King-Sized Halloween - The Mangler - Continuing The 'Industrial Hazard' Theme

 Okay, I think that's the last of the rat droppings cleaned up.

Welcome back, everyone. Sorry about the mess from last time, but October continues and so the King-sized Halloween rolls on and I continue to read and watch my way through Stephen King’s Night Shift.

As of last time you readers checked in, things were breaking even. A revisit to Jerusalem’s Lot put that story in a much better light than my first impressions went, which helped to make up for the disappointment that came from the well-intended but failed attempt to put Graveyard Shift on the big screen.

I would still recommend that story as a fun read, but I can’t really say I’d go out of the way for the movie.

Adaptation - you win some, you lose some.

We’re going to see how the next entry holds up shortly, but first, there’s a few more stories that Hollywood has not taken for a spin to crack into first.

So, before we start the movie, it’s time to hit the books again.

Night Surf

This is another story that played differently for me now compared to the first time. Part of that being the difference in age. Like I’ve said previously, the last time I read this collection was in my teenage years. A story about disaffected teenagers working their way through a world decimated by plague reads differently when you’re reading it at 14-15 compared to when you’re reading it at 41. Further, I had forgotten over the years the bleak note this tale ends on. Not a singularly grand gesture of bleakness as much as just the slowly growing realization that succumbing to the infamous Captain Trips is a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’.

Speaking of the good Captain, this is the other thing that hit me differently. Back when I first encountered this story, the only previous King I had read was The Shining. So, save for it existing, I had no knowledge of The Stand to realize King would be repurposing his plague from this story into that larger epic. So reading it with that in mind now added a moment of pondering how long he’d had this kernel of an idea rolling around in his head.

I can’t say I’m entirely shocked that Hollywood didn’t come calling on this one. It’s good, but it’s much more of a mood piece than a driven narrative. To give an idea, the biggest action of the story recounts our young survivors burning an infected person alive. It could make an effective short in the right hands, but as far as a feature goes, this is one where you’d have to strip this thing down to its foundations and rebuild it from scratch. In doing that, you risk turning it into an adaptation people look at and wonder why you didn’t just make it your own thing.

I Am the Doorway 

I was slightly nervous to revisit this one. For years, I remembered this as a story that, when I first read it, really got me hooked. As much as King is praised for his contributions to straight horror, this  The Jaunt (featured in his collection Skeleton Crew) also show some chops for science fiction as well with the right idea. 

Like The Jaunt, this mixes science fiction with a generous dash of ‘horror of the unknown.’ Told largely in recollections, we share the protagonist’s relatively limited understanding of what has happened to him following an experimental space flight. There is no single moment that makes what is befalling him all make sense. He has no ‘John Hurt with the alien egg’ incident to explain the strange sets of eyes and consciousness that are forming on his body. Like the title suggests, there’s even the possibility that they aren’t actually inside him, but simply using his body as a conduit into our world. It’s a simple but creepily effective concept handled very well, from its teasing set up to its grim finale.

As to the question of adaptation - I’d say it’s doable, but it would take someone really putting a lot of thought into how they want to do it. The story as it is is not enough on its own, but that could be addressed by expanding some of the beats - some more time on the mission, maybe a slower reveal of how it changes the protagonist, etc. The one thing I would have reservations about would be the instinct some filmmakers would have to want to give a concrete explanation and define the alien presence. The story works as well as it does with it as a vaguely defined malevolent force that this man is a reluctant vessel for. I wouldn’t automatically rule out a longer take, but I would be cautious until I heard more of how they were tackling it.

Okay, now we’re getting more King-sized with this. All this talk and we’re not even to the movie yet.

So, without further ado, let’s talk The Mangler!

(Okay, that’s one for sentences I never thought I’d ever say.)

With a body of work as extensive as Stephen King has, there’s no singular flavor that can encapsulate it all. Even within the confines of this anthology, there’s slow burn horror, higher concept sci-fi horror, and even a few more somber dramatic stories.

Then you get a story like The Mangler. The Mangler is the kind of story I would categorize as, if I may be blunt, ‘delightfully batshit.’ The whole premise revolves around a giant industrial laundry machine that, through a series of very specific accidents, becomes possessed by a demonic force that gives it a taste for blood.

That’s it. That’s the premise. It’s also a pretty fun read, so don’t take this as knocking it. It’s an idea that works in part because King is aware how inherently outlandish the pitch is, and he’s not trying to make you take it too seriously, but also not being flippant about it. He even gives the idea some extra runway by working in that this is something that has happened with other appliances in the story (obviously without people connecting the dots that it was demons, just stumped by large machines that seem to develop murderous inclinations.)

