The TSL’s Daily Horror Grindhouse: The Sweet House of Horrors (dir by Lucio Fulci)

Posted on October 27, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Mary and Roberto Vivaldi (played by Lubka Lenzi and Pascal Persiano) would appear to have a perfect life, perhaps because they do. They’re young. They’re attractive. They’re in love. They’re rich. They have a really nice house and they have two children, a boy and a girl. What could go wrong, right?

Well, they could come home from a party and discover that their house is being burglarized. And the burglar could then proceed to graphically and viscously murder them, smashing in Robert’s head and, since this is a Lucio Fulci film, popping out Mary’s eye. In fact, the opening murder is so graphic and so disturbing that it’s somewhat surprising to learn that this movie was made for television.

Of course, what’s even stranger is that the rest of the film is oddly tame, particularly for a Fulci film. Perhaps they only had enough money in the budget for one graphic gore scene.

Anyway, the parents are now dead and the children are now orphans. At the funeral, the children shock everyone by playing and laughing. However, a few seconds later, they’re standing over the grave and crying. Some people would call this an inconsistency but I think it’s the most realistic part of the film. When you lose someone who you love, you do strange things. There is no one proper way to grieve. As someone who suffered through his share of personal tragedy, this was something that Fulci probably understood.

The parents may be dead but they’re not gone! Instead, they’re haunting the house. The children are overjoyed but their new guardian, Aunt Marcia (Cinzia Monreale, who was Emily in Fulci’s The Beyond) is not. Marcia freaks out upon realizing that the house is haunted and it certainly doesn’t help that she’s attacked by a gigantic fly in the attic. Her husband, the incredibly dense Carlo (Jean Christophe Bretigniere), doesn’t think anything strange is happening. Still, Carlo does agree that it would be a good idea to sell the house and move the children elsewhere.

Nope! The parents have no intention of letting that happen! Of course, the dead parents main concern to kill the man who killed them but, once he’s dead (it doesn’t take that long), they’re free to spend their time pushing a real estate agent down a flight of stairs, harassing Marcia and Carlo and eventually causing an exorcist’s hand to melt.

If you’re getting the feeling that both the dead parents and the living children are pretty obnoxious, that’s because they are. I mean, it’s one thing to not want to be separated. That’s something we can all relate to. It’s another thing to melt a man’s hand and then laugh about it. Add to that, neither Marcia nor Carlo come across as being particularly villainous. It’s not like they’re planning on murdering the kids for their inheritance or sending them to a Dickensian orphanage or anything like that. They just want the kids to stop conducting black magic ceremonies and they want to live in a house that isn’t haunted. No matter how much sympathy you may have for the parents or the kids, it’s hard to deny that Marcia and Carlo aren’t being all that unreasonable.

(It also doesn’t help that the film ends with the suggestion that the dead parents can stay with the kids regardless of whether the house is sold or not.)

And yet, I can’t help but like The Sweet House of Horrors. Even though it doesn’t make much sense and it’s hampered by a low-budget (just check out the floating flames that represent the dead parents), there’s a sincerity to The Sweet House of Horrors. The parents really do seem to love their obnoxious children and the film actually does provide some insight regarding the way that children use imagination to deal with grief. Like many of his later film, The Sweet House of Horrors is hit-and-miss but Lucio Fulci still comes up with a few good visuals, suggesting that his heart may have been in this film in a way that it wasn’t in some of the other films he made during the final years of his storied career. Just the fact that The Sweet House of Horrors tells such an openly sentimental story makes it unique in Fulci’s filmography.

The Sweet House of Horrors cannot be compared to such Fulci classics as The Beyond, The House By The Cemetery, The Black Cat, or Zombi 2. But still, it’s an interesting little film and provides a hint that, even during his decline, Fulci still possessed some of the talent that made his earlier films so iconic.

The TSL’s Daily Horror Grindhouse: Demons 2 (dir by Lamberto Bava)

Posted on October 13, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

1985’s Demons was such a success that it only took one year for it to be followed by a sequel. Like the first film, Demons 2 was directed by Lamberto Bava and produced by Dario Argento. (Once again, Argento is also credited with co-writing the script.) Bobby Rhodes appears in both films, though he plays two different characters. And again, it’s the same basic plot: watching a movie leads to an outbreak of a plague that transforms a group of people into a pack of murderous demons.

And yet, despite all the similarities, Demons 2 is a hundred times better than the first Demons. And I say that as someone who really likes the first film. There simply is no comparison between the two. If Demons was a nonstop thrill ride, Demons 2 is a filmed nightmare.

Demons 2 takes place in a high-rise apartment building. In the style of any good disaster movie, the first part of the film introduces us to the tenants and gives us just enough information so that we’ll be able to remember who is who.

