Horror Express 2020 #4: The Exorcist III (William Peter Blatty, 1990)

Within the realm of sequel-driven horror franchises, it’s fair to say that the Exorcist series has always been a bit of an outlier. Admittedly, it got off to an earlier start than most of them, and began from a far higher level of critical acclaim and self-serious artistic intent - but still.

In stark contrast to the “iconic/ground-breaking original followed by reams of (at best) entertaining crap” furrow ploughed by ‘Halloween’, ‘..Elm Street’, ‘Hellraiser’ et al, ‘The Exorcist’ seems to have attracted highly strung, artistically-minded filmmakers like moths to a flame, each determined to fight tooth and nail with the studios to bring their own unique visions to the screen. A strategy which, unfeasibly, multiple generations of studio execs actually seem to have encouraged, even after the ridicule unfairly heaped upon John Boorman’s commercially disastrous ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’ back in ’77.

Boorman, William Peter Blatty and Paul Schrader may all in turn have lost their battles with the suits, ultimately delivering compromised, imperfect movies which they were never truly happy with, but, viewed with a few decades of hindsight, I believe that these sequels can be viewed as a disparate trilogy of wildly ambitious, unconventional films, each of which I personally find more rewarding than Friedkin’s original (which I’ve never really cared for, truth be told).

All of which is a long-winded way of getting around to the fact that I watched the theatrical release cut of Blatty’s ‘The Exorcist III’ [pedants will wish to note that it had not yet gained the ‘Legion’ sub-title applied to the later reconstruction of the writer/director’s preferred cut at this point] for the first time last month, and, though it can’t hold a candle to the weird majesty of ‘The Heretic’, I nonetheless enjoyed it a hell of a lot more than I was expecting to.

Although Blatty’s high-minded thematic concerns to some extent fall by the way-side here, that’s fine by me, as again, his particular brand of existential Catholic dualism has never really floated my boat. But, when it comes to the more down to earth matter of making a Bloody Good Horror Movie, it’s difficult to watch ‘Exorcist III’ and not conclude that this gentleman had the chops.

In purely audio-visual terms, the writer/director’s approach to this task basically seems to have consisted of throwing in way too much of everything. Every single thing in this movie is creepy and foreboding and upsetting and scary, and every time there's a chance to throw in a jump scare or a disembodied demon growl, you're damn well gonna get one.

Outside of some suitably evocative Washington DC location work, settings here run to lofty, shadow-haunted churches, forced perspective hospital corridors and sombre, steel-shuttered asylums - all photographed by DP Gerry Fisher in a drained, colourless palette which may be tediously familiar to us these days, but must have seemed a pretty fresh approach back in 1990.

(It’s interesting to note that Adrian Lyne’s ‘Jacob’s Ladder’, the other film which immediately springs to mind as a precursor to this now ubiquitous grim-dark, institutional aesthetic was also released in 1990.)

Barry De Vorzon’s score of course also deserves a big shout-out in this regard. Presumably asserting a huge influence upon post-2000 horror movie (and indeed video game) music, the composer’s relentless soundscape of treated, disembodied vocal textures, rusty gate shrieks and bowel-shaking rumbles pretty much defines the kind of thing which would become de rigour for straight-faced horror in the wake of Kenji Kawai’s soundtracks to Hideo Nakata’s ‘Ring’ films a decade later.

THAT hospital hallway scene (if you’ve looked up anything horror movie-related on Youtube in the past decade or so, you’ll know it) is of course the film’s unquestioned cinematic highlight, but viewed in context, it forms part of a steady succession of exquisitely nerve-jangling sequences spread across the opening two thirds of this picture, each executed with a seemingly impossible mixture of Lewton-esque restraint and utter, baroque excess.

In terms of plotting meanwhile, I’m happy that Blatty chose to entirely dispense with the old “possessed little girl” routine here, as the “occult crime story” angle extrapolated from his source novel is a lot more fun all round.

The movie-obsessed Lieutenant Kinderman (previously played by the late Lee J. Cobb) is my favourite character in Freidkin’s ‘Exorcist’, so it’s great to see him return as the protagonist here, and even greater that he seems in the interim to have transmuted into the gargantuan figure of George C. Scott.

