Don't Torture a Duckling

Year of Release:  1972

Director:  Lucio Fulci

Screenplay:  Lucio Fulci, Roberto Gianviti and Gianfranco Clerici, from a story by Lucio Fulci and Roberto Gianviti

Starring:  Florinda Bolkan, Barbara Bouchet, Tomas Milian, Irene Papas, Marc Porel

Running Time:  105 minutes

Genre:  Thriller, horror

The sleepy, rural Southern Italian town of Accendura is shattered by a series of murders of young boys.  As the police scramble to find a suspect, the superstitious locals, already suspicious of outsiders, prepare to take the law into their own hands.  Astute journalist Andrea Martelli (Milian) and wealthy party girl Patrizia (Bouchet) attempt to solve the crime before anyone else has to die.

Prolific Italian filmmaker Lucio Fulci worked in a. number of genres before finding his niche with numerous gruesome horror and thriller films (must famously such delightful charmers as Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979), City of the Living Dead (1980), The Beyond (1981), The House by the Cemetery (1981) and The New York Ripper (1982)).  Although the bloodletting here is fairly restrained by Fulci standards, this is one of the first films to use the violence which he would later become famous for.  This belongs firmly in the giallo subgenre.  The word "giallo" is literally the Italian for "yellow" and it was used as a name for a series of crime novels and thrillers published in Italy with distinctive yellow covers.  The term later became known for lurid horror and thriller films, that were notable for their elaborately choreographed murder scenes, usually high production values and buckets of gore.  Don't Torture a Duckling however is unusual for a giallo in having a distinctly Italian rural setting, most giallo films were set in urban settings, and frequently in London or America, to make them more saleable abroad.   As with many films of the genre, Don't Torture a Duckling has a memorable, lurid title which bears little to no connection with the plot of the film (the closest thing to a duckling in the film is a Donald Duck doll). The film is suspenseful, and the mystery is intriguing.  The Italian countryside looks beautiful and the cast are decent.  It does paint a very bleak picture of Italian small town life, as well as providing quite a scathing critique of the Catholic Church, and the police (who are portrayed as pretty much completely incompetent), as well as the causal cruelty of children (in the opening of the film a child shoots at a lizard with a catapult).  There is even a weird but effectively creepy Black Magic element.  To be fair, it paints a pretty bleak picture of human nature in general.  Some of the gore effects are unconvincing, and the theme of child murder, while not graphic, and a scene of gratuitous nudity may be offensive to some.  While it is not one of Fulci's best known films it is one of his better films.  

Barbara Bouchet and Tomas Milian in Don't Torture a Duckling

City of the Living Dead

Year of Release:  1980
Director:  Lucio Fulci
Screenplay:  Lucio Fulci and Dardano Sacchetti
Starring:  Christopher George, Catriona MacColl, Carlo De Mejo, Antonella Interlenghi, Giovanni Lombardo, Radice, Daniela Doria, Fabrizio Jovine, Janet Algren
Running Time:  93 minutes
Genre:  Horror

New York City:  A young medium, Mary Woodhouse (MacColl), goes into a catatonic sate when she experiences a traumatic vision of a priest (Jovine) hanging himself in the town of Dunwich.  When she has recovered, she explains to journalist Peter Bell (George)  that the hanging of the priest has opened the gate to Hell and that, unless it is closed, in a few days time the living dead will overwhelm and consume the living.  Meanwhile in Dunwich the population find themselves subjected to a series of horrific events, as they come under attack from flesh-eating zombies.

Prolific Italian director Lucio Fulci worked in comedy, adventure, science-fiction, erotica and spaghetti Westerns, but is most well known for his horror films, which were notorious for their high level of gore, which earned him the nickname "The Godfather of Gore".  This is the first of Fulci's "Gates of Hell" trilogy, the others being:  The Beyond (1981) and The House by the Cemetery (1981), both of which also starred English actress Catriona MacColl (billed here as "Katherine MacColl"), although in different roles in each film.  At times this feels like what you might get if a twelve year old were to come up with a horror film, because the plot (such as it is) feels like an excuse to string together the most gruesome things Fulci can think of:  people bleed out of their eyes, zombies chow down messily on slippery flesh, heads are drilled, other unfortunates are covered with rats and flesh-eating maggots and, in the film's most notorious sequence, a woman vomits up her own intestines.  Even for hardened horror fans it's pretty nauseating.  Although it's so over the top it becomes quite funny.  The acting is at best serviceable, which may be partly due to the fact that, as was standard with Italian films, the dialogue was dubbed in in post-production.  The bizarre and sudden ending was necessitated because, while they were editing the film, someone spilled coffee on the original ending print, forcing Fulci to cobble something together with whatever he had available.

