City of the Living Dead (1980) Horror Gates of Hell

City of the Living Dead (1980) Spoilers! All through this review! I have watched a shit ton of movies in my life and have extensively explored the Italian horror genre but somehow I failed to ever see this film. So I was pleasantly surprised when I put this DVD in and saw something new to me. I thought that I had seen it but watching it was a new experience. Part of a three film Blu Ray set called "Gates of Hell Trilogy" put out by the Australian company Cinema Cult it also contains the other two Lucio Fulci Gates films The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery. Whether a problem with the DVD or my player I could not get the special features to play which is a bit disappointing. The film is a wonderful piece of cinema with a great score by Fabio Frizzi and Fulci directing it tells the story of a Gate of Hell being opened by a priest killing himself near it and how the lead characters try to shut it. Dunwich is a small New England town supposedly built on the ruins of Salem where the witch trials took place. A sick looking priest, Father Thomas (Fabrizio Jovine) walks in a cemetery. There is some strange cutting in this film going between the cemetery and a seance in New York City Mary a psychic see Father Thomas hang himself, followed by the sounds of howling and we see the dead rise from a nearby grave. Mary (Catriona MacColl) goes into convulsions seeing this and appears to die. On a gravestone in the cemetery is a saying. "The soul that pines for eternity shall out span death. You Dweller of the twilight void come Dunwich."  While the cops investigate Mary's death, we get some exposition about the book of Enoch a four thousand year old book that tells of the gate or some such thing. There Interrupted by the crying out fireball that appeared out of no where to ad some proof of the supernatural. Teresa (Adelaide Aste) predicts that horrible things are happening in a distant town.  Peter Bell (Christopher George) a reporter shows up in NYC looking for a story. He and Mary end up going to Dunwich to attempt to close the gate to Hell before All Saints Day. Confused that the dead Mary is involved well with Fulci things take turns and her turn is amazing.
   A couple grave diggers having lunch at a cemetery, reporter comes by and they chase him off. Grave of  Mary Woodhouse, Peter is still investigating her death. He watches as she is buried with these great in the coffin shots. She wails in the coffin. Peter hears her but a plane going over head blocks the noise, tension as we wait to see if he is going to go back yo the grave he does but her struggle finally saving her as she screams. The scene is great with cool shots of Mary in the coffin struggle to claw her way out cut with shots of Peter thinking he is hearing her but not sure. After the rescue book of Enoch explanation is a bit much but the shots done in Giallo style close ups of the eyes Mary explains that the Monday the night is the All Saints day and if the gates of hell that have been opened in Dunwich are not closed before then the dead will walk the earth. Peter is prophesied to be the one to do it oh that book just is quite magical. Mary and Peter start the road trip to Dunwich where they will eventual meet the locals there and bring this story to an end.
  Back to Dunwich and an eerie fog is blowing in on a howling wind. A Bob (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) in an abandoned house finds a blow up doll and what looks like a child worm covered rotting corpse. Junie's Lounge in Dunwich when the mirror just breaks all by itself, the two patrons and the bar tender examine it . Ever since Father Thomas hanged himself things have been strange. Then the wall cracks open and they hear sounds, the two patrons run off leaving the bar tender alone. They are the local spice for the town. The main characters are introduced. Sandra (Janet Agren) talking with her psychiatrist, Gerry (Carlo De Mejo), Emily (Antonella Interlenghi) comes in to see Gerry and we get some exposition about the Dunwich group, Salem witch burners are the ancestors of the town people.
With the creepy starting to happen in the town we start getting scenes that are goreliscious. Emily looking for Bob at the abandoned house, snarling sound scare him and he runs away leaving the poor girl alone.  The priest finds her and smears worm goo flesh all over her. She dies of fright her Father Mr. Robins shares that while talking to Gerry. The best set piece of gooey goodness has a couple locals, Tommy and his girl making out in their jeep. She is scared so he turns on the headlights to see the hanging priest in front of them. He appears next to the car the girls eyes start bleeding and her mouth foaming. Tommy goes from frantically trying to start the car to seeing his girls insides spill out of her mouth. Then the priest appears in the jeep and rips out Tommy's skull from behind.