As a life-long devotee of the ‘Go Big’ school of acting, Scott has always been a favourite of mine, and he here delivers what must surely count as one of his absolute best late-era performances, taking his usual ‘simmering human pressure cooker’ thing to a whole new level, playing it taut and low key during his character’s most emotionally trying moments, before boiling over and completely losing his shit when we least expect it. As a showcase of repressed rage, hardboiled, craggy compassion and a dogged determination to resist the rigours of age, it’s pretty awe-inspiring stuff.

Opposite Scott meanwhile, our resident demonically-inhabited, body-jumping psychopath The Gemini Killer (Brad Dourif, with a little bit of help from the first movie’s Jason Miller) boasts the most ridiculous collection of show-boating serial killer trademarks I've ever encountered pre-‘Silence of the Lambs’.

Not only does he only kill people whose names begins with ‘K’, but he uses an extremely obscure, specialist drug to paralyse his victims, cuts off a certain finger from each hand, draws astrological symbols on their backs, and replaces pieces of their bodies with vandalised religious paraphernalia! Man is certainly not short of ideas.

In fairness to Blatty though, I suppose this convoluted MO does indeed represent the kind of symbolic cluster-fuck which I suppose might occur should an already thoroughly coo coo killer end up bouncing around the same bonce with a host of demons and the restless spirit of a tormented priest.

As heavy-handed as some of these story elements may seem though - and as ‘on the nose’ as the director’s favoured imagery of mutilated statuary, demonic crucifixions and angelic visitations may be - this is all balanced out to some extent by Blatty’s deeply eccentric approach to screenwriting.

Drawing on his oft-forgotten background as a scripter of screwball comedies, he seems determined to leaven the metaphysical hand-wringing we’d expect of an Exorcist movie with frequent excursions into high stakes, oddball humour and touches of quasi-Lynchian surrealism which I’m surely the studio must have considered totally ‘off-brand’, as well as seeding the movie with a dense tapestry of synchronicitous inter-textural referencing, touching on everything from Conrad’s ‘Lord Jim’ to the Rider Waite Tarot deck to Powell & Pressburger’s ‘The Red Shoes’ and (believe it or not) Mel Brooks’ ‘Space Balls’.

We could perhaps glimpse this trait to a certain extent in the first film via Kinderman’s cinephile banter, and it was given free reign in his directorial debut ‘The Ninth Configuration’, but it’s really turned up to eleven in ‘Exorcist III’. 

The sheer density of Blatty’s dialogue can take a while to get used to, and I’ll freely admit that I was more or less instantly lost by the early scene in which Kinderman obliquely criticises his fellow officers for their racism and lethargy by angrily throwing passages from ‘Macbeth’ in their general direction. Once you get into the swing of it though, it brings a really unique feel to proceedings, adding spice and flavour to what might otherwise have become a pretty po-faced exercise in over-cooked, airport blockbuster bombast.

Speaking of which -- we probably need at this point to address the film’s final act. Shot under duress by Blatty and the principal cast after studio Morgan Creek rejected the anti-climactic conclusion of the director’s initial cut, instead demanding a bit more action and an actual, gosh-darned exorcism, it’s… a bit of a mess, to say the least.

I mean, of all the actors you could have hustled in to play a new character needed for a bunch of pick-up shots for a major studio film with the clock ticking down to release… the legendarily temperamental Nicol Williamson (google up yr own anecdotes) is probably not the man I would have chosen. But, his casting here as hastily parachuted-in bell, book & candle guy Father Morning seems reflective of the sheer level of graft, blundering and back office vanity involved in these reshoots.

Actually, Williamson does perfectly fine work here, adding a certain amount of gravitas to a part that basically amounts to cipher created to satisfy box office expectations, and Blatty directs his scenes with a conviction comparable to the main bulk of the film. Sadly though, neither of them are a match for the risible hullaballoo of snakes, flame-pits, elderly, levitating Oscar winners, glowing gateways to hell, spectral crucifixes, indoor hurricanes and general shrieking hysteria which the producers apparently deemed necessary to provide the punters with the requisite bang for their buck.

Kinderman, had he been able to peel himself off the special effects-drenched cell walls at some point during these proceedings, might well have returned to The Scottish Play and muttered something about “sound and fury” - and indeed, this whole ridiculous finale only serves to confirm my suspicion that, despite Blatty’s noble efforts, ‘Exorcist III’ doesn’t really succeed in saying anything terribly profound about anything (in this cut, at least).