It’s the kind of idea that it feels like a filmmaker would either look at and go “Okay, let’s get cracking” or “Okay, seriously, what’s the movie really about?”

I came to this movie with a mix of caution and also curiosity. There was a lot in here that could go spectacularly wrong. At the same time, a director like Tobe Hooper handling this gave it some potential, certainly putting this on firmer ground than Graveyard Shift.

So how did it do?

I’m gonna call this a break even. I can’t call The Mangler a good movie, for reasons I’ll get into shortly. It is, however, a much more interesting misfire of a movie than Graveyard Shift for a few reasons.

The first of these comes down to the previously mentioned hand of Tobe Hooper at the helm. Graveyard Shift was the first, and to date only film Ralph Singleton has directed. In fact, his only other directorial offerings were a couple of episodes of Cagney and Lacey, with a career more marked for producer work. I point this out mainly to contrast with Hooper, who was coming off of this movie on the heels of a career that included movies like the first two Texas Chain Saw Massacre films, Poltergeist (to what degree we can debate another time), The Funhouse, and Lifeforce. Partly, this is a reflection on Hooper’s experience, but also in the fact that he has an identifiable cinematic voice. Even in his misses, you can still see him in there.

In this case, that plays into the main change Hooper makes with the source material. As I said above, King presents the killer laundry machine as becoming evil by a series of coincidences - so much so that the big twist of the story (and one I was kind of surprised the movie kept) revolves around a single ingredient in medicine that fell into the machine unknown to the protagonists. Hooper does away with the element of chance, turning the story’s demonic presence into a Faustian arrangement, overseen by the laundry’s crooked owner, played by Robert Englund in old man make-up and a maniacal grin. This demonic deal, which it’s implied by the end has a reach beyond the laundry, is one in keeping with Hooper, tracking with his critiques of capitalism in films like Poltergeist and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, presenting old, wealthy establishments sustaining themselves at the cost of those below them.

Sadly, that’s about the most this has in common with those earlier two movies. Trading the 'freak accident' element of the original story for a Faustian critique of capital is a good idea in paper, but the execution here doesn't come to the same level as Hooper's other offerings. Part of this comes from the fact that, in this case, that is embodied in Englund, whose performance plays somewhere between an aged Freddy Krueger and a caricature of George C. Scott. It makes for, admittedly, some of the most fun viewing of the whole movie, but it causes this to lose some of the impact Hooper has had in other offerings.

It's not just the look. Englund's voice even lapses into
Scott territory at times.

Thankfully, Englund isn't carrying the whole movie on his own. If I'm going to continue to compare this to our previous entry, I will say Ted Levine is a big trade up in a leading man compared to David Andrews. Even more impressive as Levine is cutting much less of a traditional protagonist, playing his detective figure with a mood that is varying degrees of unhappy from a baseline grumpiness to a genuine urge to throttle half the people around him. Not quite 'our hero' material, but Levine makes it engaging to watch all the same.

Of course, much like Hooper behind the camera, Levine and Englund (and, to be fair, the whole cast) find themselves caught up with a tricky balancing act that is, at its core, one of the biggest issues with this movie, one that will plague more than one movie in this line-up – the tone.

I reiterate what I said before – on paper, The Mangler is a really silly concept, that is pulled off in a very engaging way. On the printed page, that silliness is afforded an extra level of forgiveness that isn't afforded in the visual medium of film. One example coming to mind in this case coming from a scene used in this movie to try and tie in a thread from the original story about a possessed refrigerator. In the original story, it's recounted by other characters and that allows it some safety to maintain a degree of malevolence. In the film, it leads to Levine angrily beating on a prop refrigerator until it vomits up demonic energy in an effects display that calls attention to the fact that this movie was made on shoestring and a prayer.

I can't pretend I wasn't tempted to just clip the whole scene
of Ted Levine wailing on this thing with a sledgehammer.

This is one of several scenes where the movie seems to be trying to determine if it wants to try and lean into the full comedy or still maintain some semblance of a straight horror movie – in all fairness, Hooper has been able to play both sides of that line well in the past (as demonstrated by his two Texas Chain Saw entries.) Unfortunately, this time the balance never quite seems to land properly in either camp – it lacks the real bite in its attempts at horror, and what bits of humor there are are two scattered and uneven to really make this an especially fun movie.

If you have to see this for any reason, I'd say it's either as a completist (be it for Hooper, Englund, King, Levine or whatever thread this lands in for you) or simply as a 'seeing is believing.' The last may be the one reason I would ever try to seek out the sequels.

