Italian Horror Showcase: The House By The Cemetery (dir by Lucio Fulci)

Posted on October 10, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Lucio Fulci’s 1981 masterpiece, The House By The Cemetery, begins as so many slasher movies have begun.

A teenage couple fools around in the basement of the deserted Oak Mansion. Just from listening to them talk, we can surmise that the mansion has a reputation for strange events. Suddenly, the boy vanishes. The girl looks for him, telling him that whatever he’s doing stopped being funny a long time ago. Suddenly, a knife is driven through the back of her head, the blade eventually exiting through the girl’s mouth. Fans of Italian horror and Fulci films in particular will not be shocked by this grisly turn of events, mostly because the girl was played by Daniela Doria. Doria appeared in several Fulci films and, in each film, her character was brutally murdered. The House By The Cemetery was her third Fulci film. She would later appear and get killed in Fulci’s The New York Ripper.

From that rather conventional horror movie opening, The House By The Cemetery goes on to become progressively more bizarre and surreal.

The Boyles — Lucy (Catriona MacColl), Norman (Paolo Malco), and their young son, Bob (Giovanni Frezza) — are to spend the next six months living in a mansion in New England. It’s all so Norman can work on a research project. His colleague, Peterson, previously stayed at the house and basically went crazy, killing his family, his mistress, and himself. This doesn’t seem to particularly disturb Norman. Before they leave New York, Bob stares at a picture in his father’s office. It’s a black-and-white picture of a dilapidated house. There’s a young girl staring out the window of the house.

Suddenly, we can see and hear the girl (Silvia Collatina) as she yells at Bob to stay away from the house.

In the small town of New Whitby, the girl — who is named Mae — stands on a sidewalk. She’s clutching a doll and it doesn’t appear that anyone else can see her. Mae stares into the window of tailor’s shop. One of the mannequins has fallen over and its head has become detached. Mae watches a dark blood oozes out of the plastic head.

Sitting in the back seat of his parent’s car, Bob watches Mae. Mae turns to stare at him. Despite the fact that there’s a road in between them, Mae and Bob are able to calmly speak to each other. Again, Mae tells Bob that he shouldn’t have come.

When the family arrives at their new home, Lucy says that the Oak Mansion looks a lot like the house in the picture in Norman’s office. Norman shrugs it off as a coincidence. As for the house itself, it turns out to be a bit of a dump. Yes, it’s big but the inside of the house is covered in dust and cobwebs and there’s a particularly nasty bat living in the basement. However, what really upsets Lucy is the fact that there’s a tombstone in the middle of the front hallway. Norman dismisses her concerns, saying that it used to be very common for people to be buried in their homes.

Much as how Jack Torrance was “always the caretaker,” everyone in town seems to be convinced that they’ve met Norman before. Norman swears that he’s never been to New Whitby before. Meanwhile, Lucy grows more and more anxious inside the house. Sometimes, she thinks she can hear noises in the walls. Are they alone or is there someone else living in the house? Bob spends his time playing with his new friend Mae, who shows him a nearby headstone for someone named Mary Fruedstein. “She’s not really buried there,” Mae tells him.

Things get stranger. A mysterious young woman named Ann (Ania Pieroni, who has previously played The Mother of Tears in Dario Argento’s Inferno) shows up and says that she’s the new babysitter. A real estate agent (played by Dagmar Lassander) comes by the house while the Boyles are out and is promptly murdered. Lucy wakes up one morning to discover Ann scrubbing a huge blood stain and says nothing about it.

Norman’s research reveals that the house once belonged to a Dr. Jacob Freudstein, a Victorian-era scientist who conducted illegal experiments. Could that have something to do with all of the strange things that have happened in the house? Norman goes to New York to do further research and once again, he finds himself dealing with people who are convinced that they’ve seen him before….

In an interview, Lucio Fulci once described The House By The Cemetery as being his answer to Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining and there are some obvious similarities, from the ghostly girl to the little boy who appears to have psychic powers. Fulci said that he didn’t feel The Shining was dark enough and make no mistake about it, The House By The Cemetery is a very dark film. Even by the standards of Lucio Fulci, there is very little hope to be found in The House By The Cemetery.

As a follow-up to both The City of the Living Dead and The Beyond, it’s also the concluding chapter of Fulci’s Beyond trilogy. When Mae offers Bob a chance to escape to a safe place, those who have viewed The Beyond will immediately realize that she’s talking about the same dimension that was visited by David Warbeck and Catriona MacColl at the end of Fulci’s previous film. And while Mae may be offering Bob an escape from what’s happening the House, those who have seen the entire trilogy know that the Beyond is just as dangerous as our world. The end of the film seems to suggest that there is no escape from the horrors of the world. At best, there’s just a temporary delay to the inevitability of doom.