Viewed purely as a horror movie though, for the most part it is absolutely cracking stuff. Imaginative, unconventional, viscerally effective and often brilliantly executed, it now also has the added advantage of feeling extremely prescient, vis-a-vis the ways in which the genre has developed in subsequent decades.

To not put too fine a point on it, prior to 1990 very few horror films looked or sounded like this one. After 2000, they pretty much all did. Coincidence? Just ask all those kids currently at film school who probably spent their formative years watching SCARIEST EVER MOVIE SCENE eight thousand times on Youtube, then consult with Blatty’s restless spirit re: thoughts on Playing The Long Game.

October Horrors 2019 # 1: Mausoleum (Michael Dugan, 1983?)

 An independently-produced horror film shot in Los Angeles and Ventura County, ‘Mausoleum’ seems to have first surfaced on video in 1983, although evidence would seem to suggest that it was actually shot in the late ‘70s. IMDB meanwhile specifies Feb-Mar 1981 shooting dates, which seems like a happy compromise. Either way, the film’s widescreen 35mm photography and general technical proficiency suggest that its producers were initially gunning for a theatrical distribution deal which never materialised.

Be that as it may, ‘Mausoleum’ is a crudely commercial venture which strays into the realm of high weirdness solely as a result of its fevered determination to “deliver the goods” to a hypothetical target audience. Though the film exhibits a near total lack of talent, taste or originality, its makers nonetheless seem to have had a perfect understanding of the kind of stuff they needed to throw onto the screen in order to keep rubes like me watching, and for that I salute them.

Garish gel lighting, swathes of dry ice, gratuitous nudity, lashings of bright red gore, gruesome prosthetic wound make-up, ridiculous creature designs and a wafer thin grasp of narrative logic…. man, anyone would think this thing was secretly made by Italians, were it not for the complete absence of style or atmosphere. (It does have J&B product placement though, so anything’s possible.)

Whilst taking in the film’s genuinely bizarre prologue – in which disembodied voices lure a little girl in a fairy tale dress toward an artificial fog-shrouded, disco-lit gothic chapel which incongruously lurks in the middle of an otherwise drab suburban cemetery – it occurred to me that ‘Mausoleum’ may possibly have been inspired by the success of 1979’s Phantasm, with its similarly surreal, graveyard-based shenanigans and use of an evocative / antiquated word as a title. If Don Coscarelli’s film was indeed an influence though, the similarities are soon dropped once the main body of the movie gets underway.

The body in question is that of dead-eyed, platinum blonde actress Bobbie Bresee, appearing here in what I believe was her only leading role, though she went on to scale the giddy heights of minor b-movie renown through supporting parts in the likes of ‘Ghoulies’ and ‘Surf Nazis Must Die’. Bresee plays Susan, the grown up version of the girl we saw in the prologue, and her ‘department store model’ physique is ruthlessly and rather mechanically exploited by the filmmakers - so if you like looking at it, you’re already quids in with ‘Mausoleum’.

Susan, it transpires, is now the idle trophy wife of a successful businessman played by perpetually weird-looking former child evangelist Marjoe Gortner (‘Food of the Gods’, ‘Starcrash’, etc). The couple are apparently quite rich, as they live together in an extravagant white columned mansion-house with its own grounds, assorted grotesque-yet-expensive looking furniture, flashy cars etc, but despite these material comforts, all is not well.

I’m not sure I quite have all this straight, so please bear with me, but I think the general idea is that Susan is an unwitting descendent of – wait for it – the thrice-cursed NEMOD dynasty, erstwhile owners/occupants of that spooky chapel we saw in the prologue. As a result of her childhood visit to the mausoleum, Susan has become possessed by a demonic spirit which, now that she is all grown up, occasionally takes over her body, gifting her with luminous, glowing eyes, sharp teeth, sundry supernatural powers, and, in extreme cases, a hob-gobliny face like some creature from ‘The Dark Crystal’ or whatever.

Well, I think that’s basically the gist of it, anyway – my address is in the sidebar if credited screenwriters Robert Barich, Robert Madero or Katherine Rosenwink wish to set me straight on the finer details.

