The Prince of Terror (1988)

Original title: Il maestro del terrore

Warning: there’s no way to talk about the good bits of this one without some heavy last act spoilers!

Popular horror movie director Vincent Omen (Tomas Arana), dubbed “The Prince of Terror” by what I can only assume is movie Earth’s version of Fangoria, has an on-set falling out with his regular scriptwriter, Paul Hilary (David Brandon) and gets the man fired rather ruthlessly.

A dinner that very same night in the villa out in the sticks where Vincent lives with his wife Betty (Carole André) and his teenage daughter Susan (Joyce Pitti) is rudely interrupted by prank phone calls and a golf ball on the dinner table. Later, in an ever so tiny escalation, Susan finds her lapdog skinned in her bedroom. So everyone runs to their car and drives off to the next police station. No, wait, of course not. Rather, Susan cries, her parents shrug, and Vincent puts the dead dog into the trash.

Obviously, the dead dog is only the beginning of a night of terror. Vincent has apparently a gift for pissing people off, for Paul the angry writer has teamed up with an actor named Eddie Felsen (Ulisse Minervini) who was injured making one of Vincent’s films and is now your regular movie maniac. Together, they drive the family through various special effects horror set pieces Vincent once excised from Paul’s scripts. In-between, there’s ponderous yet nonsensical musing about the nature of horror, and the old “was it real, or not?” gambit repeated about a dozen times, until Vincent uses his golfing-based superpowers. Also, he might be the devil.

This is one of a series of four movies Lamberto Bava made for Italian television at the end of the 80s. He brought other Italian horror mainstays with him to the project, so here you get a script in the inimitable manner of Dardano Sacchetti (that is, it makes very little sense but seems to make a lot of it in the writer’s mind, and is all the better for it), a score by Simon Boswell, and effects by Sergio Stivaletti. Apparently, Italian TV was surprisingly okay with the gloopy gory bits you’d hope for from Stivaletti, so there’s at least that to look forward to for everyone.

Otherwise, this is certainly not on the level of Lamberto Bava’s best cinematic outings, but it is a fun enough movie once the viewer has decided to enter the proper mind space for its specific type of Italian horror, which means giving up on ideas of logic or proper causality and opening up to the random void, while holding back the parts of one’s personality that might want to watch this thing ironically. It’s not terribly difficult, actually, for Bava does know how to make his TV budget look surprisingly pretty, putting quite a bit of effort into making the the architecture of Omen’s home at once sexy and strange (or at least somewhat confusing).

I could have lived rather well without the whole “what’s true horror?” angle in the dialogue, though there are some peculiar lines in the English dub that will at least make the viewer ponder the nature of the drugs the writer was on (probably just wine, I know, I know). But then, Bava clearly wants to do some ratcheting up of tension like in a proper thriller, so the film needs its slow moments, structurally, and there’s little filmmakers like to talk about more than the philosophy of filmmaking.

The real meat of the movie is of course its insane climax, when Vincent first golfs Eddie’s brains out (seriously), then breaks Paul’s wrist – and apparently spirit – with a billiard variation on golf, and drives off with his family while Paul encounters Vincent’s supernatural powers beyond golfing. See the dead dog’s trash bag move! See Eddie move and puke out a stream of golf balls! Share Paul’s panicked sense of logical disconnect! Be happier than you were before seeing any of this (unlike Paul, who is now most probably dead)! And if that still isn’t enough, try to imagine this thing as a parallel universe sequel to The Omen, taking place in a world where Damien has become such a big Vincent Price fan, he stole his first name and went to Hollywood.

Past Misdeeds: Beyond Darkness (1990)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Particularly innocently faithful priest Peter (Gene LeBrock) and his family – wife Annie (Barbara Bingham) and little kids Martin (Troll 2’s Michael Stephenson) and Carole (Theresa F. Walker) move into the wrong house, or really, are maneuvered into moving into that place by his mentor, one Reverend Jonathan (Stephen Brown), I think. Please keep in mind this movie was written by Claudio Fragasso, so half of the logical connections have to be provided by the viewer or the film would go from “makes no goddamn sense at all” to the noise a brain makes when it dribbles out of a helpless cult film blogger’s ears.

Anyhow, it’s really not a good place for a family to stay, for the house is haunted by a bunch of women in black shrouds – of course once burned for witchcraft they may or may not have committed – who like to tear holes in the fabric of reality, produce dry ice fog of astonishing density, and kidnap children for sport. These charming dead persons are lead by a dead child murderess (Mary Coulson, I believe) who not just murdered her little victims but ate their souls to be able to bring them down to her favourite demon’s part of wherever he dwells.

It was an encounter with that lovely woman right before she was executed on the electric chair that broke down the faith of Peter’s old seminary friend – who unlike Peter became a Catholic priest – George (David Brandon ably assisted by buckets full of sweat). Ever since, George has sort of dropped out of the priesthood, has sort of become an alcoholic, is looking for knowledge Man Was Not Meant to Know. and may or may not be possessed by the demon the murderess prayed to, depending on the mood of Fragasso when he wrote any given scene. In any case, when the shrouded ladies get rude, it’s George who helps Peter in various ways, until the whole thing fake-climaxes in a hilarious exorcism and other assorted nonsense.

As we all know, when Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso ended their partnership, Mattei took with him whatever actual sense there was between the two (and given Mattei’s later output, that statement is rather frightening), while Fragasso went on to transfer full control to his Id and gave us Troll 2. Shot in the same year as that epochal achievement, and featuring the same non-acting child actor in Michael Stephenson, Beyond Darkness will probably always be “the normal one” in comparison, seeing as it features a vaguely understandable plot, contains only half a dozen or so scenes that might traumatise the unprepared by their sheer fucking weirdness, and even tells a – if completely unrelatable and absurdly structured – story about faith lost and found and glowing holes in the wall that lead to another dimension belonging to demons none of the three priests in the film calls Hell.

