La casa sperduta nel parco (1980)

... aka: Der Schlitzer (The Slasher)

... aka: House at the Edge of the Park, The

... aka: House on the Edge of the Park

... aka: Ripper on the Edge, The

... aka: Trampa para un violador (Trap for a Rapist)

Directed by:

Ruggero Deodato

Car lights down a busy highway and small white specks in high rise windows are caught in a backdrop of deep blue night. A man following a woman pulls in front of her, jumps into her car, throws her in the backseat, rips her clothes off and rapes her while strangling her as a eerily chirpy pop song ("Sweetly, oh sweetly. Summertime is coming. Happy and carefree. Waiting just for you...") plays. The quick-cut editing choices and decision to keep fading to black during the attack are oddly rhythmic; interesting. One hopes this haunting and disturbing opening sequence is getting the ball rolling on a film that will continue on with visual inventiveness and shocks but sadly this ends up being is the best scene in the entire film.

We then cut to a garage in New York City where perverted greaseball Alex (David A. Hess) and his slow-witted buddy Ricky (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) are about to close down shop for the night and go "boogie" at a disco. Wealthy young couple Lisa (Annie Belle) and Tom (Christian Borromeo) stop by with car problems. It's a quick fix. Since it's getting late, the couple agree to let Alex and Ricky come along with them to a small get-together at a secluded, swanky villa with three of their equally rich and refined friends; Gloria (Lorraine De Selle), Glenda (Marie Claude Joseph) and Howard (Gabriele De Giulio). So what would these respectable folks want a couple of low rent working class miscreants around? As Lisa later confesses, "Anything to stop our boredom." She gets her wish.

The little party starts out with bad disco music, bad dancing, bad dialogue ("Hot diggity!") and bad manners as Alex can't keep his hands off of the sleek, short-haired beauty Lisa. She tells him he looks like he belongs in a cage but keeps teasing him and giving off mixed signals all the same; letting him caress her legs and then more or less suggesting he join her in the shower, where she lets him ogle her and scrub her back but then leaves him cold. During a poker game, Tom and the other rich folks cheat the semi-retarded Ricky out of what little money he does have. Naturally they don't need the money. This appears to be all about having a laugh at his expense, just as they did encouraging him to dance. When Alex calls them out on it, Howard attempts to punch him out but he doesn't know who he's dealing with. Alex is the same guy who murdered the woman in the opening sequence. And he's brought along his straight razor.

After taking all of their money, Alex decides to stick around to "have a little fun with the cunts." This involves roughing up anyone up who threatens him or tries to escape. The men are beat, sliced, have their heads beat against a table and one is thrown into the swimming pool and then pissed on as he tries to climb out. The women naturally get about the same treatment, only worse as they're women so their assaults are compounded with sexual violence. Their clothes are ripped off, they're constantly being groped, having their breast squeezed, forced into having lesbian relations with one another and, of course, getting raped. Poor Cindy (Brigitte Petronio), a late arrival to the festivities, is revealed to be a virgin so she has her breasts and nude body sliced up after she's stripped naked.

While there's plenty of violence on display, though not much blood or gore, this seems much more focused on roughie sexploitation and rape fetishism and fills up most of its running time with nudity and sexual assault. Four of the five actresses have full frontal nude scenes, a number of them more than one, while the fifth actress, the only black one, gets by with only showing her tits a couple of times. The "action" probably hits its nadir when one the captives willingly has sex with her attacker seemingly out of pity! It's all rather unpleasant to sit through but Park isn't particularly harrowing as a thriller either due to poor dialogue, moronic character actions, gigantic plot holes and endless annoying shots of the cast standing around posing like models and looking only mildly uncomfortable as they watch their friends getting roughed up, violated and potentially killed. A twist during the finale attempts to explain why the victims behave like morons the entire time but it only makes their actions during the rest of the film even more senseless and infuriating.

This was clearly made in response to the success of The Last House on the Left (1972), which must have been extremely popular in Europe at the time as there are a number of similar films with similar titles hoping to cash in on Craven's notorious shocker. This one has an edge over most of the others though due to the casting coup of actual Last House star Hess ("Krug Stillo") playing a similar role. There's even a direct nod to LHOTL during the finale, only it's an amusing reversal of the fate of Last House's Mari Collingwood character inflicted upon Hess himself! The actor had already done another of these films a few years prior called HITCH HIKE (1977), which was released under the alt title Hitch Hike: Last House on the Left in some countries. Both it and Craven's film are better than this one.

Due to its tasteless nature and gratuitous nudity, this landed itself on the UK's coveted video nasties banned list. Here in the U.S. it was released theatrically in 1985 (Hess / Last House were both heavily used as marketing ploys) and then made its way to home video courtesy of Vestron, who released it unrated and completely uncut. I distinctly remember one of the video stores I frequented as a kid having this in their "Hard R" section and refusing to rent it to anyone under 18. Strangely, this same place had already let 10-year-old me rent stuff like Mondo Magic and Make Them Die Slowly, both of which are far more graphic than this one. (Irregardless, I didn't let them stop me from watching this as I just went to another video store down the block and rented it there instead, no problem!)