So yeah, from hereon in, what we’re essentially looking at is an OTT ‘80s trash version of an exorcism movie, structured around the idea of the demonically possessed Susan gradually murdering a procession of obnoxious and/or comedic secondary characters, whilst poor old Marjoe frets and wonders what’s wrong with her, and her psychiatrist (ubiquitous Hollywood character player Norman Burton, who must have had an especially big tax bill to deal with in 1981 or something) steps up in the all-important exorcist role.

Susan’s first victim is a boorish, inebriated slob who harasses her whilst she and her husband are ‘enjoying’ an evening at their local night club – a location which I confess I found more terrifying than any of the film’s supernatural horror scenes. I don’t know what benighted corner of Southern California they found this place in, but it’s a low-ceilinged, ‘hotel bar’ type room full of dark wood panelling and plush leather furnishings, in which tired-looking middle-aged couples in formal evening wear shuffle around distractedly to sounds of a white, ersatz disco ensemble (heavy on the Kenny G sax), after being served unappealing cocktails in grotesquely elaborate glassware.

Quite possibly the most comprehensively uncool night spot I have ever seen featured in a motion picture, the horrors of this unsavoury joint entirely overshadow the telekinetic car fire which does away with the drunken groper – an incident which is merely *awkward* for all concerned.

Awkwardness continues to be the film’s defining motif as Susan turns her attentions to here house’s stereotypically lecherous Hispanic gardener (actor Maurice Sherbanee’s performance reminded me of Dr Nick Riviera from ‘The Simpsons’). This whole business takes up what feels like a pretty long stretch of the movie’s middle half hour, with Susan alternately leading the horny devil on with peek-a-boo balcony appearances (whilst demonically possessed), and being repulsed by his attentions (whilst in ‘normal’ mode).

Although I realise I was probably supposed to be looking at Bobbie Bresee’s breasts whilst all this was going on, I instead found myself becoming increasingly infuriated by the way the gardener seemed to be spending ages and ages attempting to remove an unsightly tree stump by half-heartedly swinging an axe into the top of it. That won’t bloody work mate! What the hell are you even doing? You’ve at least got to get a pitchfork under there to pull the roots up, or maybe even use a small digger. What a useless gardener! (Actually, now that I think about it, Susan does eventually butcher him with a planting fork post-coitus, so maybe that’s poetic justice of a sort?)

Mercifully spared from Susan’s wrath meanwhile is the family’s comic relief maid Elsie, played by veteran comedienne LaWanda Page, who is instead called upon to enact a hand waving “fleeing from the haunted house” routine unseen since the days of Mantan Moreland.

I feel a bit torn about Elsie’s character to be honest. On the one hand, she clearly represents an appalling racial stereotype which should have been consigned to the dustbin of history long before 1981, but, on the other hand, she is also hands down the most entertaining character in this movie, raiding her employers’ liquor cabinet with gusto, and delivering lines like “good googly-moogly, I need a drink of the hard stuff” and “no more heaving’, I’m leavin’” with Dolemite-level sass.

Meanwhile, poor old Auntie Nemod (no, really) suffers one of the film’s more elaborately grisly deaths, as she is suspended in mid-air by Susan’s evil powers and has her torso graphically torn open. A delivery guy subsequently gets splatted by invisible evil whilst trying to make a phonecall, and, during a visit to the shopping mall, an art dealer gets impaled on a big, spiky abstract sculpture when Susan’s demonic alter-ego develops an obsessive attraction to a painting that… well, words can’t quite express it, so it’ll probably be easiest if I just give you a quick screen-grab:

Thereafter, the film’s exorcism plot-line picks up speed for the final act as the psychiatrist – who has recorded one of Susan’s demonic transformations on tape - calls in a former mentor of his who specialises in this sort of thing.

Refreshingly for a movie of this vintage and general boorishness, this professor turns out to be woman who is neither sexy n’ objectified nor a crazy old bag, and together, the two of them set about delivering masses of exorcism-related exposition and begin preparing for a showdown loaded with more ridiculous, rubbery demon effects and green n’ purple tinted lighting than even I can really tolerate, culminating in what some viewers may consider ‘Mausoleum’s most memorable moment, as Bresee’s demonic boobs stretch out and develop their own pus-drooling faces. Cor blimey.