Of course, compared with Troll 2, most films are “the normal one”, and you can’t really say Fragasso didn’t apply most of his powers of coming up with sheer bizarre bullshit dressed up in improbable dialogue while setting his camera at an angle when shooting Beyond Darkness. This is after all still a film that has its perhaps sometimes possessed doubting priest suddenly popping up at his old mentor’s church to sweat profusely and jam a bit on the organ while both men babble nonsense about demons a theology doctorate wouldn’t help one understand, a film where there’s a scene shot via flying knife cam, and whose kidnap, rescue and possession plot is told in the most convoluted way possible. But hey, I’m pretty sure the good guys win thanks to mentor guy shouting at a demon really loudly while staying home in his church until a Satanic bible burns and mentor guy himself dies from a heart attack (see, you can hear Fragasso think, my film’s just like The Exorcist); which is pretty good, because without that, Peter and Annie would have sacrificed their own son to the demons – and only Peter has the excuse of being possessed at the time.

This kind of nonsense is obviously only the tip of the iceberg of nonsense and non-sequiturs Beyond Darkness barfs into our eyes, ears and brains. I might be mixing my metaphors a little here but this is only appropriate when talking about a Fragasso film. In fact, it’s more or less the same approach Beyond Darkness is applying to storytelling. Visually, Fragasso is all about all kinds of crooked camera angles that are probably meant to be stylish and creepy but most of the time seem tacky and weird, incredible amounts of dry ice fog, glowing holes in walls (with dry ice fog coming through them, obviously), dry ice fog,  close-ups of eyes, dry ice fog, and more dry ice fog. Well, that and sweat, because all of the actors seem permanently drenched in a way that might – like a few other elements here – suggest some sort of misguided homage to Lucio Fulci, with David Brandon so caught up in the hot sweating action it’s a wonder nobody drowned in his fluids.

From time to time, between the nonsensical, the inane, and the bizarre, Fragasso also hits on an image that’s honestly creepy, like the shrouded (or really, wearing something that suggests he has seen The Woman in Black and/or photos of Victorian mourning garb) women stretching their hands through walls, doors, etc, again demonstrating that you don’t need to watch a “good” movie to see something shudder-worthy.


So, how much did I love this wondrous abomination of a film? Well, I wouldn’t want to marry it right now, but I’m interested in a long-term relationship full of speeches about demons, tasteless child ghosts, and some good old dimensional rifts in the walls.

On ExB: Beyond Darkness (1990)

You thought Claudio Fragasso only made one film worth watching (I’m talking about Troll 2, so you know where this will lead, imaginary reader) after he broke up with Bruno Mattei? Think again! For Beyond Darkness is the ghost and exorcism movie nobody else could have made, a Thing That Should Not Be yet which is utterly delightful.

You can – and should – learn more if you only follow this handy link to my column over at Exploder Button, a place drowning in the sweat of alcoholic priests.

In short: Aquarius (1987)

aka StageFright

Original title: Deliria

Freshly escaped insane killer Irving Wallace (Clain Parker) secretly hitches a ride on the back seat of dancer Alicia's (Barbara Cupisti) car to the soundstage where the final rehearsals for a very 80s low-rent musical about a serial killer the woman dances in are taking place.

Irv doesn't hesitate, and kills the musical's costume designer in the appropriately gruesome manner. Alicia finds the body, and the police is called. The cops don't find the killer around the soundstage, so they take their leave again, only posting two deaf and stupid colleagues in front of the building in case, well, I don't know in case of what.

The musical's director Peter (David Brandon) sees a golden opportunity here, spontaneously renames the killer of his piece into Irving Wallace and locks his play's core cast in with him, letting the dancer who's going to die next hide away the key, so he can, well, I don't know what the key business is supposed to be about. Oh right, because the killer's in the building too, and we wouldn't have much of a movie when everybody could just leave when Irving begins to slaughter further dancers.

Aquarius is the first of a handful of pretty swell horror movies actor, assistant director (among others for Argento's Tenebre and Phenomena), and all-around Italian movie person Michele Soavi directed between 1987 and 1994.

The film is a perfect example for my pet theory that in Italian horror of the country's prime periods, dumb writing and horrendously convoluted and illogical scripting was not the slightest impediment to a film turning out pretty exciting. It's all a question of presenting the stupid as if it were as quotidian as a visit to the loo. You might think it's lazy writing, but when it works, this technique gives a movie all the aspects of a particularly bizarre dream.

Of course, just having a script of doubtful taste and logic (but with some great ideas on how to set up murder scenes) is not all that's needed to make a proper Italian horror movie of dream-like aspect. There's also the small but important point of having a director who's able to take all the ingredients in the script and make them sing with style. Fortunately, Soavi shows himself to be very great at being stylish. He takes half of the stuff he probably learned while working with Dario Argento, some Hitchcock-style suspense, the gory pay-offs of post-Friday-the-13th slasher movies, and applies some of the lessons he learned about the importance of what happens in the visual background of a scene from John Carpenter's original Halloween to it, and fastly makes you forget how dumb the whole script is. When Aquarius doesn't feel like a dream, all floating camera movements and nightmare edits, it's tight and exciting.

Seemingly, all the thinking that wasn't applied to the script went into the visual presentation, leaving the viewer - as is so often the case in Italian genre cinema - with a film where the style is the substance.

 

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