Yes. Sequels. Plural.

No, those will not be part of this line-up. We came here for the original Mangler story, and the original Mangler (or its nearest equivalent) we have covered.

Of course, there are still more stories to cover, so it is time we close the laundry down and move on.

Next entry won't be quite as long as this. Thanks to the way the stories shake out, we're down to a single story and movie, this time coming to something more recent and higher profile.

So be sure to come along as we take a break from the 90s era of King movies for a foray into the current wave of Stephen King filmmaking with the 2023 adaptation of The Boogeyman.

Till then.

King-Sized Halloween – Graveyard Shift (1990) - This Episode Was NOT Endorsed by OSHA

I warned you this joke would be coming back.

Welcome back for the first entry in this October's curated run – the 1990 movie Graveyard Shift, adapted from the story of the same name.

But first, a prelude.

After all, Night Shift is a collection of twenty stories, only about half of which have graced feature films. I don't wish to do a disservice to those that haven't made the proverbial big leagues (and in some of these cases, now want to seek out the Dollar Baby adaptations for later.) Plus, I'm already committed to rereading the whole collection anyway, so before we dive into the movie, let's have a quick discussion of the story that came before it, Jerusalem's Lot.

[A note before we go any further – I'm angling to run this month in the order the stories are featured in the collection. As some of you may already be aware, this will create a discrepancy down the line thanks to an anthology movie double dipping. I will be breaking from the order for that point, but otherwise, I'm sticking to the order as arranged.]

Jerusalem's Lot – Let me start this with an admission – at the time I first read this book, I was around 14 years old. I put this out there as my way of saying that, at that time, I really hadn't come across anything in the vein of H.P. Lovecraft's work. As a result, this story hit and slid off of me the first time out. Between the mythos, the journal narratives and the heavy emphasis on the creeping dread and mystery, I really didn't vibe with this as much as what came after. Revisiting it, I've come around to it a lot more. Looking at this one in the theme of feature adaptations, this is a story that feels like it has enough meat on its bones to make a solid 90-100 minute film without needing too much padding or extrapolation. It makes me both curious and apprehensive knowing they instead turned this into a television series (Chapelwaite). I might give that a shot at some point, but for now, I'll leave it as this story was a pleasant surprise on this revisit. A heavily atmospheric slow-burn with its roots in Lovecraft, that, this time around, came out as one of my favorites. 

Now then, on to our main title for this entry - Graveyard Shift.

I know marketing tends to favor hype over fact
But damn, that tagline is writing a REALLY big check to cash.

As I stated above, I can see the makings of a feature movie in Jerusalem's Lot. I had a much harder time of thinking the same for Graveyard Shift.

Don't get me wrong - this isn't a bad story. I enjoyed it as a good down-and-dirty early King short. But it's also one that it's hard to picture someone reading and coming away from thinking “There's a great picture in this!” Save for the fact this was made at the time where Stephen King's name alone was a selling point, anyway.  

For those not familiar, the story concerns a group of luckless workers tasked with cleaning out the subterranean levels of a textile mill over a holiday weekend. What starts as a miserable slog hosing down water rotted supplies and all manner of decay takes a turn as they descend lower and discover the assorted vermin that have made this their home. To just call them rats is a touch misleading.

In some respects, this has similar elements to Jerusalem's Lot - a small cast, a fixed location, and a heavy sense of atmosphere. It's where the two go from there that differs, however. Jerusalem's Lot has its story in how deep the narrative rabbit hole goes for its protagonist as he uncovers the troubled past of his ancestral home. By comparison, the cleanup crew of Graveyard Shift just venture deeper into subterranean decay and the mutated creatures therein..

In the right hands, this would have the potential to make an awesome short film played to the page. A solid, atmospheric, mean-spirited dive into deeper and deeper dark, both in the building itself and in our protagonist's nature. As a feature length endeavor, it calls for a lot of extrapolation to get it up to a marketable run time.

In that regard, I give Ralph Singleton's 1990 adaptation this - it has good instincts in what areas to build out the story. He chooses to expand on things like establishing the not-your-typical rodent infestation early on, the overall corrupt nature of the mill's manager, and further establishing the protagonist as an outsider with all the hostility that brings with it.

On paper, these are good directions to want to go in. Sadly, they don't pan out in the actual execution.

If I had to sum up the biggest problem in this movie in a single word, it would be ‘forgettable.’ It's not an especially egregious watch - I didn't come away from it feeling like I had wasted my time or was angry with the poor quality. Which wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that the movie didn't really leave me feeling much of anything for the bulk of its runtime.

