slashedopen

Well I’m not quite sure how I can describe this film, further to what I already put in a previous post. It is, quite simply, one of the goriest films I have ever seen but was quite, quite crap. I would liken it to watching your washing machine on the final spin, you know nothing of any meaning will happen but you still watch it go round and round. The strange thing is that you can’t describe this film as uneventful.

One amazing chain of events sees Mr Fulci look out of his window and see a woman opening the curtains, his hallucinations see a different story of the lady in question performing a strange sexual act. He then looks at another window where two men are doing DIY, except Fulci sees a brutal and graphic stabbing. He then puts his dinner in a microwave, only to be confronted by the sight of a severed head slowly melting in the radiation container. He THEN knocks a bottle of liquor that smashes on the floor, looking down to (inexplicably) see a corpse slowly decomposing from the outside as though it’s being dissolved by acid. About 10 minutes with no dialogue, just a succession of gruesome, highly graphic images, with no connection to the plot other than to tell us what we already know – Fulci is mad.
The gore doesn’t stop there. We see a man continuously run over by a car until his head resembles a pork chop and his chest is caved in, we see a boy riding his bike get his head cut off with a chainsaw, we see a women decapitated with a chest of drawers (!), another has her head half chopped off during a strangulation via piano wire, there are hands chopped off, legs cut off, stabbings through the neck, a multiple stabbing in the shower, a woman is beaten to death with a baseball bat – it’s quite simply horrendous because there is no plot.

It’s also unintentionally hilarious. The doctor (left) committing most of these “real” murders has a couple of ‘mad scientist’ monologues where he ends of cackling maniacally and the ending is truly awful. Not wishing to spoil things in any way (the ending is hardly the reason for watching this film) Fulci sails off into the sunset after waving goodbye to the film crew who have been filming “Nightmare Concert”…IT WAS ALL A FILM YOU SEE!!!! THE JOKE’S ON US!!!! Basically you should watch this movie as a curiosity only, Fulci has made much better films with much less violence and far better plot. I wouldn’t recommend anybody actually goes out and buys this, but keep an eye out on ‘Zone Horror’ because I guarantee you won’t have seen a film quite like it.

"Beware the moon and stay on the path..."