FULCI FOR FAKE (2019, Severin Films Blu-ray and DVD)
In addition to AENIGMA, Severin Films is also releasing two other Lucio Fulci titles today: DEMONIA and Simone Scafidi's recent documentary FOR FAKE. In contrast to AENIGMA, which I find less a serious horror film than an absurd lampoon of 1980s trends in American and Italian horror, DEMONIA is a far more genuine project. This is as it should be, as credit for the screenplay goes to Fulci and Piero Regnoli (THE PLAYGIRLS AND THE VAMPIRE, THE THIRD EYE), one of the earliest writers in the Italian horror genre. Though visibly underproduced, it feels a more organic outgrowth of the best traditional Italian horror, telling a genuine Italian Gothic story and successfully summoning some potent imagery. It's the story of an archaeological team from the University of Toronto sent to a coastal village in Sicily to excavate the grounds surrounding an ancient castle where a nunnery was headquartered in the 15th century. During the excavation, one of the students - Liza Harris (Meg Register) - finds herself drawn inside the forbidden castle ruins where she unearths a long-blocked passage to a room where the locals had long ago crucified the nuns as devil worshippers. Being predicated on a kind of psychic affinity for the place, her discovery leads to demonic possession and a series of local murders (of typically Fulcian juiciness) where Liza is not physically present but for which her connection is somehow responsible as a conduit for a vengeful oltra-tumba energy.
An American actress who seems to have abandoned her career after 1997, Register bears an interesting resemblance to child actor Giovanni Frezza (from Fulci's THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY) and, though attractive, is never sexualized in her role. She's a strong, resilient character who starts out by mirroring our own curiosity about the location and gradually evolves into the film's battleground. Her performance is complemented by veteran actor Brett Halsey (who had previously worked with Fulci in THE DEVIL'S HONEY, 1986 and TOUCH OF DEATH, 1988), very good as Paul Evans, the expedition's leader, who is both responsible for extending their stay despite signs of danger and trying to summon Liza back the more deeply she sinks into her metaphysical mire. (As with AENIGMA, Ted Rusoff and Carolyn de Fonseca can be heard prominently among the voice actors on the English dub.) Al Cliver (ZOMBIE - credited as "Al Clever") has a supporting role as one of the film's several alcoholic characters, and Fulci himself appears as the detective assigned to the murder investigations. There are images throughout the film that resonate with other scenes in other Fulci films, while others nicely inhabit the same universe or visual vocabulary while blazing macabre new trails. This film and AENIGMA share a cinematographer in Luigi Ciccarese and, while both films have in common a bluntly lit, overexposed look to them, he nevertheless presents us with some classic Fulci images. Happily, one of these is the closing shot - which can be read metaphysically as an alternate tense of a shot near the beginning of the film.
In one of the disc's most informative extras, running about 34m, uncredited screenwriter and production assistant Antonio Tentori tells the entire story of the project from his point of view, mentioning that Fulci was able to spend only one day in the cutting room with the film's editor Otello Colangeli (whose vast number of credits - more than 235 - include nearly all of Antonio Margheriti's films). He blames the ineffectual quality of the film's death scenes to lax editing and, I would mostly agree: the 89m film might have made a considerable leap in quality had it dared not only to tighten up these scenes but to lose as much as seven or eight minutes of its running time. The scenes of the after hours celebrations of the students, drinking and dancing to monotonous folk guitar, are unnecessary and several conversation scenes are indulged for much too long before getting to their point. Also badly inhibiting the film's pace is Giovanni Cristiani's meandering, indistinct score, which feels more dedicated to lending additional veils of uneasy atmosphere than in underlining character identification, contrasting the 15th and 20th century storylines, and making Liza's possession by the long-dead Mother Superior more deeply felt. The largely incapable special effects makeup, credited to Franco Giannini and two others (one of them with the unfortunate surname Terribili), is also to blame for the film having less overall impact than it should.
The disc's extras include a rare feature-length commentary by Stephen Thrower (BEYOND TERROR: THE FILMS OF LUCIO FULCI), a 5m piece of on-set video that documents an effects shot in preparation and gives us a sample of Fulci's way of speaking English, and a 15m interview with camera operator Sandro Grossi.
Scafidi's Fulci documentary approaches its subject from the standpoint of actor Nicola Nocella, who wants to learn more about the real Fulci, as preparation for playing him in this documentary. If we can overlook the fact that Nocella is utterly ill-suited to playing the gaunt Fulci of his CAT IN THE BRAIN days, the questions he addresses to various Fulci friends and family members are earnest and helpful, and his inquisition prompts some wonderfully candid responses from Fulci's daughters Camilla (who died shortly after filming) and Antonella, as well as composer Fabio Frizzi, cinematographer Sergio Salvati, and several others. Particularly unforgettable is NOTTURNO CINEMA publisher Davide Pulici, who has a granite mien and offers his opinions - for example, that if Fulci had stopped after his first 15 films, more than most directors get to make in an entire career, he would not have reached his greatest works - with the precision of mastered style and the weight of Biblical law. It would be a mistake to expect this film to provide a wealth of film clips and open access to the musical themes associated with Fulci's work, but Fulci devotees will want this anyway and be well rewarded by it. The extras are extensive and generally encompass unedited or expanded interviews conducted for the documentary, as well as Michele Romagnoli's tapes of Fulci in conversation as they were preparing his never-completed autobiography, and family home movies - which make this release more of an essential purchase.
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