Voices From Beyond

Voices From Beyond Directed By Lucio Fulci, Starring Karina Huff (1991).

Maybe you heard that Fulci made a kids movie about a lovable wolf dog named White Fang with Franco Nero and wanted to check it out. Well, if you like extreme gore and sexual violence try this made for TV romp instead! It begins with an old dude named Giorgio (Duilio Del Prete) in the middle of boning his lady friend while an annoying moppet rudely interrupts. He grabs a knife and goes to silence the kid. It gets pretty ugly as he stabs the shit outta him. Amazon Prime bought a bunch of Code Red flicks that are currently streaming. So don’t sleep on it, because they may all be gone soon. CR is one of those elusive companies that I've bitched about in the past, they promise all these exploitative gems bursting with extras (like the Human Experiments one that had Vincent Gallo interviewing Lynda Haynes that may not even exist) and they all fetch for high ass prices on Ebay and are either in the hands of a select few or impossible to find.

Shut up about Vincent Gallo, I'm gonna retch!

Lucio Fulci wrote the script as well, which is rare for him. The lighting is very soft on a tele novella style and Stelvio Cipriani really phones in a terrible score which is a tragedy because he’s one of the best soundtrack guys.

We get lots of the normal eye zooms and weird looking people which is patented Fulci trait. During a nasty abdominal incision performed by the director himself, they don’t even bother to shave his belly, it’s pretty vile!

OK so this is where the mangina will go.

We do in deed hear the "voices from beyond" as advertised. There’s a lot of Italian dudes in weird oversized dykey glasses. Rosy (Karina Huff) a frumpy but mildly attractive girl comes home to find all these bitches hated her dad (the guy in the beginning who stabs the kid). We see the currently dead Giorgio’s past encounters and we get to meet the performers this way. Even after death he doesn’t stop quawking. Blab Blab blab, at one point he continues to talk even after worms are munching on the cartilage of his face!

JUST SHUT UP ALREADY!

Rosey looks like an extra from Full House and she keeps having nightmares of him chasing her. Man what happened to Fulci? I think it has a lot to do with him separating from his best screen writer Dardano Sachetti. At the time, Sachetti was writing for Fabrizio De Angelis and working on a few TV shows like The Return of Ribot (whatever that was). You’d have to put up with a lot of dopeyness to like this one it’s pretty retarded.

Am I stylin' or what?

There’s an old dude they refer to as a mummy that actor was in the Van Damme Rodman flick Double Team and Cannibal Holocaust, impressed? We get some Jess Franco looking zombies in a dream sequence, man how low has Fulci sunk to rely on shitty zombies? This is almost depressing. Rosy shows off her weird boobs, so stick around for that or maybe just take a nap and set an alarm. Oh and there’s a bunch of talking eyeballs that squirt blood! Keep in mind these are nightmares and possibly a record for dream sequences. The film was dedicated to Clive Barker. If you want to simultaneously be depressed and amused than dial this flick up on instant. More Code Red goodies are available so check them out before they disappear again or don't see if I care!

I taught Rodman everything about North Korea

Do my boobs look that weird?

Gates of Hell (aka City of the living dead)

THE GATES OF HELL (aka City of the Living Dead) Directed by Lucio Fulci (1980).

I’ve been slacking lately on writing, but decided after slugging it out in the doldrums of Japanese torture comedy porn aka The Guinea Pig series to revisit an old favorite. I’ve always had an affinity for Fulci over Argento, probably because I saw his film at an early age and it’s nauseating tone resonates with me.

The first moment I saw that crooked, sleepy eyed corpse hovering over NYC was in the newspaper when it debuted in the U.S. in 1983. I have a vivid memory of seeing it in the second or third grade and wondering if my mom could take me to watch this one in the theater, she didn’t obviously. I know now that I would’ve been traumatized for life, considering I was scared out of my skin during METALSTORM. In the theater when I took off my 3D glasses because the action was too over the top and I saw nothing but blurry double visions. Later on, I discovered that the primitive effects of multiple cameras created the optical illusion. Speaking of that early Charles Band Mad Max rip off check out William Wilson's first book on the subject of Empire, buy here.

