Beyond The Door

The Chi Sei Girls

Beyond The Door
aka Chi Sei?
aka The Devil Within Her
Italy 1974
Directed by Ovidio G. Assonitis
and Robert Barrett
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some spoilerage ensues!

I bought this one in an Arrow sale at the urging of my friend @cultofcinema. He knows me well enough to know that if he recommends me something slightly off kilter which is shot in an interesting manner, chances are I’ll like it. And I have to say, this one is absolutely brilliant in that it’s got some nice cinematography and it’s completely bug nuts crazy! So he gets a gold star for this one.

The film starts off with a black screen and a voice over narrative addressing the audience, which immediately made me think of the Edward Van Sloan opening or closing warnings on Universal’s original Dracula (this scene now sadly lost from that production) and Frankenstein. Turns out the guy speaking to us is the devil, inviting the audience to watch the proceedings and reminding us to look out, the person sitting next to us watching the film could be him. As the voice over continues for a bit, the screen pans onto loads of lighted candles in the darkness and, after more camera movement, we come across main protagonist/partial antagonist Jessica (played by Juliet Mills... as in sister of Hayley and daughter of John... so a lady from a very distinguished acting family).

Jessica is standing in a darkened room with her eyes closed. As the camera zooms in on her she opens her eyes and we see what she is looking at... a naked lady spread-eagled in a pentagram whose features suddenly turn into someone very much like Richard Johnson before changing back to the girl. She runs out on the ceremony. As it happens, Richard Johnson was actually standing next to her, looking on. He plays Dmitri and, as he leaves the scene, he talks with the devil in his head, who causes him to crash his car off a cliff to his demise. However, the devil keeps his spirit alive in partial physical form for ten years, so he can bring the future 'Satan’s spawn' into the world when Jessica is carrying it. It’s a bit confusing to be honest but, then the titles start and we’ve jumped ten years.

And the titles are brilliant. Crosscutting between Juliet and her two obnoxious, foul mouthed children as they go grocery shopping and scenes of her husband in a recording studio, as he records the music which is the soundtrack to these credits. Twice he stops the music and it cuts back to him in the studio before the credits continue... and that’s nicely done, with his last stop coordinating with a stop light signal as Jessica drives her car. Her husband, Robert, is played by writer/director/actor Gabriele Lavia, who I best remember for his appearances in three Dario Argento movies, especially as the irritating young musician who is friends with David Hemming’s character in Profondo Rosso (aka Deep Red, reviewed here)... you know, the one who it turns out isn’t the killer after all.

And from here on the film plays out as a complete, post-modern patchwork quilt of movies such as The Exorcist, The Omen, Rosemary's Baby, poltergeist movies, haunted doll movies... pretty much any supernaturally themed movie trope they could think of is shoved in here and, in spite of this, the movie still is thoroughly entertaining... as Juliet’s mysterious new pregnancy sees her becoming increasingly hostile and irritated until she reaches the ‘full on Linda Blair’ stage of demonic possession and Dimitri forces himself on the family, much to the chagrin of the family doctor.

So we have objects and people thrown around rooms like many a poltergeist themed movie. We have dolls walking around on their own. We have a demonically influenced truck which nearly runs over Robert, like in an Omen film. And talking of The Omen, one of the kids is obviously not quite right, which is confirmed in a twist ending where he’s revealed to have Midwych Cuckoo-like glowy eyes... which I won’t say anything about here... partially because I don’t want to spoil it for you but mostly because it makes absolutely no sense within the context of the rest of the movie and contradicts everything we’ve seen throughout the film. And then there are so many shades of The Exorcist, starting off quite subtly when Jessica starts vomiting blood, in a wonderful bathroom set which has white walls and red bathroom fittings (I guess the sink doesn’t show up the blood, at least). But I figured something must be up with her when she starts occasionally talking in a gravelly man’s voice, which sounds like a low rent version of Mercedes McCambridge. And then there’s that time when, in her sleep, her eyes both open but her left eye looks straight ahead while her right eyes looks around all over the place like she’s some kind of ultra distressed Ben Turpin... this is a charmingly unsettling scene, I might add. Or that moment when she stands up from the bed and starts floating across to the other side of the room. Of course, the 180 degree headspin moment is a dead give away as to how things are going with her. Yes, it’s not long before she’s vomiting green slime from her mouth and flicking it around at people while attacking them with her mind powers. It’s all in here.

