There is genre film and there is, oh heavenly bounty, Italian genre film. Granted, it’s a generalization, but there’s a wonderful tendency to value stylish sensationalism over logic and coherence that sets Italy apart and makes their genre (particularly horror) pictures unique delights.
Lincoln Center’s Midnight Movies series screened Italian horror maestro Lucio Fulci’s The House By The Cemetery last Friday. It was an uncut version, though the print was in lousy shape and had Dutch subtitles for some perverse reason. The movie itself was in English, or Englishish (horror movies have other and often far greater priorities than the text), so the Dutch subtitles were alternately funny and distracting rather than an insurmountable obstacle to understanding. Film Comment’s Gavin Smith, in introductory remarks about Fulci that doubled as a quasi-apologia for the quality and quirkiness of the print, offered the idea that the latter could make the experience of watching the movie a kind of grindhouse experience. While a helpful way to approach the movie itself, experientially that idea was undone by the fact that we were just down the hall from a place that makes (really good) $11 Old Fashioneds. But oh well, you can’t have everything, and the movie’s the important thing anyway.
[Onwards!]