Dr. Terror's Italian Horror Week coming this Friday the 13th

As you wander through the mist, strange things start to happen. A heady scent of entrails and marinara drifts by on the breeze. You try to speak, but somehow your words don't match your mouth movements, and your voice seems to no longer be your own. Your world seems to be lit in vibrant primary colors that wash over the faces of rotting zombies, and beautiful women. Synthesizers assail your ears, mixed with the war cries of primitive cannibals. As you begin to worry that something horrible is about to happen to your eyeballs, a black gloved hand reaches for you from out of the darkness and you realize...it must be time for Italian Horror Week.
Starting Friday, July 13, it's time for a Spaghetti Splatter Spectacular as my horror homie Dr. Jimmy Terror hosts Italian Horror Week. It's a whole week dedicated to the best of Italian horror cinema featuring an insane lineup of giveaways, 3D, and guest articles from the best writers the online horror scene has to offer...and me. If you miss it, you will be impaled, plagued with maggot storms, and made to vomit up your entire intestinal tract. Well, maybe not, but you'll miss out on all of the fun, and that's just as bad. The Doc is hard at work preparing a sumptuous feast of gory goodness, so click on that picture up there to be magically transported to DR. TERROR'S BLOG OF HORRORS, where you can peruse a great site and get good and psyched up for Italian Horror Week!

Review: The Girl In Room 2A

Ah, 70’s Italian Horror. We love you for your ridiculous traits as much as the sublime ones. Italian gothic horror had more or less died out by the 70’s, and the zombie and cannibal crazes, while beginning in the late 70’s, wouldn’t hit their strides until the early 80’s. This left giallo films to dominate spaghetti terror in the 70’s. For those unfamiliar with these flicks, they’re a mixture of mystery thriller and slasher flick. They have suspense and intrigue, but also throw in gore and gratuitous nudity. They also have fun titles like Strip Nude For Your Killer, Don’t Torture a Duckling, and Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key. There are some well-known masterpieces of Giallo, mainly the works of Argento, Fulci, Martino, Bava (both Mario and Lamberto) and Lenzi. Some of the lesser-known examples, however, are just as good and even more off the wall. One giallo flick that I was not aware of until recently that I dug a lot is The Girl in Room 2A.

Poor Margaret just can’t catch a break. First she was falsely accused of a crime and imprisoned. Then, when she gets out, she winds up in a boarding house with a mysterious secret. She has an unexplained recurring bloodstain on her bedroom floor, she keeps having visions of a guy in a red and black Justice League reject costume tormenting her, and it seems that young ladies have been disappearing. The girls who have occupied her room (betcha can’t guess which one it is) certainly haven’t fared very well. They’ve fallen victim to a sadistic cult who believes that they must cleanse these wicked girls of their sins through torture, and now they’ve set their eyes on our ex-con heroine. With the help of her new beau Jack, Margaret sets out to find out the truth bout this sect, while trying not to become their latest sacrifice.

First of all, this flick has all of those ridiculous traits I was talking about. The ones that are present in virtually every movie of this type. You know, all those hallmarks that we all love so much and, to some extent, watch these flicks for. You do love these flicks right? Of course you do. Everybody does. Anyway, it’s got the horrible dubbing that provides some unintentional comedy. It’s got those incredibly melodramatic crash-zooms. Some of these flicks have brilliant scores and some have bizarre, wacky scores. This one falls firmly in the bizarre and wacky category. Some scenes have very suspenseful music that’s actually really good. Then suddenly it will change to porn-esque music or some upbeat Saturday morning cartoon chase sequence music.

What about the nudity and gore you ask? There’s nudity and gore here for you. Was 1970’s Italy some kind of magical land where every single woman was gorgeous? Almost without fail the women in these flicks are beautiful. Plus, I like that this was in the pre-silicone and botox days, so the women look more natural. A few of the ladies in this flick decide to show of those natural bodies. Our main couple also has a love scene featuring the most awesomely awkward kissing I think I’ve ever seen. The violence is there too. It may be a little subdued when compared to something like Suspiria or Twitch of the Death Nerve, but we do get an impalement, a hanging, some hand burning, a sword to the face and neck, and other assorted nastiness in all of its Crayola-red colored bloody glory. We also get some S&M thrown in for good measure, with the cult’s victims being tied up, stripped and whipped. Of course, you’re not the type that would enjoy something like that. You’re above that kind of base cheap thrills. Sure you are.

When it comes to the story, this one gets it right. The actual plot isn’t always a strong point in giallo flicks, but The Girl in Room 2A is solid. For the first two thirds of the movie, it manages to maintain some mystery around the bizarre happenings in the boarding house. It manages to build some decent tension too. Once the big reveal is made, it keeps the pace brisk enough to drive the narrative along without sacrificing a satisfying ending. While it is a fairly outlandish premise, this flick, as opposed to a lot of giallo flicks, makes sense. It avoids a lot of the silliness often involved in the genre. Well, actually, that’s not entirely true. The main torturer looks about as silly as they come. I guess he could be menacing in the right context, but I laughed my ass off whenever I saw him. He looks like a comic book character. Actually, trade his black and red pajamas for a tux and he’d look exactly like The Red Hood from Batman.