  Hanging himself opened the gates of hell. Funeral for the Robin's. Ghoulish mortician is getting her ready. Mrs Holden died of fear also and we learn that Rose Calvin and Tommy Fisher from the jeep, town folk are blaming Bob who may be a pervert.

  Ghoul mortician tries to steal from the dead and has his hand mangled by the dead old lady. Emily's brother in his bedroom but something is outside the windows. He hears the moaning and the great music build the tension as he nears the shades to see his rotten corpse sister outside.
 Sandra has a gun smartest one out of the bunch apparently. The old lady from the mortuary is on Sandra's kitchen floor, Mrs Holden They are puzzled. Some social commentary about women having neurosis. More sound and the couple search around the house, when they return to the kitchen the body is gone. Panic sets in for Sandra knows dead Mrs. Holden is in the house. Logical Gerry calms her and she says " I will do whatever you say" Old lady was behind the painting but they don't see her. After the search the lights go out and a window blows in.(Did I mention the wind storm?) The glass blows into the painting and they see blood seeping out.
  There is also one death not caused by the dead, One of the locals finds Bob and thinking he is behind the deaths pushes his head into a industrial drill through the temple all the way through. It is quite the scene and we get great practical effects.
   Things start coming together once Mary and Peter arrive in Dunwich but the film doesn't really have clear main characters. Who are the hero's it seems they are Mary and Peter but we spend so much time away from them learning what's happening in the town that Gerry ans Sandra seem also to be emerging.  Gerry and Sandra arrive at a house the mortuary but no answer. Peter and Mary arrive at the graveyard, they have to find the priests grave and uncover him. Music tells us the tension should be rising and the fog. Gerry also arrives at the cemetery Mr. Logic meets the psychic. Now the four, Peter, Gerry, Sandra and Mary are assaulted by maggots blown in on the wind. Sandra Vomits as the floor is covered by them. It's a pretty amazing scene that ends with a call on the phone from little John-John,  Emily corpse killed her parents and John calls Gerry to tell him. The foursome drives over in the worst of wind storms and the girls look after John while the guys see the butchering of his parents. You don't see anything though this is an off camera murder, and we just get the reactions of the guys when they come out. It's a bit strange considering how much gore has already been in the movie
Plan is the funeral  parlor and then the cemetery to uncover he priest, Sandra takes John to Gerry's office while the other three enter the mortuary. Emily is waiting for Sandra and John-John and rips our the brains out of Sandra. This method is used repeatedly in the film, it like a hair pull but the back of the skull comes off. Pretty cool effect.  Kid runs, Kid in crisis running the dead are after him. Makes his way but the dead keep finding him. Gerry is suddenly there and confronts dead Emily by shutting his eyes. She vanishes and the crisis ends weird.
 Finally heading to the graveyard the three, Gerry, Mary and Peter arrive at night just a short time from midnight, they fail! The film sort of falls apart here a bit. Since they were supposed to close the gate before midnight but don't seem to do so the consequences for the world is the dead would rise. This is not the case though. They enter the family tomb and open his sarcophagus to find its broken out from the other side. They crawl through to check the other side. Dead Sandra is down there and they see her but suddenly she is behind Peter and rips out his brain. They killed Peter WTF! She then stares as Mary until her eyes bleed. Gerry rams a pipe through her and she dies a second time. Mary is okay now but what the fuck are they doing? Great visuals in the tomb of skeletal remains as the now pair move further towards the gates of hell,
They see the gates as the dead start to rise all around them.  The dead are coming for them! Priest guy appears and they are trapped his stare causes her eyes to bleed again. Jerry runs a cross through the priest who promptly burns and the dead are returned to the grave. Now we can call it City of the burning the dead catch magical fire. Wonderful Shame Peter didn't survive. Why the scream when the kid runs towards her to end the film? Must be from the first few scenes? I went back and watched the opening scenes but there is nothing there, So it is a mystery maybe the special features can solve. The music and gore are great in this film and even though it has some flaws this was a great film to finally watch. That last shot will bother me until I know the story behind it. This film is a bit problematic where women are screamy and emotional and the men are the calm ones telling them to get it together. The character Gerry in particular is a bit of a cad. Still the film is great and I definitely recommend this film to you all.