Daniela Doria in City of the Living Dead


          

Zombie Flesh Eaters

Year of Release:  1979
Director:  Lucio Fulci
Screenplay:  Elisa Biganti and Dardano Sacchetti
Starring:  Tisa Farrow, Ian McCulloch, Richard Johnson, Al Cliver, Auretta Gay, Stefania D'Amario, Olga Karlatos
Running Time:  88 minutes
Genre:  Horror

An abandoned sailboat drifts into New York Harbor.  When two harbor patrol officers board the boat they are promptly attacked by a zombie.  While the police interrogate Anne Bowles (Farrow), the daughter of the ship's owner, who hasn't seen her father in months, newspaper reporter Peter West (McCulloch) investigates the story.  Anne and Peter join forces, and trace the boat to a remote Caribbean island called Matul.  They hitch a ride with Brian Hull (Cliver) and Susan Barrett (Gay) who are on a vacation, sailing around the Caribbean. Needless to say, when they do reach Matul, they very soon wish that they had stayed home.

This Italian film exists under a number of different titles and in a number of different versions.  It was originally released in Italy as Zombi 2 in a blatant attempt to cash in on the huge success in Italy of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1979), known as Zombi in Italy.  While this film has no connection to Dawn of the Dead in either plot or characters, it's not too much of a leap to see it being set in Romero's world.  The film has it's clunky moments, but mostly it is pretty good.  It's extremely violent and very gruesome, and contains a couple of notorious scenes (one involving a splinter of wood and someone's eye, which is genuinely hard to watch).  There is also some sleazy sexploitation, although not quite as much as you might expect.  The zombie makeup is suitably disgusting, and the numerous gore scenes and violence are well staged.  The performances are good, with Tisa Farrow (sister of Mia Farrow) making an engaging heroine, and Ian McCulloch an effective and likable hero.  Most notable in the cast though is Richard Johnson as the sweatily sinister doctor on the island.  The pacing flags during the middle, but it's pretty well made and is probably the best of the Italian zombie movies which followed. 

Tisa Farrow and Ian McCulloch set sail for the Island of the Zombie Flesh Eaters           

The Beyond

Year: 1981
Director: Lucio Fulci
Screenplay: Giorgio Mariuzzo, Lucio Fulci and Dardano Sacchetti, from a story by Dardano Sacchetti
Starring: Catriona McColl, David Warbeck, Cinzia Monreale, Antoine Saint-John, Veronica Lazar
Running Time: 89 minutes
Genre: Horror, supernatural, zombie

Summary: Louisiana 1927: A lynch mob break into the Seven Doors Hotel and brutally murder a painter, Schweik (Saint-John), who is living there.
In 1981, New Yorker Liza Merril (McColl) inherits the run-down hotel from her uncle. The renovations are plagued by a series of increasingly severe and bizarre "accidents". A blind psychic girl, Emily (Monreale), informs Liza that the hotel was built above one of the seven gateways to Hell. Along with local doctor John McCabe (Warbeck), Liza finds herself pitted against nightmarish supernatural forces as the dead begin to rise and attack the living.

Opinions: This gruesome Italian horror film is often cited as the masterpiece of it's director Lucio Fulci who made his name with films such as Zombie (1979) and City of the Living Dead (1980). Certainly the film doesn't stint on gore and is full of blood and flesh tearing special effects.
The film doesn't really make a lot of sense, especially towards the end, but that isn't really important as the film works in a kind of dreamlike sense and is purely nightmarish. Aside from the zombies and flesh eating tarantulas, the film is full of dream like images, some of which are very powerful.
The special effects are effective and should provide plenty of moments to startle even jaded gore hounds. The dialogue is very obviously dubbed but that was common practice in Italian films and in any way it helps to make the film even more bizarrely surreal.
The symbol which appears prominently at various points of the film was taken from a tattoo which Fulci's fourteen year old daughter got.
Horror films and connoiseurs of cult cinema won't want to miss this one.
Incidentally, in some prints of the film which are currently available, the opening sequence is in black-and-white, when it was originally intended to be in sepia.



Catriona McColl and David Warbeck in The Beyond