Buio Omega (1979)

... aka: Beyond the Darkness

... aka: Blue Holocaust

... aka: Buried Alive

... aka: Demencia (Dementia)

... aka: Final Darkness, The

... aka: Folie sanglante (Bloody Madness)

... aka: House 6: El terror continua (House 6: The Terror Continues)

... aka: In quella casa buio omega (In That House... Blue Omega)

... aka: Mroczny instynkt (Dark Instincts)

... aka: Saddo

... aka: Sado - Stoß das Tor zur Hölle auf (Sado: Open the Gate to Hell)

Directed by:

Joe D'Amato

Along with Lucio Fulci, Ruggero Deodato and perhaps a few others, D'Amato was one of a handful of Italian genre directors to get a huge boost in international popularity during the VHS era. In D'Amato's case, that popularity existed almost exclusively because of one title, this disturbing little number, which became one of the most notorious genre films of the entire decade on the home video market. Here in America, it was given an unrated theatrical run by Aquarius Releasing in 1984, followed by a big box VHS release from ThrillerVideo in 1986, both under the new title Buried Alive. Advertisements for the film were very memorable, with the theatrical poster promising such lovely sights as "acid bath revenge," "savage dismemberments," "pails of entrails" and women being torn "limb from limb" and getting "chewed to death," while the VHS box featured a huge yellow "WARNING" sticker on the front, followed by a disclaimer on the back stating "This motion picture is one of the most violent films ever made. There are scenes of sadistic cruelty graphically shown. If the presentation of disgusting and graphic material upsets you, please do not view this film." Of course that "warning" resulted in anyone who read it immediately snatching the film up and heading straight to the counter.

While D'Amato had other films on the market that received a bit of notoriety; most notably The Grim Reaper (1980) and Absurd / Monster Hunter (1981), both of which were prosecuted video nasties in the UK, and several entries in the Emanuelle series, none achieved quite the infamy this one did. So was all that hoopla warranted? Sure. While there have been countless more graphic and disgusting films made since 1979, placed within the context of when this was made, this is pretty strong stuff.

Frank Wyler (Kieran Canter) is a lonely young taxidermist who inherited a ton of money when his parents passed away in car accident and lives in a large gated villa (more like a compound) with his, shall we say, very dedicated housekeeper, Iris (Franca Stoppi). Frank's fallen madly in love with Anna Völkl (Cinzia Monreale) but, unfortunately, she's on her deathbed. Frank ensures her that "Death is not going to separate us" while giving her a final kiss... and boy does he mean it! In order to keep her fresh, he sneaks her injections of formaldehyde before she's buried. After the funeral, he sneaks into the graveyard with a flashlight, crowbar, shovel and sack, digs up her corpse and throws it in the back of his van.

On his way back home, he has to pull over to change a flat tire. An obnoxious, chubby tourist named Jan (Lucia D'Elia), who's been hitchhiking around the country, hops into his vehicle and passes out after smoking a joint. Frank returns home and leaves the girl in the van in his garage while he gets to work preserving Anna's corpse, which involves slicing her open with a scalpel, yanking out her guts, pulling out her organs, replacing her eyeballs with glass ones and sucking out her brains through tubes stuck in her skull through her nostrils (!) It does not involve eating her heart, though he does that, anyway. When Jan wakes up, stumbles upon the gory scene and starts attacking Frank, he pins her down, rips off her fingernails with pliers and suffocates her with a rag.

Soon enough, Iris finds out what Frank's up to. Instead of going to the police, she opts to help him out. After all, Iris is in love with Frank herself and was always jealous of his relationship with Anna, even to the point of trying to speed along her demise by enlisting the aid of a sorceress to kill her using voodoo dolls! Her and Frank's very bizarre relationship includes her comforting him by whipping out her tit and breastfeeding him (!) and helping him dismember corpses with a meat cleaver and dissolving them in acid baths. Now that Anna is dead but of no real threat to her, she helps dress her corpse, paints her fingernails, makes her look presentable and is even willing to give Frankie Boy a hand so he can get off ogling her corpse. Yikes.

Frank soon claims another victim. He brings an injured female jogger (Anna Cardini) back home, seduces her onto the bed he shares with his dead girlfriend, rips out her throat with his teeth and then eats the skin. He and Iris then throw the (still-living) girl into an oven and burn her alive. Their cozy little arrangement is threatened by a number of people, including a pair of police detectives (who thankfully barely factor into the film), an older gentleman (Sam Modesto) who starts snooping around, taking photos and occasionally breaking into the villa and Anna's lookalike sister, Elena (also played by Monreale), who shows up to say goodbye at a very inopportune time.

