DarkFest 7

Dark Climes and
Tripped Up Climbs

DarkFest 7
Organised by Allan and Yanni Bryce

It was February 2021. I was just under a year into what would be two and a half years of working from home due to the Covid 19 pandemic. It was a surreal (but strangely much missed) time and I had two things which reignited my appreciation of the art of film and reminded me that, sometimes, life could be worth living, for a bit, during those unusual times. One of those things was Severin’s Al Adamson box set (written up with links to all the reviews here) and the other started with a friend telling me that the great Caroline Munro was on a nice cover painting in a magazine in my local W H Smith. Now, after washing my hands for the recommended 20 seconds, I rushed to my local news vendor - masked up and keeping my distance from everybody - and purchased said magazine, The Dark Side.

And I rekindled my declining relationship with magazines again. Not because I’d ever not liked them but, I just didn’t realise people were still doing these things in print (thankfully... I hate digital editions of anything and just don't bother reading them). And the magazine was great and I haven’t stopped buying both that and its sister magazine Infinity since. The editorials by Allan Bryce are so fun to read and I really appreciate these gems of printed materials as I grab them each month. But then I discovered that, as an annual event, the Bryce’s organised a thing called DarkFest at the Genesis cinema (around the Whitechapel area of London). I’d not been tempted before now but the quality of the guests this year such as Caroline Munro, Linzi Drew, Valerie Leon and Eileen Daly plus loads of good stalls and six mostly cool horror movies taking place over 12 hours (from 11am to 11pm), all for the ‘great value for money’ sum of £40, seemed too good to resist this year. So me and a friend braved the rain and went to check it out.

Now, I’ve often said in my years of going to FrightFest that the horror film fan community are among the friendliest in the world and this was exactly the case here. Which is very fortunate actually as the crowding of all those stalls and wonderful people somewhat resembled the ‘stateroom scene’ from the Marx Brothers movie A Night At The Opera (if you know, you know) and moving around the event was sluggish at best. I got the wonderful Ms. Munro to sign my Japanese At The Earth’s Core souvenir programme, had a word with Linzi Drew and also got a beautiful lingerie calendar signed by the charming Mrs. Moon, the organiser of the Misty Moon events. Alas, Eileen Daly left before I could get near to her which was a shame... this is the third time I’ve tried to see her and fate always conspires to keep me away.

Now I was worried about how my friend would take the first movie shown, Don’t Open ‘Til Christmas (reviewed by me here) since it’s... well it’s badly acted, badly written and badly directed. It’s also very fun but, luckily, my friend said it was her favourite film of the day. I then left her to the next movie so I could get a chance to visit some of the stalls and empty out my wallet (and also grab a hot dog) but when I rejoined her 20 minutes before the end of Scars Of Dracula (reviewed by me here only last week) I managed to trip over the stairs in the cinema in the dark and hugely exacerbated the pain in my knees after a perilous falling accident in 2019. As I type these words I am in total agony and can barely walk... which is not the best state to be in.

We then watched what is probably my favourite vampire movie of all time... the low budget, highly creative Razor Blade Smile starring Eileen Daly as Lilith Silver and directed by Jake West. It’s been restored and will be getting a proper Blu Ray release soon so I won’t do a full review yet but, if you’ve never seen this film, with Daly playing a Jerry Cornelius-like vampire turned assassin caught up in a deadly conspiracy... you’re missing out. It’s a wonderful film and deserves to be properly re-evaluated by modern audiences. I could never figure out why there wasn’t a string of Lilith Silver movies made after this one.

At this point I had a brief but nice chat with Rick Melton, the erotic artist whose magazine cover had caught my interest in the first place. He was a really nice chap and I am looking forward to a new book coming out, according to him, in about ten months time. Then, after this year’s ‘Slaughter Awards’, we saw one of Lucio Fulci’s best horror films, The Beyond (reviewed by me here). This was good fun but, surprisingly, had loads of walkouts. I’m guessing the audience was already very familiar with this movie and were somewhat jaded and needed refreshments by this point.

After that we were faced with two more films... Friday The 13th, which held no interest and, the mystery film which I’d correctly guessed was a screening of a new transfer of Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter. Alas, the screenings were already running around 20 minutes late and we knew that if we stayed past the advertised time we would both have trouble catching our last trains home from Liverpool Street station so, at this point, we decided to call it a day. Alas, this was when I’d found that Eileen Daly had just flown the coop and all the stalls were beginning to get packed away already.

So, apart from the overcrowding at DarkFest 7 (but hey, at least everybody was friendly) and the late running schedule, I had a blast at this year’s event and something tells me that my friend (who preferred it even to FrightFest) and I will be back again around this time next year for DarkFest 8, which I assume will happen. I’ll report back on that one as the opportunity arises.