Regina Mardek (billed as "Karoline Mardeck"), the real-life wife of the star, plays the victim in the opening sequence. The score is by Riz Ortolani and most of the main crew (writer Gianfranco Clerici, cinematographer Sergio D'Offizi, editor Vincenzo Tomassi) had been ported over from Deodato's notorious Cannibal Holocaust (1980), which was filmed just a few months prior for the same producers and production company. Unlike the much more potent Holocaust, this one has always been easy to find and widely circulated. There have been numerous releases over the years, including a Media Blasters / Shriek Show DVD in 2002 (which includes interviews with the director and two male stars), and Blu-ray releases from TC Entertainment out of Japan and Code Red and Dark Force Entertainment here in America. A sequel, to be directed by Deodato and star Radice, was announced way back in 2011 but nothing has come of it so far.

★★

Paura nella città dei morti viventi (1980)

... aka: City of the Living Dead
... aka: Ein Zombie hing am Glockenseil (Zombie Hung on a Bell Rope)
... aka: Fear in the City of the Living Dead
... aka: Frayeurs (Fears)
... aka: Gates of Hell, The
... aka: Pater Thomas (Father Thomas)
... aka: Zombiernes by (Zombie City)

Directed by:
Lucio Fulci

In a small New England town, priest Father William Thomas (Fabrizio Jovine) hangs himself in a cemetery. Meanwhile, in New York City, psychic Mary Woodhouse (Catriona MacColl) and some of her colleagues are having a séance. Mary has visions of the suicide and of a zombie rising from the grave, freaks out, breaks the link and keels over onto the floor dead. When police show up at the scene, they're told she was scared to death. Not buying into the story, wisecracking journalist Peter Bell (Christopher George) decides to look into matters. He goes to the cemetery, rescues Mary from being buried alive when she miraculously springs back to life and then accompanies her to a friend's apartment to learn all about a prophecy contained in the Book of Enoch, a religious text written over 4000 years ago. According to the book, the gates of hell will open somewhere in a small town and mankind will be wiped out because no dead body will ever be able to rest in peace again. The only remedy to the situation is closing the gates before All Saint's Day.

Back in Dunwich, strange things are afoot. Winds are atypically strong, the town is enveloped in a cloud of “dust” (fog), windows and mirrors shatter on their own, walls crack open and sometimes bleed and cute little kittens attack their owners. Even worse, the dead priest has returned from the grave and now has supernatural powers that he doesn't hesitate using against the townsfolk, who are rumored to be descendants of “Salem witch burners.” He starts out by force feeding pretty young Emily (Antonella Interlenghi) a mouthful of worms and muck. During the film's most memorably gross bit, he appears before a pair of necking teens and squeezes the brains right out of the guy's head after making his girl puke up all of her internal organs. Others disappear or start turning up dead and the recently deceased return to life and add to the army of the undead. At a mortuary, an old lady kills a thieving mortician. Emily returns as a pizza-faced zombie to haunt her parents and kid brother. And so on and so on.

Since Mary saw “Dunwich” written on a tombstone in one of her visions, she knows just where to go. Peter, despite his skepticism, decides to tag along. I'd like to say the two are in a big hurry to get there considering a zombie apocalypse and the fate of all mankind life is at stake. But nope. With just 48 hours to find the town (which isn't even on a map), the two decide to flirt, act casual about the whole ordeal and even take a detour to sample some fine regional cuisine. Getting directions from another priest in a nearby town, the two finally make it to their destination, but not until many have died and everything's pretty much gone to (literal) hell. Our heroes eventually team up with town shrink Gerry (Carlo De Mejo) and one of his patients, neurotic painter Sandra (Janet Agren), in an effort to close the gates. The four get showered with maggots at one point and the big finale takes place in an underground tomb and some catacombs.

This is one of the key titles on Fulci's filmography that helped turn him into a cult director during the early days of home video. Like most of the director's other works, it drags at times (particularly around the midway point), some scenes work better than others and there are about 1001 zoom shots into eyeballs, but it's also atmospheric, gloomy and gory. Nicely shot by Sergio Salvati (who shot all of the director's films around this time), this also boasts an excellent score from Fabio Frizzi and a more straightforward and less confusing story line (co-written by Dardano Sacchetti) than some of Fulci's other efforts.

Italian horror / exploitation fans should recognize much of this cast. Aside from those already mentioned, small roles are also played by future director Michele Soavi, Fulci regular Daniela Doria (who almost always gets the best death scene in these things), Venantino Venantini, Luciano Rossi, Robert Sampson and Fulci himself as a pathologist. Giovanni Lombardo Radice (aka “John Morghen”) has a memorable bit as the slow-witted town outcast whose girlfriend is an inflatable doll and who may or not be a sex predator. He also meets a memorable demise when the father of one of his supposed victims pushes a huge electric drill through his head (an excellent effect). American porn actor Michael Gaunt also turns up playing a gravedigger in one scene alongside Percy Pirkanen of Cannibal Holocaust fame.

Here in America, this was picked up by Motion Picture Marketing, who wanted to release it as Twilight of the Dead with ad art copying Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978) until they were served a cease and desist order. It was then re-titled The Gates of Hell, great new posters were made and it played theaters unrated and uncut in 1983. On home video, it was issued the following year by Paragon, also unrated and under the same title. Later VHS, DVD and BR releases (from Anchor Bay, Arrow, Blue Underground, etc.) used the City of the Living Dead title. The full running time of the uncut version is 93 minutes, though some countries (like Australia) received a shorter cut missing some of the gore.

★★1/2