To be fair and try to highlight some good, there are some bits I would consider as making some impact, if not for the reasons they hoped for. 

Though if I'm being completely fair,
Brad Dourif is one of those actors who could make
reading the phone book an interesting experience.

At the top of that list is Brad Dourif - a supporting actor here but easily the biggest star power - as an exterminator written just for the movie. The character on its own isn't an especially fleshed out or engaging figure. In fact, the role is an almost cartoonish cliche that would have been an embarrassment with a lesser actor. Instead, Dourif takes this exterminator whose basically your over the top unstable Vietnam vet stereotype and makes it watchable by playing it at a constant 11.

As fun as Dourif is, most of the rest of the cast leave nowhere near the same impression, sadly. The one other who comes coming close is Stephen Macht, whose corrupt manager has one finger constantly twirling his mustache with every single line read. It kind of makes me feel bad for David Andrew's stoic protagonist, who simply blends in, lacking either the darkness of his original character or a heroic appeal of a more traditional movie lead.

You know what? I take it back.
He doesn't need the finger twirling it,
with some of his line reads, this stache twirls itself.

Which ultimately undercuts the potential in the idea of expanded story - the elements used to make those expansions don't really leave you wanting more of this world. In fact, the actual work under the mill that is the focus of the story is relegated to the final third, making it an utter slog to get there.

As much as I want to say patience is rewarded, even after getting through said slog, the payoff is unrewarding. On page, the descent into the mill is dark, dank, and the increasingly more primal, both in terms of the location and the mutated rodents that reside there. King paint a picture that you can imagine to the point of almost envisioning touch and small in how damp and gruesome it is. In the finished film, it all just feels dimly lit and cheap. That goes for both the set design and the creature work

Reading up on the production of this just adds to the frustration. There were a few attempts at this film starting from initially getting the rights from King on the set of Maximum Overdrive (which, given the allegations of King's state while filming, doesn't speak well for that greenlight.) The first attempt fell through and it led to a next attempt building on the old script and a sense of the budget being whittled down with each go. That there was an initial attempt at this with effects work by Tom Savini makes the unremarkable creature work in the finished version even more of a let down.

I keep telling myself to judge the movie for what it is,
not what I want it to be. But man, for a design was already
underwhelmed by, knowing we could have had Savini
creatures is just insult to injury.

A let down. As much as I feel bad using that term here, it's really the one that feels the most appropriate here. As I said before, I didn't come away from this amused or even angry as much as just…there.
Not the most thrilling way to start things up, I admit. At least I was pleasantly surprised by the revisit to Jerusalem's Lot, and the original story for Graveyard Shift was enjoyable.

I promise, the films will overall pick up from here. This next one is…I'm not gonna claim great, but it's certainly going to be more interesting.
Plus, the next slate includes a story I am pleased to say is still a favorite in this collection.
Till then.

New Year, New October, New Spin on the Horror Dive

Holy shit, this place is dusty.

Pardon my language. I know, that's on me for leaving things untouched here for so long.

In any case, it's October, and after taking last year off, I'll admit it – I've missed this.

So, once again, I'm turning the lights back on and getting ready for another Halloween horror deep dive.

I suppose you're wondering, what franchise will it be this year?

About that...

I'd been thinking that over this summer. There's a few I've been circling for years now to varying degrees of interest or availability (one of these years, I will pull the pin on Argento's Three Mothers, but not this time around.)

After turning over a few have toyed with before, a thought occurred to me to try something a little different this time.

Let me start by saying this has been a surprisingly good year for Stephen King movies. Four movies lined up for major theatrical releases, three have already opened to, if not major box offices, generally good critical response and word of mouth, most recently with the long awaited adaptation of The Long Walk.

So, my brain has already been percolating on King adaptations, and an idea began to form.

If you're reading this and thinking Children of the Corn? Partial credit, though I don't think I have it in me to go all the way down that hole. I powered through all of Hellraiser, but even I have my limits.

But don't worry - those murderous children will be crossing the feed this month in their own time, even if not for the full limelight. Rather than doing a franchise proper, I'm going on a curated dive into the cinematic works taken from King's short story collection, Night Shift.

 

 Yeah, the first edition was kind of understated,
but, as they say, don't judge it by its cover.

I had weighed between this and Skeleton Crew initially. Skeleton Crew was particularly tempting for the one-two punch of The Mist and The Monkey. But, if I'm being honest, Night Shift was among the first King I ever read, so in a way it only felt right.