The House By The Cemetary is Fulci at his most atmospheric as he combines the gothic visual style of City of the Living Dead with the aggressive dream logic of The Beyond. In much the same way that the The Beyond indicated that the price for discovering the truth about the world was blindness, The House By The Cemetery indicates that the longer the Boyles remains in the house, the more incapable they are of seeing the horror right in front of their faces.

And what horror! When Dr. Freudstein does make his appearance, he’s a monster straight out of Lovecraft, a mix of Frankenstein, Freud, and the Great Old Ones. And yet, the film’s real horror is not to be found in the monster but in the disintegration of the family living in the house. In the end, Bob is stalked not only by the monster in the basement but also by his parent’s increasingly unhappy marriage.

Giovanni Frezza actually does a pretty good job in the role of Bob, though you might not notice because he’s been so atrociously dubbed. (Far too often, in Italian horror films, children were dubbed by adults speaking in squeaky voices and that seems to be what happened here.) Frezza would later appear in Fulci’s perplexing Manhattan Baby while Paolo Malco would play another arrogant academic in The New York Ripper. And then there’s Catriona MacColl, appearing in her third and final Fulci film. Fulci was often criticized for the way women were portrayed in his films but MacColl gave strong lead performances in The City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, and The House By The Cemetery and, most importantly, her instantly relatable presence helped to provide some grounding for Fulci’s surreal vision. Even if the films didn’t always make perfect logical sense, audiences would continue to watch because they wanted things to turn out well for whichever character MacColl was playing. (Of course, they rarely did.)

The House By The Cemetery was the third and final part of Fulci’s Beyond trilogy and one of his strongest films. Lucio Fulci passed away in 1996 but, like the inhabitants of the Beyond, his films live forever.

Italian Horror Spotlight: Hatchet for the Honeymoon (dir by Mario Bava)

Posted on October 2, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“My name is John Harrington. I’m 30 years old. I am a paranoiac.”

So declares John Harrington (Stephen Forsyth) at the start of the 1969’s Hatchet for The Honeymoon. Along with being a paranoiac, John Harrington is also handsome, charming, and apparently quite successful. He owns a bridal dress factory in France, a business that he inherited from his mother after her untimely death. On the outside, everything looks perfect but appearances can often be deceiving.

John’s wife, Mildred (Laura Betti), knows that John is hiding secrets. She regularly taunts John, reminding him that he’s not only impotent but that he’s also has an unhealthy obsession with his memories of his mother. John’s mother died when he was very young. He witnessed her death but he’s repressed the memory of who actually killed her. John is determined to recover those memories.

So, what does John do?

Does he go to a hypnotist? Does he dig through old police files and search for clues? Does he ask someone to analyze his dreams? That’s what you or I might do but John, you must remember, is a paranoiac. Somehow, John has realized that, whenever he commits a murder, he remembers just a little bit more about the night his mother died. So, in order to learn the truth about his mother’s death, John is murdering the models who work at his bridal salon. Apparently, it’s very important that his victims be wearing a wedding dress when they die….

Okay, now you’re probably already thinking that this sounds like a somewhat bizarre movie. Well, believe it or not, things are about to get a lot stranger.

After John meets a new model named Helen (Dagmar Lassander), he decided that he doesn’t need Mildred yelling at him anymore. So, he puts on a wedding veil and murders Mildred. However, even in death, Mildred won’t leave John alone. Mildred’s ghost shows up and announces that everyone will be able to see her but John.

So now, John is having to deal with everyone assuming that his wife is with him, even though he can’t see her. As you might guess, this makes it a bit difficult for John to convince potential victims to come back to the salon with him.

And, from there, it just keeps getting stranger and stranger….

Hatchet For The Honeymoon was written and directed by one of the most important figures in the history of Italian cinema, Mario Bava. A master technician with a wry and occasionally self-mocking sense of humor, Bava worked in every genre, from peplums to spaghetti westerns to poliziotteschis, but he’s best remembered for his work in the horror genre. Bava is often credited with having directed the first giallo film and his often-violent thrillers are still influential to this day.

Hatchet For The Honeymoon is often described as being one of Bava’s lesser films but I don’t agree with that judgment. If nothing else, Hatchet For The Honeymoon is probably one of Bava’s more playful movies. From the increasingly bizarre twists and turns of the film’s plot to John Harrington’s wonderfully overwrought narration, the entire film has an almost improvisational feel to it. One gets the feeling that Bava is poking fun at the conventions of the giallo genre. The usual omnipresent, black glove-wearing killer has been replaced by an impotent wedding dress designer who can’t even escape the ghost of his dead wife.

(Reportedly, Mildred wasn’t originally in the script and was only added because Bava wanted to work with actress Laura Betti. Perhaps that explains why Mildred often seems to be standing outside of the story, mocking not only John but also the mechanics of the thriller plot.)

