Yet again my life is foiled by my shoddy attention to detail. Apparently when I was busy readying my 1oo Scariest Movie Moments movies in my queue I failed to realize that the classic The Black Cat with Bela Lugosi
was in the dreaded saved pile and that Fulci's dreaded movie The Black Cat had snuck into the queue. I watched the entire movie- half asleep mind you but I did watch it, and could not for the life of me figure out what possible scene those morons could have selected for their list. Upon a quick youtube check I was floored.
Of course, this has happened to me before only the time in question involved thinking they put the original The Fly when they actually put Cronenberg's The Fly on the list. No one got upset then because both films are fantastic. But this? This thing. Is....well let's just say that if I was having Fulci doubts before, The Black Cat did absolutely nothing to remedy the situation. Here's what I suppose the movie was about.
Some crazy guy who needs to trim his eyebrows can make his cat do things...or the cat was possessed by an evil spirit who knows. Also the cat at some point hangs itself with a tiny noose? I'm all for movies about cats but this was just atrocious. To save yourself the pain and agony I would suggest seeing The Black Cat we were all meant to see. Or at the very least, listening to the fantastic song of the same name.
The worst is when you order the right movie and get the right sleeve in the mail, but the wrong disk. This happens to me with remakes every now and then, and sometimes I don't realize the mistake if I haven't seen either one before, unless of course there are really obvious present day moments like cell phones and such for a movie that is supposed to have been made in the 70s (this is how I realized the Black Christmas I was watching probably wasn't the right one).
ReplyDeleteFulci's Black Cat is freakin' great though.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately Richard I don't think I can agree. But only because I'm just not a Fulci kind of woman. His films may be great, but they just don't float my boat I guess!
ReplyDeleteOh, you are not alone there, Andre. Lots of folks don't get bitten by the Fulci bug. There's just this thing about his movies. He's like a lot of other Italian horror directors that worked in nearly every conceivable genre as the trends changed, etc. But then he got into horror films and created this little universe of his own.
ReplyDeleteAnd it's in this way that I think he and Argento are a lot alike. While you'd never mistake an Argento film with a Fulci film, they both achieved something very special around the same time. From around 1975 through 1984, Fulci actually had a distinct and unmistakable style. That style is like this inescapable miasma of death and horror (and eye violence). It's often swirling and in soft focus but damn, it's good shit. You probably just haven't found your gateway into his world (AKA your seventh door of death) yet.
Anyway, I pride myself on being a Fulci kind of woman.