Unclearly we begin as a swarthy bearded man gets chased out of the woods by another gent decked-out in a black trench coat. This foot chase then continues until the pursued tries to scale the wrought-iron gate of some walled-in palatial estate. But when his older pursuer catches up, grabs him by the legs, and tries to prevent this, his prey winds up impaling himself on the gate’s not-so-ornamental spires.
Meanwhile, inside the sprawling mansion that gate is allegedly protecting, we meet the Bennett's, starting with the mom, Anya (Kochansky), who is currently attending to her oldest daughter, Katya (Berger). Apparently, Katya recently suffered some kind of spinal or neck injury, resulting in partial paralysis. A full recovery is projected, but for now the girl is confined to her bed, completely strapped down and stretched out in-traction to stay immobilized, which will help the healing process along by not aggravating her injuries any further.
Progress has been good thus far, but while mom assures that any day now she will be freed from her current predicament, Katya has heard this all before, ignores it, and continues doodling with her spirograph to pass the endless tedium.
Also running loose in the house is her little brother, Willie (Berger), a recalcitrant little shit of a human tornado, who is constantly pursued by the family au pair, Peggy (Leadbetter). Thus, it’s young Willie who thunders off and answers the front door when the bell rings. But when he opens it, the boy is greeted by a stranger -- the man who had tried to scale the fence, his abdomen lacerated badly, with half of his intestines spilling out, who promptly collapses as he tries to push his innards back in where they belong.
Cut to a hospital, where a Dr. Kramer performs emergency surgery on the disemboweled man. Now, Kramer (Rusoff) is a bit baffled by his patient, who by all rights should be dead due to the extent of his traumatic injuries and massive blood loss. And not only that, but his body appears to be healing itself faster than Kramer can stitch it back together -- as if the patient had a regenerative healing factor. (Omigod, it’s the Wolverine! No. Wait. Logan is nowhere near that tall.)
Thus, as Kramer relates this baffling medical anomaly to Emily (Belle), his surgical nurse, he orders a full battery of lab tests on the patient to see if they can explain away this “lymphatic oddity.” Also of note, neither realized this but their patient was awake the whole time and listening in until the anesthesiologist upped the dose and put him back under.
Back at the Bennett’s, Detective Sgt. Ben Englemen (Borromel) is just finishing up with witness statements. Close to retirement and getting way too old for this kinda crap, Englemen also drew the short straw and had to work this Super Bowl Sunday while the rest of the force, aside from his rookie partner, apparently took the day off to watch the big game between the Los Angeles Rams and the Pittsburgh Steelers (-- Super Bowl XIV, if memory serves). He also isn’t so sure that this was just a botched robbery. The mysterious intruder carried no I.D. -- with the only clue to his identity being a pocketful of Greek coins.
Englemen’s next stop is the hospital to check on his John Doe, who has just woken up in recovery, spots the man in the black trench coat spying on him through a window, and then freaks out so badly over this the attending staff has to put him back under sedation. Here, hospital security was on the ball and detained the other man until Englemen arrives, who recognizes him as the “stranded motorist” he’d met while on the way to the Bennett Estate.
Wanting to know why the John Doe was so afraid of him, the suspect in black refuses to explain himself unless the doctor who operated on the man he was pursuing is present, saying that’s the only way the detective will ever believe him. For there is a “reality we do not see,” he insists. Here, Engleman’s background check on the mystery man’s Greek passport comes through, revealing him to be a Catholic priest, who goes unnamed, so let's call him Father Gyro (Purdom).
But just as Father Gyro explains how he serves God not by rite or ritual but through biochemistry, the interrogation is interrupted by a ruckus that’s traced back to the recovery room, where they make a grisly discovery: the John Doe, now fully regenerated, has escaped; but not before brutally murdering a nurse by ramming a surgical drill through her skull.
And while having a homicidal maniac on the loose was bad enough, it gets even worse. You see, the John Doe’s real name is Mikos Stenopolis, a Greek gangster, who, technically, already died some six years ago. But Stenopolis had been exposed to some contaminating substance before he was gunned down, which is the root cause to all those regenerative medical mysteries Kramer was puzzling over.
Thus, according to Father Gyro, Stenopolis is essentially immortal as his body constantly regenerates itself from any injury. This condition also drove him completely insane. And while he was confined in some top secret Papal lab, where he was most likely studied, poked, prodded, and experimented on by Father Gyro and several others of his ilk over the years -- explaining the violent enmity, he eventually escaped, leaving a trail of bodies for his keepers to follow, which eventually led them to this sleepy little 'burgh and the current situation.
“He is a creature of evil,” insists Father Gyro. “The spark of God was smothered the moment the Devil took possession of him.” Thus, Mikos Stenopolis carries the mark of Cain and is essentially a preternaturally unstoppable killing machine. And they have no idea where he currently is, and it's already too late…
The first time George Eastman ever met Joe D’Amato was on the set for Michele Lupo’s Ben and CharlIe -- alias, Amigo, Stay Away (Amico, stammi lontano almeno un palmo, 1972), a slapstick Spaghetti Western meant to cash in on the international box-office hit, They Call Me Trinity (Lo chiamavano Trinità, 1970). Eastman had almost starred in that film, too, with Peter Martell as the bickering and brawling brothers, Trinity and Bambino, but a last second casting decision found them replaced by Terence Hill and Bud Spencer. And speaking frankly, Ben and Charlie wasn’t much of a consolation prize.
Born Luigi Montefiori in August, 1942, as he grew up in and around Genoa, Italy, and grew into his massive six foot six frame, Eastman played rugby and competed as a Greco-Roman wrestler. He would later attend the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, one of the oldest film schools in western Europe, and well on the road to recovery after being plundered by the Nazis during World War II, which taught courses in directing, acting, cinematography, editing, screenwriting, production design, costuming and sound engineering. Here, Eastman would focus on acting, and would later hone his craft further by studying under Alessandro Fersen, who taught Stanislavski's method at the Studio di arti sceniche.
