Voices From Beyond

One of Lucio Fulci's very last efforts, this one reflects an undeniable decline that had occurred in his directorial work from around the mid eighties onwards.  Shot in 1990/1 for Executive Cine TV from one of Fulci's own stories, Voices From Beyond (or Voci dal Profondo / Voices From The Deep to take its original title) is a mystery horror tale about a rich man whose premature death leaves his spirit lingering around while his body rots.  Due to supernatural laws unknown his daughter has the same amount of time it will take his corpse to completely decompose in order to discover who was responsible for his death, and there are a number of suitable suspects, from a mistress to an estranged wife, all of whom were treated badly by the old man.  Feeling quite padded at just over ninety minutes there are nevertheless a number of points that will interest fans of the macabre and Lucio Fulci in particular.  Having acquainted himself with heavy gore towards the end of the seventies, Fulci appeared to feel obliged to wander down the same path in virtually every venture since, and Voices... is no exception - there's a gruesome autopsy scene, plenty of shots of the rotting body beneath the ground (covered in maggots, 'natch), and even the stabbing of a young boy!  There is also a fair bit of nudity for the body-conscious amongst you.  The dream sequences are adeptly executed, generally providing the film with most of its horror content (in fact, without them it would be significantly less interesting I think).  No doubt the best of these is where one character wanders through a claustrophobic morgue consisting of increasingly closed-in walls, before the tombs break open at the hands of the living dead.  Stelvio Cipriani's music is very good in places (Fulci had a knack for embellishing his films with excellent scores), while the hazy cinematography elicits a dreamy feel.  My personal favourite sequence is the funeral of the old man, where his enemies drop wreaths on the coffin one by one as they re-live some of the terrible memories they have of him, all backed by grooving beat.

I did have this on video cassette a long time ago and it was difficult to appreciate the film's strengths on such a medium - needless to say it eventually ended up in a car-boot sale.  Not well touched on DVD anywhere, Code Red announced a while back a US release of a newly scanned transfer on both DVD and Blu-ray!  This has finally come to fruition after what seems like quite a long wait.  The (very) old EC DVD was severely limited in terms of translating the soft-focus image to standard definition (albeit in widescreen), with an equally limited mono audio track (English language).  I haven't seen Code Red's DVD, and don't intend to, but their Blu-ray is an attractive option.  Similarly presented in widescreen - full HD at 24 frames per second - the colours are very strong, grain is present, and detail enhanced.  The relaxed focus of much of the source (surely an artistic choice, given the ghostly nature of the story?) is evident of course, but the film here looks possibly as vivid as we will ever see it - especially some of the harder-focussed exterior shots.  The Dolby TrueHD-encoded audio (still in English, and as atrociously dubbed as ever - I know of nothing that provides an Italian audio option unfortunately and am unsure if such a track even exists) is stronger than before, with the music finally given chance to be assessed with some clarity.  Oddly, there is no menu on the disc - the film starts immediately upon entry, and ceases after the credits on your player's own menu.  There are, however, ten chapter stops, but nothing in way of chapter naming.  Neither are there any extras, but really, who is going to track down ageing participants for a lower-key movie such as this?  Limited to 1000 at the time of writing, and available only direct through Code Red (see my links/escape routes above) this Blu-ray is, despite the film's shortcomings and the discs lack of bonus material, the best way to experience the film and a desirable collector's item for fans of Lucio Fulci.

Touch of Death

Quando Alice Ruppe Lo Pecchio (which translates as When Alice Broke The Mirror rather than Touch of Death as it's better known to English speakers) was made around the same time as Sodoma's Ghost (1988) for the same producers.  It's about a man with serious gambling issues who is compelled to date and murder rich women to fund his downwardly spiralling lifestyle.  It would appear that his mind is losing its stability in the process, as he believes odd things are happening with his own shadows, conversations occur with himself, and most uncannily, people he has killed are indeed found dead - but not where he left them.  Furthermore the police seem to be closing in as clues to his identity materialise on the News with alarming frequency.

As with Sodoma's Ghost Fulci wrote the story and screenplay for this one, though his efforts are more successful here than the dire Naziploitation flick.  Carlo Maria Cordio's score is stronger, though still a tad excessive, and the dialogue appears to be improved (though it's difficult to directly compare due to the fact that I couldn't view Sodoma's Ghost in Italian, as previously mentioned).  There are doses of humour varnished on to the horrors (e.g. the feet of a recently murdered corpse keep popping out of his car boot, until he resorts to chopping them off!) that occasionally function as intended, but what keeps your eyes on the screen is the presence of the downright bizarre.  Every woman he tends to get his mitts on is remarkably ugly, even to the point where one of them has a scarred face that he can barely even look at (and as plain wrong as it is, this scenario actually forces a couple of smiles that you'll be desperately trying to suppress).  Surprisingly the film is incredibly gory (I say surprisingly because I believe it was made for television), one scene early on reminding me of some of the atrocities in Guinea Pig II, which is kind of pleasing given Fulci's history with some of the best gore films to ever come out of Italy, however, special effects man Angelo Mattei is no Gianetto De Rossi.  Having said that the head in an oven is a bit of a show-stopper.  Exploitation regular Zora Kerova (Miss Meathook from Cannibal Ferox) is also present.

The Dutch DVD from EC Entertainment gives us a soft, washed-out fullframe (framed as shot on 16mm) transfer, with optional English or Italian audio tracks.  Thankfully there were English subtitles available, although the Italian track is in quite bad shape (I've heard forties films sounding better than this).  Shriek Show released a DVD a couple of years after this one, looking much the same although featuring a more comprehensive package of extras.  Make no mistake: this is not an excellent film, though I do feel there is enough of the macabre and weird here to save it from the dust-bin (garbage can if you're American).