All this and some lovely shot set ups too. Asides from Richard Johnson suddenly popping up in mirrors etc we have a scene where he’s watching Gabriele Lavia in a restaurant. Johnson’s on the inside, watching through the big glass doors and Lavia is on a balcony table. When he sees Johnson we cut to a shot of Johnson to the window in the right of the screen and the strong reflection of Lavia watching him back in the left of the screen. Cool stuff. Alas, not all of the best shots made it into the picture, it turns out... 

When I watched the trailer, after my friend recommended it to me, the absolutely amazing shot which sold the film to me was one where Lavia is walking in long shot towards the camera in a street in San Francisco (the exteriors were all shot by one director there while the interiors were shot by the other director in Rome... don’t ask me why). He is walking in the right hand quarter of the screen and the shot is split, clearly delineated by the lampposts and street signs which create a vertical to partition him off from the rest of the street. Then, at the end of the shot, as he approaches the vicinity of the camera view, he moves into the left of the frame to grab a newspaper. It’s wonderful but, alas, in the film itself, only the last little bit of the shot, where he crosses into the left, remains in the film. Which is a shame so, watch the trailer if you get a chance, it’s a fantastic piece of cinematography and frame design absent from the final cut.

The films also totally ‘brings the crazy’... as if all the demonic, supernatural tropes colliding wasn’t enough for you. There’s a scene where Robert takes a walk and a street guitarist starts playing the soundtrack of him walking, in a strange moment where the diegetic and non-diegetic exist simultaneously. Then, as the song Roberto’s Theme (which I’d already heard on the wonderful Easy Tempo Volume 4 compilation album) plays out as his soundtrack, various street musicians follow him and get in his face with their flutes and so on, harassing him with their cool and mellow vibes in about as threatening a manner as you can imagine a musician could and still play their instrument. It’s just totally bizarre and almost worth a watch just for that scene alone.

There are some nice referential nods too. I mean, goodness knows why, when her two children are sent away, their poster of choice on the walls is Andy Warhol’s soup can painting but, when they pack their bags they get tins of Campbell’s Pea Soup from the drawers... um, strange behaviour for children but a nice literal reference to The Exorcist at least. Warner Brothers must have thought so too because they sued the company for copying their film and got ‘an undisclosed sum’ for their trouble. Perhaps they could see the box office take because... and I really wasn’t expecting this... the film was a huge success in Italy and made a load of money. Indeed, Mario Bava’s Shock was also marketed as Beyond The Door II on occasion to get people in, even though it’s not an actual sequel (although I can see some thematic commonalities) and there was even a Beyond The Door III, which was similarly unconnected, from what I can make out.

And that’s me done on this one. Beyond The Door is a totally bonkers movie which I will try and foist upon my most unsuspecting friends when I get a chance. I’m really grateful for the recommendation on this one and I thought everything about it was just a little bit odd, off kilter or plain daft... which is a recipe for an interesting cinematic dish in my opinion. I'll definitely be watching this one again at some point... preferably when I can get the opportunity to inflict it on others.

Giallo Meltdown - A Moviethon Diary

Mellow Giallo

Giallo Meltdown - A Moviethon Diary
by Richard Glenn Schmidt
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform  2015
ISBN: 9781507839126

This was another of those pesky “other people who bought this who are much cooler than you, also bought this stuff...” recommendations from Amazon and, frankly, I’m not sure if this book is a work of crazed genius or the exact opposite. I’m going to plead the fifth and conclude to myself that it averages out as something in between the two but, most books devoted to Italian giallo films are doing a service to a hugely neglected, although certainly rediscovered in the last decade or so, genre of cinema that mixes mostly terrible acting and bad mystery plots with violence and sex soaked shenanigans. The fact that these films are quite often so beautifully filmed, designed, edited and musically scored that the craftsmanship behind the camera more than makes up for the lack of coherence and elevates the genre to an art form which is possibly the most vibrant in the history of cinema, makes them much worthier of your attention than a lot of the stuff playing in your local multiplex these days.