Special effects here were handled by John Carl Buechler, who went on to direct stuff like ‘Troll’ and ‘Cellar Dweller’ for Charles Band, which… actually kind of makes sense, I suppose? I mean, I may not have quite as much of a detailed understanding of 80s b-horror chronology as fans more thoroughly steeped in this particular area, but I’ve always had the general impression that it was in the late ‘80s - when trolls, gnomes, killer dolls and god knows what were running amok and films like ‘House’ and assorted ‘..Elm Street’ sequels were ruling the video shelves – that medium budget horror films, perhaps wary of censorship or simply aware of the genre’s increasingly young fan-base, began to focus on fantastical, rubbery creature designs as a substitute for more quote-unquote “realistic” sex n’ violence.

To my mind therefore, 1981 feels very early for the kind of latex monstrosities which dominate the last few reels of ‘Mausoleum’; perhaps we could even see Buechler’s work here as somewhat pioneering in that respect, although the film as a whole could perhaps be better framed as a transitory work, mixing full on, creature-feature goofiness with lurid gore and a defiantly puerile, ‘70s drive-in approach to nudity and sexual exploitation?

Well, who knows. Overall, ‘Mausoleum’ is a strange beast, standing out largely for its EC Comics-on-crack tastelessness, and for the eye-watering ugliness of its production design. In this respect, the film is pitched roughly on the level you’d expect from the kind of teenage SOV movie celebrated by Bleeding Skull, which sits oddly alongside its technical proficiency, orchestral score and cast of industry professionals.

In an attempt to understand this disjuncture, I will close by simply drawing your attention to the background of a couple of the film’s principal architects.

Producer Michael Franzese was an heir to New York’s notorious Colombo crime family who earned himself the nickname “The Yuppie Don” during the ‘80s, reportedly raking in a vast fortune via a gasoline bootlegging operation he arranged with the Russian Mafia. A veteran of numerous Grand Jury appearances, racketeering trials and state indictments, he is widely assumed to have begun investing in the film industry for the purposes of money laundering and/or tax avoidance. After ‘Mausoleum’, he went on to produce the impossibly crass (yet hugely entertaining) Linda Blair exploitation classic ‘Savage Streets’ (1984), before eventually getting hit with a jail term and subsequently re-inventing himself as a born-again motivational speaker.

Meanwhile, the sum total of director Michael Dugan’s other film industry credits to date are, in order: a 1976 kids movie named ‘Super Seal’, a 1999 T&A comedy (‘Raging Hormones’), and a 2015 “TV mini-series” entitled ‘The Adventures of Turkey Dude’, which does not appear to have ever been publically screened.

Somewhere between the aesthetics embodied by these two gentlemen, the essence of ‘Mausoleum’ lies, waiting.

Exploito All’Italiana: Manhattan Baby (Lucio Fulci, 1982)

(These Thai posters are great, aren’t they?)

It occurred to me recently that, despite counting myself as more-or-less of a fan of Lucio Fulci’s horror movies, I had never actually taken the time to watch this oft-maligned black sheep in the flock of his early ‘80s “hits”, and that my reasons for avoiding it were flimsy to say the least.

After all, the similarly overlooked ‘The Black Cat’ (1982) holds a huge place in my heart, and the broadly similar line taken by fans when trashing ‘Manhattan Baby’ – that its subject matter is weird, it makes no sense and it features an insufficient quantity the director’s trademark gore set-pieces – actually makes it sound like exactly the kind of Fulci film I might enjoy a great deal (by which I mean, I can take or leave the gore, but I’m *all about* the weirdness).

So - ‘Manhattan Baby’.

[Long, awkward silence.]

Well, uh… that was… something?

Ok, let’s back up a bit, and start by saying that, whilst ‘Manhattan Baby’s script can probably hold its own against any other ‘80s Fulci movie in the high stakes game of making-no-bloody-sense-whatsoever, what I found most difficult to grasp about the film was less the familiar holes in the action that transpires on-screen, but rather the more profound mystery of how this production came to exist in the first place.

Basically, I suppose you could say that the production system fans often refer to as “the great Italian rip off machine” worked primarily on the basis of constant forward momentum. Source material (Hollywood hits, other successful cultural properties and trends) were fed in at one end, whilst unexpected hybrids, reworkings and wildly unlikely combinations emerged at the other, hitting cinemas (or, subsequently, video stores), making back their money and disappearing into the abyss before anyone had a chance to re-read the warped plot synopsis and exclaim “hang on, this doesn’t make any se…”.