It's easy to see why this became such a favorite of gore-hounds and sleazy exploitation fans. There's plenty of bloody violence (a crotch is stabbed, a cheek is bitten off, a head and limbs are hacked, eyeballs gets ripped out with bare hands...), perversity, tastelessness and nudity, with three women going full frontal, including a blonde Frank picks up at a disco who comes back to his home and immediately jumps into the bathtub for some strange reason. There's also a pretty great Goblin score to complete the package.

Apparently having a leading role in an internationally-released film like this didn't do Canter's career any favors. He was appearing in hardcore sex films like Erotic Flash and The Bisexual Lover almost immediately afterward. He also played Satan in the filmed-in-Italy The Devil in Mr. Holmes (1987), which was the final film John Holmes made prior to passing away from AIDS in 1988. The female stars seemed to fair a bit better. Stoppi, who gives the best performance here by a country mile, went on appear in a number of Bruno Mattei films, like The Other Hell and Women's Prison Massacre, which some viewers may view as being only a small step up from porn. Monreale (who was sometimes billed as "Sarah Keller") would act for Lucio Fulci in three films, as well as Dario Argento and others, and is still acting today.

For decades, no one seemed to realize that this is actually a remake of a long-forgotten 1966 Psycho-inspired chiller called Il terzo occhio / THE THIRD EYE. That film, which starred a young Franco Nero and Erika Blanc, plays out almost identically to this one save for the ending. Naturally, the 1966 film features no explicit nudity or graphic gore like this re-do, but it surprisingly does maintain nearly the same level of perversity.

Original Italian posters featured a phony quote attributed to Alfred Hitchcock (who passed away in 1980) singing the film's praises! Even though this was primarily known as Buried Alive (a bit of a misleading title) in the U.S. through the VHS era, it's become much better known as of late as Beyond the Darkness; the title used for most of the subsequent DVD and Blu-ray releases from companies like Shriek Show and Severin. In Spain, it was released on VHS as House 6: El terror continua ("House 6: The Terror Continues") and it was re-titled and re-released in Italy to try to trick viewers into thinking it was an Evil Dead sequel.

★★★

Tenebrae (1982)

... aka: Der kalte Hauch des Todes (The Cold Breath of Death)
... aka: El placer del miedo (The Pleasure of Fear)
... aka: Pelkoa ei voi paeta (Fear Cannot be Escaped)
... aka: Shadow
... aka: Shadows
... aka: Sotto gli occhi dell'assassino (Under the Eyes of the Killer)
... aka: Tenebre
... aka: Unsane

Directed by:
Dario Argento

Having taken a break from the more traditionally-plotted murder mysteries he initially made his name with to concentrate on the supernatural-themed SUSPIRIA (1977) and INFERNO (1980), Argento makes a return here to the style he's now most associated with. The film was only moderately successful in Europe (it performed better than Inferno though not as well as many of Argento's previous films) but was very poorly-received here in America when it was given a limited theatrical release in 1984 under the new title Unsane. As was customary at the time, the U.S. distributor (Bedford Entertainment Film Gallery) decided to remove most of the violence / gore, neutering the murder scenes in the process, and even took it upon themselves to shorten some of the more elaborate camera shots (which is unconscionable for an Argento film!). Around ten minutes in total were removed. This same cut of the film was re-released in 1987 to theaters and issued on VHS (by Fox Hills Video) to little fanfare. It would take well over a decade for the film to start to repair its reputation when it was finally made available uncut on VHS and DVD by Anchor Bay (it has since been released on Blu-ray by Arrow, Synapse and other companies). But rebound it has! Out of the 20+ features Argento has directed since 1970, it's currently his fourth highest-rated on IMDb and his third highest-rated on Letterboxd.