Now, my main problem with this book is the use of English throughout.... American, Canadian or any other. There are a heck of a lot of typos and grammar clangers in this book and, while I understand that a smattering of these are clearly deliberate, to match the humour of the writer, I still see red when words or letters are mis-used or, in the case of some sentences, missed out altogether. That being said, there’s a fair amount on offer in this tome too and it’s certainly not like any other book on giallo you may have read in the past, I suspect.

The book itself is divided into 13 sections where the writer sits down for three or four days at a time and just binge watches a load of giallo movies... well into double figures, in any one period. I guess we’ve all done stuff like this but Schmidt is a repeat offender and, frankly, when it comes to watching gialli, who can blame him. He’s often joined by his wife LeEtta... who also did the cover art to this misguided gem of a book... and various other friends, mother-in-law and pets, as the moviethons run their inevitable course. It’s not the best structure in the world but it’s not like he’s trying to say huge amounts about the films in question and these are more like reading reactionary notes to the images and situations as they unwind before his J&B stained eyes in real time... even though he’s obviously gone back and edited them to make them more coherent after the fact.

Okay, so I don’t know much about Schmidt himself, other than he seems to be a fairly entertaining guy. It looks like he’s also a blogger for doomedmoviethon.com and cinemasomnambulist.com and this may go some way to explaining his writing style which, to me, seems to be as manic, unfocused and driven as a drugged up version of James Ellroy in one of his more frenetic streaks of twisted prose. Think White Jazz on acid! That being said, his humour runs consistently throughout the text and, although he’s not trying to deliver solid, critical reviews of the films here... he does quite often touch the little kernels of truth about a flick which demonstrates that his somewhat self-deprecating words actually mask a rare insight into the art of film in general.

The films range from the obvious to the obscure and that’s one of the things that kept my interest going throughout the length of the book, to be honest. I’ve got maybe between 150 to 200 gialli in my personal library (and growing steadily) but this guy seems to have seen even more than I have... which means about a third of the movies covered in this book are new to me and, for the most part, went straight on my ‘to acquire’ list... although I suspect I have a fair few of them already, foldered away in my ‘to watch’ movie backlog, which is probably well over a thousand movies deep by now.

The book gets off to a good start when the writer mentions that his wife refers to Luigi Pistilli as the Italian Jeremy Irons. Which is pretty funny, I think. Say that to anyone at my work place and I can guarantee that not a one of them will even know who Pistilli is but, little moments like this are what makes the book readable and, although I found his style infuriating at various times, I somehow could not put the thing down. It even distracted me from my Candy Crush time so... you know... I must have really liked it.

And on it goes. There’s a weird mix of fairly obscure films and giallo classics on show here. I like that the author is totally okay with sourcing copies of the films he wants to watch from... um... illegitimate sources and that he’s up front about it. Over half the films in here are not, and probably never will be, commercially available and I think the writer takes the same attitude as me when it comes to seeking out prints of movies you want to see before you die. If it’s not available commercially, life is too short to wait around on the off chance that it might, one day, become so. So there are a lot of caveats in here about bootleg VHS transfers with Greek subtitles and bad tracking problems. In the case of a couple of the films he’s watching, he even complains that the movie has some of the reels in the wrong order. I have to respect someone who goes to extreme lengths to watch films which he can’t source from anywhere else and, by the looks of it (and also like me) he's happy to upgrade to a proper, commercial transfer, when one becomes available for sale. Or ‘if... it becomes available’, more to the point.

The writer has some nice patter when he’s at his most coherent. Here are a couple of my favourite gems from a book that has a fair few jewels tucked away when you least expect them...

“The beautiful scenery is totally beautiful. Darn it, where's my thesaurus.”

“The killer liberates them both of the burden of keeping all that blood inside their bodies.”

I’m also really pleased he has some of the same problems that I have when I’m trying to review a movie and can’t remember details like character or actor names. At one stage he says:

“Good old Howard Ross is here as the police inspector. IMDB says his character's name is police inspector.”

I’m glad that the guy is this sarcastic when it comes to the IMDB because, honestly, the amount of times it’s let me down in a similar manner is beyond belief. Sometimes it can’t even find the title of the movie you’ve just watched because it’s just not been entered into the database. So, yeah... I can kinda relate to this guy because he obviously has the same kinds of research problems as me to get through.