Sometimes though, the machine got a spanner in the works. The parts didn’t cohere, the gears crunched together… but the momentum could not be allowed to slow. There was no time for anyone to get in there and fix the problem, and so the mangled movie was spat out into the world anyway and left to fend for itself.

And, boom, there you have it – a mutant like ‘Manhattan Baby’ lies writhing in a pool of goo on the floor, as the movie industry stands around scratching their heads, wondering what the hell they’re supposed to do with some misbegotten mash-up of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, ‘Poltergeist’ and ‘The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb’, as directed by a visionary, misanthropic sadist and scripted by a couple (Dardano Sacchetti and Elisa Briganti) who’d find it difficult to get through a knock knock joke without contradicting each other and getting lost in the resulting plot holes.

I mean – firstly, who was this thing supposed to be aimed at? The action-adventure tinged storyline, the concentration on child characters and familial relationships, and the complete lack of sexually suggestive content or what the BBFC might term “adult themes”, all leads me to suspect that the original intent may have been to gear the film toward a family audience. But, needless to say, the fevered directorial decisions, scenes of extreme violence and general aura of raging insanity that Lucio Fulci brought to proceedings render that an impossibility, resulting in a tonal disjuncture that pretty much leaves all potential demographics unsatisfied.

And secondly, why in the hell is it called ‘Manhattan Baby’? What a terrible name for a horror movie! [Before anyone writes in, I believe this title was also used for the film’s Italian release too.]

After pondering this question for quite some time (because, you know, it’s the kind of pressing issue that tends to me on my mind in the dark of the night), I can only suppose that the title was intended to echo of ‘Rosemary’s Baby’. But then, why would they want to imply a connection to a film that came out fourteen years earlier, and that furthermore has no real similarity to this film’s storyline whatsoever, beyond the fact that both feature somewhat occult-ish goings on afflicting people in a New York apartment building? And to then imply this connection in such an obscure fashion that I daresay most viewers never even noticed it..? Man, the “great rip-off machine” must have really blown a fuse the day it came up with this one.

Whilst such questionable decisions may have hurt ‘Manhattan Baby’s commercial potential though, I think it is fair to say that they do not necessarily mitigate against the possibility of euro-horror aficionados such as you or I enjoying the film thirty-something years down the line. No, what does the mitigating there is the unfortunate realisation that this production’s on-set execution was just as confused as its conception and marketing.

Admittedly, the Indiana Jones-ish opening scenes, set in some gloriously clichéd Movie Egypt, are pretty cool. For a start, it looks as if they did actually go out on location in Real Egypt, with desert panoramas, monolithic ruins and bustling market places all present and correct. The atmosphere of grandeur and dread that Fulci’s roving camera conjures from these environs is quite impressive too, leading us to keenly anticipate the adventures that surely must follow after Christopher Connelly’s two-fisted archeologist is blinded by an ancient laser beam during a sacred-site-of-ancient-devil-cult defiling tomb-raiding expedition and his daughter is meanwhile presented with a sinister amulet by a spectral crone.

Sadly though, once Daring Dr Connelly (who I’m sure must have done brisk business in the ‘80s as “that guy who looks like a slightly older Harrison Ford”, incidentally ) calls the whole thing off and the action shifts back to the rather pokey interiors of his family’s “New York” apartment, well, all bets for a fun time are off.

To some extent, Fulci’s characteristic disinterest in his human protagonists must take the blame here – after all, establishing and maintaining our interest in the characters and their relationships to each other is integral to the success of this kind of “evil creeping into a nuclear family” set-up (‘The Shining’, ‘The Exorcist’ and ‘Poltergeist’ would all be go-to reference points here), but, in the wake of ‘The Beyond’ and ‘The New York Ripper’, one suspects the director was simply not in the right frame of mind to deliver on this more subtle, slow-burn kind of horror picture. Instead, he keeps things cold, distant and faintly inhuman, leaving his cast to stare blankly into the camera and denying us the sense of empathy that would more conventionally pay off later in terms of tension and fear once characters we’ve come to care for are imperiled.