And with his imposing size, Eastman started landing roles as heavies and henchmen in a long string of films, mostly Spaghetti Westerns. His first feature was an uncredited role in Alberto De Martino’s Django Shoots First (Django spara per primo, 1966); and from there, he would go through several aliases, including Gigi Montefiori -- My Name is Pecos (2 once di piombo, 1966), and George Histman -- The Cobra (Il cobra, 1967), before finally settling on George Eastman for his first starring vehicle, Django Kills Softly (Bill il taciturno, 1967), co-starring Liana Orfei -- Mill of the Stone Women (Il mulino delle donne di pietra, 1960), Hercules, Samson and Ulysses (Ercole sfida Sansone, 1963), where they played the two lone survivors of a wagon train massacre, who seek refuge in a nearby town, which just so happens to be where the gang that attacked them originated. Vengeance ensues.
More starring vehicles followed in Un poker di pistole (1967), L'ultimo killer (1967), and Ferdinando Baldi’s Django, Prepare a Coffin (Preparati la bara!, 1968), which was sort of a morbid sagebrush twist on The Dirty Dozen (1967). He also co-starred in Boot Hill (La collina degli stivali, 1969), which first teamed up Hill and Spencer, paving the way for him getting skunked out of They Call me Trinity. But it wasn’t always westerns, as Eastman also appeared in the James Bond knock-off, OSS 117 Murder for Sale (Niente rose per OSS 117, 1968), and he would play the Minotaur in Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (Fellini Satyricon, 1969).
Luigi Montefiori -- alias, George Eastman
By 1970, Eastman was still at it in front of the camera but, bored with the repetitive parts, he also started working behind the scenes, too, as a screenwriter, beginning with The Unholy Four (Ciakmull - L'uomo della vendetta, 1970) for Enzo Barboni (E.B. Clucher), which he co-wrote with Mario di Nardo and Franco Rossettii. Eastman would also take a starring role in this offbeat tale, where an asylum is burned to the ground as part of a bank heist, resulting in four escaped inmates going on the lam.
Barboni, of course, would follow this up with They Call Me Trinity and Trinity is Still My Name (Continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità, 1971) without Eastman as originally planned; but fear not. For his destiny lay elsewhere, with a different director, and he would find them both a couple of features down the road.
Thus, after starring in Bastard, Go and Kill (Bastardo, vamos a matar, 1971) and Quel maledetto giorno della resa dei conti (1971) with Ty Hardin, Eastman finally got around to doing Ben and Charlie. Like with The Unholy Four, Eastman would co-write (with Sergio Donati) and co-star in the feature. And when he arrived on set, he was introduced to the film’s director of photography, Aristide Massaccesi.
According to a later interview in the supplements of Shriek Show’s DVD release of Anthropophagus (1980), initially, Massaccesi didn’t make much of an impression on Eastman -- aside from the ever present cigarette dangling out of his mouth. “He was a little guy,” said Eastman. “Shy. He reminded me of the comic book character, Andy Capp” -- which is hilariously accurate. (Reference photo below for those of you under the age of 40.) But that all changed once the cameras started rolling, and Massaccesi was all in, risking life and limb to get the needed shots.
Aristide Massaccesi -- alias, Joe D'Amato.
“Here was this same little guy, strapped in and hanging by his waist underneath a six horse stagecoach going full tilt to get a shot of their galloping feet,” said Eastman. “He had balls. Calm and crafty. And was capable of unbelievable things.”
And so, Eastman took an immediate liking to Massaccesi. And not only for his fearlessness, or his skills and proficiency that resulted in very fast scene lighting and set-ups, but because the cameraman was “a very down to earth person,” who preferred spending time with the crew instead of hobnobbing with the imported actors, directors or producers.
A native of Rome, Massaccesi had worked his way up from studio electrician, to grip, to gaffer, to camera operator, to assistant cinematographer, and then, finally, director of photography on films ranging from Mario Bava’s Hercules in the Haunted World (Ercole al centro della Terra, 1961), Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (Le mépris, 1963), Umberto Lenzi’s A Quiet Place to Kill (Paranoia, 1970) and Massimo Dallamano’s What Have You Done to Solange? (Cosa avete fatto a Solange?, 1972).
Now, the same year that he shot Ben and Charlie, Massaccesi also took the next step and moved into the director’s chair for a string of westerns -- Stay Away from Trinity... When He Comes to Eldorado (Scansati... a Trinità arriva Eldorado, 1972), God Is My Colt .45 (La colt era il suo Dio, 1972), and Bounty Hunter is Trinity (Un bounty killer a Trinità, 1972), which were all commercial failures. But Massaccesi really found his groove with his next two features, which would combine two things that he would, fair or not, become known for: smut and gore -- or a combination of both.
This reputation emerged when he took over and finished up The Devil’s Wedding Night (Il plenilunio delle vergini, 1973), a two-punch combo of Carmilla and Lady Bathory, where Lady Dracula lured virgins into her castle, seduced them, killed them, and bathed in their blood (-- and sharp eyes will spot a young Cassandra "Elvira" Peterson lurking in the cast); and then he followed that up with Death Smiles on a Murderer (La morte ha sorriso all'assassino, 1973), a gothic melodrama starring Klaus Kinski and Ewa Aulin that involved a love triangle, multiple murders, cat-to-the-face mutilation, and a mad scientist bringing the dead back to life.