For all this, though, there was one bit which put me into a red rage, at first, when the writer is talking about giallo master Dario Argento’s Do You Like Hitchcock? He refers to one of the characters in it spying on his neighbours like Cary Grant does in North By Northwest. I was on my feet and angrily ranting up and down the room at this point because, as you know, everybody knows this was James Stewart in Rear Window. After I’d calmed down and read another paragraph, I came to the realisation that maybe the writer was having me on because he then goes on to reference the Hitchcock movie where the two characters swap murders as being The Birds (as opposed to Strangers On A Train). Okay, so this is even more blatantly ludicrous than the first ‘slip up’ and so, I can only conclude that the dude is messing with the reader’s minds for fun. At least... I hope he is.

At the end of the day, Giallo Meltdown is a slightly patchily written but hugely entertaining love letter to a genre of films which has become very popular again over the last decade or more. One thing I will say is that, if you are less than familiar with some of the films he’s giving notes on here, you might find yourself a bit lost. So we come to that old conundrum of the reader having enough knowledge so that they’ll be entertained by R. G. Schmidt’s jokes and observations about a particular film while, at the same time somehow being unfamiliar with classic and basic essentials of the genre such as Argento’s Deep Red (reviewed here) and Tenebrae (reviewed here) or Mario Bava’s Five Dolls For An August Moon (reviewed here)... that you will actually find the writer’s plot descriptions of some use. It’s kind of a Catch 22 situation but I think I’d rather be in the former camp than the latter. Either way, the book is as much about the writer and his companions (and some of the revelations about these companions, although expected, are kinda heartbreaking) and I ultimately had a good time with it. If you’re a fan of the genre and the various actors, actresses, directors and composers (I’m pleased to say he also talks about the music in these things a fair bit), then you should probably give Giallo Meltdown a try. I’m glad I did. I just have to find out what Mountain Dew is now because the author here drinks gallons of the stuff and I don’t think they make it in this country.

Lightning Bolt

Most Eisley

Lightning Bolt
(aka Operazione Goldman)
Italy/Mexico 1966
Directed by Antonio Margheriti (as Anthony Dawson)
Rare Flix Region 1 DVD

Wow. Are there really any words I can use to describe just how awful this movie turned out to be?

I bought this as a special order a couple of years ago and it’s because I just assumed, from the artwork, that this was one of those awful Italian superhero movies I can have a lot of fun with. The poster shows a red lycra clad, amply endowed blonde lady... judo throwing some kind of masked ninja. I mean. c’mon... who’s not going to go after a film that promises a buxom superheroine meting out justice to an army of masked blokes. A similar poster I’ve recently discovered under another of the film’s release titles, Operazione Goldman, similarly features the red clad blonde lady at rest on the barrel of a gun belonging to the leading actor.

I’d like to say that either of these posters is a good representation of what’s in the movie but, truth be told, there is no blonde, red lycra clad super lady to be found in this one in any shape or form... unless you count the main character’s not so blonde boss, ‘never clad in red lycra’ lady, Captain Patricia Flanagan (played by Diana Lorys), who only seems to be in about of the third movie. And she just seems to be there purely as eye candy for the other characters to look at and act surprised that their government is employing the services of one of the fairer sex. The only other things she does in this movie are get in trouble and be a damsel in distress for the main protagonist, not-so-superspy Harry Sennet (played not so convincingly by Anthony Eisley) and, in one scene, shoot a not so prominent villainess played by Wandisa Guida in the back to stop her from killing Harry with a squirty acid gun. In fact, you could just as easily use this poster and change the title to, say, one of the Star Wars movies and it would still have as much resemblance to the movie it is trying to advertise as it does here. Which is, of course, absolutely nothing.

What can I say about this film? I’ve not seen that many Italian spy movies, yet, but this one... which is presumably called Lightning Bolt to cash in on the previous year’s James Bond title Thunderball... has surely got to be one of the worst of its kind... I hope. There are movies which are so bad they’re good... a pleasure to spend time with as you watch the cast and crew stumble around and try to fashion what they’re doing into a fairly coherent viewing experience but, in the case of this one, I have to say that it’s just bad, period.