The Beyond

To Infinity And The Beyond

The Beyond Italy 1981

Directed by Lucio Fulci

Arrow Films Region 0

Right then. Next movie up in my series of discoveries that Lucio Fulci might have been a better director than I gave him credit for is the second in an unofficial trilogy which started with City Of The Living Dead (reviewed here) and finishes with The House By The Cemetery (which I’ve not yet seen at the time of writing this, but hope to rectify that sometime soon). I use the term trilogy in it’s loosest possible sense because the only elements that I can see that connect these three films uniquely is the fact that all three star Katherine MacColl in them and all three are concerned with entrance ways to hell... thus it’s sometimes collective title of The Gates of Hell Trilogy (depending on whether you buy into the whole trilogy argument or not).

This one starts of with a sepia pre-credits sequence (if your DVD from Arrow only has the pre-credits in black and white, find the receipt and follow this thread here) as a torch and pitchfork maddened mob of people... well I say maddened but for the most part they are quite sedate... kill a local artist in New Orleans because he has found an opening to hell and brought “icky goings on” to the local population... and probably because he does weird paintings too.

I have to say that this scene is quite brutal to watch, especially in its sepia tones, as the ugly mob first “chain-whip” the gentleman in question, opening deep lesions in his skin on various parts of his body, beginning with his face. This is the second chain-whipping sequence I’ve seen in a Fulci film and I don’t much like them to be honest... the first and more infamous one being the sequence of “village-mob” violence inflicted on Florinda Bolcan in Fulci’s giallo Don’t Torture A Duckling. I didn’t know that the one at the start of The Beyond was coming and I’m surprised to find that it’s not considered as infamous... or at least that’s the way it seems. Maybe it’s because this particular sequence in The Beyond is inflicted on a man instead of a woman?

Anyway, I digress. Once said artistic fellah has been given a good seeing too with the chains, his wrists are then hammered into a wall (right by one of the Gates Of Hell) and then he is given a good dissolving with acid (or possibly quicklime)... and then the credits roll!

After the credits are played out we are back in modern day (that is to say, in a time contemporary to this films original release date) and the film goes into colour and we find ourselves following Katherine MacColl’s character Liza, who has purchased the same house the painter was killed in... it’s a bit of a fixer upper to be honest with you. Liza has various people trying to do said “fixer-upping” but they keep getting killed off by undead zombies and so her source of handymen is dying out. She comes across a blind woman called Emily, played by Cinzia Monreale, and her Alsatian. Emily has white contact lenses to show the audience that

a) she’s blind and b) she’s probably also one of the undead come back in that “supernatural” way that only ghostly beings can... to warn Liza to leave her new house. One point I’d like to throw in here though... it seems that in a Fulci film, be you ghost, apparition or zombie, you’re just as likely to bleed from a gory denouement as any other character. I guess that kind of non-logic is kind of par for the course for the kind of film which seems specifically tailiored to people who like the spectacle of violence and have a morbid curiosity about it almost regardless of its context.

And there is quite a fair bit of gore here on show with lots of eye gouging, blood pumping and various acid-pourings thrown into the mix. Added to this is an absolutely laughable scene where Liza’s chief interior decorator gets stunned and eaten alive by a large number of tarantulas... this gets so over the top and goes on for so long that I defy you not to collapse in hysterics or at the very least chuckle enthusiastically at both the absolute unnecessariness of the scene and also at the bad prosthetic effects. Don’t get me wrong, these special effects guys did wonders with the limited resources and budgets they had... but sometimes it just doesn’t work and I’ve noticed that Fulci’s films in particular seem to be prone to bad “splatter effects” for want of a better term.

Things get really gory when Liza’s doctor friend John, played by cult horror star David Warbeck, starts shooting at zombies. Anyone else would be a quick learn but good ol’ John will shoot a few in the chest and then shoot one in the head... and still not twig that the head shots are the only things which are taking these creatures down. I mean seriously, this character is mentally challenged. He wastes ammo like tic-tacs and just keeps on shooting bullets into parts of zombies other than their heads for absolutely no apparent reason. Except when he runs out of bullets and corners himself in a room just so we can see his friend sliced up with flying glass. When the zombies finally get into the room he’s holed up in though... his gun magically has bullets back in it!

What? What the -?

So what does he start doing again? Yeah, that’s right, you guessed it... shooting zombies in the chest. Hello! Earth to Fulci, earth to Fulci. Squib effects lose their effectiveness after you’ve seen a few! We don’t need to see that again at the cost of a characters intelligence.

All this probably makes The Beyond sound like a bit of a laugh fest and, to be honest, in some places it is... but, like his excellent City Of The Living Dead before it, the film scores big on atmosphere... such as the moody and perhaps a little less ambiguous ending than people might have led one to believe, or the sequence with a little gorehound gag (and in this case I do mean gorehound) which twists around the expectations of the "line of attack" in a sequence which is very much a dead steal (um... yeah homage... right) from a similar famous sequence in Dario Argento’s Suspiria.

Ultimately, this film is quite moody when it’s not trying hard to be bloody and although I wouldn’t quite rate it as highly as City Of The Living Dead, it does avoid that one element that made that earlier film a lot weaker... the zombies in The Beyond don’t magically teleport all over the place! This is good news.

Still, a very good entry into the Italian horror cycle and one which I’m very glad to have seen. My Fulci “hit” pile is starting to even up with my Fulci “miss” pile.