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29th February 2008

Notes On Three Films By Lucio Fulci.

Prompted by my friend Dave’s effusive exclamations about “A Lizard In A Woman’s Skin” -- which I’d just got round to purchasing -- I delved headlong into some serious Fulci this last week. In tandem, I’ve been able to marvel over Stephen Thrower’s majestic tome on the late, great man: “Beyond Terror”. From Harvey Fenton’s incomparable FAB imprint, it’s really a thing of beauty, full to bursting with incisive writing, commentary and incredible visuals from Fulci’s diverse and divisive filmography. I revisited three films in particular and revelled unashamedly in their myriad pleasures.

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Catriona McColl's exhumation by pick-axe in “City Of the Living Dead” is a moment worthy of Hitchcock, if not in his prime, then certainly by 1981 when the limp "Family Plot" was the last he had proffered to weary viewers.

"City…" is an astonishing picture. I'd go so far as to say it's better than the extremely bitty "Zombie" -- all isolated set-pieces, great as they are, do not a cohesive whole make. And there's an awful lot of shuffling and gurning in that uneven Romero homage (and that includes the curiously uninvolving zombie vs. shark fight – sorry mondo fans).

Alongside "Don't Torture A Duckling", "City Of The Living Dead" is Fulci's greatest experiment in mood. And mood is what you get in gravedigger's spadefuls. To paraphrase Clive Barker's marvellous assessment of "Suspiria"s power, "City..." is sort of how you imagine Hammer Horror pictures to be before you actually get around to seeing them: in place of a truly reeking atmosphere of dread you've been led to expect, what you encounter are reams of elegantly gothic woodwork and blood-soaked velvet. "City Of The Living Dead" stakes the heart of guignol. You can choke on the shadows and fog Fulci and cinematographer Sergio Salvati conjure up, like so many pulsating pieces of human offal.

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I still can't get Riz Ortolani’s score “Don't Torture A Duckling” out of my head a month after I saw the picture and posted about it on the message board. It’s one of the most insanely memorable Italian scores I've heard (and quite plainly from the pen of the man that gave the world the Bobby Darin hit ‘More’, originally from “Mondo Cane”). This 'Love Theme' is used during one of the most stunning sequences I've ever seen in a film, let alone an Italian exploitation picture. When Florinda Balkan is the subject of a literal witch hunt, it is, if one may be permitted to use the word and I think it’s entirely apt, “exquisite”.

It may be stating the fcuking obvious, but I’m convinced the very spectacle of death is at the root of many people’s revulsion with other people’s fascination with it. Which is the crux of the moral majority’s crusade: they refuse to understand the desire to confront one’s own mortality in such unmitigated and uncompromising terms in anything other than terms of disgust and, surely, fear.

Cultural theorist (come on, don’t yawn at the back, this’ll be quick, I promise) Julia Kristeva crystallises our fascination with all things bloody and horrific in life in much of her writing, and it transposes to the horror film quite naturally. Without turning this into a film studies lecture, simply put, the things that are inside of us that are shown in such loving detail in horror films -- blood, guts, brains and shit -- fascinate us at the same time they repulse us. Although these things are us and are the stuff of all human beings, we’re not used to seeing them quite so detailed and exposed to the world. This fascination with our immediate repulsion, the desire to look at those things we don’t normally get to see but realise are us, is therefore the most human reaction to a horror film that any person can have. Indeed, to reject it, to chastise those who embrace that conflicting feeling of uneasy attraction, is actually the more perverse reaction. Which is why the right wing censorship brigade probably appears more oddly histrionic than the generally well-spoken, rationally minded horror critic or genre fan.

Fulci’s violence, then, is “exquisite”, in as much as it is lovingly, morbidly and acceptingly detailed. Fulci himself was no stranger to pain and death -- in the early 1970s his wife killed herself under tragic circumstances (is there any other circumstance? I don’t think so) -- and its been remarked by Stephen Thrower and others that it was at this point that misanthropy may have crept into Fulci’s work with ever more (unconscious or not) zeal. That his early brace of giallo, “One On Top Of The Other”, “Lizard…”, ”Don’t Torture A Duckling” and “Murder To The Tune Of Seven Black Notes” feature ever more rank, odious and disintegrating personalities and societies is perhaps no surprise from a man struggling to cope with such an unendurable loss. No wonder he takes a long, dark look into the abyss. Should we judge him because of that? As someone wise once said, “context is all”.

“Don’t Torture A Duckling” is as much about social persecution as it is about bodily devastation (although the two tragically converge come the elegiac climax, that musical theme repeating, coiling seductively over images of the killer’s bloody comeuppance). The repressed allure of evil/desire/perversion, secreted away behind closed doors rather than discussed and confronted in open, intelligent and hopefully civilised society, is often at the root of all giallo, and in “Don’t Torture A Duckling”, a rather different and introspective incarnation, nowhere is this more relevant.

Metaphorical bolts of thunder wielded with religious zeal from on high often preside in the iron-clad civilization inhabited by many giallo. Spurned by conservative peers, or merely ridiculed for their “difference” in society, the protagonists and victims in these films are punished -- or bring punishment upon themselves by terrible acts of what they see as retribution -- by that society’s unwillingness to be open about what evil lurks in the hearts of all men. Just as broken minds misinterpret broken mirrors, closed societies ignore open wounds, both real and simmering beneath the surface.

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Toward the decade’s end, the horror genre’s lurid appreciation of audiences’ fascination with the ravages of evil on the human body meant Fulci himself as forced to up the ante within his films. He was a businessman after all and film was his livelihood.