The Theatre Bizarre (2011) Horror Anthology

The Theatre Bizarre (2011) - Anthologies have been really making a comeback the last few years. The VHS films and the ABCs of Death are a couple more successful entries. The Theater Bizarre with some wonderfully strange stories, more of a weird tales than hard horror is the latest to be reviewed here. Search anthology on the site for more reviews. This one starts a fever dream of an artist, Enola Penny (Virginia Newcomb) obsessed with the old theater across the street from her. Seeming emotionally unstable and frigidity she is drawn from her apartment into the theater. A scattering of mannequins occupy seats in the audience. Her presence raises a puppet like master of ceremonies, Peg Poett (Udo Kier) who reveals some other mechanized puppet that leads into each of the stories of this anthology. The trick of the interwoven piece is as each time the master of ceremonies returns he is a bit more human. Enola at the end becomes one of the puppets deposited onstage to become part of the play for the next person drawn to the Theatre Bizarre. It was written by Zach Chassler and directed by Jeremy Kasten. There was a depth of clarity missing in this piece where it did not have meaning in a way that the viewer could see it as one of the parts of the whole. Sure it connected the stories giving a familiar place to come back to and a way into the next. It was not strong enough though to stand on its own. It's meaning not communicated strongly enough leaving it just a device and not a self supporting piece of the film. It did have the wonderful treat of having the renown actor Udo Kier, a veteran of genre film, extraordinary performer he brings an expertise that raises the piece and at 70 years old commands a frame better than most actors.
The first is Mother of Toads about an anthropologist Martin (Shane Woodward) and his girlfriend, Karina (Victoria Maurette) who come across an old star symbol at a market in an old French village . The Store keeper, Mere (Catriona MacColl) talks of it being part of her family traditions for generations. She invites him (a fact not lost on his girlfriend) to come to the french countryside to see a copy of the Necronomicon.  As someone who studies such things Martin starts fitting the trip into their schedule right away without really consulting  but more explaining how its going to happen. There is some nice simple character dialog in this piece that defines the characters and brings the viewer right into their situation. He obviously has been here for a longer time than she and his condescending attitude quickly brings up the cracks in their relationship. She arrives to join him, a vacation for her and he has his interests forefront in his mind paying less attention to her than he should. Slightly obsessed with the symbols on a marker near the road, that he sees as signs, the boundary between the real world and the spirit world. We are having him cross a boundary, it may not be completely clear to the audience as this transition is subtle and it is certainly not clear to Karina who just wants to get to the spa but there is a symbolic change.
  Martin arrives at the house of Mere and fails to notice the symbols on the floor below the table she sits him at. We begin to learn that she is a witch and follower of the Mother of Toads and through mostly musical queues we see that her intentions for him go beyond sharing her beliefs. It is a classic motif of a witch seducing a traveler on the road and is done with atmosphere and style by director Richard Stanley. Mere is played with, possibly overplayed by MacColl yet another veteran actor who known for some favorites from the seventies, The Beyond, House by the Cemetery and City of the Living Dead. Stanley also holds a place in genre hearts with his wonderful, Dust Devil, as well as directing the less acclaimed The Island of Dr. Moreau and Hardware. He pulls no punches with this story and it is appreciated.
 Seduced and condemned the couple could have been part of an elaborate fever dream but instead we get some harsh reality. Karina coming back to pick up her missing boyfriend discovers the drugged and in the throws of some slimy lust making with a younger more fuck-able version of  Mere. She runs off into the now toad filled countryside to meet her doom. He wakes staring at an old photo that could be him.It's some old magic that enchanted him. A creature with the desire for a former lover a role that he easily filled.  The Mother of Toads has found the love of her past in the present and his inevitable rejection of her will also mean he is short for this world. There are some excellent visuals at this point in the movie. Groggy Martin wakes and the first indication we the audience get that things are awry is the clawed amphibian are draped over the man. Then as he gets up we get the full view of the toad creature sleeping next to him, our view from above.
  A dark tale warning that one should never reject a god. Mere certainly gives Martin the chance to save himself. She offers him more of the wonders of a goddess if only he will stay and be hers. His rejection seals his fate.