Popular American mystery writer Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) arrives in Rome for a book signing / press tour for his best-selling latest release Tenebrae, leaving behind mentally imbalanced former lover Jane (Veronica Lario), who he's been avoiding for six weeks, in the process. Peter is greeted at the airport by his agent Bullmer (John Saxon), secretary Anne (Daria Nicolodi), young personal assistant Gianni (Christian Borromeo) and a slew of reporters / photographers. And then the trouble starts. First off, his formerly pleasant friend Tilde (Mirella D'Angelo) has turned into a (gasp!) angry lesbian feminist magazine writer who attacks Tenebrae as being "sexist" for featuring "women as victims" and "men with their hairy macho bullshit." Second, someone back at the airport in New York has destroyed all of his belongings in his carry-on bag. Third, once Peter arrives at the hotel suite he'll be staying while in Rome, he's greeted by Germani (Giuliano Gemma) and Altieri (Carola Stagnaro), a pair of police detectives who relay something even more startling...

Just three hours before Peter arrived in Italy, shoplifter Elsa Manni (Ania Pieroni) was attacked by a black-gloved assailant who stuffed pages of Tenebrae in her mouth before slashing her to death with an old-fashioned open razor... the same murder weapon of choice for Tenebrae's fictional killer. The killer has also somehow managed to locate Peter's suite before his arrival to slip a note under his door quoting a passage from his book. And if that's not enough for one day, the killer makes a creepy, threatening phone call from a pay phone right outside the window. Time for new accommodations? Nope! For better or worse (read: worse), Peter and his entourage decide to just stay put where they are despite the fact a psycho killer knows their exact location!

The stalking and string of grisly murders continues as the suspect list, also including Peter's ex Jane (who comes all the way to Rome just to spy on him) and Cristiano (John Steiner), a TV reporter a little too into the psycho-sexual content of Tenebrae (the killer is also obsessed with the "degenerates" and "filthy, slimy perverts" in Neal's book), is trimmed down. During the film's most memorable (and celebrated) sequence, Tilde and her promiscuous bisexual girlfriend are killed by the psycho, which not only features Argento's trademark woman's-head-goes-through-glass bit but also includes an unbroken 2 ½ minute shot prowling outside the home, which goes from the window, up the side of the house, over the roof and around to the other side. This impressive shot was achieved with a special Louma Crane that had to be imported in from France.

Many of the other horror set pieces are also very well-done and photographed by Luciano Tovoli, especially one involving the hotel porter's teenage daughter (Lara Wendel) being pursued by a rabid, fence-scaling Doberman Pinscher before (whatta coincidence!) running afoul of the murderer. On a side note, Wendel deserves special credit for running around the woods, repeatedly falling down, wrestling with the dog and scaling (and jumping off of!) numerous high fences all while barefoot and wearing a miniskirt! The hectic ending, featuring several axe murders, an amazingly bloody (and oddly beautiful) bit where a severed arm stump paints a white wall red and an impalement with a piece of abstract sculpture is pretty memorable, too.

On the down side, the scenes where people aren't being slaughtered are far less successful. The plot is contrived, frequently silly and filled with implausible cheat scenes to try to throw you off, much of the dialogue is poor and unintentionally funny and most of the supporting performances suffer from poor English dubbing. There's a self-reflective element to the proceedings when it comes to contrasting Tenebrae's fictional author with the real-life Argento (both are criticized for essentially making careers out of depictions of violently killing beautiful women) that provides slight additional interest. It's also worth noting that while the film is stylish in its own way, it has more of a consistent steely / stone / cold / blue-grey color pallet than the eye-catching full color spectrum used on Argento's previous two films. It's also much brighter, with well-lit night scenes and even a number of the horror scenes taking place in broad daylight. Not that the visual presentation necessarily means everything. While Inferno is one of Argento's best-looking and most colorful films, it is also, narratively-speaking, perhaps his weakest up until the 90s.

Transgender actress Eva Robins (born Roberto Coatti) was interestingly cast in a small role as a red shoed temptress in some brief, though evocative, beach flashbacks. Marino Masé (ALIEN CONTAMINATION) and Fulvio Mingozzi (who had small roles in every Argento film up until 1985's Phenomena) also show up briefly and Lamberto Bava and Michele Soavi (both assistant directors) appear in uncredited bit parts. The score, which is more polarizing than in most of the director's other films (personally I really like it), is from Massimo Morante, Fabio Pignatelli and Claudio Simonetti.

I haven't seen this one in well over a decade but it was interesting on a re-watch, especially in regards to how my rankings for Argento films have changed over time and how well some of them have held up over the years and through repeat viewings. When I was a teenage horror fan obsessed with Argento films and collecting everything Argento I could get my hands on, this was among my Top 3 favorites. Now, not so much, though I do still like this one.

★★★