As I’ve written in a previous column, fans of the absurd bloodshed in this should check out Johnnie To and Andrew Kam’s mighty "The Big Heat" from 1986. Someone told once that it was like Fulci directing a Hong Kong action picture. Fulci’s “Contraband” is that very picture and one that would make an incredible double bill with To/Kam's sublime piece of exploitainment

It's strange; this picture should be utterly terrible. It's got none of the style or pace of tense plotting/histrionics of a Di Leo or Castellari polizia. It's not got the style of something like Sergio Sollima's rather pretty “Violent City”. And yet....and yet.

Made during Fulci's zombie period, it's almost as if he wanted to break the cycle of violence he'd been propagating since Florinda Balkan stuck a knife in Anita Strindberg's chest during the dream sequence in “A Lizard In A Woman's Skin” by shooting something grounded in relative “reality”. Only he found that he couldn't shake the specters of grandiose death the previous decade had riled up in him. And this was the result.

If the Italian genre picture (from horror to giallo to westerns to ‘erotique’) is predicated on the notion of eclectically paced thrill-moments (it's been called "electrocardiogram cinema" by critic Christopher Wagstaff, due to its peaks and spikes of violent incident dispersed as intervals in the narrative to maintain a viewer's piqued interest) then this is perhaps the most wildly eclectic of them all. With its slipshod plotting, woeful lack of character development and extended sequences of languorous over-acting, it really does exist simply to pull off some extraordinary moments of nihilistic brutality: a vicarious show reel for future, better made giallo or horror pictures that sadly never emerged.

‘God’ bless Fulci, that most reassuringly curmudgeonly of misanthropes.

Released this week:

‘Bug”: many of us saw it; most of us couldn’t believe it. Bug" is crazy. I remain unsure whether I actually liked it, but I was thoroughly entertained, nonetheless. It maintains a fresh, invigorating confidence for at least an hour of its running time before imploding on its own preposterousness during a good 20 minute stretch. The issue is, of course, that each of these facets seems to flip-flop throughout the entire length of the picture meaning it's impossible to tell where the joins are between inspired and absurd. It makes for an indelibly loopy experience.

Undeniably, the first 1/2 hour contains some of the most vibrant filmmaking I've seen in an age: roving, prying camerawork, bold sound design and the impressively stylised performances It seems as though Friedkin was completely energised for the shoot’s first week before losing interest in the mechanics and becoming fascinated with the visual disintegration of his two characters, while the story and staging fell about around them, finally collapsing in foiled-wrapped exhaustion under the outlandish developments of the screenplay.

A fascinating infuriatingly uneven comeback project from William Friedkin then, working back to the quixotic, mercurial style of his early documentary days. Despite the preponderance for over-wrought histrionics, ‘super mother bugs’ and Harry Connick Jnr’s ploddingly one-note beefcake, Ashley Judd gives an enormously brave performance.

I just can’t help but wish that the picture had been made sometime between “The French Connection” and “To Live & Die In L.A.”, when Friedkin was at a creative peak and Christopher Walken would have been a prime candidate for the psychologically destructive male lead. It might have meant we’d been spared the other picture under review.

“Cruising”: this stands alongside “The Guardian” as one of Friedkin’s more terrible films. A rather weak serial killer tale-cum-character study (no pun intended) set in New York’s S&M scene, its lasting reputation is most probably founded upon the parade of parties from all areas of the political spectrum to whom the film was deeply offensive.

For me, its most offensive characteristic (amongst a litany of artistic offences) is its embarrassingly held assumptions about gay life. I’m no expert on “the scene” but the prime suspect(s) in the case of the slaying of some overtly caricatured homosexuals are defined in the most shallow and stereotypical fashion --all disco and musicals, leather and hair, pain and loneliness with nary a loving relationship in sight. It’s not remiss to say there something deeply uneasy for the modern, liberally minded viewer there.

Perhaps it was Friedkin’s creative aspiration for “Cruising” to be a dark portrait of contemporary New Yorkers from all walks of life or persuasions (true, cop Pacino’s hetero relationship with Karen Allen before his descent into the seedily presented underground world of leather bars doesn’t fair much better, but the picture’s closing moments give the audience a unsurprisingly jaundiced indication as to why that might be). Yet it doesn’t work remotely as a thriller, either. Delighting in using otherwise effective visual ticks to draw some unconscionable and rather sophomoric parallels between anal penetration and that of the killer’s knife, Friedkin seems less concerned with the mechanics of suspense or the genuine psychosis of a killer as he is fascinated by a culture he knows not whether to explore, celebrate or to demonise. His artistic talent by this point in his career was unquestionable; his intellectual motives deeply suspect.

You can only wonder what a filmmaker like Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant (or Fassbinder!) might have made of a similar story.

Throughout it all, Pacino sort of barrels along somnambulistically, aping the mannered pre-‘Panic In Needle Park’ malaise from which the ‘The Godfather‘ rescued him. He’s no ‘Serpico’ here, that’s for certain.

For Pacino-centric New York serial killer thrills, stick with Harold Becker’s more Hollywood, but vastly superior and more intriguing “Sea Of Love”; for a portrait of an all-consuming investigation, “Zodiac” (which replays Friedkin’s trope of using a variety of actors to play the single supposed killer) is vastly more effective; for credible gay-themed populist thrills (as opposed to Greg Araki’s neon-flecked devoutly indie shock-indulgences) perhaps we’ll have to wait until the brilliantly talented Haynes or Van Sant (or Almodovar – imagine!) tackles the genre with some integrity and sincerity.