Inbred-itor, one of those knock off Chinese He-Man villians

This was somewhere down the pecking order of Fulci flicks that I’d watched first, starting off with ZOMBIE. I remember constantly seeing this one on the video store shelves along with the Continental VHS version of NIGHTMARE CITY (with its alternate title that I always think of when I hear the re-vamped title of COTLD verses Gates of Hell). By the way, that Umberto Lenzi aforementioned flick poster art has always struck me as clunky. It has a topless, blood speckled female with her eye socket torn open and mouth agape. What kind of sickos do they want to attract with that cover, it basically looks like the aftermath of a savage gang rape. I should mention just for some context that this was written a week after Umberto died, rest in peace paisano.

Mike Pence's fav masturbatory/ flagellant cassette.

That brownish mustard colored zombie from the cover of GOH, seemed to get around in the 80’s, donning the cover of Hell of the Living Dead (aka Night of the Zombies) and inspiring a similar floating disembodied noggin on BURIAL GROUND VHS cover. The first time I recall watching this Fulci movie was on a dingy, eternally dark and almost unwatchable video tape. I think I borrowed a copy from Skunkape and still had a hard time diving into the murkiness. In middle school, I had the Bloody Best issue of Fangoria and remember seeing all the wacky captions on GATES like “kids are not exempt from undead grips from the grave.” Fango is an obvious influence on TOG, definitely the Bob Martin time period.

At least I died knowing my fans find me less irritating than Giovanni Frezza

The gaunt figure and sunken in eyes of John Morghen also impressed me and I wondered if they just found some authentic derelict on the streets to play Bob the blow-up doll carrying pervert who ends up skull-drilled to death.

The most infamous scene that highlights the spectacle is of course the one involving poor Daniela Dora puking up genuine sheep entrails and crying blood. I couldn't figure where that ghostly torment stems from but it seems like Japanese folklore to me. It's pretty obvious when she is spitting her guts out that they replaced her with a fake head and yank the offal through the open mouth. Michele Soavi, star of the DEMONS series is in the car next to her and I remember when Skunkape and I were in TV production school together, he put together a wacky comedy video that had a laugh track and Brak commenting on the carnage of that very scene. The primary source he used to put together the mini episode about Soavi for our vocational school was Deep Red Alert #2. This was years before CEMETERY MAN became a zombie classic.

The Fabio Frizzi score is my favorite, it descends into cryptic eerie tones just after the blood curdling scream. There are a lot of soundtracks that sound as if they’re based on "Heart of the Sunrise" by YES (1971). The segment in the tune with the foot pedals, then ominous keyboard sounds seems to me to have influenced this score plus Contamination-Goblin and Possession by Andrzej Korzynski. It’s all speculation on my part but I figured I would mention it, since I’ve never heard anyone else bring it up. I hate to admit it but the Yes song is used to brilliantly montage Buffalo 66.

I can only watch the last 30 mins of Brown Bunny.

Fabrizio Jovine, the actor who plays the priest looks slightly Argento-esque, which always cracked me up considering the 80’s rivalry the two film makers had. It’s pretty fascinating to me that the ghoulish priest showed up in a TV movie about Christ, which starred Chris Sarandon as the Messiah.   

Me and Glenn Benton got a bromance brewing with our matching forehead cross scars.

Mary Woodhouse (Catriona McColl) looks very greased out, as if she hasn’t slept for a few weeks. During the séance, she froths at the mouth and as the dead erupt from the ground and it triggers an instant heart attack. Enoch, a magical book is yet another Lovecraft influenced text like the Eibon from THE BEYOND. This is pure coincidence but Mary Whitehouse, the ultra -conservative dingbat who spearheaded the Video Nasty witchhunt and Woodhouse are very similar sounding surnames.

I'm glad nobodies gonna watch these furshlugginer' shit flicks, oh wait!

There are demonic flames that belch up from the floor, every time I see this part, it makes me think of Skunkape’s wacky trailer for GOH. That crazy monkey had the flame ring float up and down incessantly until it looked comical, adding moans and wails while it looped.

