International Horror Film Review: Manhattan Baby (dir by Lucio Fulci)

Posted on October 6, 2021 by Lisa Marie Bowman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eikqn9OCGo

“Manhattan, baby!”

That’s what a friend of mine yelled a few years ago. Jack was a choreographer who had just received a call from someone in New York City, offering him the chance to come work on an off-Broadway show. He accepted, of course and then he hugged everyone who had been standing nearby, listening to the call.

“Manhattan, baby!” he shouted.

Now, the show itself didn’t really work out but Jack did get a trip to Manhattan out of it and really, I think that’s what everyone was excited about. No matter how many bad things you may hear about New York City, it’s hard not to get excited when you hear the word Manhattan. For many, Manhattan represents culture, sophistication, and wealth. For others, Manhattan represents crime, inequity, and alienation. Across the world, Manhattan stands for everything that is both good and bad about America. Just the word Manhattan carries a power to it. You would never get excited if someone announced that they had gotten a job in Minnesota, for instance. If Jack had shouted, “Minnesota, baby!,” we all would have been concerned about him. Minnesota? Who gives a fuck? But Manhattan …. Manhattan has power, baby!

Manhattan also lent its name to one of Lucio Fulci’s post-Zombi films and the title just happened to duplicate Jack’s proclomation, Manhattan Baby. Released in 1982, Manhattan Baby is often cited as being the last of Fulci’s “major” productions. While his career was reinvigorated by the success of the films he made with producer Fabrizio De Angelis (including Zombi 2 and the Beyond trilogy), Fulci and De Angelis had a falling out over Manhattan Baby. Fulci claimed that De Angelis essentially forced him to make the movie, despite the fact that Fulci himself did not have much interest in the script. Initially, the film was to be a special effects spectacluar with a large budget but, after the controversy surrounding Fulci’s The New York Ripper, the budget was drastically scaled back and the special effects were done on the cheap. Fulci later said that he felt the movie was terrible and that it set back his career.

As for what the film is actually about, Manhattan Baby deals with …. well, the plot is not easy to describe. Fulci’s films were always better known for their surreal imagery than their tight plots and, even by his standards, Manhattan Baby is all over the place. The film opens in Egypt, where archeologist George Hacker (Christopher Connelly) is struck blind when he enters a previously unexplored tomb. Meanwhile, his daughter, Susie (Brigitta Boccoli), is given an amulet by another blind woman.

Back in Manhattan, George waits for his sight to return and Susie and her little brother, Tommy (Giovanni Frezza, who played Bob In The House By The Cemetery) start to act weird. It turns out that their bedroom is now some sort of demensional gateway, from which snakes sometimes emerge. At the same time, the gateway occasionally sucks people through and they end up stranded in the Egyptian desert. Why? Who knows? Is Susie possessed or does the gateway operate independently from her? Why does she occasionally glow a weird blue color? Why do she and her brother suddenly seem to hate their nannny (played by Cinzia De Ponti, who was also in The New York Ripper)? It all has something to do with the amulet but the exact details of how it all works seems to change from scene-to-scene. Eventually, it turns out that the owner of the local antique shop knows about the amulet and its evil designs. Unfortunately, all of his stuffed birds come to life and peck his eyes out. Meanwhile, Susie’s parents and her doctors wonder why her latest x-ray seems to indicate that Susie has a cobra living inside of her and….

Like I said, it doesn’t really make any sense and, despite the power of the name, the meaning behind Manhattan Baby as a title is never really explained. In fact, more time is probably spent in Egypt than in Manhattan. It’s easy to assume that the film was called Manhattan Baby because it was felt that the title would appeal to American audiences but, when then the film was released in the U.S., it was actually retitled Eye of the Evil Dead in an attempt to disguise it as being a sequel to Sam Raimi’s classic shocker. (This was actually a common practice as far as the Italian film industry was concerned. Many films were retitled to disguise them as being a sequel. Fulci’s Zombi 2, for instance, recieved that title because, in Europe, Dawn of the Dead was released under the title Zombi.)

One can understand Fulci’s frustration with Manhattan Baby but, at the same time, is it really as bad as he often said it was? Yes, the plot is incoherent but that’s to be expected with a Fulci film. Yes, the special effects are cheap but again, that’s kind of part of the charm when it comes to Italian exploitation films. While Manhattan Baby never duplicates the ominous atmosphere of Zombi 2 or achieves the same sort of surreal grandeur as The Byond trilgoy, there are still enough memorable, if confusing, moments to make it watchable. The sequece where a shot of a man standing in a doorway cuts to a shot of him lying dead in the desert works surprisingly well. The scene where the shop owner is attacked by reanimated birds is both ludiscrous and scary, in the grand Fulci tradition. With their emphasis on foolhardy explorers ignoring curses, the Egyptian scenes feel almost as if they could have been lifted from one of the Hammer mummy films. Manhattan Baby may not be Fulci’s best but it’s hardly his worst.

In fact, with its obsession with blindness, Manhttan Baby is actually one of Fulci’s more personal films. Fulci was diabetic and reportedly lived in fear that he would someday lose his eyesight. Many critics, including me, have suggested that he dealt with this fear by having people lose their eyesight in his movies, often in the most violent ways possible. Manhattan Baby is full of people losing the ability to see. George Hacker is rendered blind in Egypt. The mysterious Egyptain woman hands out amulets to people who she cannot see. The store owner loses his eyes. One of George’s colleagues falls on a bed of spikers and, of course, one spike goes straight through an eye. Manhattan Baby is all about blindness and only be getting rid of the amulet can George hope to once again truly see the world and the people that he loves. If only illness could be tossed away as easily as an amulet.

Despite Fulci’s disdain for the final result, Manhattan Baby is hardly the disaster that it’s often made out to be. Those who aren’t familiar with Fulci’s unique aesthetic will undoubtedly confused by the film but, for those of us who know the man’s work, Manhattan Baby may be a minor Fulci film but it’s still an occasionally intriguing one.

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.