See?

Mondo Macabro, who will always have a special place in my heart for releasing Aludarda, put this one out. As usual, they did a hell of a job on the DVD. The transfer looks great, being crisp and clean while still maintaining that “40 year old film patina” charm. As far as special features go, we get a video interview with star Daniela Giordano, the US theatrical trailer, a pretty extensive written history of the film, and previews for other Mondo Macabro releases. To me special features are like money or chocolate, there’s no such thing as enough, but this is a very nice package. It’s available from their website (http://www.mondomacabrodvd.com/).

I was surprised to find out that while the flick was made in Italy, the director was American. That’s right, William Rose was from New York. That caught me off guard because he had the Giallo formula and the atmosphere of Italian horror down pat. I thoroughly enjoyed this one, and I’m honestly dumbfounded that I’d never heard of it before now. If you don’t dig Giallo, or Italian horror in general, The Girl in Room 2A isn’t going to change your mind. If, like me, you love everything about the “yellow flicks” (look it up if you don’t know), then this one will surely satisfy. Two severed thumbs up. Nathan says check it out.

30 Day Horror Challenge Day 18 - Your favorite foreign horror film

I love me some foreign horror. It really does make me sad when I see “horror fans” that don’t bother to seek out the great stuff beyond their country's borders. In recent years, the French have really been bringing it with some truly intense flicks. I’m not a big fan of the J-ghost, but Japan has given us some insane flicks. Germany has had some great hardcore horror fare, mainly in the 80’s. My favorite, though, is Italian horror. From gothic horror to giallo to spaghetti splatter and exploitation, no one does it like Italy. There are so many masters there; Argento, Fulci, Bava (both of them), Deodato, Soavi, D’Amato, Freda, Lenzi. I, as an American, may be biased, but two countries stand head and shoulders above the rest in the world of horror cinema, USA and Italy. The Gates of Hell, or City of the Living Dead, was the movie that introduced me to Italian horror.

I’m gonna tell you a little story. It’s about a kid who had just turned 14 and was discovering the world of horror movies. He grew up in a very religious house, so horror flicks were off limits. He would sneak to watch the cut for TV versions of the Elm Street or Friday the 13^th movies or whatever was being offered on basic cable whenever he could. In his rabid search for every shred of information about horror movies he could get his hands on, he would “acquire” issues of Fangoria. This was back in the days of yore when he had no internet access. This budding horror freak ordered the bootleg catalogs out of Fango’s classified section, and read them like textbooks.

He had gotten the family’s hand me down VCR when they upgraded, so one day he took some lawn mowing money, got a ride to the mall with a friend, and went into Suncoast Video to buy the first horror movies in his collection. He saw a bin labeled “3 for $20.” Yes kids, there was a time when VHS was expensive. There were also stores devoted solely to selling them in those days. Anyway, he grabbed a special edition 2 tape set of Night of the Living Dead, because he had seen it on late night TV and loved it. He also got Plan 9 from Outer Space, because he had gotten a book about Ed Wood from the library. He recognized the name Lucio Fulci on another box and couldn’t believe his luck. This was one of those forbidden fruit movies from the catalog! In big bold red letters across the front it read “UNCUT!” and he knew he had to have it. He picked up The Gates of Hell, which was the American release title of City of the Walking Dead.

Later, when he watched it, his mind was absolutely blown. This kid, who had never seen a horror movie that wasn’t edited for TV before, was watching an Italian splatter flick in all its glory. He saw a girl vomit her intestines. He saw a drill press through the head. He saw a priest hanging and a maggot storm. The coffin/pickaxe scene embedded itself in his mind. It didn’t matter that the plot barely made any sense. As this movie heaped weirdness upon creepiness upon bizarreness upon gore, he realized that in an Italian horror movie anything can happen at any moment. The thrill of that kind of frenzied, visceral thrill of the unexpected was something he never got over. He was now an unabashed Italian horror fan thanks to The Gates of Hell. I, er…HE would never be the same again.

Obviously the kid was me. That movie watching experiences changed my life. It was both my first splatter flick and my first foreign horror flick. It introduced me to the nonsensical plots, bad dubbing, beautiful actresses, killer music, enthusiastic bloodletting, and overall awesomeness of Italian cinema. In a more general sense, I had only seen the horror that the mainstream had to offer, this introduced me to the world of extreme horror that existed beyond cable. The Gates of Hell, by the way, is a much, much cooler title than City of the Living Dead. I still have that old beat up VHS tape. I also own two different editions of the DVD, but I wouldn’t ever dream of getting rid of that outdated copy. They say your first time is always special, and The Gates of Hell deflowered me but good. Thankfully it wasn’t very gentle. Two severed thumbs up. Nathan says check it out.