The infamous John Morghen shows up in one of his first roles as Bob the pervert. The Blue Underground DVD really enhanced the entire viewing experience, it’s just so much more satisfying than getting an instant migraine trying to pick through the visual refuse. Here, you get to see every slithering worm feasting on a disgustingly bloated body (make sure not to eat anything during this flick or you might blow chunks so hard they will get caught in your remote buttons). When Bob’s blowup doll springs to life on its own, it reminds me of Otto, the autopilot from AIRPLANE.

Dunwich is the spookiest town ever, it’s pretty lame how “Junies” the only place to drown your sorrows in this sad sack dump is infested with zombies, ghosts and demons.

Nobody's drunk enough to tolerate an interdimensional pathway to hell splitting open and letting in the unholiest of ghouls.

stripper cake mishap!

Janet Agren (DOOMED TO DIE), who needs all the psychological help she can get is being treated by the afro-ed dude you’ve seen in other Italian horror classics like MANHATTAN BABY and TERROR EXPRESS.

Chris George (THE EXTERMINATOR, ENTER THE NINJA) bumps into two grave diggers, one Deodato aficionados will know as Perry Pirkanen or the guy with a giant blonde mustache making scary faces by a mutilated turtle foot. Both actors chomp their sandwiches and forget to swallow as they talk.

I felt so guilty about killing that giant turtle, I decided to move in with this tortoise douche.

Pirkanen is a guy who according to IMDB was uncredited in practically all of his films (CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, this and CRUEL JAWS). There’s gotta be an easier way to collect a paycheck!

Catriona gasps and claws her fingernails till the velvet is drenched in her blood. I’ve always been disturbed by the way she ferociously tries to break out of the coffin. The Fulci motifs are all present, like narrowly missing a fatal blow from a weapon or the extreme eyeball close-ups.

I like how right after Mary erupts from a coffin, instead of going to a hospital to see if there was any damage from being asphyxiated, they all stare into the camera and chat over tea and coffee about “Dunwich” and how the Gates are gonna bust open. Talk about pushing the panic button! You can just feel the grottiness as the haunted priest shoves a fistful of slithering worms into Bob's unusually attractive gal pal's mouth. Why do these babes hang out with him anyway, is he their only weed connection in this fucked up corn pone town?

just mash the keypad to dial Papa Johns

Next is the most iconic money shot, if you’ll excuse that term, but it’s a scene that basically framed Fulci’s entire legacy and especially his vile treatment of women, you know where I’m going with this—Daniela Dora mouth pooping out her entire intestinal tract! This is just beyond repulsive and brilliantly creative as a ghost power. Who comes up with this shit, well I can answer that it was one of the greatest Italian horror screenwriters Dardano Sachetti, who we've mentioned a lot in previous years. He's scripted everything from Macaroni combat flicks to Amityville 2, Iron Master and has worked for almost every giant in the Pastaland exploitation scene.

Larry the Cable Guy is a dick, this Prilosec removed my entrails instead of fixed them!

The bartender at Junies resembles Sachetti. John-John the whiny moptopped kid almost shits his feety pajamas as Emily (Antonella Interlenghi), his sister returns from the grave. She wasn’t even that long gone on the slab but her face managed to get completely shredded and maggot eaten.

GAWD somebody drive me to the mall to get some moisturizer!

Everyone is in a panicky frenzy in this town, especially the extremely sharp cheek boned Janet Agren. I like how her paintings have odd looking rhinos and waves.

Now most kiddies today can dial the drill brain scene on Youtube, but It always resonated with me as iconic and connected to Chas Balun/ Deep Red Magazine because his artwork captured that moment when a long assed drill enters John Morghen’s brain bucket and erupts from the other side of his temple. It’s just as shocking today as in 1980 and given the fact that he receives this punishment for getting high with a cute girl and being blamed for her death. It’s just a crime that it happened at all!

Oh yeah and she comes back as well as one of the undead, I mean someone should’ve strapped her down ROTLD wagging spinal cord lady and sequestered her at least.

