|
Profile:
Lucio Fulci
 Next to the great Dario
Argento, Italy's Lucio Fulci is probably the best-known horror director to
come out of that country. His cult is enormous, but some of us don't fully
understand why. The maker of ineptly written and
acted horror schlock, Fulci did produce some of the sickest movies ever made.
Quentin Tarantino championed his film "The Beyond." But one
would be hard-pressed to name a "great" Fulci movie, although
his biggest hit, "Zombie," is one hell of an entertaining
flick.
Fulci was propelled onto the horror/gore scene in 1979 with "Zombie,"
a copy of "Dawn of the Dead" that had the
audacity to market itself in Europe as a sequel to that film. It
was a cover story in Fangoria that put "Zombie" in the collective consciousness
of the splatter film viewing public—and it's stayed there ever since.
Extremely
silly and gory, "Zombie" somehow manages to carry a beautiful nihilism that
would be imitated by the hordes of Italian zombie and cannibal movies that would follow
it, including Fulci's own copy cat, "Gates of Hell."
"Zombie" made more than $30 million worldwide. Fulci never would never make a
better or more successful movie, although Quentin Tarantino is a big fan of his later
zombie film, "The Beyond," which Tarantino re-released
to theaters in 1998. At the midnight screening I saw, the audience was noticeably
underwhelmed. But Fulci never stopped attempting to top "Zombie." One of his
films, "The New York Ripper," was so
controversial that it was banned in many countries and reportedly didn't even make
a profit. The cut version that saw release in the U.S. was unwatchable.
Truth
be told, Fulci's films were quite consistently bad. Despite the worldwide
following he has, Fulci simply wasn't all that great of a director. His fanbase
seems more focused on the gore in his films. But a Fulci film typically has a slow
pace, bad acting and even worse dubbing.
Fulci
died in 1996, shortly before he was to begin a collaboration with Argento on a "House
of Wax" remake called "The Wax Mask."
Visit the official Lucio Fulci Web site here.
|
