Sodoma's Ghost (1988)

Nazis make the perfect monsters.  Steven Spielberg has often said this is the reason why he used them more than once in his Indiana Jones films.  They are the embodiment of cruelty, of hatred, of everything that normal, decent people are against.  Further, they allow for a higher (or lower, perspective depending) level of transgression in narratives.  After all, these are people who tortured and murdered millions of human beings for nothing more than the circumstance of their birth.  Depicting the fictitious shenanigans they can get up to feels somehow grimier while also being far easier to believe because of this.  

Sure, there are films which gave their Nazi characters some nuance, tried to make them, if not sympathetic, then at least more well-rounded.  But Nazis function best when they are pure villains.  Pairing them together with attributes of actual monsters just makes them more intriguing.  This is why films like Shock Waves or Hellboy or Outpost work as well as they do (to whatever degree).  This is not to say that they always work.  There are enough Nazi Monster movies that fall flat to make this sub-genre a truly mixed bag (See Oasis of the Zombies, if you doubt).  It’s rather surprising, considering Italy’s rich tradition of Nazisploitation films that they didn’t churn out more of them that added in supernatural components.  But if Lucio Fulci’s Sodoma’s Ghost (aka The Ghosts of Sodom aka Il Fantasma di Sodoma) is any stick by which to measure, maybe that’s for the best.

Six teen jerks (let’s assume they’re American for the sake of convenience) dick around in the French countryside until they wind up at an old villa.  Holing up there for the night, they soon find more than a few surprises waiting for them, not least of which is the fact that the manse played host to an ill-fated Nazi orgy forty-five years earlier.  And the revelers still want to party.

Roger Ebert’s film glossary defines the Dead Teenager Movie as “a generic term for any film primarily concerned with killing teenagers, without regard for logic, plot, performance, humor, etcetera.”  Part of the genius of the Dead Teenager Movie is that (when done right) it makes us want these kids dead.  We watch for the kills.  This is why the virginal female character is typically the Final Girl.  She is virtuous, nice, even bland, but she is worth more to the human race than the remainder of the characters surrounding her.  The rule of thumb with this sort of film is that, if characters do drugs or have sex, they are marked for death.  I could see going one step further (or maybe just putting a little shading on it).  The reason these kids are lined up for death stems from their sense of entitlement.  The majority of times, these are people who behave like the world owes them something, and, goddammit, they’re gonna take it all.  This is why they indulge their every whim like they do.  They don’t care, because they deserve to be allowed to be reckless (the converse argument can be made that this recklessness is from the natural maturation process, and their slaughter is a stymieing of this, a way for youth to be kept in check, but I like my theory more).  With this in mind, the Ugly Americans of this film break into a house they were not invited into, because they are due a roof over their heads rather than having to rough it for their bad decisions.  They eat food and drink wine that doesn’t belong to them, because it’s available, not because they earned it or even plan to pay for it.  They make themselves at home and snoop through the entirety of the estate, because they have no regard for other people’s stuff.  They are takers.  This is much like the Nazis and their orgy.  The Nazis took advantage of every vice they could get their grubby, little dick-beaters on because they were “The Master Race.”  They were entitled to it.  Both the Nazis and the teenagers in the film are punished for hubristic narcissism far more than for acting on their baser impulses.

It’s well-known that the Nazis had a penchant for documenting, in gruesome detail, all of their atrocities.  This translates into Fulci’s film in two ways.  During the prologue, young, rat-stache-having Nazi, Willy (Robert Egon), stumbles around the party with a film camera, gleefully recording everything around him.  At several points, he aims his camera in direct address to the audience, as if he were filming us.  We are partakers in the orgy.  We are enjoying the flesh, sweat, and depravity as much as the Germans, because this is a part of why we are watching this movie in the first place.  Willy’s film is (magically?) developed and screened for the participants (I assumed that same evening, since there’s no separation of time, direct or indirect).  They watch the things we also watched, while we were also being watched.  Moreover, the teenagers that infest the house also engage in this act of looking and self-reflexivity.  As they are separated and “attacked,” each is shown a mirror through which they see their innermost desires and/or selves revealed while being watched by what’s on the other side (the fact that this is done via mirror goes to my point about narcissism, though far more overtly in this case).  Mark (Joseph Alan Johnson) is horny and inebriated, so he sees a naked woman enticing him to the point that he plays Russian Roulette to get her.  Anne (Teresa Razzaudi) sees Willy and is seduced by the promise of rough sex she would never tell anyone she secretly wants.  Predatory lesbian Maria (Luciana Ottaviani aka Jessica Moore) sees her heart’s desire, Anne, getting hot and heavy with Celine (Maria Concetta Salieri), causing a fit of jealous rage.  Everyone in Sodoma’s Ghost, including the viewer is watching and being watched, partaker and partaken.  

