Italian Horror Blogathon: Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2 (1979)

Italian horror movies of the 1970s and early 1980s are a mixed bag of delight and frustration. They gleefully rip off popular American movies (Jaws, Dawn of the Dead, The Exorcist, Alien, etc.), amp up the blood and gore and music and intensity, but mostly fall flat because they can't be concerned with plot, dialogue, characterization, good production values, etc. But we love them because of these charming flaws, not in spite of them!

For me, the essential '70s Italian horror movie is Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2 (known in the US as simply Zombie), a 1979 rip-off "sequel" to George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead, which was known to the Continent as Zombi. Now, Dawn gets all the love, which it deserves because it is truly groundbreaking, but Zombi 2 is pretty much my favorite Italian horror movie and zombie movie. It has stuff Dawn does not: disgustingly wormy, squishy, rotting zombies; a mad scientist on a deserted Caribbean island not unlike Dr. Moreau; and an air of grim desolation I find much more appropriate to the proceedings than the cheeky satire of Romero's film.

How is Zombi 2 representative of Italian horror? First, it comes complete with bad dubbing and wooden acting. Yes, that is Mia Farrow's sister Tisa in the lead, which hilariously puts Woody Allen well within six degrees of separation from exploitative Italian horror movies. American and English actors down on their luck often turned up in these flicks. I don't think they expected to be part of a cult movie history. Ian McCullough, seen above, turns in an audio commentary on the DVD and he states he has never seen the movie.

Then there's an astonishing underwater zombie-versus-shark scene (every movie, TV show, or cartoon in the five or so years post Jaws had to have a shark in it somewhere). This sequence is, I believe, literally a cinematic one-of-a-kind! And the zombies themselves are Spanish conquistadors who we see rise from their graves in the jungle in the middle of the day. Very effective. Also it's a great example of Italian horror's love of inept, nonsensical ideas: how do corpses hundreds of years dead bleed a gout of fresh blood?

There's infamous eye violence sequence (a staple in Fulci's movies – Luis Bunuel had nothing on him) followed by a glorious tableaux of gore as the zombies devour their eye-penetrated victim, accompanied by the infamous and clumsy zoom shot so beloved of Italian horror filmmakers. Overall, though, it's the ridiculously, gloriously over-the-top gore that makes this a classic of its genre.

When I first saw Zombi 2 I was probably 15 or 16 – the perfect age to appreciate such shenanigans – when my friends and I had the habit of renting the nastiest-looking foreign horror videos, which usually had a thin patina of dust upon them. I was reintroduced to it at a 4th of July party about 7 or 8 years ago where I'd indulged a bit too much to be social, so I wandered into the empty living room, where I found, to my surprise, a nice remastered VHS copy. Delighted to be acquainted with an old friend, I put it on, finding it perfect for the condition I was in.

Other party-goers would wander in, chat a moment during one of the dull parts (which are plentiful in Italian horror), drawn by that implacable score, and then suddenly be gob-smacked (the ones not used to Italian horror movies, anyway) by a scene of unremitting violence and dubbing ineptitude. This is an Italian horror WIN.

The movie's climax is like an early Lovecraft story ("Argh! Aaack! They've got me!") but it works in a fun, satisfying way. But its implications are inescapable: there is no transcendence here. Bodies are consumed, brains displayed, blood is merely an appetizer; eyes, once windows to the soul, are now squeezed tight in shock and fear and ultimately penetrated to reveal no soul whatsoever. Romero's vision of the zombie invasion has people finding their common humanity; when Fulci's zombipocalypse arrives, we find we are meat, and nothing besides.

Note: This post is my contribution to the ITALIAN HORROR BLOGATHON.


Note: This post is ALSO my contribution to the COUNTDOWN TO HALLOWEEN.

Countdown to Halloween: Portraits of Dracula

I don't draw nearly as much as when I was a kid. Every now and then I'll take out an old notebook to sketch and occasionally, lo and behold, it ain't that bad.



This post is part of the Countdown to Halloween.

Countdown to Halloween: Henry, or, Horror Itself

Most horror films are like roller coaster rides—we get thrills and chills, but we also laugh because we know we're safe. It's only an illusion of fear, not fear itself. John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) just might be fear itself. We cannot laugh after this movie, cannot recount its most famous scenes with pleasure, cannot quote it for humorous effect, because this film stands as one of the bleakest, despairing, most relentless depictions of a murderer ever put to celluloid. It's all there in the title; this is practically a documentary.

