to a home elsewhere, but are told that it will be another couple days before they can be rehoused. Not long afterwards, real estate agent Mrs. Gittelson goes by Oak Mansion to tell the Boyles she has found them a new home, but the family is not there as Norman is being treated at the hospital for the bat bite, so she makes the fatal mistake of letting herself in, where she stands on the Freudstein tombstone, which cracks apart and pins her ankle and not long after, the grotesque being appears and drives a firepoker through her neck, subsequently dragging her lifeless body to the cellar.

 Naturally, Lucy is rather disturbed to find the new family babysitter, Ann (Ania Pieroni), who bears a striking resemblance to Brooke Shields and rather bizarrely is the one who was responsible for unlocking the cellar door, cleaning blood off the kitchen floor, ultimately evading all questions asked about the mysterious hemoglobin stain. Not long after, Norman tells Lucy that he has learned that Jacob Tess Freudstein was a vile Victorian surgeon who conducted inhuman illegal experiments. On his way to New York City to conduct research on the Freudstein home, Norman drops by the library and finds a cassette tape of his ex-collegue Peterson discussing how Dr. Freudstein committed familicide, ultimately killing his entire family. When babysitter Ann goes in the cellar to look for Bob, she has her throat slit and head decapitated by the monster Freudstein, which the little boy witnesses the end of, but cannot convince his mother Lucy that it really happened. Determined to take matters into his own hands, little Bob returns to the cellar from hell to look for his babysitter Ann and in no time, his mother Lucy hears the boy crying with terror from the basement. Although Lucy cannot seem to get the cellar door open, Norman inevitably comes home and takes an axe to the basement door. When Norman finally enters the cellar, he finds corpse-like monster-mummy-zombie Freudstein (Giovanni De Nava), who is over 150-years-old and uses his victims’ body parts to regenerate his rapidly degenerate blood cells, grabbing Bob by the face, so he cuts off the ghastly ghoul's arm and the undead being scampers away like a hobo cripple. After Norman once again attempts to attack Freudstein with the axe, the reanimated corpse manages to take the weapon away and before Mr. Boyle knows it, his throat is ripped out. Lucy and Bob attempt to make a getaway via a ladder leading to Freudstein’s tomb upstairs, but the hysterical mother does not have enough strength to move the gravestone and she ultimately dies when Dr. Zombie rams her down on each step as her corpse falls to the cellar floor. Magically, Bob manages to escape when he is randomly yanked from the ladder to the upstairs floor where he is greeted by his little girlfriend Mae. Mae’s mother Mary Freudstein urges the two children to leave and Bob enters ‘the beyond,’ thus become an adopted member of the prestigious Freudstein family as an inhabitant of a nefarious netherworld of melancholy, mayhem, and misanthropic phantasms. 

 While the setting is all wrong (post-WWII Vienna would be the ideal place), The House by the Cemetery is especially interesting, at least to an anti-Freudian like myself, due to its inclusion of a grotesque zombie doctor known for a murderous sort of malpractice as the archfiend villain, as if he is an undead Sigmund Freud who has set to destroy children and families with his debauched alien ideas. Considering the lack of political correctness in his films, I do not think it would be going too far to suggest that Fulci and his co-writers, Giorgio Mariuzzo and Dardano Sacchetti, intentionally sought out to use the name of Freud as a symbol of derangement and depravity because, like the theories of the hostile Hebraic psychoanalyst, Freudstein undermines traditional culture as a pernicious parasite who lives off the health of normal families. Of course, Sigmund Freud’s theories have gone on to become parts of mainstream culture and vocabulary, with stereotypical Freudian sexual innuendos even appearing in children’s films like Shrek (2001) and subconscious psychoanalytic techniques being used in advertising and ‘public opinion forming’ (aka propaganda) since his nephew Edward Bernays began working for President Woodrow Wilson during World War I. Interestingly, Bernays died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is just north of where The House by the Cemetery was set, thus one could argue that it is the very first anti-psychoanalytic horror flick. Ironically, like what Bernays did when implementing his propaganda (i.e. manipulating the goys), The House by the Cemetery, not unlike virtually all horror films, albeit to a more audacious extent, is a work that exploits the innate irrationality and ‘herd instincts’ of the viewer, as a work that ultimately stirs man’s most archaic emotions. A totally tasteless yet sleekly stylized work that wallows in spectacle and negates narrative, The House by the Cemetery—in its mystification of monsters and morbid metaphysical horror—is essentially psychoanalysis in reverse. In describing the ending of the film, Fulci offered the followings insights, “…what is to me the most tragic thing in The House by the Cemetery is not the people who die, but that little girl who opens for her young friend the gates to the world of the dead, and saves him from normality (i.e. from the monster who killed the boy’s parents), but also plunged him into the Beyond.” And, indeed, The House by the Cemetery concludes much like The Beyond, where the lead protagonists are not brutally butchered like their dismembered compatriots, but suffer a much more sinister and soul-stirring fate where they are plunged into a sort of pandemonium of nothingness and necromancy in what amounts to hell everlasting. Not unlike his early atypical giallo Don't Torture a Duckling (1972) aka Non si sevizia un paperino, The House by the Cemetery is a children’s horror flick made for adults, so it should be no surprise the film concludes with the Henry James quote, “no one will ever know whether children are monsters or monsters are children.” Ultimately, The House by the Cemetery is a film about the loss of childhood innocence, which considering the director's Catholic upbringing and seemingly contradictory cinematic output, demonstrates that Lucio Fulci was a hopeless romantic who sought tirelessly to once again obtain something he lost long ago. As somewhat farcically depicted in his rather reflexive work A Cat in the Brain (1990) aka Un gatto nel cervello, it seems that no one was more horrified by the films of Lucio Fulci than Lucio Fulci, a filmmaker who started making copies but ultimately ended up churning out some of the most grotesque horror films ever made, thereupon epitomizing the overused Nietzsche aphorism, “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”

-Ty E