Rating: 2.5/5
Hooptober 4.0 | 12/31 | Countries 6/6 | Italy | Decades 6/6 | 90s
Sadism, Nazism, is there any point anymore?
Lucio Fulci sits at his desk, writing out a murder scene for a movie script — faces cleaved in half, women strangled and hanged, someone chopped to bits by a chainsaw, and whatnot.
Lester Parson cooks himself a steak cut from the leg of a woman and watches a video of the drugged-out woman confessing her love for him. Afterwards, he breaks her down and grinds her into meat for his pigs
Fulci calls cut on the horrifying scene from his latest flick, Touch of Death. They break for lunch, and Fulci goes to his regular restaurant. He chastises himself for smoking. The waiter offers him a steak but flashes back to the movie and declines.
These interferences continue in his life, where everyday occurrences bring disturbing images to his mind. So, he sees a psychiatrist named Egon Schwartz. Schwartz offers to help him differentiate between the film works and reality through hypnosis. When Schwartz has Fulci under, he reveals his true intentions.
Meanwhile, the studio wants to make a documentary about Fulci and his filmmaking style.
This meta-narrative is, on paper, a revelatory approach to horror, predating Adaptation by 12 years. And yet, when we get into the meat of it, there isn’t much here.
The film repurposes footage from other Fulci films for the goriest details, leaving this movie as connective weaving between those scenes. Most horror that happens outside of the movie is off-screen or suggested, with a few exceptions.
In some ways, that fits well with the blending of reality and film. If Fulci wanted to get clever with it, he could have re-filmed some of the kills so that it bleeds into reality better. But that would require money, and they made this movie as cheaply as possible.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t some disgusting scenes. Good lord, some of those kills are relentless and nauseating. Which is impressive, because they don’t look realistic!
The hypnosis scenes threaten to unveil something honest about Fulci, but he is not interested in any introspection.
I make horror films. If I made love films, no one would buy a ticket!
This revelation (or lack thereof) may disappoint some, but I don’t care why Fulci makes the movies he does. What annoys me is how this movie is a clip show. If I had seen these Fulci movies, I would have been bored to death. But I haven’t, so I was able to enjoy some of it.
The interpolation of In the Hall of the Mountain King is funny.
The end credits song is a bop!