As one would expect from a Bava film, Hatchet for the Honeymoon is frequently a visual marvel, a pop art-inspired mix of dark shadows and red blood. The wedding dresses are to die for and so is the cinematography. I especially liked the darkly ominous shots of John surrounded by the lifeless mannequins in his salon. Early on, when we get a shot from John’s point of view, the image is slightly blurred and the angle seem just a bit off, a reminder of John’s twisted impression of the world around him. When John walks up stairs to the kill his wife, the sound of his movement seems to echo through his ornate but sterile home.

If Stephen Forsyth sometimes seems to be a bit stiff in the role of John, it’s an appropriate reminder that John is an empty shell and all of his feelings and emotions are manufactured. Laura Betti does a wonderful job nagging him in life and her palpable joy about getting revenge in death is one of the best things about the movie.

Hatchet For The Honeymoon is an exuberantly weird film and definitely one that needs to be seen by anyone seeking to fall in love with Italian horror.

The TSL’s Daily Horror Grindhouse: Werewolf Woman (dir by Rino Di Silvestro)

Posted on October 2, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Since I earlier reviewed The Wolf Man, it only made sense to me that tonight’s entry in daily horror grindhouse should be the 1976 Italian horror film, Werewolf Woman. I’d had Werewolf Woman on DVD for a while now but I had yet to get around to watching it. I actually knew next to nothing about it. The only reason why I bought the DVD was because of the title.

So, last night, I watched the movie and I quickly discovered that, in the best tradition of grindhouse cinema, Werewolf Woman‘s title actually had very little do with the actual film. The title character may go around ripping out throats with her teeth but it’s not because Daniella Neseri (Annik Borel) is a werewolf. Instead, it’s just because she’s gone insane.

When Daniella was thirteen years old, she was raped by a family friend. She has now grown up to be a young woman who fears sex and rarely leaves her family’s decaying estate. Her aging father, Count Neseri (Tino Carraro), is extremely protective of Daniella but, at the same time, he also tells her stories about how one of her ancestors was rumored to be a werewolf so you really have to wonder how good of a father he actually is.

When Daniella’s younger sister, Elena (Dagmar Lassander), comes home with her fiancée, Daniella hides out in the hallway and listens while they make love. Later that night, Daniella is wandering around outside when she runs into the fiancée. She proceeds to rip out his throat with her teeth and then leave him for dead. The police are convinced that he was murdered by a wild animal but Elena and Count Neseri both believe that Daniella was responsible.

So, Daniella ends up in an insane asylum but it takes more than just four walls and a locked door to hold Daniella prisoner. One of her fellow patients is a predatory lesbian (yes, this is very much a 70s movie) who tries to seduce Daniella. Unfortunately, any and all sexual thoughts cause Daniella to mentally (if not physically) transform into a werewolf. Soon, the patient has had her throat ripped out and Daniella has escaped.

The rest of the film follows Daniella as she makes her way across the Italian countryside, stopping to kill anyone who causes her to become aroused or to even think about sex. Or, at least, that is until she meets Luca (Howard Ross), who is a sensitive man and lover. Daniella and Luca have a falling in love montage. They make love without Daniella feeling the urge to rip out his throat. Things are going to be okay, right?

Nope. Inevitably, a biker gang shows up and violently destroys their happiness. In the spirit and style of I Spit On Your Grave, it’s up to Daniella to get revenge.

Now, when talking about a movie like Werewolf Woman — one that links lycanthropy with both sexual repression and a sexual awakening — it’s easy to read too much into the plot. I’ve been tempted to do just that while writing this review. Whether it was what the director’s intended it or not, there is a potentially intriguing theme running through Werewolf Woman, in which Daniella imagines herself as a werewolf because it’s the only way that she can survive in a world that is determined to sexually exploit, demean, and oppress her. Daniella’s mental transformation is ultimately the result of her own repressed emotions and fears and I’m sure that many would argue that Werewolf Woman, in the tradition of Repulsion and Ms. 45, is taking a stand against a patriarchal and repressive society (never mind that Daniella ultimately kills almost as many women as men).

And you know what? If this was a Jess Franco film, I’d give it the benefit of the doubt.

But ultimately, Werewolf Woman is no Ginger Snaps. Instead, it’s a somewhat slow soft core flick that doesn’t really add up to much. (Any and all subtext is definitely present by accident only.) That said, Annik Borel does a good job in the lead role and loves of Euroshock will enjoy seeing familiar faces like Howard Ross and Dagmar Lassander in the cast. Add to that, I always enjoy any film the features a woman getting bloody revenge on misogynists, even if this film ultimately left me feeling more icky than empowered.