Director: Lucio Fulci
Year Released: 1980
Rating: 0.5
Incoherent movie about how a priest's suicide opens up the gates to hell - not only does the hanging priest appear everywhere like Bernie from Weekend at Bernie's, but the undead have the ability to appear and disappear at will and can crush heads like beer cans (which I've never understood - you mean rotting skeletons have more strength than a healthy, live human? Hades must have one mean workout regimen). Fulci has never been especially good at telling a logical story, writing even passable dialogue or directing actors, but his movies aren't cinematically inept on an Ed Wood-level - he usually knows where to put the camera, and is pretty good at creating an air of menace. It's too bad that his pictures are all feature-length and not trailer-length, because having to patiently wade through the overly long expository scenes prevents one from fully 'enjoying' the trash value of, oh, the actors getting sprayed with live maggots that get blown in through a window, an actress vomiting up their own intestines or seeing the town pervert having his head drilled open by the irate father of a teenage girl (he didn't take Andre Williams' advice: that was jail bait).