So, this October, we're going into the weird, wild, wonderful world of the various directors who have taken on the stories in the Night Shift collection, including King himself (that's right – Maximum Overdrive is on the table!)

Just as a final note – this obviously won't cover every story in the collection. As fun as it would be to take on the various stories that have been adapted for short form of television or dollar babies*, I feel like I would bite off more than I could chew. So this will be limited to feature length adaptations, though I will be offering thoughts on the other stories in the collection along the way.

*For those not familiar with this term, King has long had a program in place called the Dollar Baby program he offers to aspiring filmmakers. Through this, they can by the rights to make an adaptation of one of his stories that hasn't been optioned for the low cost of a dollar. As fun as the idea of using those to fill in is, that would require successfully finding them all, and some of these mainly only play festivals, which puts me at a disadvantage with the space of a month.

So, hopefully you'll be coming along for some or all of the ride. Cause it's gonna be a King-sized Halloween here at the Third Row.

Yes, I was able to hold off a whole page before making that joke. No, it won't be the last time. In fact, that's probably now the name of this run.

So, until next time when we kick things off by getting down and dirty in the 1990 movie Graveyard Shift.

 

 Till then.

The House by the Cemetery - What About Bob?

I thought about making the subtitle for this a third riff on landing in hot water with a local board of tourism. I opted not to because, for one - if you’ve seen this before this, you’ll get why I chose this name. The other reason - pattern breaking is a big part of this entry.

First let me lead this off by falling on my proverbial sword for you all not once, but twice over errors I made in my previous entries. First up - in discussing Fulci’s collaborators over the course of this trilogy, I named one person in error. Composer Fabio Frizzi provided the scores for City of the Living Dead and The Beyond, but the score to The House by the Cemetery was provided by Walter Rizzati and Alessando Blonksteiner. Second, though much less of a faux-pas by comparison - at the start of this, I had stated the entire trilogy of these movies could be streamed on Tubi. Once again, that only applies to CotLD and TB, but don’t be discouraged - The House by the Cemetery can be streamed for free from RedBox of all places as of this writing (with ads, but you’d get the same deal with Tubi, so there’s that.)

Okay, so now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s go into The House by the Cemetery, and my reasons for using this particular subtitle.

Overall, I like this movie. I want to get that out of the way up front. It’s a fun riff on a haunted house film, it has some properly grisly Fulci-style kills, and it offers a different take on the zombie type from the previous entries.

The last point is where I get stuck on it - looking at these movies as a trilogy, one can see the connective tissue between City of the Living Dead and The Beyond. By comparison, The House by the Cemetery feels like a hard shift from the earlier films. It’s not that there aren’t connections - as previously established, Fulci is again working with Sacchetti and MacColl in their respective roles of director, writer, and actress. Also, Fulci and Sacchetti are making a story inspired by the work of H.P. Lovecraft, though this marks where things start to break off.

In the prior movies, the Lovecraft influence skewed toward broader (or as it tends to be generally coined cosmic) horror - the version of Hell presented is seen as a supernatural corruption that is opened and poured forth into our world, growing in scope and power. Here, the angle is a story that could exist within the universe of Lovecraft’s work, but not of the same type as the others. In this case, that takes the form of a doctor whose quest for immortality leads him to ends that can be described as, in the least spoilery terms, the ghoulish. It’s an interesting concept, and as the zombie aspect goes, it makes a fun spin. But again, it feels somewhat out of step with what came before, both in terms of the nature of the horror and the much smaller scale this movie plays at.

It's a minor quibble, but I'll say it - it seems weird
to call a child 'Bob.' Bobby, sure. Robert, yeah.
Bob just feels like of those names you have to age into.

Speaking of smaller, we go to the subject of our title and the other big difference of this movie - its protagonist. MacColl completes her run in this movie, but unlike the last two, she feels more like a supporting role. Instead, the lion’s share of the focus goes to Giovanni Frezza (with a voice dubbed by Lyle Stetler that feels eerily out of place on the young actor) as MacColl’s son, Bob. I feel a little bit like a jerk coming down on this character since he IS a kid, and at least appearance-wise, Frezza is making a game attempt with the role. Having said that, for being the focus of much of the movie, Bob is sort of ineffectual in the larger movie. He’s set up at first as being akin to Danny Torrance in The Shining, being treated to visions that foreshadow the coming horror, but ultimately all he can really do is try to warn people who still wind up dead anyway. I place the fault on this more on the script than the child himself, but when he’s that big a part of the movie, it is a hard problem to look past.