  The second tale, "I Love You" opens with a man Axel (André Hennicke) waking on a bathroom floor of his bathroom with a gash on his hand and wondering why his wife, Mo (Suzan Anbeh) is not home. An obsessive man with a drinking problem he is a man losing the woman he loves. He wants to know everything about her life at all times. She has decided that the overly attentive husband is not what she wants, but is is more than that. There is an intimacy problem that they have where he thinks sex is for him and fails to meet her needs. As we learn more we start to wonder about whether this is what it seems or some sort of hallucination the broken man is having. The story unfolds and we learn more and more about how broken their relationship has been. They have a conversation but the whole time you can think this is his subconscious working out the reasons why he has sunk so far. As the memories come to him now back in the aftermath on his bathroom floor we see that things are much worse than previously presented. It is an incredibly sad take on the dangers of  beautiful crazy love and how we create the reality we want when in its thrall. Written and directed by Buddy Giovinazzo.
  In "Wet Dreams" we meet a man Donnie (James Gill) driven by his desire but where his fantasies that become horrible nightmares. A wife Carla (Debbie Rochon) with emotional and physical scars theirs is a relationship on the rocks. Donnie's therapist Dr Maurey (Tom Savini) tries to help him get to the bottom of it but that role does not seem professional in his interactions with Donnie, maybe this is the first hint of the twisty twist of this segment. Whose dream is this anyway? Sometimes the penalty for our actions can't be dispelled by recognizing it is a nightmare. Making it hard to tell what is fantasy and what is reality is a problem for this segment. Maybe its the writing by John Esposito or maybe its the Directing by Savini or editing by Douglas Buck, or even this viewer may have been the issue but this segment was hard to define. Certainly it is a revenge tale but what part of it is real?
  "The Accident" is a meditation on death, framed in the eyes of a little girl who saw death on the side of the road. Traveling in her car a motorcycle hits a deer and is killed. The child trying to understand what she has seen asked her mother a bunch of question. She sees the suffering deer still alive and her mother calling the accident in. Cut with Mother (Lena Kleine) and Child (Melodie Simard) discussing the incident later. Touching but these type of stories have a hard to pull off. The child seems too smart in her dialog and the explanations too simple. It makes you wonder who the audience the piece is intended for. It is well done and a topic anyone with children will at some time have to breach. Not really fitting neatly with the other pieces in this film as it is far from the bizarre threshold the film name implies. Still writer director Douglas Buck makes a emotional short about the fragility of life.
  "Vision Stains" A strange but enjoyable story of a women gone mad with visions of other peoples memories. This young woman (Kaniehtiio Horn), a psychopath really learns that the key memories of a person's life are captured in the fluid of their eyes. When they die all those memories come to the forefront and can be extracted using a needle. So this young woman kills homeless women and using a needle extracts the memories from their eyes in what is wonderfully done special effects. She then injects this eye fluid in her own eye and relives the victims life memories. She records all she sees into journals and sees herself not as an addicted killer but as a recorder of those women's lives. Her commitment is important to her next idea where she steps even a step further than she has. Not ready to settle for live that have been lived she wants to see the memories of someone who has yet to see. Then things go horribly wrong. Writer / director Karim Hussain has statements in the climax about predestination and lack of original lives and stories was cynical, first in its assumption of even a distracted God but second in that knowing we are predestined seemed unbearable. A side note that there are several stories about people coming out of the theater during Visions Stains and fainting from the eye damage special effects.
The final story "Sweets" is a sad and sorry tale of a relationship at its end.Written and directed by David Gregory it is centered around the gluttony of sweets. We see a fat (ish) man, Greg (Guilford Adams) struggling to come to terms with his attractive girlfriend Estelle (Lindsay Goranson) as she dumps him. The Excellent straight faced liturgy of cliche excuses she runs though are a great counter to his overly emotional almost child like whining. The disgusting room filled with rotting sweets is the perfect metaphor for the  crumbling relationship. Then the mixed in scenes of them in happier times is a perfect counter of then and now. Then when the turn of the story come it is so wonderfully evil that it makes the whole story. The truly grisly scene is worth the wait.
  Overall this was an interesting anthology. Like every anthology the opportunity to have hits and misses is there. This one hits more than it misses. Strange is what it is about and it lives up tho its title of Bizarre. Recommended.