Poster by Joe Coleman

This film is light years from Hollywood treatments of serial killers. Sure, Se7en and Silence of the Lambs are exciting, well-made movies, but when did you ever hear of a murderer with such an M.O.? Henry, as played by Michael Rooker, is an emotional blank, a human cipher. He's not sympathetic at all—no wisecracks, no catch-phrases, nothing that we can latch onto to understand him.

Therein lies the power of the movie. If Henry reveled in his bloodshed, we could despise him. If he suffered crippling feelings of guilt afterward, we could pity him. But we can't do either. We just kind of watch him, hoping he won't go too far... that he'll stop soon... that some tough detective will track him down... But none of these things happen.

"It's always the same, and it's always different," Henry tells his friend Otis (Tom Towles), who eventually ventures out with Henry on his killing sprees. Why? Because he's stupid, restless, filled with unfocused loathing. What more of an explanation do you need? "It's either you or them, one way or another," Henry continues. That's all the rationale you'll get for Henry's compulsion, and it's as good an explanation as any.

The plot, such as it is, takes a twist for the worst when Otis's younger sister Becky (Tracy Arnold) comes to stay with him and Henry in Chicago. Lonely and destitute after the break-up of her marriage, she finds Henry someone she can talk to because he's not "judgmental." Read: he's a blank slate upon whom she can project whatever she wants, and right now she wants someone to understand her. In one subtly chilling scene, she tells Henry how she, as a teen, had been beaten and raped repeatedly by her father. Henry simply responds in his deadened rasp, "Didn't get along with your Daddy, huh?"

Henry's normally placid demeanor dissolves only when he talks about his abusive mother. I like how he mis-remembers how he murdered her. That strikes me as true and accurate; serial killers are like this. "It ain't what she done," he says, "it's how she done it." We see how brutality breeds brutality, how violence and despair and rage are almost in our genetic code. But the director McNaughton isn't making a message movie; we can only infer his message from these clues.

Like any sane person, I cringe when I see realistic violence in a film, but unlike many, I can't turn away. Some media critics state that this depiction of violence in movies ultimately desensitizes the viewer, but nothing could be further from the truth in Henry.

Can anyone watch the infamous videotape sequence, in which Henry and Otis slaughter an entire family in a home invasion, and not be left feeling disturbed, violated, empty? These murders are virtually bloodless, and yet it may be the most unsettling screen violence I have ever seen. I wanted it to... go away... stop, just stop (I did indeed turn off the VCR for a break at this point when I first saw it in 1990). But then, real violence makes you feel that way. That's what makes Henry brilliant—no cheap thrills here. We need films this raw and immediate and rough to explore such foul things; you can't expect Hollywood to do it. McNaughton is playing for real.

"But if you strangle one, and stab another, and one you cut up and one you don't, then the police don't know what to do," Henry explains. And there's the moral center of this movie. Sorry. This is not about good and evil, because there are no such things in the serial killer's world. Don't pretend that there is. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is a horror film in which the truly horrified are not the characters on the screen, as it too often is, but the audience itself. This is not an enjoyable movie by any means, but it is one you must see.

Countdown to Halloween: The Corpse-Keeper

Often considered the Edgar Allan Poe of France, Charles Baudelaire wrote some of the greatest French literature of all time. His magnum opus, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), is one of the world'smost lauded books of poetry. Indeed, recognizing a fellow genius in Poe, Baudelaire was responsible for translating the American writer into French and securing Poe's reputation for the world. Baudelaire's decadent, daring fusion of the erotic and the macabre can be seen everywhere in the modern horror genre, whether one knows his name or not. One should.

I'm not here to celebrate his literary credentials; I'm here to share with you some of his most grotesque, morbid, and horrifying poetic imagery that's just perfect for our next Countdown to Halloween.

Packed tight, like hives of maggots, thickly seething,
Within our brains a host of demons surges
Deep down into our lungs at every breathing,
Death flows, an unseen river, moaning dirges.

from "To the Reader"

Like angels who have bestial eyes
I'll come again to your alcove
And glide in silence to your side
In shadows of the night, my love;
And I will give to my dark mate
Cold kisses, frigid as the moon,
And I'll caress you like a snake
That slides and writhes around a tomb.

from "The Ghost"

Do you come from deep heaven or do you come from hell,
O Beauty? Your eyes, infernal and divine,
Pour out both goodness and crime,
And for that you can be compared to wine...

You walk over the dead, O Beauty, and mock them.
Among your jewels, Horror is not the least charming,
And Murder, among your dearest baubles,
Dances amorously on your proud body.

from "Hymn to Beauty"

Remember, my love, the object we saw
That beautiful morning in June;
By a bend in the path a carcass reclined...