Ultimately, I’m of two minds on this movie. On its own, it’s still a fun time. It hits the notes I come to Fulci for - good atmosphere, solid score (it’s no Frizzi, but it works) and that sweet, sweet carnage. Its biggest faults lie in its role as the final part of the ostensible Gates of Hell trilogy, where it lacks the gates, the Hell, and honestly, just the highs of its predecessors.

Also, after a series called The Gates of Hell literally ends
its second movie with its leads going to Hell,
this ending just feels underwhelming.

Again though, it’s a brisk 90 minutes and well worth seeking out.

I needed this right about now. It’s been a weird year and I’ve been wanting to get back into this. November is probably off the table as that will be a busy month, but we’ll see how things shake out in December.

In the meantime, a Happy Halloween till you all, and if nothing else, I’ll see you all next October!.

The Beyond - New City, Same Great Hell Zombies!

Welcome back once again to the Third Row’s October Franchise Dive (someday I’ll have a proper name for this thing.)

Well, the survivors of Dunwich put it to a vote. I won’t go into the details, but let me just say that if I’m spotted within city limits, there WILL be consequences. So, you win this round, board of tourism.

But, the journey through Fulci’s Gates of Hell trilogy isn’t over, so we’re pulling up stakes and heading south. There’s a quaint little hotel in Louisiana I’ve been hearing about. Nice location, good price. Just a little matter of a portal into Hell in the basement, but hey - it adds character!

Okay, joking aside, I’m gonna start with an up front disclosure. As of what I have seen to this point, The Beyond (AKA …E tu vivrai nel terrore! L'aldilà, AKA 7 Doors of Death) is, hands down, my favorite Italian horror movie. This isn’t to say ‘best’, mind you. If you put the proverbial screws to me, I’d say the best likely goes to something like Black Sunday or Suspiria. But that’s the thing - favorite isn’t always going to be best, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Just want to get that out there now in the interests of transparency.

Watching the movie this time, I went in with an eye for how this plays as a continuation of the trilogy, in particular compared to the previous City of the Living Dead. To that end, I want to again reaffirm my sentiment from last time - I like City of the Living Dead quite a bit, but in many ways, it feels like a test run for a lot of what Fulci would do in The Beyond.

Once again, we’re given a similar premise, albeit this time with some changes in presentation. Gone is the ill-fated town of Dunwich as we’re instead transplanted to a hotel in Louisiana. Care of a prologue, we learn the building is located over one of the fabled seven portals to Hell foretold in the Book of Eibon. In this case, however, there’s no act that invokes its opening. In fact, we start this film with an artist who claims to be able to stop it - shortly before he’s attacked and murdered by an angry mob.

Hey, we all make mistakes.

Flash forward - this time, the race against the clock has been swapped out for Catriona MacColl playing the ‘lucky’ new owner of said Hell-adjacent hotel. Right from the jump, we’re getting similar but different - Fulci keeps the growing corruption angle, but in this case, our heroes are initially unaware of what they’re dealing with instead of racing to stop it.

Which comes to one of the areas where I feel like this improves on City - the escalation feels more consistent (as much as the film's dreamlike narrative allows for) starting slowly and getting gradually larger and more graphic. Our first incident is framed as a benign accident. In fact, it’s probably one of the tamest injuries you’ll see in a Fulci movie. From there, we get isolated cases of people running afoul of the living dead, strange unseen forces, and two triumphs of prosthetic heads, the first involving a bottle of acid, and then second an army of half actual tarantulas, half props. Each time, the set pieces cast a little further out before, once again, we have hordes of the shambling dead to send us to our big finish.

Alongside that better sense of an upped ante, I have been noticing a through line in this movie that I find curious. Again, compared to its predecessor, there seems to be more of a shared thematic through line in this movie’s carnage.

Which is probably the best opportunity I have to say, before I continue, if you’re squeamish about eye trauma, this MIGHT not be the movie for you. I’ve joked in the past about Fulci’s predilection for grisly scenes with eyeballs, but even by that metric, this movie goes for them with all the frequency and passion of all Three Stooges.

As much as I joke about this just being a standard Fulci tendency, I have to admit it does feel like it also has a narrative basis in this case. Most notably with regards to the presence of Cinzea Monreale’s character Emily.

Shout out to numerous cast members.
Apparently they could see nothing behind those contacts.

Second warning for this entry - for this point, I will need to drop some spoilers. So I will give you till the count of…

Okay. You were warned. Let’s go.