Death Smiles on a Murderer would be a rare instance where Massaccesi would use his real name in the directing credits. Wanting to keep his cinematic crafts separated, he would be credited as himself as a cinematographer but would use several aliases as a director over the years -- Michael Wotruba, David Hills, Robert Yip and Joan Russell, but the one he wound up using the most was Joe D’Amato.
According to the fossil record, the first feature under that infamous alias would be Red Coat (Giubbe rosse, 1975), an unofficial sequel to Lucio Fulci’s unofficial adaptation of Jack London’s White Fang (Zanna Bianca, 1973). For those curious, I covered the quirk in Italian copyright law in several reviews on the old site but, basically, it allowed anyone to call anything a sequel to an existing work without any legal consequences, explaining the ton of Django, Sartana, and Trinity movies and other assorted knock-offs and loose adaptations.
Described as a “family horror film western set in the snows of Canada,” the production got off to a rocky start when both the producer, Alfonso Donati, and the lead actor, Fabio Testi, had some major objections over the script, written initially by D’Amato and Claudio Bernabei. And if D’Amato couldn’t get this fixed before the cameras were set to roll in less than three days, Testi would be forced to walk due to other contractual commitments, the picture would go into default, it wouldn’t get made, and therefore, nobody got paid.
Eastman, meanwhile, had also appeared in a Jack London adaptation -- Ken Annakin’s Call of the Wild (1972), playing the heavy opposite Charlton Heston. He also appeared in Corrado Farina’s erotic thriller Baba Yaga (1973) and turned in a stellar performance for Mario Bava in the ultra-violent crime caper gone-to-shit saga, Rabid Dogs (1974), that, sadly, was tied-up in legal hassles and bankruptcy-hell for nearly twenty years before finally getting assembled and released in 1997 (-- 17 years after Bava had passed away). And then Eastman got a call from his old friend Massaccesi, asking if he was interested in doing a little script-doctoring for “D’Amato” on Red Coat.
Eastman agreed. And as the legend goes from there, the volunteer would spend the next 36-hours chained to a typewriter, pounding away, constantly supervised, poked, and prodded along by D’Amato -- “He was afraid I’d fall asleep and not get any writing done,” said Eastman. And to ensure he kept on writing, D’Amato would physically hand-feed Eastman pieces from a rotisserie chicken, not allowing any interruptions and to keep his writer’s energy up. Alas, there’s no documentation on how they handled bathroom breaks.
George Eastman (left), Joe D'Amato (right).
This marathon session began on a Friday afternoon and ran until the wee hours of Monday morning. But these Herculean efforts proved worth it as the new script quickly passed muster with Donati and Testi, and then filming on Red Coat began in earnest. This would also mark the beginning of nearly a decade’s worth of collaboration between Eastman and D’Amato. Said Eastman, “We were already friends, but from that moment on we started an ongoing partnership; because after this film, he kept calling me in for projects.”
Sadly, with its expanded budget and extended shooting schedule, Red Coat appeared to be D’Amato’s one and only shot at legitimacy. And while he always claimed it was his best work, the film failed to find an audience. And so, from there, as the Italian film industry essentially imploded around him, D’Amato dove headfirst into making soft-core porn and erotica.
In 1974, French film director Just Jaeckin teamed up with Sylvia Kristel for an adaption of Marayat and Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane’s steamy novel of sexual awakening and rampant hedonism, Emmanuelle: the Joys of Women. And while the X-Rated Emmanuelle (1974) was critically panned, it made a shit-ton of money all over Europe, the United States, and Asia, making it ripe to be knocked-off and cashed-in on.
Enter D’Amato and Eastman, with an assist from Bruno Mattei, for Emanuelle and Francoise (Emanuelle e Françoise, 1974). But then D’Amato really found his muse in Laura Gemser, who would play Emanuelle for him in Emanuelle in Bangkok (Emanuelle nera: Orient reportage, 1976), Emanuelle in America (1977), and Emanuelle Around the World (Emanuelle - Perché violenza alle donne?, 1977).
And then things got a little weird, and grotesque, as D’Amato also decided to get in on the concurrent cannibal atrocity craze linked to the running feud between Umberto Lenzi and Ruggero Deodato, who would wander off into the jungle and then come back with gut-munching films like Lenzi's The Man from Deep River (Il paese del sesso selvaggio, 1972) and Deodato's Jungle Holocaust (Ultimo mondo cannibale, 1977) -- or for another example, Sergio Martino’s The Mountain of the Cannibal God (La montagna del dio cannibale, 1978).
D’Amato, of course, left in all the fornicating and just added a gore garnish for Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (Emanuelle e gli ultimi cannibali, 1977) and Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade (La via della prostituzione, 1978). And while Gemser skipped out on Papaya: Love Goddess of the Cannibals (Papaya dei Caraibi, 1978), she would return for Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (Le notti erotiche dei morti viventi, 1980); and then the faux Emmanuelle franchise officially closed out with The Unleashed Perversions of Emmanuelle (1983), where our intrepid investigative reporter delves into the workings of a prostitution ring and runs afoul of drug traffickers.
Now, between all of that came Beyond the Darkness -- alias Buried Alive (Buio Omega, 1979), a strange little bugaboo of a movie, which distilled all of D’Amato’s myriad idioms and sexual hang-ups into one single, slightly nauseating feature. A feature Manlio Gomarasca described in the documentary, Joe D’Amato Totally Uncut: The Horror Experience (2001), as “exceptionally perverse, with sick atmospherics, and an extremely black sense of desolation.” But don’t take his word for it, or mine, but just try to wrap your head around this plot:
After his beloved fiance, Anna (Cinzia Monreale), unexpectedly dies, Frank Wyler (Kieran Canter) consoles himself by breastfeeding off his old family maid, Iris (Franca Stoppi). But this is only a temporary stop-gap as Wyler, a taxidermist by trade, sneaks into the funeral home and injects Anna’s corpse with an embalming solution of his own design. He then later digs up the body and brings it home so the two of them can be together forever.
