THE GATES OF HELL (1980)

REVIEW / MOVIE.. GATES OF HELL’ A MONUMENT TO BAD TASTE.. THE GATES OF HELL - DIRECTED BY LUCIO FULCI , FROM A SCREENPLAY BY DANNY.. SACCHETTI AND FULCI, WHO ALSO DID THE HAIRSTYLES, STARRING CHRISTOPHER.. GEORGE, KATHERINE MACCOLL AND ROBERT.. SAMPSON, AT THE CINEMA 57AND SUBURBAN THEATERS, RATED R.

Boston Globe - May 28, 1983

Author: Jay Carr Globe Staff

Spaghetti westerns have been supplanted by spaghetti sauce horror movies. "The Gates of Hell," an example of the genre, is a film that only a diehard necrophile could love, but not if he or she has any taste.

When a priest wearing bad eye makeup strolls into a graveyard and for no apparent reason hangs himself, he and the other corpses start rising up out of their graves. Predictably, they do not look their best.

Matted, maggoty, in various stages of slimy decomposition, they stalk the town, squeezing the scalps of victims, with unpleasant consequences.

The gory effects are amateurish. So is what passes for plot and characters. This is the kind of film that could have been squelched by a single crucifix, and should have been. Inept and woebegone, it is, let’s face it, no "Night of the Living Dead.

IT’S ’HELL’ JUST TO WATCH
Miami Herald, The (FL) - June 13, 1983
Author: TERRY KELLEHER Herald Arts Writer

The Gates of Hell can’t be accused of misrepresentation.

You’ve probably seen the ads in this newspaper: a decomposing (and ugly, to boot) head under the caption, "When the moon turns red the dead shall rise." The art work is cheap, the pitch is disgusting.

So it’s no upset that The Gates of Hell is cheap and disgusting. This is the kind of movie that gives rise to gloomy meditations on how low modern man will go for a buck.

It would be a mistake, however, to imply that this three- year-old junker is without touches of drollery. How’s this for subtle humor? The only recognizable name in the cast is Christopher George, who once starred in a TV series called "Rat Patrol." George’s character dies horribly near the end of The Gates of Hell, and rats nibble at his brain.

Let’s see now. Other funny bits in The Gates of Hell. The local pervert, the one who appears to be dating an inflatable doll, wears a Notre Dame windbreaker. George and a concerned young woman search a graveyard for the stone of a priest who hanged himself at the cemetery. "I’m glad he didn’t hang himself at Arlington," George says. Arlington, right? Where all the stones look the same? OK, here’s a sight gag. A uniformed cop wears a hat so big, it covers his eyes.

Do unintentional laughs count? A weird hag gives a trenchcoated detective an improbable (not to mention badly dubbed) spiel about the dead rising when the moon turns red. "You’re either on grass," he responds, "or you’re pulling my leg." When the dead start pushing against the sod, the sound effect is that of a squeaking door. There are so many tight closeups of eyes that optometrists will mistake this for a training film.

That’s about it for the lighter side of The Gates of Hell. It’s hard to grin and bear the sight of a drill boring through a man’s head or a girl vomiting up her insides or armies of worms having their fill of human flesh. The weird hag promises "horrendously awful things," and director-writer Lucio Fulci delivers.

How low will modern man go for a buck?

Movie Review

The Gates of Hell (R) No stars

....

CAST

Christopher George, Katriona MacColl, Robert Sampson, Janet Agren, Carlo de Mejo

CREDITS

Director: Lucio Fulci

Producer: Robert Warner

Screenwriters: Lucio Fulci, Dardano Sacchetti

Cinematographer: Sergio Salvati

Music: Fabio Frizzi

....

An MPM Release

....

Violence, gore

....

At the America, Colonial Village, Palm Avenue, Marina, Northside, Homestead, Movie City, Southland, Thunderbird, Lake Shore, Movie Center

HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY (1981)

REVIEW MOVIE.. HOUSE’ FOR GORE FANS ONLY.. HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY - DIRECTED BY LUCIO FULCI , SCREENPLAY BY FULCI.. AND DARDANO SACCHETTI. STARRING KATHERINE MACCOLL, PAOLO MALCO, GIOVANNI.. FREZZA. AT THE BEACON HILL AND.. SUBURBS. UNRATED, BUT NOBODY UNDER 17 WILL BE ADMITTED, OWING TO THE.. FILM’S FREQUENT AND EXPLICIT VIOLENCE.

Boston Globe - April 21, 1984

Author: Jay Carr Globe Staff

Add "House by the Cemetery" to your must-miss list, unless you’re interested in the title-roleist, a handsome three-story gray-and-white Victorian house in Scituate (called New Whitby in the film), where the action unfolds, or, rather, spurts. Otherwise, it’s a tacky little cement block of a monster-in-the-cellar movie by the same people who gave us the utterly unmemorable "Gates of Hell," the most arresting aspect of which was a priest wearing eye makeup. The most notable feature of "House by the Cemetery" is the name of its mad scientist, banned from medicine in 1879 for illegal experiments, but still clumping around the cellar, kitchen knife in rotting hand, breathing heavily, complexion a bit, well, off. He’s called Dr. Freudstein.

