Well, I was going to just comment on Dario Argento’s ‘Inferno’, but my wife popped out for an Indian with the girls last night so I decided to watch it again, but this time in a double bill with Lucio Fulci’s ‘The Beyond’, in the hope that one might illuminate the other. Was it a brilliant idea or just a deluded folly? Let’s see.

‘Inferno’ thankfully ditches the comedy that made ‘Four Flies’ such a riseable experience and instead focusses on pure horror. I’m not saying it’s devoid of unintentional laughs (loathe as I am to mock the disabled, the film’s hero is such an appalling actor that you might, indeed, find his portrait under the urban dictionary definition of ‘ginger spaz’) but mostly the film’s crazed dismissal of narrative convention generates the same eerie logic as ‘Lisa and The Devil’, and works on a similar level of nightmarish vision.

The plot, such as it is, starts in modern day New York, where a young poet named Rose becomes convinced that her apartment block is actually the original residence of Mater Tenebrarum, aka The Mother of Darkness, one of ‘The Three Mothers’ who together hold dominion over the Earth through the power of Death. Her main suspicion comes from a tome she picks up from the creepy bookshop next door, a book written by the dark architect Varelli, who built a house for each Mother – one in New York, one in Germany, and one in Rome.

After stumbling into the block’s basement, Rose drops her keys down a watery hole and dives in to discover an ornate 19th Century room featuring a portrait of Mater Tenebrarum and a partially decomposed corpse. Understandably freaked, she writes a letter to her brother Mark in Rome, begging him for help.

Musicology student Mark (played by the aforementioned ginger spaz) flies over as soon as he can, but not before becoming embroiled in a mini-murder mystery of his own. After being spooked in a lecture by an intense, sultry bitch with a cat (see top of the page) he accidentally leaves his sister’s letter behind to be retrieved by Sara, a fellow student who also discovers the ’Three Mothers’ book in the city library and who consequently meets a brutal, bloody end. As Mark stumbles away from the murder scene he sees the intense, sultry bitch again, driving by in the back of a taxi. Could she be Rome’s own Mater Lachrymarum, The Mother of Tears?

Anyway, Mark arrives in New York to find his sister missing and the oddball occupants of her apartment block disappearing one by one until only an old man and his nurse survive. After uncovering many of the building’s dark architectural secrets – including small baroque floors between the actual floors  – Mark eventually stumbles on the truth. The old man is Varelli, and his nurse is Mater Tenebrarum. As the building is consumed in a sudden inferno, her mirrored reflection shatters to reveal the skeletal figure of Death itself.

The New York of ‘Inferno’ is so empty and silent it might as well be a stage set, and that’s exactly how Argento lights it. Blues & reds predominate to create an artificiality that fights against any attempt to rationalise the movie, as does the narrative’s wildly elliptical progression. If you try to watch this film as a standard slice of hollywood storytelling you – and it – will fail. Only in retrospect did all the individual images in each individual scene gel into one terrible memory for me. Watching ‘Inferno’ is definitely hard work, and is probably best attempted half drunk, but the horrific impression it leaves is well worth it.

Lucio Fulci’s ‘The Beyond’ is a far more linear piece of work and it’s approach to gore stratospherically more visceral, to the point where Fulci’s bloodbaths make Argento’s slayings in ‘Inferno’ seem almost poetically restrained.

The story opens in 1920′s Louisiana with the crucifixion and quicklime face-melting of a local Warlock, who’s then bricked up in his hotel basement by a baying mob. Half a century later an unlucky lady named Liza buys the derelict hotel as an investment opportunity, unaware that it’s built on one of the seven gateways to Hell that’s been blown wide open by the Warlock’s slaughter, allowing the dead to walk the earth the second her handyman chips away the mob’s brickwork. Doh! The resulting slaughter of everyone connected with the house is so mercilessly graphic that, on two occasions, I almost vomited.

Here are just a few examples. A zombie pushes a maid’s head through an iron nail. Do we cut away before the impact and maybe just hear the scream? Or perhaps just see her quivering mouth fording the river of blood running down her face? Nope, we see the nail ramming the eyeball out of its socket in all its gloopy glory. An Estate Agent lies dazed on the library floor having fallen from a flight of steps. Tarantulas advance from the shadowy corners. Do we just keep tight on his boggle-eyed horror while the first bite sinks in? Nope, we spend the next five minutes watching the spiders tear the flesh from his nose, ears, and eyelids, while the Queen gouges his tongue till his mouth bloodily erupts. Cornered by several zombies, a blind woman sets her guide dog on them. Having cleared the room he returns to his mistress and tears her throat out.

So, ‘The Beyond’ pulls no punches. It has the best teenage girl’s gunshot decapitation scene yet committed to DVD, so it’s a gorehound’s must see, but it also has a curiously intelligent sci-fi finale. Liza and her Doctor companion flee the hotel only to find themselves in a zombie world in which they are the only surviving humans. Every road seems to lead them back to the hotel, and yet they’re not finally devoured by the Undead. Instead they ‘escape’ into a grey cemetary landscape painted by the Warlock. Everywhere they turn, everywhere they run, they face the same two dimensional vista of ashen bodies semi-shrouded in the mist, forever safe but forever trapped in the brush strokes of the Witch.

‘Inferno’ and ‘The Beyond’ couldn’t be more different in their approaches – the latter is hyper-realistic while the former is hyper-fantastical – and yet the two films are not dissimilar in their suggestion that true horror lies in the ability of Hell and Death to consume our world on a whim; that the membrane between mundane reality and mindbreaking torture is terrifyingly thin. Neither movie is totally satisfying because both scripts dip n’ dive from woeful to functional and they’ll certainly be no acting gongs for any of the nobodies dragged into the feiry pit. But if you postpone a final analysis to that short interval between wakefulness and sleep, as you lie in bed waiting for dreams or nightmares, I think you’ll find yourself profoundly disturbed.

If that’s not recommendation enough then I have to confess to being so suitably impressed with ‘Inferno’ that I ordered its prequel, ‘Suspiria’, on DVD. It arrived this morning and I fully intend to review it as extra homework - yes, I have exceeded Head Chef’s remit on my own initiative, which suggests that it may, indeed, be all over and that he’s successfully converted me to the dark ways of Italian Horror. But fear not! Next week it’s ‘Cemetary Man’ starring Rupert Everett. QED: It must suck.

Head Chef: Ah, Lucio Fulci, the class clown of Italian horror. He’ll do anything to get a reaction from the viewer and does it relentlessly. It’s effective, but can be tiresome. You’re right, his use of gore is something else, and I find it amazing that these films were released in cinemas across Italy. To me, a humid, smoky, Naples cinema, sometime in the 70′s/80′s, would be the ultimate way to experience these films. I’d love to see an authentic audience reaction to Fulci’s on-screen eye traumas, an obsession that litters his movies. He also stole that guide dog idea from Suspiria. Shame you had to come to it the wrong way round, but then I wasn’t sure we’d get this far into the program. Great reviews though, and a spot-on analysis of both films. I haven’t seen ‘The Beyond’ in a few years, but it will be going on as soon as I get my DVDs back. ‘Inferno’? Masterpiece.

But enough of this blood-soaked love-in. Surely I can find at least one more ordeal for Roomybonce? Well, my last choice is Michele Soavi’s ‘Dellamorte, Dellamore’ AKA ‘Cemetery Man’. Martin Scorsese called it one of the best Italian films of the 1990′s and who’s going to argue with him? I’d call it a horror/comedy/zombie love story/existential art film, but will it ring Roomy’s bell? Well, the man’s practically Italian by now, how can it fail?