And to those ends, Wyler starts to preserve the corpse even further by removing all the internal organs and replacing her eyes with glass replicas -- basically turning Anna into one of his stuffed animal effigies. During this rather graphic process, through dubious plot twists, several witnesses to these necrophiliac shenanigans must be eliminated and disposed of -- after Wyler has sex with them, ‘natch.
With Iris’ help, a nosy hitchhiker gets her fingernails ripped out, who then gets chopped-up in a bathtub with a meat cleaver, and then washed down the drain with acid. And then an injured jogger finds refuge in the Wyler home, has sex with Wyler, realizes Anna’s body was in the bed with them, freaks out, gets partially eaten by the man she just had sex with, then gets stuffed inside the basement furnace and is incinerated alive. Neat.
And then things really get weird when Anna’s twin sister, Elena (Monreale again), shows up, who asks to stay while she sorts out her late sister’s estate. This confuses the already addled Wyler, who defends Elena from a jealous Iris after she discovers her taxidermied sister. During the struggle, Iris is killed but not before she stabs Wyler in the balls and gouges out one of his eyes. These wounds will prove mortal, but Wyler manages to incinerate Anna’s body since he doesn’t need it anymore with Elena around, currently passed out due to being overwhelmed by, well, everything.
Meanwhile, a funeral home employee, suspicious of Wyler’s activities, arrives to find everyone apparently dead. He informs the police and takes possession of what he believes to be Anna, only its Elena, and prepares to bury her again. But just as he is about to seal the coffin for good, Elena finally wakes up, bursts out of the coffin, and screams as we fade to black.
And all of that set to a cock-knocking score by Goblin. Unbelievable. Beyond the Darkness didn’t have much of a budget and was shot almost entirely at a villa near Bressanone, but it would go on to be one of D’Amato’s most successful horror films in Italy -- even though he did get into some trouble with the censors.
Like with Lenzi and Deodato, his efforts to make audiences throw up proved a little too graphic and a little too real. In fact, D’Amato was accused of defiling an actual corpse during the taxidermy scenes. Popping in her new eyes and pulling out all of those intestines was bad enough, but then D’Amato has his lead character pull out her heart and then take a bite out of it, too. But, no, they weren’t really human remains, though they were no less real.
“I pulled that off by going to the butcher near where we were shooting, and buying pounds and pounds of innards,” said D’Amato in a supplemental interview in Severin Films’ DVD release of Absurd (1981). “We did the scene of the incision -- I learnt this from Giannetto de Rossi, who was a great makeup artist -- using pork hide. We’d go buy loads of pork hide, that we’d shave and lay over the body, completely covering the breasts or wherever it was, and then we could cut without worries, having placed some protective stuff underneath.”
Thus, for good or ill, D’Amato was starting to leave a mark on the cinematic landscape -- some would argue a skid-mark, and I don’t mean asphalt but underwear. But how does one follow up a feature as grisly and depraved as that? Well, if it’s one thing I’ve learned falling down this particular rabbit hole, is to never, ever, underestimate Joe D’Amato -- especially when George Eastman was also involved. As Gomarasca put it, “It’s not surprising that by the end of the 1970s, when traditional horror was updated by more gory American films, D’Amato found himself right at home with this new type of cinema. It was a type of filmmaking he’d long been practicing.”
Now, while filming that glut of Emmanuelle hybrids, while on location, Eastman apparently blew through his salary at the casinos but managed to get an advance from D’Amato in return for writing the script for Black Sex (Sesso nero, 1980), which would be the first film D’Amato would produce and direct. Eastman would also moonlight for other producers and productions, writing the genre redefining Keoma (1976), which was arguably the last of the traditional Spaghetti Westerns, Escape from Women’s Prison (Le evase - Storie di sesso e di violenze, 1978), and the totally bonkers The Great Alligator (Il fiume del grande caimano, 1979) for Sergio Martino. And then D’Amato came calling again, wanting him to punch up the script for his follow up to Beyond the Darkness, Anthropophagus (1980).
“Joe had a script that was really bad,” said Eastman. “I read it, saw it didn’t work, and agreed to rewrite it. And if [the revisions] worked, I wanted to play the lead. So I did this, but didn’t imagine myself, the lead, exactly as it turned out. I didn’t know I’d have to spend two hours a day getting in makeup with hundreds of bandages on my face to play the monster.”
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In the original treatment, the whole movie took place on a life-raft where the Wortmans, a husband and wife, stranded at sea, debate on whether to eat their dead child in order to survive. Said Eastman, “So I took that scenario and used it as a recurrent flashback in order to tell the story of a group of people going to an island, where this man had gone crazy after he’d eaten his son and wife while stranded at sea.”
Thus, the stage was set for a group of unwitting castaways to get marooned on a small Greek isle, where they soon discover why it appears abandoned because it is -- as everyone who used to live there has since been cannibalized and at least partially devoured by Klaus Wortman (Eastman). Wortman then picks them off, like some morbid smorgasbord, including pulling a fetus from a pregnant woman and eating that, too. *sigh* If you’d like a full rundown, we did a review of Anthropophagus at the old Bloggo for those brave enough to follow the link to see how it ends, because you wouldn’t believe me, even if I told you.
Said Eastman, “The idea of doing what we ended up doing, was sort of a contest to see who could come up with the most disgusting scenes. It wasn’t as if there was a long, drawn out, symbolic plan, we just invented stuff to get viewers to jump out of their seats. There were no artistic pretensions and no one took themselves seriously … The cruder things got, the harder we laughed. But I honestly can’t say I’m proud of that film. It’s basically quite banal, and I’ve never really liked it.”