The story seems to involve a plot very similar, pretty much stolen in fact, from the movie version of Ian Fleming’s Dr. No... the idea of toppling rockets. The reason that the supervillian here is doing it is because he wants to reach the moon first and control mankind with the threat of his giant, moon based laser rocket. So, you know, he needs to stop everybody else from getting there first so he can get his mad laser of death built in the most effortless way possible. Did I also mention that this man is the owner of his own worldwide beer company? His lair is in one of his factory warehouses and... yeah... so there’s that.

We see two people exploring what could be the underwater cause of the rocket toppling early on as one of them goes down to investigate a giant dome. Two mechanical arms come out of the dome and then they... ‘something’ him to death. I couldn’t quite work out what was supposed to be going on here but the diver was obviously having a hard time as he was reacting to what looks like something that should probably have been added in as a special effect later... I’m guessing. So, whatever it is that the arms held... lethal electricity or strange beams of death defying otherness... they’re pretty much an invisible version of that and I’m sure that must have helped the budget tremendously. Doesn’t help the audience much but... hey... at least it was a cheap death.

The guy left in the boat above is presumed killed when it explodes for some unknown reason. Luckily and inexplicably, he is a very clever scientist that the villain somehow manages to save and who he can use to develop the laser he wants to install on the moon for him. Seriously? What kind of plan is that? Do these guys not go to Supervillain Business College where they can find out about the simple things like not spending a load of their beer profits on building a rocket to the moon before they’ve actually finished developing the laser they’re going to put up there? This makes no sense.

Anyway, red headed Harry Sennet is sent to investigate. He was supposed to be blonde but, from what I can gather,  when they tried to dye Anthony Eisley’s hair that colour it just went red instead. So.... anyway, his voice-over narrative provides clues to what’s going on about 70% of the time (you can try and navigate the logic of the rest yourself) and there are some genuinely corny and puntastic lines, befitting the downmarket Bond character that this guy is trying so hard to be... at least for a while. Bits of dialogue such as when he’s asked by a poolside lady, “Do you like my tan Harry?” to which he answers, “Tan-talising.” Or his unfettered wit when he informs the audience about a possible romantic conquest like this... “She carried around a silencer. Her husband, Archie.” But after a fairly short time the dialogue just pitches down to an even lesser level of banter than this and the voice-over moments become fairly interminable.

One of the real problems with this pun slinging and confident but beyond sexist, bottom swatting special agent is that he never really looks the part. There are some actors... Sean Connery, Charlton Heston, Angelina Jolie, Arnold Schwarzenneger, to name a few... and they look like they can pretty much handle anything the world could throw at them quite credibly... whether they actually could or not. In Eisley’s case he doesn’t, I’ll be honest, look like he is that young or fit enough to hold his own against any kind of henchman or supervillain... of any kind. I’m wondering if the producers of this movie thought so too because, most of the time, he just seems to be walking around trying to talk the villains out of his way. The one time when he does get kinda physical is when he and Captain Patricia enter... one of the most ridiculous and self defeating deathtraps ever put in a movie, I reckon.

So, the two of them get locked into a small but very tall chamber.... a set which is inexplicably re-used as a completely different room with a completely different function at a completely different location later in the movie. And then one of the wealth of completely non-functional looking pipes, which is open at the end for some reason, presumably for just this purpose, starts gushing out water and slowly, oh so slowly, filling the tall chamber. It’s a good job there are lots of pipes jutting out from the wall or Harry wouldn’t have somewhere to leave the good lady sitting while he both climbs and swims to alleviate their diabolical predicament. So how do our heroes escape? They can’t shoot their way out because the old ricochet sound effect on the soundtrack says they can’t, when they try.

Well... the first thing Harry does is climb up to the top of the chamber and plug a hole which he says must be sucking all the water into the room. Um... what? So, yes, he plugs the little hole in the top of the chamber and, indeed, the pipe does suddenly defy logic and stop gushing water. We’re through the looking glass here people! Then, the villain, who can see him and pretty much anyone, anywhere in the world with his science bending, magical view screen... tries to stop Harry tinkering with the locked trap door at the bottom of the chamber. He says to his assistant to open it if he tries to get it open again... because, um, yeah, that’ll teach him. And he does. Presumably his twisted thinking is that Harry will be killed from all the water pressure as the chamber empties him out and washes him into the surrounding landscape. Golly, never saw that completely ludicrous escape coming... as Harry just walks back into the chamber and escapes with his pipe perched lady friend.

