80s completist that I am, I had to purchase the Blu-ray release of super indie anthology The Basement. And Fulci completist that I am, I had to purchase two of his films that I didn’t yet have on disc. All three were blind buys because I’d never seen any of them. Let’s find out how that turned out for me.
THE BASEMENT (1989)
This low budget anthology is only 69 minutes long, and the reason I’d never seen it back in the day is because apparently no one had. It seems it was never completed back then, but someone dug it up, restored it, and created a completed audio track with a score and sound effects as well as all the dialogue. The original audio is included as a bonus on the Blu-ray, and there are no embellishments—just white noise between actors’ lines.
Not surprisingly, it’s a sloppy feature, but it sure is gritty, and it perfectly serves as a time capsule reflecting how shot-on-video movies looked and felt back then.
The wraparound has a foursome of people in a basement with no idea how they got there. A ghoul in a robe appears and tells them they must pay…for sins they haven’t committed yet! I guess the four stories are supposed to show us what their sins will be….
1st story – A woman sitting by a pool keeps luring people she has a beef with into the water, where something with tentacles kills them…including a silver daddy in a Speedo.
2nd story – One of my favorite tales here, this one has a “Halloween Scrooge” being visited by creeps and monsters on Halloween night, including the kind of awesome witch that was so rare in 80s horror movies.
3rd story – While filming a hard rock zombie movie in the wilderness, the cast and crew is attacked by real zombies. This has a classic, 1970s zombie movie vibe and has embellished with rock music to enhance the retro vibe.
4th story – A young dude buys an allegedly possessed house and soon discovers there definitely are killer creeps haunting the place.
The writing might be weak, but the 80s nostalgia is through the roof, and the practical special effects are fantastic.
VOICES FROM BEYOND (1991)
This Fulci film was released during my days of working at the video store, but we didn’t carry it, so I’d never seen it before. In true throwback fashion, cheesy is the only way to describe it.
The opener promises so much. We see a man and wife in bed together before he gets up and goes to stab a crying kid to death. Awesome.
Next, we witness that man hemorrhage to death in a hospital. After that the plot becomes a classic trope. His family descends on his home because there’s money involved.
And here’s where we get the extra cheese spread. His daughter returns home, and his ghost visits her to tell her she must figure out the mystery of who hated him enough to kill him before his body rots in the ground.
There are ghostly voice overdubs as he keeps urging her to solve the mystery, and we even get a few shots of his body starting to deteriorate in his grave.
The horror is relegated to nightmare sequences his hateful family members have, including a mortuary zombie scene and an eyeball cake scene. It’s nowhere near the level of Fulci horror you’d expect, and in the end the daughter uncovers the truth and then walks off while smiling at the camera. Groan.
A CAT IN THE BRAIN (1990)
This is Lucio Fulci being totally meta about his own movies. He plays himself, and we follow his “character” as he directs scenes from some of the films he’s directed or produced—meaning, a good chunk of the gore and sex in this flick come from actual movie clips inserted into the plot as if they are being created at that moment.
Fulci begins to see the horrors from his movies in real life, and fearing that his mind is being warped by his own sick imagination, he goes to a psychiatrist. Here’s the sneaky part. While Fulci thinks he’s starting to go crazy, it turns out his psychiatrist is a fricking psycho killer.
Almost awesome, but the film is so over-the-top campy that the whole concept gets bogged down by the movie clip scenes, which mostly serve as ads for other Fulci films more than anything else. The psychiatrist plays a giddy psycho perfectly, and his kill scenes deliver classic, cheap-looking Fulci practical effects gore, but I just wish his terror tour had been the focus of the film.