Her legs were spread out like a lecherous whore,
Sweating out poisonous fumes
Who opened in slick invitational style
Her stinking and festering womb...

And the sky cast an eye on this marvelous meat
As over the flowers in bloom.
The stench was so wretched that there on the grass
You nearly nearly collapsed in a swoon...

From back in the rocks, a pitiful bitch
Eyed us with angry distaste,
Awaiting the moment to snatch from the bones
The morsel she'd dropped in her haste.

--And you, in your turn, will be rotten as this:
Horrible, filthy, undone...
Yes, such will you be, o regent of grace,
After the rites have been read...

Ah then, o my beauty, explain to the worms
Who cherish your body so fine,
That I am the keeper for corpses of love
Of the form and the essence divine!

from "A Carcass"

Countdown to Halloween: By the pricking of my thumbs...

“First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.”

Indeed. So begins Ray Bradbury's iconic 1962 dark fantasy novel. Hard as it may be to believe, it's true that I've never read it! In the early '90s I made my way through a handful of Bradbury's other classics - Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, Illustrated Man, etc. - but Wicked has simply sat on my shelf uncracked and unloved. Every October since then I've glanced at it high upon my bookshelves and thought, "Time to read Something Wicked This Way Comes," but I never did. Until now - but I'm barely on page 40 as I write this entry (Jim and Will are watching the ghostly silent carnival men set up tents at 3:00 a.m.).

So in lieu of an actual book review, I will just post some of the wonderful covers of various editions of the book from over the years.

This 1970s' Bantam edition is the copy I'm reading now.

The always-weird JK Potter cover was part of a series of reprints in the late '80s.

A UK edition not quite as fantastical as the others.

I remember seeing the Disney adaptation of it about 20 years ago and, of course, can recall nothing of it!

A 1999 hardcover edition.

Something Wicked still, happily, turns up on school reading lists, as do several of his other major works. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some reading of my own to do.

This post is part of the Countdown to Halloween.

For more great Ray Bradbury book covers, see the wonderful coffee-table tome Bradbury: An Illustrated Life.

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy (1987): Horror in Hollywoodland

The woman is severed, the two halves of her pale, bloodless body placed as carefully in a Los Angeles lot as one would hang a painting in an art gallery. Her face bears a camprichico smile, battered sunken eyes, a pulped nose. Cigarette burns stubble her breasts, one of which is still attached by only a gristle of meat. Beneath the rib cage, nothing. She is disassembled.

Her second half begins above her pubic bone, her legs spread in a necrophiliac's wet dream pose, an open gash like an arrow pointing towards her vagina. Her knees are broken and a triangle of flesh is missing from her left thigh. We can easily read the secrets she will never tell: days of unspeakable torture, and, in her portrait photos, of dreams deformed into horror. She is the Black Dahlia, a young woman named Elizabeth Short, and her murderer will never be found.

My introduction to this disturbing real-life horror story came in the form of James Ellroy's 1987 novel The Black Dahlia, which I read for the first time in 1991. It is the masterful crime writer's fictional account of this infamous unsolved murder case, complete with a wish-fulfilling conclusion. It's a relentlessly intense pulp novel, bursting at the seams with violence, perversion, macho aggression (and weakness), and the gutter-glimmer of a Hollywood buried beneath nearly 60 years of history.


Two young LA cops burning with ambition and haunted pasts, Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard, become obsessed with the alluring murder victim Betty Short. Glamor photos of her in tight black dresses with her pale blue eyes—as well as the gruesome images of the famous corpse she would come to be—become talismanic. Each finds his life in disarray because of it. Now all of the LAPD is on the case as the largest manhunt in the state's history gathers to find the murderer, but in the end only one man will be strong enough to handle (or, indeed, care) about the truth.

Ellroy rubs our noses in the grit and the dirt of investigating the murder of a beautiful girl on the skids; as Bucky and Lee roust lowlifes in LA's warzones you can smell the cheap liquor, the stench of bum urine, feel the California heat as it shimmers on the blacktop, your bourbon hangover gripping your skull like a vice as you try to slice through inter-departmental bullshit, the politics and the lies, to find out who killed a worthless two-bit beautiful piece of cheap Hollywood cooze (as Ellroy might put it).

The atmosphere is heavy with neon, rain-slicked streets at night and reeking bachelor pads, sunlight filtered through venetian blinds, men and women frozen in a time we can only imagine as film noir. The dialogue is realistic, staccato, and filled with the period tough-guy slang of bebop jazz and cop-shop talk. The plot twists and turns, with a long jaunt to filthy Mexico graveyard, where Bucky literally digs up his past; to the early Hollywood machinations of (real-life) Keystone Kops director Mack Sennett and mobster Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen. Lee Blanchard disappears, leaving Bucky to fend off three women: Kay Lake, who loved Lee; Madeleine Sprague, a Dahlia-lookalike; and the Black Dahlia herself, who even in death casts a spell over men.