And that about sums up the level of the movie, I’m afraid. It sounds like it could be at least entertaining, purely on a comedy level... but it really isn’t.  And when Harry finally despatches the supervillain by having him fall off a gantry to his death before reviving just in time to be rolled over by red hot magma midst all the random explosions... Harry comes out with probably the most completely witless quip in superspy history... “I didn't like your beer, either.” No, seriously. Comedy genius here.

The print is in terrible shape and while I must give a big thank you and well done to Rare Flix for somehow managing to preserve this thing as best they can, including retaining the scope aspect ratio... the print degradation kinda offsets any chance the transfer had of getting this into the realm of quality viewing. But, you know, it’s really good that they’ve made the effort because films like this are a) a useful reminder of some of the most dire films out there and b) means you can find out how much you didn’t want to see it as soon as possible, rather than spending a lifetime trying to track such a terrible disappointment of a movie down. If you like 1960s spy movies, you may just welcome the idea of seeing what Lightning Bolt is like. If you don’t have that much of an interest though... I’d say it’s fairly safe to give this one a miss.

Zombie Flesh Eaters (aka Zombi 2 aka Zombie)

Breakfast At Fulci’s

Zombie Flesh Eaters (aka Zombi 2 aka Zombie)
1979 Italy
Directed by Lucio Fulci
Arrow Blu Ray Region A/B/C

When I finally caught up with seeing Blake Edwards 1961 romantic comedy Breakfast At Tiffany’s a number of years ago, my first impression of the film was, “Wow! This is just like Zombie Flesh Eaters.” I’ll come back to that thought for you in a minute.

Lucio Fulci has always been a bit of a hit and miss director for me, although I have started coming around to his work more in recent years (this stuff was almost impossible to get uncut and in its correct aspect ratio before the dawn of the multiregion DVD) and I think some of his films, such as the giallo Lizard In A Woman’s Skin (reviewed here) are among the finest of the genre.

When I first saw Zombie Flesh Eaters, as it is quaintly and luridly known here in the UK, it was with the reputation of being a once banned video nasty which a lot of the kids at school had already seen on uncut pirate video in their very early teens. I caught up with it almost two decades later when it was shown on a cable channel but... it still had the notoriously censored “wooden splinter slowly penetrates eyeball” scene sliced out of it by our less than beloved censors. I’ve said this before, a long time ago, but I think it bears repeating here... the removal of what is ultimately a fairly cheesy technical and practical effect actually serves to render the scene a lot stronger because your imagination tends to fill in the blank and it takes on a certain power as a scene without it. Nevertheless, there’s no way I was going to be left having watched only a censored version of the movie so I immediately bought the American DVD edition which was uncut, and my appreciation for the movie grew over the years.

I’m now on my third home video print of the film, Arrow’s new Region Free Blu Ray edition, which my cousin got me in a nice “steelbook double disc” edition for Christmas. There is, ironically, a ‘seamless branching’ error on the first disc, containing the film, which means the initial purchase of this “uncut zombie classic” will actually be missing the first 6 seconds of the post-credits establishing shot. Luckily, Arrow have now come clean about this and there is an address where you can send the first disc back to them and they will, hopefully, send you a replacement disc when the second pressing is done (was still waiting for mine to come back when I started writing this review but, hey! It’s here now with 6 seconds fully restored).

Contrary to popular belief, this movie was not “initially” made to cash in on the Dario Argento cut of George Romero’s second zombie feature Dawn Of The Dead (also known as Zombi) in its Italian release. The script was already being well worked on and looked at before that film hit cinemas. However, the players in the Italian film industry are never ones to let the opportunity for a ride on a successful band wagon get away from them so Zombie Flesh Eaters was released after Romero’s film with the title, in Italy, of Zombi 2... in the hopes that people would think it was a sequel (the irony being, of course, that Dawn Of The Dead was already, in itself, a sequel to Romero’s groundbreaking Night Of The Living Dead). In the US I believe it was just released as Zombie and over here it ran afoul of the Video Nasties list when it was released to early home video as Zombie Flesh Eaters. A small case could be put forward, if one wanted to bother to try to tenuously link this movie to Romero’s film, that this movie “could” be seen as a prequel to Romero’s Dead films, since the movie closes with hordes of zombies invading New York over the Brooklyn Bridge (presumably stolen shots because I believe there was some trouble when Fulci’s production didn’t bother to get a license to shoot any footage in the US) but it’s a frail link at best and I don’t think Romero would approve of the mere idea of voodoo being the cause of the zombies in his movies.