Anyone who hears the name Lucio Fulci in association with this movie might get a little excited to check out one of his lesser known works.  Don’t be.  This film is a mess from front to back, technically, stylistically, and logically (I realize few people watch Fulci’s films for their logic, but the best of them have some internal sense of it that they follow to some extent or another).  The use of handheld camera is out of control and sloppy, even when it’s motivated.  The editing is disjointed (the best example of this is a sexual rendezvous between two characters that ends abruptly and is followed by a scene where one of the characters despairs that his sex partner turned into a monster, which we are deprived of seeing entirely; I get that there was no budget for this thing, but come on).  Outside of the grating characters, the shit dialogue, the turgid melodrama, the plank-like acting, is the ultimate discovery that there is absolutely nothing threatening about anything that happens (with one exception), and these grabassers just spent eighty-four very long minutes of YOUR life learning diddly-shit other than that they should just continue with their tour of France as if all of this never happened.  I guarantee you, if you watch Sodoma’s Ghost, you’ll wish you could continue with your life as if it never happened, as well.

MVT:  It’s the obvious co-winners of the copious female nudity and some decent gross-out effects.

Make or Break:  The finale and denouement are just infuriatingly unsatisfying.

Score:  2/10

Aenigma (1987)

Escargot, that French delicacy that everyone wishes they could afford, but no one actually wants to eat.  Even if it’s slathered in garlic and butter, like in Lucio Fulci’s Aenigma, the prospect of eating some chewy gastropod with the consistency of snot holds little appeal.  In fairness, I’m sure there are, in fact, people who genuinely like escargot, but I don’t know any of them, thus no sane person craves them (this is a stone fact and totally not confirmation bias or somesuch).  But let’s be honest, if it weren’t for the continental air and the sheer status symbolism of their expense, snails would rarely be consumed in this country (outside of people stuck in the wilderness who have no other option).  I stand by this opinion.  Let’s not forget that these little bastards can be deadly, too.  They cover a victim in this film, smothering her, including one “I bought this from a gumball machine” slug that works its way into the girl’s mouth (surely, not a metaphor for anything).  Clearly, Fulci understood that snails are more horrific than savory to the vast majority of his audience (I ponder how this sequence played in France).  Considering the film’s director, I’m kind of surprised that the snails didn’t rip this girl apart with their tiny, fang-festooned maws (they don’t actually have teeth, but there is no way this scene cannot be compared to the pipe-cleaner spider scene from The Beyond).

Kathy (Milijana Zirojevic) gets all dolled up to go on a big date with Fred (Riccardo Acerbi), the gym instructor at St. Mary’s College in Boston, which she attends.  The two-faced, prick friends of hers, however, have set her up for humiliation, and, after being chased into traffic and put in a coma, Kathy finds her mind free to exact revenge through the body of new student Eva (Lara Lamberti).  The more I think of it, the more this plot follows that of Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2 (and, I’m sure, many others, but Prom Night 2 was a recent watch for me, so…).  Ah, well.

Fulci, it would seem, is something of a critic-proof director (at least in genre circles).  The worst thing I ever saw of his was Manhattan Baby, yet even that turkey couldn’t dissuade my rather high opinion of the filmmaker.  I think this allowance the man is given stems from two aspects of his filmography.  First, you’re guaranteed to see at least one thing in each of his films that you won’t see almost anywhere else.  Witness: the zombie versus shark scene from Zombie, if you have any doubt.  There is imagination at work in his films, despite the fact that sometimes he’s able to pull off the effect he desires and sometimes he isn’t (see the aforementioned spider scene).  But his films try so hard, one can’t help but be charmed both by their earnest ambition and their lunatic grotesqueries.  Second, the man and his movies unashamedly play to the peanut gallery.  Despite the themes that his films may or may not have (largely that the world is shit, and the people in it are shitheels), they are pulp entertainment, first and foremost, grand guignol for the spaghetti set.  Consequently, Fulci curries favor that other splatter meisters don’t/can’t, flying in the face of all sense, and it’s glorious.