Ellroy ends his novel with the killer caught; the Black Dahlia's final hours revealed in gut-wrenching detail ("She bit on the gag and blood from where I took the Joe DiMaggio to her teeth came out due to her biting so hard. I stuck the knife down to a little bone I felt, then I twisted it"); one of the saddest of all unsolved murder mystery cases finally laid to rest. The climax is drawn out over the final 30 pages in a jagged wave of secrets uncovered and killers come forth.

Ellroy gives you your money's worth, that's for sure. This book is so dark it's virtually a horror novel; horror not in the sense of Stephen King but in the true sense of the word: awe at the depths to which humanity can sink and how it stains all our lives. Ellroy calls this book his "Valediction in Blood" and it's easy to see why: as a boy, his own mother was killed by an unknown man, and here in The Black Dahlia, he has solved one murder for another. RIP.

Mia Kirshner as Short in the not-so-good '06 movie version

Boxing the Compass: Crime Classics of the Early '70s

There's just nothing else like 'em. These really aren't up there with Chinatown, The Long Goodbye, Mean Streets, or Night Moves, but they all have that realistic, mundane, day-in-the-life-of-crime vibe that reached its apotheosis in Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction, and The Sopranos. Respect.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973, dir. Peter Yates)

Robert Mitchum's performance here as the titular criminal is masterful as he tries to escape his fate; his wheeling and dealing isn't the work of a master con artist—even though it may seem that way at first—but the frantic scramblings of a man who knows he's doomed but can't admit it to himself. Who could? Caught between the Irish mob and the Feds and one seriously low-level gunrunner, he does everything he can to avoid another trip to the big house. The way this one plays out is pure '70s grit. Terrific Boston locales too. I suppose the only odd thing here is how a man of Mitchum's age could have kids barely in grade school. This was recently released on a Criterion Collection DVD.


French Connection II (1975, dir. John Frankenheimer)

Since the original French Connection swept up the major Oscars in '71 a sequel was practically a foregone conclusion. Missing the estimable Roy Scheider (lost at sea with Spielberg and co. for Jaws) FCII might not boast his and Hackman's buddy routine and the New York mean streets, but it has a harrowing forced addiction/detox sequence and parts of Paris the tourists never see. Hackman pushes Popeye even further in his single-mindedness, although he still takes the time to get drunk (in a hilarious scene with a French bartender) and try to pick up hot French chicks. The climactic shootout with Charnier (Fernando Rey), the bad guy from the original, is terrific, and the final shot reduces the action movie to its barest essential. The poster doesn't lie.


Charley Varrick (1973, dir. Don Siegel)

This character-driven heist-gone-wrong piece is best known today as the origin of a line from Pulp Fiction ("a blow torch and a pair of pliers"), Joe Don Baker's hired killer Molly who seems to be an inspiration for Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, and this unexpected exchange between Varrick (the estimable Walter Matthau) and a willing lady:

Charley Varrick: I like your bed. You may find this hard to believe but I've never slept on a round bed.
Sybil Fort: Is that so?
CV: What's the best way? North, south, east, or west?
SF: That depends on what you had in mind.
CV: What I had in mind was boxing the compass.

Walter Matthau makes a dirty double-entendre?! Probably his best one since "It took me three hours to figure out that 'F.U.' was Felix Unger!"


Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974, dir. Sam Peckinpah)

Reviled by many, considered by some to be Peckinpah's masterpiece, this existential modern-day western Mexican manhunt features the always-welcome Warren Oates. It revels in cruelty, grunginess, misogyny—indeed, misanthropy—slow-motion death, and some terrific lines. Shoving off goons hanging around a cemetery: "Don't look at me with your goddamn fuckin' eyes!" To an already-dead body as he shoots it: "Why? Because it feels so damn good!" And to his prostitute girlfriend who objects to gathering up the head of a man dead and buried: "The church cuts off the feet, fingers, any other goddamn thing from the saints, don't they? Well, what the hell? Alfredo's our saint. He's the saint of our money, and I'm gonna borrow a piece of him." Apparently when Oates saw Tom Waits on TV in the mid-'70s, he exclaimed, "That guy stole my act." He was probably speaking of this scene:



Also contains the classic bit, perhaps a cinematic anomaly, of trying to kill crabs with tequila. Yes, those kinds of crabs. There is nothing Warren Oates cannot do. Respect.