Julie Hagerty's finest role.

Like the Gwar song goes- “Maggots are falling like rain” and strategically attaching themselves to people’s cheek bones. The scene where each actor you know and love gets blasted with real mealworms and wrigglers is pretty fucking nasty and also they used real vermin.

Once they are all down in the blueish rocky caverns, Morlock style zombies show up to wobble around in place. Up until this moment, these bug-eyed beasties are super easy to destroy, I mean they might as well be made of tissue paper! You don’t even have to shoot them in the head either, just pick up a random 2X4 and clumsily push it forward--problem solved.

My favorite mistake toward the end, shows a guy in a full fire retardant suit and gas mask under the flames. It’s nice that they didn’t actually burn anyone alive, right? There’s also that crackly cartoon ending that caps off into an ambiguous and confusing way. We'll return with more Fulci shenanigans pretty soon, until next time watch more coherent films if you can.

The Don't Go in the House guy literally was struck by boogie lightning!

Guinea Pig (1985)

Guinea Pig: Devil's Experiment (1985, dir. Satoru Ogura)

This "Guinea Pig" series reboot is a great idea!

Review by Goat Scrote

     Yes, this is the first one in the series that got Chas Balun in all that hot water with the FBI! 

     Although there are several repulsive scenes, “Guinea Pig” doesn’t even come close to living up to its reputation as an extreme shock classic. The entire thing is only 43 minutes long and there is no story to spend time on, yet it’s halfway through before actual blood flows. Since this movie seems to have no purpose for existing other than to showcase blood and guts, that means there is a whole lot of purposeless violent filler occupying screen time. With no context for the violence it just seems like a meaningless exercise in misogynistic torture fantasy. If that sounds like your thing, you may dig it. My personal reaction to "Guinea Pig" was boredom and distaste (not a good combination), except during the brutal finale which features artfully disturbing imagery and an outstandingly horrifying gore effect which is a must-watch for gorehounds and practical SFX nerds.

     Three men torture a woman, and she dies. There it is, the complete plot, in every detail. The abusers are anonymous and the victim never says anything. No one in the film is individualized or made into an actual character. There’s no explanation except that the project is claimed to be a series of experiments exploring the limits of suffering. Each “experiment” opens with a title card hinting at what kind of punishment they will inflict this time. This film is genuinely nothing but torture porn (and I use the term without malice), although they actually leave a lot of the worst of it out of view even during the gruesome and explicit final scene. They sacrifice quantity of gore for quality, which is usually the right trade-off.

     The movie presents itself as something which was obtained illicitly and redistributed, in a “Blair Witch” style marketing maneuver. Most of the time the perpetrators faces aren’t shown, which further lends to the feeling that we’re watching something we’re not supposed to be seeing. I suspect it was these facts combined with the plotless pseudo-porno presentation which confused certain drug-addled celebrities into mistaking “Guinea Pig” for a real snuff film.

Part 2: Flower of Flesh and blood was the tape that freaked Charlie Sheen out enough to alert the FBI. Here's what Dennis Daniel said about the embarrassing event after he lent out the tape. Well, when I finished with it, I sent it to my pal Chris Gore at FILM THREAT. He ended up lending it to a friend who watched it with Charlie Sheen, of all people!  Sheen thought the shit was REAL!!! He contacted a friend of his in the FBI and before you know it, I got a call from an FBI Agent saying that it was a federal offense to send snuff films through the mail! We’re talking 20 years in prison!!!!  I had remembered that Chas told me there was a tape called THE MAKING OF GUINEA PIG, so the FBI said I had to give him the contact info for the person who sent me the tape and they needed to send that “MAKING OF” tape as well. So, I had to call Chas and tell him all this. Needless to say, he was not pleased. I actually called him on his birthday and he was having a fucking grand old time till I called him with the info. Remember, Chas was a California hippie dude of epic proportions…the fact that I gave “the man” info about him was not too cool…but I had no choice. He was my only hope to prove it was fake. It all worked out in the end but it really sucked at the time.