Sodoma's Ghost

The later eighties would be the beginning of decline in quality for Lucio Fulci's work (some would argue it began earlier with the likes of Murder-Rock but I think there was still some drive in his material at that point personally).  During this period he made a few films for producers Antonio Lucidi and Luigi Nannerini, of which Il Fantasma Di Sodoma (Sodoma's Ghost) is one.  The most idiotic teens you've seen since wandering past a British inner city high school are driving out on holiday and get hopelessly lost, only to come across an old house that was used by the Nazis for the purposes of sexual degradation back in the day.  Finding that it's impossible to escape from the place the dumb teens end up staying a few days, only to be accosted in various ways by the malevolent (but still quite sexually charged) spirits of the long-dead Nazis.

Whilst I've not seen everything that Fulci ever directed I have seen a fair bit of his work, but this is the lowest pile of drivel I've witnessed (he also wrote the story and screenplay for this one) - a sad comedown from the glory days (just a few years before, amazingly) of The Beyond and House By The Cemetery.  I could only view this in English and perhaps the translation/dubbing was flawed, but judging it from this alone the dialogue itself is atrocious, sometimes to amusing effect.  The saving grace of the teens, who generally deserve to be shot on sight, is the presence of one sultry Jessica Moore, who made this after the far more enjoyable Eleven Days, Eleven Nights, and thankfully gets her kit off here too.  In fact there is a very high level of nudity in this film throughout, though even this plus-point can't quite save the film.  Any potential (and there was some in the germ of the idea) is also damaged by Carlo Maria Cordio's incessant and irritating score.  To add final insult to injury is the lame-as-f**k ending, almost suggesting that nobody involved with this production had a modicum of enthusiasm for it.

EC Entertainment released this abortion via region 2 PAL DVD well over ten years ago - the fullframe (as shot) transfer is quite ugly.  Two audio tracks are included - English language and Italian language (the latter being much hissier).  Why did I not watch the film in Italian?  Because, despite what it said on the back of the box, there are no subtitles!  Still, a bad disc serving up a worse film is not the end of humanity.

The New York Ripper

1982, Italy, Directed by Lucio Fulci
Colour, Running Time: 93 minutes
Review Source: Blu-ray, Region A, Blue Underground; Video: 2.40:1 1080p 24fps, Audio: DTS HD MA

Already steeped in streets of sleaze, New York City is hit by a plague of brutal murders by a psychopath with an apparent dislike of women. Tough but jaded, detective Williams is saddled with the case and chases up various leads to track down the increasingly sadistic killer. Following on from a string of well received fantasy horrors Fulci took on a more real world approach to the genre, effectively stepping back into the realms of the giallo (an area he'd previously experimented with a decade or so prior). The gruesomeness of the films he'd made in the few years preceding New York Ripper is present and accounted for here, although the method here reeks of nihilism and hopelessness. The semi-frequent deaths are clearly as horrific as Fulci could make them at the time, and very well executed they are in terms of editing and framing, being only occasionally let down by the budgetary limitations of the effects themselves (Lord knows how horrible this would have been with more realistic special effects). Still, these death scenes will not be appealing to most viewers. Fulci's characters are victims of the sleazy world in which they've been cultivated from birth, with sexually frustrated rich wives intermingling with moral-free Hispanic immigrants, roamers of streets lined with porn shops/shows, subway travellers almost oblivious to the graffiti-wrecked transport on which they travel, cops who sleep with prostitutes, etc. None of the characters are especially likable, and the cynical nature of the film is summed up by the final scene where a terminally ill, amputee child cries for her dead, homicidal parent. It's nice to see Fulci regular bit part victim Daniela Doria here, more attractive than ever but as always graphically put to an end in arguably the film's most shocking sequence (she was the same lass who coughed up her guts in City of the Living Dead and had a knife put through the back of her skull in House By The Cemetery). I think this one must have put her off acting altogether - it was her last role on film sadly.

I've previously watched this a few times on VHS, and a couple of times on DVD, so how does the Blue Underground Blu-ray compare? Wow! It actually looks amazing, with a bright, clear, sumptuous image throughout, without a doubt stamping on all previous releases. In fact the BD reveals just how well photographed this film is, offering further evidence in my opinion that Fulci was no trash director, even though the subject matter of this particular movie is quite deliberately trash. The increase in detail and clarity almost make this a joy to watch, as much as that may be possible in a case such as New York Ripper. Audio (English only) is served with a 7.1 lossless track alongside the original mono (the former being much quieter, something I've noticed with a lot of DTS HD MA tracks). Extras are minimal, consisting of an interview with Zora Kerova, the girl who takes part in a live sex show before being butchered very nastily by the ripper. I never actually realised before but this is the same actress who plays the unfortunate victim who gets hung up by the boobs in Cannibal Ferox, an experience she describes here as quite painful! She was also in Terror Express and the notorious former-nasty Anthropophagus. Kerova's not looking too bad for her age, speaking quite enthusiastically about the film and Fulci as a colleague. The other extra (apart from the trailer) is a short featurette demonstrating how New York has changed and been 'cleaned up' over the years, with comparison shots between the film and the same locations today. The lack of extras is not for great lamentation when one considers how incredible the film looks - no amount of extras can compensate for a bad transfer in my book. For fans of the film, they have to get this disc.