Regardless of this however, what I think really killed ‘Manhattan Baby’ for me is just its sheer lack of *mystery*. Whilst the opening (as outlined above) is somewhat intriguing, like many Italio-horror films that deal with occult-ish subject matter, the basic set-up is mundanely predictable, poorly developed and blindingly obvious from the outset.

I mean, come on - the scary amulet is causing the kid to become possessed, or else causing her to act as a conduit for evil spirits or a gate to another world or whatever, as an act of vengeance for her dad having desecrated the tomb – any idiot who ever watched a mummy movie already knows this, so why don’t we just cut to the chase, wheel on the learned Egyptian exorcist guy from the dusty old bookshop and get this show on the road, right?

Apparently unaware of this though, Briganti and Sacchetti tiptoe around their ‘big reveal’ for what seems like hours, expecting us to remain on the edge of our seats as they feed us obtusely spooky ‘clues’ (ghostly images turning up on polaroids, sinister strangers mouthing words from balconies, that sort of thing), whilst simultaneously failing to expand upon the imagery or mythology of their tale in any terribly satisfying fashion. (Ok, the idea that the daughter and other characters are being taken on “journeys” to some alternate world ancient Egypt, returning in a flurry of wind and sand, is pleasantly bizarre, but it’s too little too late to really overcome the feeling that the screenwriters are just cribbing straight from ‘Egyptian Curses 101’.)

What makes all this flim-flam worth sitting through – and indeed, allows ‘Manhattan Baby’ to remain a moderately worthwhile film overall – is the sheer extremity of Fulci’s direction. Despite the film’s relatively restrained subject matter, in purely technical terms I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Lucio go quite so far off the leash as he does here.

Once things get underway, almost every scene shot on the cramped interior sets becomes a riot of unnecessarily high or low angles, Franco-esque roving zooms, sudden pans and shock cuts that mock a mockery of the spatial relationships between character and the objects around them. Mundane dialogue scenes are conveyed to us via a mixture of extreme facial close-ups and shakey handheld footage of people’s torsos, and by the time the horror business heats up in the second half, Fulci seems determined to beat us over the head with jarring audio and visual stimuli until we reach the far end of Pure Cinema delirium, never to return to the mundane realm of cause and effect-based logic.

Happily, the director falls back to some extent here on the defiantly irrational approach to supernatural horror he pioneered in ‘The Beyond’ and ‘City of the Living Dead’, wherein the story’s rather nebulous “evil” manifests itself not through the more traditional auspices of some meandering physical monster, but rather via a series of completely inexplicable, terrifying incidents that descend upon the protagonists almost like natural disasters.

As well as providing a good time for filmmakers (allowing their imaginations to run riot without the tedious necessity of having to explain their ghastly set-pieces), this approach, whether by accident or design, also lends the aforementioned Fulci films a touch of impersonal Lovecraftian terror that is also felt somewhat in the closing chapters of ‘Manhattan Baby’, despite the far less intense nature of the bloodshed and cruelty on display.

Rather than anything dreamed up by the writers or effects team, it is Lucio’s camera itself that (along with an honourable mention to the film’s aggressive sound mix) is the main assault weapon here, and, if you’ve ever harboured a wish to see our man go full-on ‘Exorcist’, the finale of ‘Manhattan Baby’ won’t disappoint. A subsequent sequence that sees the exorcist guy being torn apart by reanimated stuffed birds(!) feels both gratuitous and ridiculous, but, by that point in proceedings, many viewers (your correspondent included) will feel so utterly disorientated they’ll barely be able to comprehend what’s going on, let alone criticise it.

Though it is a film that is difficult to describe as ‘enjoyable’, and frankly a mass audience was never likely to deem it even ‘tolerable’, there is nonetheless quite a bit for us hermetic, horror-lovin’ weirdos to get our teeth into in ‘Manhattan Baby’. Between the chuckles that can be gleaned from the drool-brained scripting and cardboard performances and the pleasures of getting our socks knocked off by Fulci’s sturm-und-drang direction in fact, I’d even go so far as to hesitantly commend this one to you as worthwhile viewing, regardless of its status as a flailing, god-forsaken mess of the highest order.

Certainly, if you make a habit of subjecting yourself to VHS-era Italian exploitation, you’ll have seen far worse train-wrecks than this on a fairly regular basis. Best therefore to file it under “worth a(nother) look”, and expect it to remain there in perpetuity.