Emily is initially presented to us as a mystery. She has knowledge of the hotel’s past, and other than that, her most distinct characteristic is the fact she is visibly blind. When I say ‘visibly’, I call your attention to the above screencap - and props to Monreale for sticking out her scenes with those. This in and of itself could just be a stylistic effect of the movie, but for two things. First - she has a scene later in the film where her dialogue establishes that she was a former damned soul that was released from Hell to warn of the doorway’s opening. Second - the movie’s final scenes, in which our two leads have now wandered through the door and are trapped in the barren abyss of Hell. As they wander, they gain the same blinded appearance Emily has.

And with that, I bring this back to my initial point - there is a distinct thematic through line in this movie of Fulci tying the eyes to the concept of being damned/blinded by evil. It’s an idea that plays through many of the kills inflicted by Hell’s growing influence, as characters’ eyes are crushed, gouged, or in one case eaten by the growing demonic forces. Yes, it also doubles for some great visceral set pieces, but Fulci for making it all tie together with the general idea of the movie merits some additional respect.

Okay, I lied.
None of these spiders will give you super powers.
Mostly, they'll just eat your face.
Sorry about that.

Besides having a (relatively) tighter narrative and thematic consistency, the one other thing I want to give a shout-out for this movie - the music. Fabio Frizzi definitely one-ups his work from the prior installment, most notably with the recurring ‘Voci Dal Nulla’ - a choral track that bookends the movie, effectively serving first as ominous intro and then an ending that, for our protagonists, feels downright apocalyptic.

Honestly, if you only watch one of the movies in this series (and why only one? Come on, these are brisk 90 minute jaunts!) I would say make The Beyond your go to. They’re all solid, but this is definitely Fulci at his most on point of the three.

Which makes me feel like kind of a jerk because we still have one more of these to go. This isn’t to prematurely toss our next entry under the bus, because it does have its charms. But man, after the highs of The Beyond, The House by the Cemetery does feel like a bit of a step down.

Still, best to make the most of it. Because after this entry, Louisiana won’t want me back either.

So, see you again in a couple more days as we scale our sights down from town-wide carnage to a quaint little house that becomes a proving ground for a creature of purest evil.

Oh and Hell. Yes, Hell will be there too.

Till then.

City of the Living Dead - Not Approved by the Dunwich Board of Tourism

Welcome back for another October here at the Third Row.

Mind the newspapers. This series is gonna get messy.

Probably should have thought of that last year, but hindsight's 20-20.

Speaking of which, be sure your protective eyewear is properly secured, we're in Fulci territory now.

Okay, with all that cheek aside, let's dive into City of the Living Dead.
AKA The Gates of Hell.
AKA Paura nella città dei morti viventi.

One of the fun parts of Italian horror - more often than not, these will have multiple titles. I'll include the alternates where I can within reason, though for the rest of this, let's stick to CotLD.

To set the scene, this movie came about thanks to the success of Fulci's earlier Zombie (aka Zombi 2 and Zombie Flesh Eaters.) There was interest in him making another horror movie, and he began working with previous scriptwriter Dardano Saccheti (who is one of a few collaborators who worked on all three movies in this trilogy, others including composer Fabio Frizzi and lead actress Catriona Mac Coll.)

The idea they came up with is one heavily inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Set in the town of Dunwich (a big tip of the hat), the suicide of a local priest sets in motion a chain of events that signal the opening of a portal to Hell. As the clock ticks down to its opening, a psychic and a journalist race to stop the opening before it's too late.

I'll admit it - I don't have a quip for this.
I just really like how Fulci frames this transition.
...and no, the Dunwich tourist board didn't
okay this one either.

That’s the elevator pitch, in any case. The story in the film plays a bit looser, including things like a police investigation in New York and a vagrant who, even by the standards of Fulci’s characters, has spectacularly bad luck. These both play in the orbit of the growing doom descending on Dunwich, however, even if the connections don’t always feel concrete.

Yeah, it’s not intricately plotted, but honestly, with the influence Fulci is working with, I feel like that helps. There’s any number of works that play to Lovecraft’s specific mythos of ancient eldritch gods and arcane texts (while carefully cutting around his uncomfortable racial issues), but Fulci opts to go for the broader strokes of the creeping unknown rather than a specific evil. It’s a big part of why I find this series fascinating - rather than a singular monster or straightforward threat, the films share an idea of a sort of growing corruption, starting from a single incident and growing outward with greater scope and stranger horrors.