Still, as gross as the film got, imagine having to actually act in it by those who got pulled into D’Amato’s madness. “The people who were really shocked by the film were the actors who didn’t yet know him,” Eastman said. “[D’Amato] had a language all his own. He’d talk about the crudest things in the sweetest voice. There was an enormous contrast. Can you imagine a director who comes up to you and says, sweetly, ‘Please spread your thighs and put this dead rabbit between your legs' (-- which subbed in for the fetus)? He wasn’t vulgar at all, he was very kind. But he’d say and do the damnedest things.”
Eastman would later relate how he attended a screening of Anthropophagus in Rome at a sparsely filled theater, and how by the end he was the only one left. And while Anthropophagus officially bombed in Italy, it was a modest hit everywhere else, including the States, where it was imported by Edward Montoro’s Film Ventures International -- Beyond the Door (1974), Grizzly (1976), who released it as The Grim Reaper (1981) -- the first movie John Bloom ever wrote a review for as Joe Bob Briggs, published in the Dallas Times Herald, officially launching his career.
And smelling more money to be made, D’Amato wanted to make a sequel to Anthropophagus / The Grim Reaper for the express purpose of American distribution. Thus, he approached Eastman to once again provide a script for Absurd (Rosso sangue, 1981). Of course, that was a bit of a tall order since Wortman technically ate himself to death during the climax of the first feature. No. Really. It’s true. They also kicked around the idea of working around this technicality by making the sequel a prequel instead, but these notions were quickly abandoned.
And then the decision was made to just forgo a sequel and try to tune-into the burgeoning Slasher Movie / Body Count craze in America instead, borrowing the idea of an indestructible boogeyman from John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and lifting the grisly kills provided by Tom Savini for Sean Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980).
And so, Klaus Wortman was out and Mikos Stenopolis was in, whose Aegean backstory kinda-sorta still carries elements over from Anthropophagus, too, so the ever wily D’Amato could hedge his bet when trying to sell the film as a sequel, where his secret Vatican lab experiment gets his intestines ripped out, goes on a deadly rampage, and, eventually, terrorizes a babysitter and her charges. It’s no wonder, then, that a flabbergasted old cop like Englemen can hardly believe what Father Gyro says they’re up against; but Dr. Kramer keeps backing up all these outlandish claims, as he goes over the data provided by all of those medical tests he’d ordered.
Now, there is some good news as the priest then reveals that Stenopolis does have an Achilles heel -- well, more of an Achilles brain stem. Seems after all of that experimentation and observation over the years in the Vatican’s super-secret lab, they discovered that the brain of their victim -- sorry, “patient” doesn’t regenerate like everything else. (... How?!) And so, if you destroy the brain, you destroy the living dead man. (Think you should’ve led with that one, padre.)
Unfortunately, while Englemen has come around, his boss does not, who refuses to call in any reinforcements to help search for the mad-dog killer because -- wait for it -- the football game is about to start. Thus, totally on their own, the detective has no choice but to give Father Gyro a gun and a patrol car as they split up to cover more ground and start searching for Stenopolis.
And as I said earlier, they’re already too late because the killer has claimed yet another victim. See, after escaping from the hospital he wandered into a slaughterhouse and stumbled upon the night janitorial staff of one. And after being chased into the locker room, the janitor produced a gun and put six bullets into his attacker's central mass with no effect -- except to piss him off even more. And to work out this aggression, the killer seizes his latest victim and rather gruesomely runs his head through a bandsaw.
Moving on, the killer next zeroes-in on a motorcyclist broken down on the side of the road. But the biker (-- whom sharp eyes will recognize as future director Michael Soavi --) is saved, at least temporarily, by a careless hit and run driver, who plows over Stenopolis and then speeds away. Here, the biker unwittingly moves to help the victim only to get pummeled and strangled to death for his troubles.
As to who was driving the car? Meet Ian Bennett (Danby), Anya’s husband and father of Katya and little Willie. And while his conscience does seem to be bothering him a little bit over what he just did -- I mean, what’s a little vehicular manslaughter amongst the elite, it’s not enough to keep him and his wife from going to the neighbors for a Super Bowl party.
To be fair, after the harrowing day, Anya suggests they should just beg off and stay home with the kids; but Ian says, no, they’ve already committed and can’t back out now. Also, it’s apparently Peggy’s night off, too, but the Bennett’s have arranged for Emily, the nurse, who’s also in charge of Katya’s physical therapy, to spend the night with the children. Only she hasn’t shown up yet.
No. She’s currently on the way, on foot, navigating through the darkened woods, convinced someone is following her. Luckily, it’s just the town drunk and not the killer. Meantime, Peggy agrees to stay until her relief shows up.
Thus, the Bennetts leave for the neighbors but make a tactical blunder when they take Anya’s car, leaving Ian’s in the driveway for Stenopolis to spot later as he wanders by. Recognizing it as the car that hit him, the killer decides to lay siege on the mansion, looking for a little payback.
Inside, Peggy is going through her nightly ritual of trying to get Willie to go to bed, threatening that if he doesn’t do as he’s told the Boogeyman will not only get him but eat him alive. This, of course, only riles up Willie even more, who is terrified of the dark, and only Katya is able to calm him down, convincing her little brother, for the moment, that the Boogeyman doesn’t exist.
Then, Peggy is drawn away to the front door by the family dog, who seems convinced there’s someone lurking on the other side. Here, the girl unlocks the door to investigate further but is then distracted by a phone call from Anya, who’s just checking in.
What follows next is a few suspenseful psych-outs, since we’re not sure if the killer managed to get inside in the interim, as Peggy chases shadows around the labyrinthine mansion for a spell until she circles back to the front door and takes a step outside, where a pick-axe is embedded in her skull, courtesy of Stenopolis.