The high priority attached to cramming the screen full of sadistic stabbings and slicings (the stage blood not only flows like lambrusco; it looks like lambrusco) means minimal attention to such niceties as lip- synchronization (it was made in Italian) and consistency. The scruffy patriarch of the family renting the house, is fanged by a tenacious bat that suggests a winged cruller. We next see his bitten hand undamaged, but in the following scene he’s wearing a bandage. "House by the Cemetery" isn’t even a good bad movie; it’s too complacent and inept, letting the soundtrack do most of the work, with creakings, groanings and lots of electronic keyboard pumping. "The Shining" and even "Friday the 13th" did it better, avoiding such howlers as sending a car from Manhattan to Boston by way of the Brooklyn Bridge, as this one does.

Italian gore master surpasses himself in ..House by Cemetery’

The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution - January 14, 1985

Author: CAIN, SCOTT, Scott Cain Staff Writer: STAFF

Lucio Fulci , the Italian gore master, surpasses his own lurid standard in "House by the Cemetery." There is no way to sit through the entirety of this blood-drenched movie except by being impervious to it, and that defeats the purpose of going to the theater.

Regrettably, Fulci likes to work in America. He is fascinated with Nathaniel Hawthorne territory, but hasn’t spent enough time in this country to pick up a sense of social etiquette.

The house where the shenanigans take place is a ramshackle monstrosity deep in the countryside. Middle-class Americans would consider the building to be uninhabitable, but Fulci’s family moves in without a moment’s hesitation.

Owing to restless spirits, a grotesque amount of slaughter occurs. Fulci trots out his usual supply of severed limbs, split skulls, lacerated chests and tumbling eyeballs. As ever, he decorates this carnage with an abundant supply of maggots. If there is such a place as a maggot farm, Fulci is undoubtedly its No. 1 customer.

House by the Cemetery: A horror movie directed by Lucio Fulci . Movie guide: Rating, R; sex, none; violence, a lot and very gory; nudity, none; language, mild. Theaters: Tower Place, Galleria, South DeKalb, Shannon, North 85, Marbro.

THE PSYCHIC (1977)

’Psychic’ Shivers

Washington Post, The (DC) - May 1, 1979

Author: Gary Arnold

"The Psychic," on the whole an uneven experiment in terror, had as unheralded an opening as any movie in Washington.Audiences who took potluck on it, however, were probably agreeably surprised by some genuinely clever touches and reflectively sustained shivers.

According to the minimal advertising material available, "The Psychic" was directed by someone named Lucio Fulci , who transcends his overdramatic mannerisms to reveal a talent for orchestrating pictorial suspense. Fulci hits his stride in the last reel or so, when Jennifer O’Neill, evidently lingering in Italy after "The Innocent" and cast as the clairvoyant heroine, is stalked from one old dark premises to another by the killer whose past and future crimes she has envisioned.

Although Fulci plants intriguing clues to the showdown-a shattered wall mirror, a wooden floor lamp with a huge red shade, a yellow-papered cigarette smoldering in a blue ash-tray, a hint of entombment borrowed from Poe’s "Cask of Amontillado"-much of the early exposition requires patience. The sound has the sepulchral quality of Italian post-dubbing. One must also put up with repetitive visual hokum, particularly shots boring in for a look at O’Neill’s all-seeing eyes.

But once the heroine embarks unwittingly on her final rendezvous with the murderer-clairvoyance conveniently fails her at this juncture to make a spine-tingling conclusion possible-Fulci demonstrates a masterful command of timing, mood and seductively menacing images. He seems to turn the corner during a passage that recalls Martin Balsam’s ill-fated walk up the staircase in "Psycho." In this case O’Neill, summoned to a murder house by a possible informant, begins mounting a wide, shadowy staircase and halts at the sight of blood slowly drip, drip, dripping onto the steps from the floor above. When she looks up, the sequence is off and running for perhaps 20 minutes of wittily elaborated hide-and-seek.

Like Dario Argento, the talented but excessive director of horror films like "Suspiria" and "The Bird With the Crystal Plumage," the obscure Fulci seems to have more stuff than he often needs. Still, it’s more amusing and rewarding to play along with the excesses of enthusiasm in a Fulci than to wait for a laborious tease, like John Carpenter of the grossly overrated "Halloween," to get his scare-show off the dime.

One could imagine many other actresses supplying a more entertaining performance as a threatened psychic than O’Neill does. Fulci uses her beautiful but usually impassive face as a decorative object in compositions where darkness and threatening emblems appear to be closing in on its luminous surface.

The little detail of the wristwatch given the heroine by a friend is essential. The timepiece proves one of the more delightful props ever exploited in a movie thriller. It plays a critical role on two occasions in the closing minutes, the second cueing a stunning freeze-frame fade-out.