Aenigma follows in line with this assessment.  To wit: Kathy is pursued by what, in any other movie, could be termed a lynch mob, and the revelers cackle and bray at the tops of their lungs.  It reminds me of a rib-tickler that the Joker tells in Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum graphic novel.  Basically, the punchline illustrates (with a moment of people screaming in a new dad’s face) that people are vicious, life is cruel, and it’s all a massive joke on us.  Kathy’s physician, Doctor Anderson (Jared Martin), not only can’t figure out why a braindead vegetable can “experience a violent emotion” but also can, apparently, read her mind in order to come up with this diagnosis in the first place.  He’s also completely not above chasing after girls half his age and all but fucking them in open view of anyone with eyes in their head (I’m including blind people in this statement, he’s that brazen).  A marble statue “comes to life” and chokes someone to death.  The beauty here is that the statue is actually an extremely obvious rubber suit.  Doctor Anderson wears a sweatshirt that simply states “University” (shades of John Blutarsky from Animal House).  Kathy’s mom, Crazy Mary (Dusica Zegarac), is the most pale, pasty-faced, pasta-haired nutso you can envision.  Her eyes turn red for no reason (is Kathy possessing her mother?  Is her mother the power behind Kathy?  Is the college’s faculty populated with witches/Satanists/bad apples?  Who knows?  Who cares?).  That’s just a smattering of the gonzo goings on at work here.

The intriguing thing is not so much the supernatural revenge idea as the classism taking place within this context.  Kathy is, of course, the Carrie White character (or Patrick, if you like that movie more), and she is as innocently gormless as they come.  She’s Melvin the Mop Boy from The Toxic Avenger, just a girl and slightly more restrained.  Furthermore, she is dirt poor, her mother’s job at the college providing the gateway for her to attend the exclusive institution for free.  This, in conjunction with her working class origin, places her beneath the other girls at the school and beneath contempt.  She is a thing to be mocked and tormented.  Consequently, Kathy’s vengeance is a strike back at the upper classes, and I would suggest that the forms of her vengeance imply a turning of the markers of high society back on their partakers.  Hence, we get things like a work of fine art dripping blood on a girl.  There are the previously noted marble statue and snail deaths.  An egoist of the fitness variety is strangled by a doppelganger.  The things the upper crust champion are the same things which enable their ends (mostly).     

Nonetheless, this wouldn’t be a Fulci film without a fetishization of the human eye.  The very first shot of the movie is a closeup on Kathy’s eyes as she puts on her makeup (while somebody croons, “put on your makeup”).  After the possession begins, there are a great many extreme closeups of eyes, sometimes with quick zooms, sometimes without.  Eyes in Aenigma are symbols of hatred, burrowing into the souls of others while simultaneously revealing the soul of the gazer.  It’s interesting to note, then, that there is no actual eyeball trauma in the film, which may upset some Fulci fanatics.  I can’t say I wasn’t expecting some ocular carnage, and the denial of this desire presents a subversion of this expectation from the man.  While the film does stand on its own well enough, a little eye pokery would, however, have made for a comfier watch (like waiting for Henny Youngman to deliver his “Take my wife.  Please” zinger).

MVT:  Lamberti is very easy on the eye, and she plays possessively bitchy as well as she does passionately vindictive.

Make or Break: The credits/opening sequence is as quintessentially Eighties Eurohorror as anything could be, for better and worse. 

Score:  6.25/10

Seven Notes in Black (1977)

I don’t know that I believe in psychics.  Brushing aside any of the science (or pseudoscience) about the human brain and how much of it is actually “tapped into” or not in that regard or whether that’s all just bullshit fueled by fantastic fiction (surely not), I’m just unsure on a core, cynical level that there are folks who can access some nebulous spirit world or glimpse into the future simply with the power of their mind.  But like Fox Mulder, I want to believe, and this is one of the many struggles that goes on daily between my rational and irrational mind.  I want to believe in things like this, because I want to believe that the world isn’t as drably mundane as it actually is.  By that same token, I’ve never personally encountered any convincing evidence to prove the converse (to be fair, it takes a lot to convince me).  