     It begins with a woman handcuffed to a chair and several men dressed in black beating her. They rub salt in her eyes. They club her with a bag full of coins while one dude chills in the background casually enjoying a soda. Some time later, they throw her on the ground and kick her while verbally abusing her. Next they torture her with pliers pinching and twisting her skin. The most absurd torture arrives when they spin her around a whole lot on an office chair. After way too much time lingering on that, they force Jack Daniels down her gullet, and spin her around some more until she pukes.

     The second most absurd "experiment" is when they torture her with headphones roped to her head, playing something which sounds like a perfectly ordinary Merzbow recording. This goes on until she is a drooling wreck. Around 22 minutes into the runtime it starts to get gory as they pull out her fingernails. She is tied up and asleep when they start pouring boiling oil on her arm with a cringe-inducing sizzling sound. That’s one seriously fucked up alarm clock.

     Next up is the maggot torture. They pour maggots on the burns and sprinkle a few on her face just for the hell of it. She seems to be unconscious through it all. Maggots are pretty fucking gross, and the thought of them eating the dead flesh on her arm is unsettling. The entire maggot scene is about getting under our skin with psychological creepy crawlies.

     For their next amazing trick, the torturers throw raw meat and real animal guts on the woman. The guys, mostly off-camera, giggle and breath heavily like masturbating morons. She is unconscious, and the gut-throwing goes on and on for what feels like a really long time. Finally she wakes up and screams. Again, it’s pretty gross to have guts all over you, but mainly I am bored at this point in the movie. If you've cooked chicken or turkey in your kitchen, you've handled things just as gross as this. Like the maggots, it's something a quick shower can take care of..

     Things get drastic near the end. They move on to surgical incisions and smashing her hand with a sledgehammer. It does look pretty realistic. For the finale, they chain her head down and shove a long needled into her eye socket sideways. The eye socket floods with blood and the eye is skewered until it pops right out. Fulci and Bunuel would probably approve. It closes with what appears to be her corpse, dangling inside a net in the woods.

     After it was over I felt all the emotional involvement of having watched a practical f/x demo reel. It was very hard for me to connect with this movie, since I couldn't see any purpose beyond serial-killer stroke material or showing off their gore effects prowess. I would've liked it better as a five-minute short, and I don't think anything significant would be lost that way. I know that they were doing their very best to present something deeply disturbing, but other than a handful of short sequences, I had to fight to avoid letting my attention wander.

Recommendation: Only watch the ending, unless you are a huge fan of torture porn and fake snuff.

Macabre

Macabre (Macabro, Frozen Terror) Directed by Lamberto Bava (LamBava) starring Bernice Stegers, Stanko Molnar, Veronica Zinny, Roberto Posse, Ferdinando Orlandi (1980)

-Reviewed by Richard Glenn Schmidt

Mom Of The Year/Wife Of The Year for 1980 runner-up Jane Baker (Bernice Stegers) waits until her husband leaves for work so that she can abandon her two kids and meet up with her lover in his apartment. I don’t know if this is normal or not because this story -“inspired by actual events”- takes place in New Orleans; that could just be how they roll there. What Jane doesn’t know is that her daughter Lucy (Veronica Zinny) is a complete wacko. In a desperate plea for attention she fucking drowns her little brother! Dang, those tween years are murder!

When she gets the call that her son is dead, Jane and her lover Fred (Roberto Posse) -fresh from making the sex act- jump in his VW Bug and head for the house. Because she’s having a nervous breakdown in the passenger seat, Fred loses control of the car and is killed in the ensuing crash. Jane has to spend some time recovering in the loony bin. Once she gets out, Jane heads home to patch things up with her long-suffering husband and deal with the clearly insane Lucy. Just kidding, she heads right to Fred’s apartment to be even more of an asshole than she’s already been thus far.

This is not about Hurricane Katrina.

Enter Robert Duval. No, not Robert Duvall (with two L’s), Robert Duval (Stanko Molnar), the blind son of the former landlord who lives alone in the same building as Dead Fred -not Drop Dead Fred. Stop distracting me, IMDB. I’m trying to write about Macabre! He has always had a crush on Jane and now that she’s single, he’s ready to make his move. But is she single? Robert immediately notices that Jane is acting rather strange. She has nightly rendezvous with someone she calls “Fred” and is having about a thousand loud orgasms during these encounters.

