Lucio Fulci‘s penultimate film, Voices From Beyond is beyond awful and repeatedly threatened to plunge me into a catatonic state. I was hoping though that he was going out with a little class when it began since the word “prologue” came up and I had visions of a grizzled old sailor setting the stage for a tale of some foul deed done long ago and the resulting modern day ghost seeking revenge. I was a bit surprised then when the first scene consisted of two naked people humping each other. Holy crap, I thought! We were going to be haunted by really icky made-for-Italian TV softcore porn!
Had the producers taken advantage of an aged Fulci and tricked him into making a grody skin flick? If that’s what they thought, the joke’s on them because the guy (Giorgio) rolls off the girl when he hears her kid crying and repeatedly stabs the piss out of him with some scissors right in his little kid gut!
Most likely this was a dream sequence because this little kid later was the instrument in the devious plot that killed this guy. (Surely a dream sequence for any guy who’s ever had his girlfriend’s snot-nosed kid interrupt some good loving with their self-centered mewling.)
If you’re watching a Fulci movie for its gore then you better load up on the uppers, keep the lights on and make sure you don’t blink because the only gore is a short little autopsy scene where some guy is taking out the innards of Giorgio and gives us a play by play where he talks about stuff like the colon which is kind of scary in its own way.
And when your movie hinges on some dude talking about how he found chunks of glass in some guy’s intestine, you’re simply reminding me why I’ve never watched Bones.
At Girogio’s funeral, there’s a nice mixture of memorial service and flashback. As each grieving relative or mistress approaches the casket, they remember how crappy Giorgio was to them when he was alive.
Everyone that is except his daughter Rosy, who was away at college and still loves her father very much. Their love is so strong (or she went really crazy at college) that she begins hearing her father’s voice telling her that she needs to find out who killed him!
But there’s an even bigger mystery to solve! Giorgio was a jerk, his family members are greedy trolls, and Rosy is an airheaded moron who listens to the voices of dead people. Why should we care about any of this?
The bulk of the movie is Rosy’s clumsy investigation of her father’s death. Rosy accuses the mistress of being the culprit, then her own mother, then figures out that someone had tricked the little boy into grinding up light bulbs and filling the ice cube trays with them and some water. Her father then had some drinks with the tainted ice cubes and this killed him when he failed to recognize that the “crushed up light bulb” taste of his drink wasn’t normal.
Rosy has a confrontation with the rest of her family and tells them that they will have to live with what they’ve done before leaving to visit her father’s grave where she laughs heartily about everything, finally exiting the graveyard skipping merrily down the steps to the street below!
The funniest part was that the family killed Giorgio because they were worried that he would cut them out of his will. It turned out that he already had!
That just goes to show you that the perfect murder isn’t just about coming up with a really far-fetched scheme involving a crazy little boy who likes to grind up light bulbs. Searching through desks and safety deposit boxes for a will may not be as glamorous as getting some glass in a guy’s intestines, but just as important!
Stupid beyond words in every respect, you have to think that even Fulci realized how lacking and thin the story was (which he came up with) since he added in another useless dream sequence where Giorgio’s stepson gets attacked by zombies at his crypt. Without question, this one goes down as smoothly as a light bulb laced lemonade and will leave you with blood in your stool.
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