re: Fulci. One of the best directors ever. Has made so many awesome movies, with genuinely unsettling scenes. LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN, NEW YORK RIPPER, THE BEYOND, GATES OF HELL, ZOMBIE, DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING, NEW GLADIATORS, TOUCH OF DEATH, and THE PSYCHIC are all great films. He has his share of total crap, but for the most part he was a great director. Was capable of producing totally atmospheric, arty films that looked like nothing before and nothing since then. He is easy to make fun of, because of his constant useage of the zoom button, his total lack of clarity in his plots (or perhaps something was lost in translation...), and his overall sloppiness. But to me, he has made some of the most genuinely unsettling scenes ever in a film:
- The autopsy/chopping off limbs with a chainsaw scene in touch of death
- The spiders eating the face in The Beyond; also see the ending which just blows my mind
- The cat eating the brains in the film I just watched
- And almost the entire film, "The Gates of Hell"... what a masterpiece... the drill in the face, the odd soundtrack, the constant crackling and decaying film footage, the end where the entire film breaks like shards of glass, the weird and jarring edits (in the
unedited version), the buried-underneath-the-ground scene, the organ vomitting scene, the constant visions of the priest's eyes, and the scene near the end where one of the main character's head.. the back of his head.. gets ripped off and his brains spill out. All very genuinely unsettling and difficult to watch, in a good way. OH, that's not even mentioning the storm of millions of maggots infesting an entire room... that movie is amazing, one of the best... it's a little off, but it's supposed to be.
He basically made art-horror films.. films more concerned with atmosphere and imagery than a conventional plot or story. It took me a while to truely appreciate what he was doing. When I was 14 and watched Zombie for the first time, I basically walked away with, "Oh, that was pretty cool but not really what I was looking for." Now I recognize it, and many of his other films, as the masterpieces they are. When you consider many of his films were unfinished and rushed, he never had any budget whatsoever for most of his films.. I mean, if you look at any of his films, they often were met with so much restraint from everyone all around him.. censors, actors, other directors... he had a very troubled life and made very troubled films, but it paid off. He has his share of crap.. MANHATTAN BABY is one of the worst films I've ever seen... but I don't think anyone will ever be able to make genuinely unsettling, upsetting, even DISTURBING horror films -- TRUE horror -- like him again.
I just watched this:
One film was a cool little doc (though not as good as "speak of the devil"), the other was a shitty but hallucinagenic film. I don't rate docs, but the film part was probably a 5/10...