A few minutes later, when Emily finally arrives, she’s surprised to find the front door unlocked. Inside, she has another scare courtesy of Willie. When asked where Peggy is, Willie insists the Boogeyman got her; but Katya says she probably got tired of waiting around and just left. Willie, of course, is closer to the truth. And here, Emily gets a phone call from Dr. Kramer, who warns her to take precautions due to the mad killer being loose in the area.
But again, it’s already too late as the moment she hangs up the power goes out. And when Emily fixes the fuses, she discovers Peggy’s body -- with the pick still stuck in her brain-pan. Keeping it together, the nurse tries to call for help but the phone lines have now been severed. And so, not wanting to abandon Katya, Emily sends a terrified Willie into the night with instructions to go find his parents at the neighbors and bring back help as fast as possible.
Once he’s gone, Emily holes up in Katya’s bedroom, does her best to fortify the door, and will just wait it out there until help arrives. A good plan and a sound plan that quickly falls apart due to Willie being too frightened to complete his task. And so, when he circles back to the house, Stenopolis uses him as bait to lure Emily out of the bedroom. And once she does come out, the killer pounces, dragging the girl into the kitchen, where he fires up the gas oven and forces her inside until she literally bakes to death. This … takes a while.
The deed done, Stenopolis then turns his attention back to Willie. But! Just as he’s about to kill him, turns out Emily was still kicking and manages to distract him long enough, stabbing him several times with a pair of scissors, to allow Willie to once more flee into the night. Her last act as the killer wrenches the scissors away and then returns them by burying the utensil into her throat up to the handles.
Now, while all of this was happening, back in the bedroom, Katya has been feverishly working to undo all of her traction restraints. And once free, she is able to move but the going is slow. Unfortunately, her efforts also made too much noise, drawing the attention of the killer, who violently breaks through the locked door to get at her. But as they struggle, the girl is able to grab her compass and then manages to plant this drawing tool right into the killer’s eye sockets!
Blinded, the killer lashes around, trying to get at her. And in an extremely clever move, Katya crawls to her hi-fi, cranks the volume, and pushes play, allowing her to escape the confines of her bedroom in the deafening confusion. And then the chase is on as the girl works some stagnant muscles loose as she leads an enraged Stenopolis on a game of Blind Man’s Bluff throughout the mansion; but who knows how long it will take for his eyes to heal?
Meanwhile, poor Willie is lost in the woods until he crosses paths with Father Gyro, who heads back to the Bennett mansion. Leaving the boy outside, the priest heads in. And while Katya seemed to have everything well under control by my eye as the killer stumbles around without his, bumping into furniture, and knocking over a vintage suit of armor, which was holding a rather fearsome looking battle axe, when she makes a break for the front door, Stenopolis hears this and intercepts her.
And while they struggle, Father Gyro bursts inside. Unable to shoot because the girl is in the way, the killer keeps her in between them until he can reach the other man. But while Stenopolis strangles the life out of Father Gyro, Katya picks up that axe and starts going all Lizzie Borden on the bad guy. *whack* *whack* *whack* *whack* to the tenth power.
Cut to the exterior of the mansion as all the rest of our players converge near the front entrance; the Bennetts, who returned to check on things because no one was answering the damned phone; and Englemen, who’d been finding bodies all night, and whom Father Gyro apparently radioed to say where the killer was holed up. Here, they find Willie, who excitedly tries to explain how the Boogeyman is real until their attention is drawn to the front door by Katya, who assures Willie there is no reason to be afraid anymore. The Boogeyman is dead. And then presents her decapitated evidence with a smile to back that up as the screen fades to black.
After enduring the deliriously perverse Beyond the Darkness and the projectile-vomit-inducing Anthropophagus, Absurd comes off a bit tired and worn. But even if you haven’t seen those other two features, D’Amato’s sequel / prequel / knock-off / whatever ultimately fails to connect on any level because it commits the cardinal sin of any movie, in any genre, of being rather tedious and boring despite a set-up that kooky and a few spectacular murder set-pieces.
As the movie kicked off I honestly wasn’t sure if the regeneration macguffin was a plot contrivance to resurrect the character from the first film or a nod to Michael Myers; but by the time the third act rolls around it becomes quite obvious what D’Amato and Eastman were trying to do, and who they were liberally borrowing ideas from.
“It’s rare to see a movie with a completely original idea, because they’re always repurposed,” said Eastman in his own defense. “When you write these stories, these claustrophobic thrillers set in a single location, you don’t look for a classic movie to get inspiration from. You already have this inspiration inside of you from seeing films like Friday the 13th, The Shining (1980), and so on. You have absorbed them so much that they influence you when you think about your story. And so, in the end, I’m not saying they’re identical but they tend to look similar. It can’t be helped.”
But even Eastman appears to have lost interest both with writing the script and his performance, as his character meanders around between murders, waiting impatiently for the condoms filled with fake blood strapped to him to pop-off, or walking through scenes as fast as (in)humanly possible. “These were movies that started out with the disadvantage of low budgets and solid ideas; films we tried to make quickly or else nobody would earn a cent,” he said. “For Absurd I tried to do a little bit more. But I lost that enthusiasm as it became clear that it would end up being something a little bit less, as usual. [D’Amato] always went for the bone, and never wanted to experiment.”
And that’s one of the problems with knock-offs and rip-offs like these: an audience has already seen this picture -- and usually a better version of the picture, which is why D’Amato ripped it off in the first place; and so, unless you can bring something to the table to make your version unique in its own right, well, your recycling efforts are kinda doomed.
One of D’Amato’s biggest failures is he never learned the lesson of just repeating what was already good doesn’t make what you’re doing any good. Aside from the rare moments when Stenopolis was getting his murder on -- and I do find it weird that D’Amato and Eastman didn’t make him a cannibal, too, Absurd is pretty lifeless, listless, and barely perfunctory. And the less said about the constant cutaways to the Super Bowl party and the reel-killing game footage inserts the better. (For the record, the Steelers won 31-19.)