Maybe it goes back to my love of Godzilla films and Eiji Tsuburaya’s philosophy of having a sense of wonder about the world and wanting to pass this on to others through his work.  I mean, if things like psychics or Bigfoot or UFOs don’t exist, all that leaves is a workaday existence filled with the crushing realities of life (I know, I’m starting to get depressing here).  Contrarily, these things really probably shouldn’t be proven one way or the other, because then they would become as unremarkable as everything else we face daily.  In some ways, this is the same function that film bestows.  Cinema provides us with lives less ordinary, and we live in these narratives for a time, staving off the real world and all its problems, even as it reflects and/or addresses them.  My reasoning on all of this may read as murky to you, but that’s only because it’s murky to me (I’m notoriously bad at being black or white on a lot of things; the curse of a semi-open mind).  So I’m okay (and we, as an audience, are okay) with investing in the possibility that Virginia Ducci (Jennifer O’Neill) can see a murder she wasn’t actually present for in Lucio Fulci’s Seven Notes in Black (aka The Psychic aka Sette Note in Nero aka Death Tolls Seven Times).  I mean, why watch a film about a psychic, otherwise?

When she was just a young girl, Virginia “saw” her mother’s death while she was miles and miles away. Now an adult, Virginia, housewife of the wealthy Francesco Ducci (Gianni Garko), suddenly begins to have visions again, this time of a murder.  Obsessed with and plagued by her second sight, she pushes on in her investigation, placing herself in mortal peril.

Time in this film is fragmented in much the same way that reality is fragmented in other Fulci films (in fact, I would argue they essentially are the same).  We are constantly taken from the linear present to the murder, which is never presented in a straight line.  We get a shot of a smashed mirror, a shot of a yellow (giallo) cigarette in a blue ashtray, a shot of a man’s feet dragging across a carpet, etcetera.  This continuously happens to Virginia throughout the film, and it is usually accompanied by a quick zoom into her eyes (a form of Fulci’s signature ocular trauma motif?).  In other words, the camera attacks her, and the result is a disorientating reordering of the real world.  In this sense, Virginia is brought into Hell (or a hell), similar to that which bursts forth through the portal under the hotel in The Beyond and so forth, the difference here being that a person is the gateway rather than a place, and she is drawn through her mind to this Hell rather than this Hell being drawn through a door to us.  Another contrast is that Virginia’s reality is a knot ceaselessly being untangled, whereas in The Beyond, reality is being twisted, though both stories will eventually still make some sort of sense in their own way (one is just more literal than the other, arguably).

Also fitting with Fulci’s other work, Seven Notes in Black is a fatalistic film (as films about psychics tend to be).  Virginia has witnessed something, and she must follow the line of it to the bitter end.  There’s no getting around it, because this is the only way for her to unburden herself of her visions (at least for now).  Plus, there is the aspect that what’s coming down the pike is inexorable, despite attempts to avoid it.  The segments have to be pieced together in the proper sequence for order to be reinstated (whether or not this reinstated order is better or worse than what came before it is debatable).  Yet, as the pieces fall into place, Virginia understands (as do we) that she is following a preordained narrative; she just didn’t realize it at first.  Her free will, then, is robbed from her, for the most part.  The only question left open is whether or not she will survive (you can argue that her free will kicks in here, but previous evidence makes that claim suspect), and this provides the tension of the film.  Just because you can see into another time or across continents, doesn’t mean you can halt the universe’s forward movement.  There is still cause and effect, but Virginia’s agency is limited in its influence on them.

From what I’ve seen of Fulci’s filmography, I feel fairly confident stating that Seven Notes in Black is not only his most coherent film, but it’s also his most accomplished (I’m sure some would contend that Lizard in a Woman’s Skin is the winner in the latter category).  The film stays on point from start to finish.  It builds its story from disparate elements, and said story remains unambiguous despite the ambiguity upon which it’s constructed.  There is also a lack of gore to be found here.  The most ludicrous visual we get is of a dummy having its plastic head bashed repeatedly off a cliff side (this was pretty amusing, all things considered, and proof that you can take the man out of the outrageousness, but you can’t take the outrageousness out of the man; not completely).  The film’s weakest point, ironically enough, is O’Neill.  She’s certainly attractive enough, and can pull off being anxious, but she has no real presence onscreen, otherwise.  Thankfully, Fulci is enough of a visual stylist to keep things interesting.  It’s surprising to me that the filmmaker doesn’t get more respect because of work like this (maybe because it was so infrequent in his oeuvre), but he deserves it, as does this film.

MVT:  Fulci shows some real restraint here, proving that ridiculous gore wasn’t the only thing he could do very well when given the chance.

Make or Break:  The prologue sets up the premise nicely, and it’s as enigmatic as it is audacious.

Score: 7/10