So, getting back to my opening statement... looking at this film again after a good few years reminds me straight away why I feel that Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters and Edwards’ Breakfast at Tiffany’s are like two peas in a pod. It’s all to do with the way the shots are framed and designed. Everything in this movie is composed around vertical lines which often serve to truncate the frame into sections for the placement of people and objects within a shot... and this is exactly what I remember the Blake Edwards film doing too. Fulci seems hell bent on finding vertical splitters for a good deal of the film, heck he’ll even split shots with highlighted “hero” palm trees in the jungle scenes, or ensure that the jeep which our heroes ride in has one of those two piece windscreens so that he can compose people in this fashion. Other times, when it’s just two people talking in a room, for example, he’ll use texture and colour change on the wallpaper behind them to artificially create this kind of blocked in space and patiently drop his actors into different sections. It’s a great triumph of cinematography (which is more than most pictures of this kind of subject matter might have gotten treated to in terms of design) but it also serves to give the film a certain sense of subconscious claustrophobia to it... as everyone seems to be closeted away in their own separate space.

The film has Tisa Farrow (Mia’s sister) and the lovely Auretta Gay but its two principle assets are the English actors Richard Johnson (yeah, the cool dude who played Bulldog Drummond in the sixties and who played a major role in the original Robet Wise version of The Haunting) and Ian McCulloch (who was in stuff like The Survivors and who went on to star in a couple of other Italian horror-exploitation movies including the ludicrous and eminently watchable Contagion). Johnson and McCulloch really lend credence to the plot and laughable dialogue in this movie by investing everything they have to say and do with a certain amount of conviction and weight.

Of course, one of the movie’s standout and most celebrated scenes starts off with Auretta Gay showing off a couple of her principle assets with her topless scuba dive routine (which is nice, I admit). This leads into an extraordinary scene where she comes face to face with a shark. Things get intense (and nice to look at) as she tries to evade the shark and goes to hide behind a bit or underwater coral... and then you get the ‘hand on the shoulder’ moment and she is in battle with... an underwater zombie. Yes! She manages to evade both the zombie and the shark to get back on her boat but this leaves us with a shark versus zombie scene, where the zombie bites the shark and comes out the clear winner. Yeah, that’s right. This film has a Zombie VS Shark scene. How can you not want to watch a film that has that? How cool is this?

The rest of the film after this scene is not an anti-climax as you’d think either, with two great gory set pieces being the famous house invasion/eye gouging scene and the ancient graveyard scene with the famous iconic ‘zombie with maggots in its eye’ that usually makes the cover of most releases of the film (recently referenced in the charming zombie remake of Romeo and Juliet, Warm Bodies, reviewed here). The sense of claustrophobia and intensity increases as the film goes on (aided by those fantastic shot designs) and the ending is pretty good too, with the film's two survivors (I’m not telling you which two) facing a less than certain future in their boat with a living dead friend threatening to batter his way up from below and nowhere for them to run to.

Zombie Flesh Eaters may seem, these days, to be a bit of a cliché in terms of genre classics to keep an eye out for (quite literally), but it still packs a wallop and though I’d have liked to have seen the Ian McCulloch commentary track from the old Anchor Bay release making the cut on the new Blu Ray edition (or at least a new commentary track, maybe), Arrow have done a good job with this release (seamless branching error aside) and some of the extras on here, while still being repetitive in terms of what has come from various releases in the past, are well worth your time... as are the little, cute animations this company likes to create for some of the featurettes on their titles. If you’ve not seen this movie before and, especially, if you’re a native of the UK and haven’t seen it uncut before, now’s your chance to catch it in as good an edition as your likely to get... just remember to check the opening, pre-credits shot out and send it back if you’ve got one of the discs with an error on it.