It’s something I haven’t seen done as often in other horror movies (Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness comes to mind as the most immediate comparison), so it’s part of what makes these movies standout. The horrors, in this case running anywhere from Fulci’s signature zombies, to a rain of maggots, to one particularly memorable set piece in which a woman vomits up her own organs (an effect accomplished with veal intestines, a prosthetic head, and one INCREDIBLY game actress that I hope was paid well for her part.)

Seriously. This scene goes a good way before they
swap to the prosthetic head - partly because no human
being can regurgitate that much safely.
This woman is a damn trooper!

While a part of me feels odd putting the gory set pieces first and foremost in the strengths, the fact is, they really do make up the backbone of this movie. Not simply as gore for gore’s sake, but as reflecting  the growing escalation that goes with that otherworldly corruption. We start the movie with a priest hanging himself and a man finding a decayed body. From there, we see first graphic standalone deaths, then carnage unfolding on greater and greater scales. To his credit, Fulci maintains the momentum almost perfectly, save for the last twist of the movie that feels like a fumble, and possibly a reshoot for how little set-up it has compared with a lot of what came before.

The movie opened to its share of mixed reception - besides the series of violence cuts for different countries, as was the style at the time, the movie earned its Gates of Hell moniker in response to a legal response from United Artists who felt that the distributors were trying to ride George Romero’s coattails. Critically, there were some who praised Fulci’s style, but many who were turned off by the violence and some of the looser writing of the movie. In the years since, it has developed a respectable following in horror circles.

Granted, it’s still somewhat in the shadow of its successor, but we’ll be going into that more next time. For now, I’ll say this much - on its own, City of the Living Dead is still a very fun, watchable, work of Italian horror. Its set pieces may sometimes be disjointed, but they move at a brisk pace that keeps you invested (so long as you have the stomach for some low budget carnage, anyway.) As its own movie, it’s a good time, as part of the trilogy, it walked so The Beyond can run, but it still stands well on its own.

In the interests of playing somewhat fair with the
good townsfolk, I have been asked to say this:
Come see scenic Dunwich, where you will more than
likely NOT have your brains squeezed out of your
skull by the undead!

If this has gotten you interested in checking this out (and if it hasn’t, you might want to turn back now - Fulci’s penchant for blood, guts, and strange, dreamlike narratives persists in this series), you can watch this, and its sequels, for free on Tubi as of this writing.

In the meantime, unless you’re sticking around for a watch or rewatch, it’s time for us to bid farewell to the ill-fated town of Dunwich as we make our way south to a little hotel in Louisiana. There, we’ll be opening one of the seven doors of Hell with 1981’s The Beyond.

Until then.

I'm Back and I'm Bringing Zombies!

 You feeling that?

The days are getting shorter, the temperature's getting cooler, the leaves are changing color.

Fall is here.

And that means I'm back on my BS again.

This past year has been a lot. Some good, some bad, and just a lot going on. I was honestly debating if I wanted to do another horror dive this year.

This was also a result of last year's run. Don't get me wrong, there were parts of diving into Hellraiser that I really enjoyed - finally reading The Hellbound Heart and digging into the production history were good times, including gaining a level of respect for Bloodline, in all of its flawed glory.

Then we had the six movies Dimension pumped out purely to keep the rights in their camp. That was where the project went from enjoyable to a chore. I was being entirely sincere when I said a big part of why I summed those up in a single article was simply because I could only repeat the same flaws so many times.

So, in approaching this year, I had two requirements in mind - I wanted something that was going to be less of a backlog, and I wanted something I would enjoy without feeling like I was forcing myself through it. In the future, I may take on another tall order again, but this year, I wanted to treat myself.

I went over a few options before the answer smacked me in the face, care of a program I did with my partner on Italian horror.

With all that said, buckle your seatbelts and break out your safety goggles - we're going back to Hell. And this time, Lucio Fulci's taking us there.

"It's just the same cenobite designs in every sequel now!"

Okay, I know calling a thematic trilogy a franchise could be read as a cheat by some. BUT, seeing as no one gave me grief for it when I did John Carpenter's Apocalypse Trilogy in 2019, I'm gonna take that as approval for Fulci's Gates of Hell trilogy this year.

So, keep an eye on this space in the weeks to come. We kick things off in suitably gut-churning fashion with 1980's City of the Living Dead, followed by the 1981 classic The Beyond before bringing the month a close with 1981's The House by the Cemetery.

Part of me would like to say I could throw in some supplemental material, but I can't make guarantees - I know The Beyond has a comic tie-in, but those tend to be a bit on the pricier side. If anything else comes up, I'll be sure to try to surprise you!

It's gonna be a fun ride. The dead will rise, eyes will be gouged.

Till next time.