FULCI - VS - FASSBINDER

Andrei you are dead to me

and also I guess everybody else but especially me

I've never seen anything by either filmmaker! Feel a far more pressing need to correct the Fassbinder oversight than the Fulci one, however (sorry Scott).

I watched Five Of The Apocalypse the other day.

I don't enjoy horror movies as I don't like being scared or grossed out, but I also have a deep fondness for midcentury Italian exploitation cinema, so I spend a lot of time exploring the horror-adjacent.

This film has always been hyped to me as one of the goriest spaghetti westerns, and sure there's some stuff like that in there, but I feel like as a whole the film's been undersold, it's a really strange, poetic piece.

We follow these four outsiders (a gambler, a sex worker, a drunk and someone suffering from mental health issues) as they try to make their way to a vaguely defined town, but the plot is very much secondary to these mood pieces as the characters traverse violence, misery, solidarity.

There's certainly horror elements to this: at the beginning of the film the four are locked up in jail but then the town they're in just gets entirely massacred by these mysterious hooded figures and it is never explained or even followed up on; Tomas Millian as Chaco is a real horror movie presence, just absolute evil, impossible to argue with, seemingly impossible to stop.

There's a prolonged scene where they end up in this rainy ghost town and the lighting is just gorgeous, these melancholic blue tones. The woman opens a door and there's just torrential rain pouring down into the room next door; it's such a surreal moment. When they leave the mentally ill guy stays behind and we get all of these POV shots from different buildings as the characters point to these buildings and say "maybe he's waving at us from there". So we're given the pov of the person who's staying but also it constantly changes as we get shots from different buildings, and he can't be in all of them, real trippy stuff. There's also a very unpleasant scene where Chaco is feeding the four peyote and washing it down with whiskey and again it's pov, with the group kneeling down to receive his gifts...so it's pretty blatantly shot to resemble Chaco getting a blowjob, but I do respect Fulci for having the male characters do this as well as the woman.

There's certainly stuff that could be said about the film's villain being latino, especially considering Millian's history of portraying those kinds of characters as heroic and revolutionary; also the mentally ill guy being played by black actor Harry Baird, and breaking into spirituals and getting full frontal naked at some point.

But then despite all the evil and violence the film ends up travelling to this all male miner's town and spending a large amount of time with how the inhabitants try to help the sex worker give birth, and their affection for the newborn. Like just a totally unexpected explosion of sentimentality in this nasty little western.

The Fassbinder/Fulci opposition scott was playing with in this thread already feels so quaint - the ppl watching Fulci and Fassbinder in 2024 are mostly the same audience I think.