As for the Dr. Loomis and Sheriff Brackett surrogates, Father Gyro and Sgt. Englemen are pale imitations. One of the best parts of Halloween and its subsequent sequels is Donald Pleasance’s outro performance, making the audience ponder if the good doctor was even loonier and more dangerous than the escaped mental patient he was after. Here, Edmund Purdom plays it way too straight as he tries to convince everyone what they’re up against. And once that’s established, both he and Charles Borromel’s characters essentially disappear from the picture for the next hour.
As for Stenopolis’ victims, D’Amato does surprise and short-circuits things a bit by killing off what audiences would later come to define as the Final Girl. Annie Belle (Annie Brilliand), who played nurse Emily, was a French actress, who had come out of the world of European softcore. Her first films were Fly Me the French Way (Tout le monde il en a deux, 1974) and Sex Rally (Le rallye des joyeuses, 1974); and she would later appear in a couple of those Emmanuelle knock-offs, co-starring with Laura Gemser in Brunello Rondi’s Black Emanuelle, White Emmanuelle (Velluto nero, 1976) and Massimo Dallamano’s Teenage Emmanuelle (La fine dell'innocenza, 1976).
Her first horror film would be for Deodato in House on the Edge of the Park (La casa sperduta nel parco, 1980), where a couple of lowlifes, led by David Hess -- The Last House on the Left (1972), Hitch-Hike (1977), crash an upscale party, which soon turns into a hostage situation. This was followed by Absurd, where she gives a fine performance in a rather thankless role, destined to get broiled alive. Both the actress and the character deserved better.
The Bennett children were played by Katya and Kasimir Berger, the real life children of actors Hanja Kochansky, who played their mom, Anya Bennett, and William Berger, an American expatriate, who starred in a string of things ranging from Sabata (1969), Super Fly T.N.T. (1973) and Devil Fish (1984). Apparently, little Kasimir was a bit of a handful according to Eastman. “The kid was like an earthquake. It was difficult to go after him and make him do things.”
As for Katya, she’s one of the few bright spots in the movie. I like how only she can calm her brother down -- adulting better than the real adults around her. And one of the few sequences that had any real life to it, is during the climactic battle of wits and subsequent game of cat and mouse between the blinded killer and the crippled girl, but by then it was already way too late.
Thus, with such a lackluster, half-assed effort, it’s really easy to see how and why Absurd failed to garner a theatrical release in America as D’Amato had hoped. It didn’t help that between the release of The Grim Reaper and Absurd, Montoro and FVI had run into some legal troubles when they tried to import Enzo Castellari’s The Last Shark (L'ultimo squalo, 1981) and release it as Great White.
By now, I’m sure everyone knows that The Last Shark was simply a remake of JAWS (1975) with the serial numbers barely filed off. (We go into greater details on this in an old review of 1983's JAWS III.) And while you can get away with that in Italy, in the United States, well, not so much. And after Universal dropped the hammer and sued Great White out of theaters and FVI into bankruptcy, Montoro absconded with nearly a million dollars out of FVI’s dwindling coffers and disappeared into Mexico, never to be heard from again.
Absurd did manage a theatrical release in Italy, Spain, France and Mexico, barely cutting a dry popcorn fart in receipts. Thus, Absurd would make its debut in most countries on home video, including the U.S., where it was finally released in 1986 as Monster Hunter by Wizard Home Video, who had some of the best damned over-sized video boxes to ever grace a rental aisle. And then we really get into the weeds as the film was released under myriad titles all over the world: Rosso sangue (Italy), Horrible (France), Psychose Infernale (French Canadian), and it was even sold as a direct sequel in West Germany as Anthropophagus 2.
Of course, as per tradition, I can’t do one of these Halloween review blitzes without doing a Zombi sequel. And one of the problems with tradition is, like with a zombie, they just won’t die. Yeah, one of the many alternate titles for Absurd is Zombie 6: Monster Hunter, thanks to the fine folks at Ace Video and EDDE Entertainment.
Now, I’ve already covered this ground in earlier reviews of Zombie (1979), Zombie 3 (1988), Zombie 4: After Death (1989), and Zombie 5: Killing Birds (1987). And I swear to my User, this will be the last time I try to explain the EXTREMELY convoluted history of this damnable franchise (-- like that ever works), which makes no logical or chronological sense, and why there's a Zombi 2 but no Zombie 2 even though there technically is. Anyhoo, inhale deeply, and go:
It all began innocently enough when Dario Argento recut George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), eliminating most of the gallows humor and had it rescored by Goblin, which was then released as Zombi (1978) in Italy. This version proved so wildly popular it inspired one of those unofficial sequels, Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 (1979).
Simple enough, but here’s where things start to get confusing. Enter Jerry Gross, who released Zombi 2 in America as Zombie (1979). Then, when Fulci finally got around to making Zombi 3, the long awaited sequel to Zombi 2, which had absolutely nothing to do with Zombi, which was then extensively reworked by Claudio Fragrasso and Bruno Mattei, and then finally released as Zombi 3 in Italy and Zombie 3 everywhere else, consumers had to wonder, Whatever the hell happened to Zombie 2?
Fragrasso then followed that up with Zombi 4 or Zombie 4: After Death. And things get ever more confusing when you start getting into home video releases, where no less than 14 films staked a claim to being a sequel to Zombi 2 / Zombie, including Andrea Bianchi's Burial Ground (1981), which was released on VHS as Zombi 3: Nights of Terror; and Marino Girolami's Zombie Holocaust (1980) used both aliases of Zombi 3 and Doctor Butcher M.D; and then José Luis Merino’s The Hanging Woman (1973) would later pass as Zombie 3: Return of the Living Dead; and don’t forget Mattei’s Hell of the Living Dead also circulated as both Zombie 3: Zombie Inferno and as Zombi 4; meanwhile, Jess Franco’s A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973) would also, you guessed it, get released as Zombi 4, which brings us to Zombi 5.
