D: Lucio Fulci (1990); with Fulci, David L. Thompson, Jeoffrey Kennedy, Malisa Longo. (87 minutes)
Okay, so you’re an aging Italian horror director, and you need to bust out another movie but don’t have a lot of time or money with which to do it. Solution? Feature yourself as the star, playing a director who goes to a shrink and complains about being haunted by scenes from your own movies, wondering about your sanity and if you could possibly be a killer yourself. It sounds like a cheap dodge, but think about it: Fulci was able to exploit his own work (the film is replete with decapitations, cannibalism, mangled bodies, and — a shower scene?) while working in a self-reflexive element. It prefigured the similarly premised Wes Craven’s New Nightmare by a few years and provided Fulci fans with a sort of greatest-hits reel wrapped around the self-reference. The added bonus for the devout is a chance to see the director himself in front of the camera. Of course, all the gore scenes are done with the typical amount of Fulci Italo-horror overkill and gleeful excess. Is it a clever exercise in filmmaking or a bargain-basement paste-up job designed to get out the door and into VCRs? You decide — either way, it does deliver the goods.
This article appears in Carol Keeton Rylander.