Service Advisory

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• BB says:

  October 18, 2011 at 12:46 pm

  Sorry to hear about your troubles with the PS3, Glenn. I’m wait­ing for mine to keel over any day now, since I have one of the really old, fat, 60 Gb models.
  Despite lov­ing his work to a fault, I have nev­er been able to warm up much to Fulci’s HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY (although the bat attack will nev­er get old). Still, I’m glad that Blue Underground is releas­ing this blu along with his oth­er work as altern­at­ives to the lousy discs Arrow has been put­ting out in the past year – every damn one of those releases look like some­thing is wrong with the pic­ture. They can shove new extras onto the disc until it bursts, but if they can­’t even get the damn image right, it’s all for naught.
  If only they’d give the red car­pet hi-def treat­ment to DON’T TORTURE A DUCKLING and A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN!

• Lex says:

  October 18, 2011 at 1:54 pm

  I’m sure the Blu trans­fer is fant­ast­ic, but the main even in House by the Cemetery needs no digit­al upgrade, and that’s that Danny-from-The Shining ripoff kid’s INCREDIBLY ANNOYING per­form­ance (ie, dub) with that absurd WHINY VOICE that’ll get stuck in your head for six weeks after you watch the movie.
  Also one of the best throwaway hor­ror gasps around is when the awe­some dad picks up an axe and hauls it into that door, and the creature puts the kid’s head right up against where it’s being swung. That was a real “holy shit” moment on first watch, on par with the bat attack… Also the little girl and that weird doll are all freaky… Italians are the weird­est people ever, and this era of their hor­ror stuff is like it’s beamed entirely from a sep­ar­ate plan­et– all the weirder since it was usu­ally shot here in the U.S.

• bill says:

  October 19, 2011 at 10:04 am

  Yeah, Fulci…I don’t get it. I mean, I *get* it, but only up to a point. I feel like a lot of people put him on the same level as Bava, but when I watch Fulci I do not see it. The end of DON’T TORTURE A DUCKLING is jaw-droppingly ridicu­lous, and while a cer­tain level of that is to be expec­ted in the world of Italian hor­ror, the dif­fer­ence between what Fulci likely wanted the reac­tion to that scene to be, and what it likely WAS, at least in my case, is so wide as to be cav­ernous. This sort of thing is often embraced – the insan­ity of images and so forth – by fans of these films, but at what point do you have to stop giv­ing Fulci the actu­al cred­it, if what he’s aim­ing for is not where he’s hit­ting? Or does it mat­ter? It does to me, I guess.

• BB says:

  October 19, 2011 at 4:50 pm

  Let it be said that the Fulci > Bava argu­ment you men­tion has­n’t actu­ally happened here, so I’d rather not assume the (straw-covered) position.
  Because I dis­agree with it strongly, by the way! Despite my love for the guy’s work, Fulci was­n’t half the dir­ect­or or crafts­man Bava was. I enjoy Fulci’s work purely on its own mer­its, instead of in the shad­ow of any­one else. Mario Bava could never/would nev­er have filmed some­thing with the same night­mar­ish sim­pli­city as the pos­sessed girl puk­ing up her own insides and then rip­ping out a chunk of her date’s brain, in CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, and I can name 35 oth­er examples of the same incon­gru­ity if I had to.
  But then, that seems like part of the claim as well – that his string of films through the 70s and 80s, with their weird, dis­join­ted sense of con­tinu­ity, their vis­cer­al gore moments, night­mar­ish atmo­sphere, and awk­ward, unreal per­form­ances, are… what? Some sort of incom­pet­ence mis­in­ter­preted by the gull­ible hor­ror audi­ence as actu­al style and intent? I don’t buy that argu­ment at all.
  Believe me, I’ll sym­path­ize with any­one who ever had to sit next to an asshole in a ZOMBIE2 t‑shirt scream­ing “FULCI LIVES!” before, dur­ing, or after, reviv­al screen­ings; still, I think we should be look­ing at the films them­selves instead of pit­ting these cre­at­ive types against each oth­er in cage-matches.
  And if the fall­ing man­nequin at the cli­max of DUCKLING does­n’t work for you, that is a per­fectly legit take on it; but to swipe at the film and ignore all of its unique mer­its (which it really does have) simply because you can­’t fathom that Fulci might ever have wanted such a shock­ing, graph­ic, and awk­wardly framed bit of action in that sequence is really puzz­ling to me. It’s a scream­ing fin­ish to the thing and abso­lutely unfor­get­table – and you would char­ac­ter­ize it as the film’s great shame! We just don’t see eye to eye on this, and that’s per­fectly alright.

• BB says:

  October 19, 2011 at 5:01 pm

  Oh shit, bill – you actu­ally only said “on the same level as” in your post, rather than the ima­gin­ary “bet­ter than Bava” I attrib­uted to you and went off the rails on.
  Mea culpa – I’m THAT guy!
  I guess in my defense, I haven’t had enough cof­fee today, and my mis-guided rant here still addresses a lar­ger, com­mon, thing that I see in Euro cult/horror for­ums, where these par­tic­u­lar, style-heavy dir­ect­ors (along with Argento in a trio) are set against each oth­er. I hope at the least that you can tell I feel strongly about lov­ing these guys all on their own merits!

• John Keefer says:

  October 26, 2011 at 1:27 pm

  House by the Cemetery is amaz­ing! The most art­ful Fulci I’ve encountered so far, whatever that means. The bat attack, the fact that almost the last half is spent hav­ing the char­ac­ters keep going down into that damn base­ment, the implied rela­tion­ship with the fath­er and care­taker in all those great zoom-in close-ups cross­cut­ting. It employs the con­ven­tions to its own ends, almost like a free asso­ci­ation hor­ror film. Basically I dug it alot, my first Fulci!