As a preview of next month's ABC's of Italian genre cinema post, I thought I'd take an opportunity to take a couple of monster movies that didn't make the cut for that one. Moreover, this post is to write a bit about Joe D'Amato (1936-99), born Artistide Massaccesi.
He's often seen as one of the more banal Italian genre film director, making shlock from popular cannibal and zombie genres. Yet I don't particularly find his movies "so-bad-they're-good". While he is not a brilliant horror director in disguise, I do find his films to often be more original and suspense-driven than their reputation suggests.
Probably what ruined his reputation was the moralistic fact that he also worked on Adult films, producing first the Erotic films like the Black Emmanuelle series, and then moving on to hardcore pornography (like making the notorious Porno Holocaust). But I have selected here three horror films that perhaps shed a light a bit on why D'Amato was an unique director after all, if not entirely successful.
Antropophagus: The Beast (Antropophagous, 1980)
Italian film fans know the character actor George Eastman, often playing nasty brutes, from films like 2019: After the Fall of New York and Warriors of the Wasteland. He had a fruitful work relationship with D'Amato, working with multiple genres and even co-directing 1983's 2020 Texas Gladiators. But with Antrophagus, he had a role of a lifetime. He also worked as one of the film's screenwriters.
Most of the film concerns a group of young vacationers exploring a mysteriously empty Greek island. It's as if all the occupants therein had died or fled. To spoil a little, it turns out a cannibalistic and mute killer with a scarred face (played by Eastman) lurks there.
The film builds up very slowly, which is partly impressive for a film deemed a Video Nasty, but also partly a bit boring as the puzzle pieces don't seem to reveal themselves. Nevertheless, as D'Amato started out as a cinematographer, he manages to create an unsettling vastness of the island, and claustrophobic interior scenes with ease.
The film's most memorable part comes when we get a flashback on the tragic events that made Eastman's character lose his mind and all sort of reasoning. D'Amato seems to have a point that we are only one bad day away from reverting back into cavemen and killing everyone within our territory.
★★★
Absurd (Rosso Sangue, 1981)
A sort-of sequel to Antropophagus, except it actually has an entirely different backstory. But Eastman looks and acts the same way. The actor worked as a screenwriter in this one as well. This time, Eastman's mute killer surfaces on the mainland, killing people that happen on his way, and seeming impervious to bullets.
It turns out the killer has escaped from a medical facility. He battles a motorcycle gang and some cops, but ends up in the houselhold of a seemingly regular family, The Bennetts, who have to fight for their life against the unremorseful killer. The film is a bit darker, utilizing night scenes and the fear of the unknown within a city setting to its advantage. It includes all the basics of a slasher movie, with its unfeeling and unstoppable force coming out of nowhere to intrude on a normal family life.
Compared to the previous one, this is more eventful, but also a bit confusing, as pieces don't seem to add up the same way to a big reveal as before. The violence is particularly brutal here, with plenty of gore and a particularly nasty scene where Katya Berger's head is being burned in an oven. This film turned out on the list of the notorious Video Nasties as well.
Massacessi used the pseudonym Peter Newton this time around. It might be that since he had directed ten Erotic movies in the year between these two movies, the name D'Amato started to wear out.
★★★
Beyond the Darkness (Buio Omega, 1979)
As much as those two monster pictures had some nasty and disgusting shades, they pale in comparison with D'Amato's best horror work. It is a thoroughly disturbing serial killer movie that cares not of the boundaries of taste and reason. It has some shades of black comedy as well, that were later more realized in purely comedic films such as DellaMorte DellAmore. It also takes ideas presented by films such as Psycho to their logical extremes.
Frank Wyler (Kieran Canter) loses his girlfriend to an illness. But instead of letting go, he decides to dig up the corpse and embalm her. The family villa houses this secret, but multiple people stumble upon the scene by accident and meet their grisly fate as punishment for this. Iris (Franca Stoppi), the strange housekeeper is culprit on all of this, finding also suitable victims for his young master and helping dispose of the corpses.
The film is a gruesome remake of The Third Eye, but also revels in the historical knowledge on stuff such as how mummies were used to be embalmed (we can see this in all gory detail). While the film centers around necrophilia, it also includes cannibalism and gory dismemberments. It seems the effects budget for this was considerably bigger than in most of D'Amato's other works.
While the film may seem to have so many tasteless elements in order to irate cencors and decency activists, it also has a very perculiar and odd sense of wonder in all this. The human mind in its most crazed can be oddly creative and logical in its illogicalities. It's not an easy movie to predict the next scene and it keeps surprising the viewer. The images are sterile and unmoving, which makes for an odd experience to follow such depravity.
On the worse side, the ending seems rushed and a bit clichéd compared to the rest of the movie. It had some ingredients that could have made it a serial killer classic, but now it stays more or less just a curiosity for those that can stomach its contents. It has a very cool Goblin soundtrack, though.
★★★ 1/2
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