For instance, in one apartment, we have George (David Knight) and his pregnant wife, Hannah (Nancy Brilli). In another, we have a woman (Anita Bartolucci) who obsessively dotes on her dog. Down the hall, ten year-old Ingrid Haller (Asia Argento, making her film debut) watches TV while her parents eat dinner. In the basement, a gym instructor named Hank (Bobby Rhodes) shouts encouragement at a group of body builders.

And finally, in another apartment, a teenage girl named Sally (Coralina Cataldi Tassoni) sits in her bedroom and cries. It’s her birthday but her parents are out for the night. Meanwhile, her friends are gathered in the living room and wondering if Sally is ever going to come out of her room. Sally is upset because her boyfriend didn’t come to the party. Poor Sally.

In her sadness, Sally has turned on her TV but she’s barely watching. And what’s on TV that night? A horror movie, one that tells the same story as the one we saw in the first Demons and the one that we will eventually see again in Demons 2 (and also in Michele Soavi’s The Church). A group of teenagers come across a dead demon. When one of them accidentally gets splashed by the demon’s blood, he is transformed into a demon himself…

(If this sound familiar, that’s perhaps because the same idea was later used in 28 Days Later, a film that owns a not insignificant debt to both of the Demons films and Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City.)

Suddenly, the movie demon stops and seems to be staring straight at the unseen camera. He starts to approach it, until his twisted face fills the entire TV screen…

Suddenly, the demon bursts out of the TV and infects Sally. Sally finally leaves her bedroom and proceeds to attack everyone at her party, spreading the infection. Meanwhile, acidic demon bile eats through the floor and drips into the apartments below, infecting everyone that it touches…

And I do mean everyone! If there’s anything that truly separates the Demons films from so many other horror films, it’s that literally anyone can be infected. It doesn’t matter if you’re likable or if you’re funny or if you’re played by a familiar actor. If you get infected, you’re going to turn into a demon. Usually, when you watch a horror film, you can sure that children and pregnant women will automatically be safe. Demons 2 wastes little time in letting you know that this isn’t the case as far as this film is concerned.

Demons was pretty much distinguished by nonstop action. In Demons 2, director Lamberto Bava devoted more time to atmosphere and characterization. As a result, Demons 2 features characters that we actually care about and some truly haunting images, everything from Sally’s friends moving, in slow motion, down a dark hallway to Asia Argento watching as her parents are literally ripped into pieces in front of her. If Demons was defined by its relentless heavy metal soundtrack, Demons 2 is defined by the ambient but haunting new wave music that plays through the majority of the film. Demons was an action-horror film. Demons 2 is a nightmare from which you cannot awake.

If you have the opportunity, I would say to watch both of the Demons films. But if you have to choose only one to watch, go with Demons 2.

The TSL’s Daily Horror Grindhouse: Demons (dir by Lamberto Bava)

Posted on October 12, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“What the Hell happened to Rosemary?”

— Tony The Pimp (Bobby Rhodes) in Demons (1985)

A lot of what you need to know about Demons, an Italian horror film from 1985, can be summed up by the fact that one of the leading characters is named Tony the Pimp. Demons is a very self-aware film, one that is not only over-the-top and ludicrous but which is cheerfully aware that it’s over-the-top and ludicrous. Considering that Demons is an apocalyptic film that ends with nearly the entire cast dead, Demons is a surprisingly good-natured horror film.

The film opens in Berlin. There’s a mysterious man hanging out at a subway station. He’s wearing a silver half-mask and, from what we can see of his face, he appears to be heavily scarred. Interestingly enough, the man is played by Michele Soavi. (Though Soavi is now best remembered as the director of Dellamorte Dellamore, he was an actor and assistant to Dario Argento when Demons was produced.) The man doesn’t speak. Instead, he hands out flyers to random people, inviting them to attend the premiere of a new horror film.

The man obviously does a very good because a truly diverse group of characters show up for the premiere. There’s a wealthy blind man who comes with his assistant. (The assistant is played by Dario Argento’s oldest daughter, Fiore.) There’s an older couple who keep shushing everyone in the audience. There’s Cheryl (Natasha Hovey), who ends up sitting next to the handsome George (Urbano Barberini, who would later co-star in Dario Argento’s Opera). And, of course, there’s Tony the Pimp (Bobby Rhoades) who shows up wearing a white suit and with two prostitutes.

The film-within-the-film is a horror film that plays out like an homage to every Italian horror film released in the 1980s. It deals with four teenagers who stumble across the grave of Nostradamus and end up transforming into blood-thirsty demons. One of the teenagers is played by Michele Soavi, though it’s never clear whether the teenager and the man in the mask are supposed to be the same person.