Here, D’Amato finally got involved, when his Killing Birds (1987) got rebranded as Zombie 5: Killing Birds, which shares this distinction with Franco’s Revenge in the House of Usher (1983), which also saw a release as Zombie 5: Revenge in the House of Usher for … reasons. And then Anthropophagus was also sold on home video as Zombie 7: The Grim Reaper, which technically makes it a sequel to its own prequel-sequel and … and, I think my brain just melted a bit. Moving on!
I’ll assume the reason Absurd got lumped into the Zombi / Zombie home video armageddon is due to D’Amato borrowing the notion that the only way to stop Stenopolis was by destroying his brain. Somewhat ironically, Absurd’s delightfully gruesome final freeze frame kinda presages the final twist in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988). And the whole subplot of an indestructible, self-healing killer created by dubious genetic experiments was lifted wholesale for the Chuck Norris vehicle, Silent Rage (1982).
Regardless, after Absurd fizzled, the two-punch combo of D’Amato and Eastman went after Tinto Brass and Bob Guccione’s Caligula (1979) next, with their take on the unfettered decadence of the Roman Empire with Caligula: The Untold Story (Caligola: La storia mai raccontata, 1982).
Meanwhile, Eastman’s acting career got a bit of a second wind after the release of The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2,1981) and the resulting surge of post-apocalyptic knock-offs coming out of Italy and Spain, where he fit right in with Castellari’s 1990: The Bronx Warriors (I guerrieri del Bronx, 1982) and Warriors of the Wasteland (I nuovi barbari, 1983), and 2019: After the Fall of New York (2019: Dopo la caduta di New York, 1983) and Hands of Steel (Vendetta dal futuro, 1986) for Martino. He even appeared in D’Amato’s knock-off of these knock-offs, Endgame - Bronx lotta finale (1983), where “a telepathic mutant recruits a post-World War III TV game-show warrior to lead her band of mutants to safety.”
But D’Amato and Eastman sort of had a falling out during the production of 2020 Texas Gladiators (Anno 2020: I gladiatori del futuro, 1983), which Eastman wrote and was set to direct with D’Amato producing. But after chasing D’Amato off the set on several occasions, Eastman eventually wound up quitting the production, leaving it to D’Amato to finish off this Magnificent Seven (1960) pastiche set in a nuclear wasteland.
Said Eastman, “These (post-atomic) films, which were made in the wake of the various Mad Max movies, were decidedly crummy. The set designs were poor. No attempt at originality was made at all. And the genre met a swift and well-deserved death.”
The two would work together only a few more times, reuniting briefly for Michele Soavi’s StageFright (Deleria, 1987), which D’Amato produced and Eastman provided a screenplay for and took an uncredited role as the masked killer. Here, under Soavi’s guiding hand the two finally found the temperature as StageFright is a truly remarkable and a visually mesmerizing experience -- and one of my favorite films of the 1980s.
Then, after starring in a couple of features for Lamberto Bava -- Blastfighter (1984), Delirium (1987), Eastman would take his last shot at directing with Metamorphosis (1990), another tale of dubious genetic experiments that go slightly awry, which he also wrote the screenplay for and had a cameo in. After that, Eastman retired from acting; but he would continue writing, mostly for Television, before he officially retired in 2010.
As for D’Amato, he kept on cranking things out until his death in 1999. And while there were a few legit features scattered around -- The Crawlers (1990), Frankenstein 2000 (1992), which came on the heels of Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound (1990), most of his output from 1990 on was a combination of straight to video softcore and hardcore porn, with titles ranging from Paprika: The Last Italian Whore (1995) to 120 Days of Anal (1995) to Robin Hood: Thief of Wives (1996) to Rio Lust (1998).
“Everything you’ve heard about Joe D’Amato is true, and yet it also isn’t,” lamented Soavi in a later interview included on the DVD release of Absurd. “It was impossible not to love him. Such squandered potential. He picked up the crumbs, and for him that was enough. And it’s a pity.
As with all popular media, over the decades since his passing, D’Amato’s contribution to the world of cinema has gone through periods of rediscovery and reevaluation. But from beyond the grave, D’Amato was having none of it, saying in one of his last interviews, “In Italy we’re very -- what’s the word, presumptuous. The presumption of someone who’s panned a film would never admit you couldn’t do anything to get him to change that initial opinion.
“Not even now. Maybe some young person who comes along. But I think any reevaluation now is due to nostalgia. The movies I made years ago, the fact they’re now considered good, especially in other countries, is due to nostalgia. We don’t make them anymore. My films, Fulci’s films, or Freda’s. Our kind is becoming extinct.”
And, love 'em or hate 'em, the world of cinema is lesser for it -- even when considering a turd like Absurd. For only D’Amato could screw-up a knock-off, a prequel and a sequel, all at the same time, so spectacularly.
Published on October 30, 2022, at Confirmed, Alan_01.
Absurd / Rosso sangue (1981) Cinema 80 :: Filmirage :: Metaxa Corporation / P: Joe D'Amato, Donatella Donati / D: Joe D'Amato / W: George Eastman C: Joe D'Amato / E: George Morley / M: Carlo Maria Cordio / S: George Eastman, Annie Belle, Edmund Purdom, Charles Borromel, Katya Berger, Kasimir Berger, Hanja Kochansky, Ian Danby, Cindy Leadbetter, Ted Rusoff