Never date anyone with anything less than a Passat.

Skip this paragraph if you don’t want the film spoiled for you. But if you’ve seen the completely unsubtle VHS art for this film under its Frozen Terror title, then you know what I’m about to say. Somehow Jane has managed to save Fred’s severed head in a freezer and has been making love to it since she got out of the nuthouse. How the hell she managed to score this little trophy is beyond me. Robert and Lucy figure out the truth at the same time. He wants to help Jane and presumably hook up when she gets back from a possible second trip to the place with padded walls. Lucy decides to use her knowledge of the severed head of Fred to torture her mother for reasons unknown. I’m telling you. Tweens, man.

The doctors dilated my pupils years ago, I kept the glasses.

In case you ever wondered if British actress Bernice Stegers (of Xtro) is batshit insane, Macabre can answer that one for you. Her performance in this is completely unhinged and ludicrously over-the-top. I love it! Of course, it doesn’t hurt that she’s voluptuous as hell and her character is dangerously horny with a slightly (sarcasm) unhealthy dose of sexual obsession and necrophilia to boot. If her half-assed altar to the memory of her deceased lover doesn’t make you snicker, then I don’t know my business.

You can never wash off the Stanko.

A huge part of what makes this all so brilliant is Jane’s epic cockteasing of poor Robert. And for reals, part of me wants to think that she’s genuinely interested in Robert but she’s so damn bonkers that she can’t let Fred go, even in the face of a seemingly normal encounter. Robert repairs brass musical instruments for a living so you know he’s good with his hands! Give the guy a chance, lady.

Possessing one of the finest names in history -second only to Fabio Testi- is Croatian born Stanko Molnar. He’s really good in this one and I wish he’d done more Italian horror and giallo. Of course, the real MVP of Macabre is Veronica Zinny. Her portrayal of the diabolical and unintentionally hilarious Lucy really carries the movie when Bernice Stegers isn’t chewing giant sexy holes in the scenery. I wish that this wasn’t her only screen credit. I would have liked to have seen those constantly narrowing, sneaky eyes in more Italian horror flicks.

No one plays Minecraft anymore.

I kept misremembering this film as having a 100 minute or longer running time but no, it just feels like it does. While the same can be said to a lesser degree of his follow-up, the hilarious giallo A Blade in the Dark (1983, see review here), LamBava’s feature film debut is disastrously methodical in its pacing. Add a couple of megaton bomb level annoying brats and a one note mystery to the mix and you’ve got a film that I find tough to recommend but enjoyable enough for seasoned Italian horror fans. Just don’t expect anything remotely insane like the director’s own Demons (1985). This is the un-Demons.

Tastes like Fabio Testi.

The music by composer Ubaldo Continello (Trauma, Play Motel) is spare when it’s not ramming a saxophone, harmonica, or wildly heavy handed percussion and strings up your ass. I really think this film would have benefited from some synthesizer freak-outs to fill in the long stretches without music. Hey LamBava, I know you probably thought that less is more but it’s not true. Less is just less, duder. Do I really think that blogs speak directly to all them fancy directors in Hollywood?  How long has LamBava lived in Hollywood anyway? Eh, probably since Body Puzzle (1992) came out.

So yeah, I have mixed feelings about Macabre. There’s quite a bit of atmosphere, lavish set decorations, great locations, unexplained plot weirdness, mind-melting histrionics, and abrupt, comedic violence. The director admits that the idea for the film started as a joke and/or is based on a real case. I’m thinking it’s the former but you know what, why not? New Orleans doesn’t have laws against this kind of thing happening. Just like Ft. Pierce, Florida, anything goes. The aforementioned slowness of the plot is kind of a deal breaker but I might give Macabre another viewing someday. Or not. The music score certainly doesn’t do the film any favors because let’s be honest, the harmonica is the butthole of musical instruments.

Can you necro-feel me, dawg?