As they watch the movie, something strange starts to happen in the audience. One of the prostitutes scratched her face when she put on a prop mask. When the same mask appears in the movie, the cut on her face starts to throb. Soon, she is transformed into a … DEMON!

JUST LIKE IN THE MOVIE!

Needless to say, the arrival of a real-life demon leads to a panic in the theater but guess what? The doors are locked! There’s no way out! When Tony the Pimp breaks into the projection booth, he discovers that there’s no projectionist and the movie cannot be stopped! On top of that, getting scratched by a demon means that you transform into a demon yourself!

In other words — remember the debate about whether or not horror movies can turn their viewers into murderous monsters? Well, Demons says that they definitely can…

Demons was directed by Lamberto Bava, son of the famous Mario Bava, and it remains one of the most popular Italian horror films of all time. With a script that was co-written by Dario Argento (who also produced), Demons is a fun and exciting horror film that cheerfully dares you to take it too seriously. Watching this energetic film, you can tell that Bava was having a lot of fun with the idea that the world could end as a result of watching just one horror movie.

Demons was a huge box office hit so, naturally, there were hundreds of unofficial sequels. Though Michele Soavi’s The Church was a Demons film in every way but name, the only official sequel was Demons 2. We’ll look at that film tomorrow.

Horror Film Review: Delirium (dir by Lamberto Bava)

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“I warn you, the hate of a woman can be very bad!”

— Dialogue from Delirium (1987

The 1987 Italian film Delirium is an odd combination of soapy melodrama and giallo horror. Someone is murdering models and taking pictures of their corpses. Some other people are plotting to take over a magazine. Obscene phone calls are received. Recorded taunts are heard. Oh, and one unlucky model is attacked by a swarm of bees.

That’s right — Delirium is the first and probably the only giallo to feature bees used as a deadly weapon.

Gioia (Serena Grande) is a former prostitute-turned-model-turned-men’s-magazine-publisher. When we first meet Gioia, she’s sitting out at her pool and watching a photo shoot. Her neighbor — a teenage boy who is confined to a wheel chair — calls her.

“You make my member hard with desire!” he tells her, “It wants to penetrate your flower and explode!”

Gioia calmly tells him to stop bothering her and then hangs up on him. And really, this scene pretty much establishes everything that we need to know about Gioia. She is a successful businesswoman who is just as comfortable dealing with the pervert next door as she is making high power deals. You think Donald Trump’s ruthless? Well, he’s got nothing on Gioia!

The other thing that you notice about Gioia is that she has an extremely voluptuous figure. There’s not a single scene that isn’t shot to emphasize that fact and yet, the unapologetic pride that Gioia (and actress Serena Grande) took in her body was actually very empowering and one of the better aspects of the film. Far too often, movies associate being busty with either being stupid or slutty and women are told that they have to hide their figure to be taken seriously. (Traditionally, in horror films, it seems like the bigger an actress’s cup size, the less likely she is to survive until the end of the film.) Speaking as someone who shares Gioia’s struggle, I was happy to see a woman with big boobs being portrayed as both an intelligent businesswoman and a tough, strong survivor.

Gioia has more than just the pervert next door to deal with. There’s also the fact that her models are being murdered and she’s receiving photos of their dead bodies in the mail. Who is killing Gioia’s employees? Could it be a rival publisher (played by Capucine)? Could it be Gioia’s neurotic assistant (played by Daria Nicolodi)? Could it be George Eastman, who plays Gioia’s former lover? Actually, it’s made pretty clear that it’s not George Eastman, which is odd when you consider how many movies have featured Eastman as a killer. (Eastman and Grandi also co-starred in the infamous cannibal epic Anthropophagus, in which Eastman was the killer and Grandi was the center of one of the most infamous scenes in the history of Italian horror.) Or could the killer by the pervert next door?

As is typical of films in the giallo genre, most of the murders are filmed from the killer’s point of view. What’s interesting is that, when the killer looks at his victims, he literally sees them as twisted monsters. It’s a neat little technique that leads to scenes like this:

Delirium was directed by Lamberto Bava, who has never quite gotten the attention that he deserves. Despite the fact that he directed such classics as the two Demons films and A Blade In the Dark, I’ve always felt that Lamberto is often overshadowed by the achievements of his father, Mario Bava. However, Lamberto Bava’s films are almost always entertaining when taken on their own terms. Delirium may not reach the heights of A Blade In The Dark or even Demons but it’s still an entertaining giallo. It’s perhaps not the film to use to introduce a newcomer to the genre but, those of us who are familiar with giallo, Delirium is an enjoyably crazed offering.