We are in a catacomb somewhere, where a nun seems to have gotten lost. She ends up in a “mad scientist” style lab where another nun lies freshly dead, naked, ready for God knows what. One of the other nuns shows up to cut out a part of her uterus (I guess), like some kind of ritual punishment, while preaching how sinful she was. And we’re only 6 minutes into the movie where the acting is so hysterically bad with one retarded facial expression after another. And out of pure randomness, a cauldron starts to boil over as we see close-ups of two glowing, blinking red eyes that gives off some really cheap cyborg/Terminator vibes. (And yes, this is made by the same director and screenwriter who also made the cheap unofficial Italian Terminator II some years later.) The glowing eyes seem to possess one of the nuns to stab the other to death. In this local convent, run by Mother Vincenza, several nuns seems to die in mysterious ways, while priests are being burned alive… and so on.
So… just to have the non-existing plot going on, an investigator is put on the case to find out what kind of fishy things are happening inside of the convent’s walls. Well, good luck with that, for not even the movie’s Wikipedia page has a fucking clue on what to fill in the plot section, as we speak.
So… uhm… yeah, it’s hard to convey what’s really going on here. A lot of weird convoluted shit just happens… just because. With the directing (to use the word loosely) by Bruno “Italian Ed Wood” Mattei and a script by Claudio “Troll 2” Fragasso, there isn’t much movie magic to witness here. I didn’t really expect it to be either. This rather shabby duo has made over a dozen shitty schlocks together, and is perhaps best known for Hell of the Living Dead (1980) where a considerable amount of the screen time consists of stock footage.
The one and only quality to dig up here is the soundtrack by Goblin, which I have no idea they used legally or not, but it doesn’t help that much with putting some lustre on this pure stumbling incompetence or add any form of atmosphere. On the other hand, I can’t deny that I had a fun time watching The Other Hell. It’s completely unpredictable and has plenty of insane campiness to get entertained by. And of course, the absurdly bad acting itself makes it worth a watch alone.
Director: Bruno Mattei
Original title: L’altro inferno
Country & year: Italy, 1981
Actors: Franca Stoppi, Carlo De Mejo, Francesca Carmeno, Susan Forget, Franco Garofalo, Paola Montenero, Ornella Picozzi, Andrea Aureli
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0080362/
City of the Living Dead is the first part of the Lucio Fulci Gates of Hell trilogy, which followed up with The Beyond and House By the Cemetery. But apart from sharing the theme of the dead being brought to life, with some small doses of inspiration from H.P Lovecraft and with actress Catriona MacColl starring in all three, they work well as separate films.
On a subway station in Rome, the young lady Cheryl stumbles into a mysterious man who’s got half his face covered with an iron mask. He gives her two tickets to a horrormovie. She asks him if he’s dressed like that for the promotion of the film, but he does not give her an answer. Her curiosity has been peaked, so she hooks up with her girlfriend Kathy and decides to head for the movie theatre to check out this mysterious untitled film. Other random people pops in, such as an elderly couple who’s probably never seen a horror movie before, some pussy-hound teenagers, a pimp with two hookers, and of course a blind dude with sunglasses with his wife who must explain what happens on the screen to him. You know, the regular moviegoers..
The movie opens with a group of duck hunters who happens to shoot down a bat. “It’s bad luck to kill a bat” one of them says, before one of their dogs eats it. And no, it wasn’t Nosferatu the dog ate, just a random bat. Then we jump to Venice where Professor Paris Catalano (Christopher Plummer) arrives to meet a young lady after getting a vague letter about Nosferatu. According to the letter, Nosferatu was last seen in Venice during a carnival in 1786, and legend has it that he’s still hiding in the city. Paris Catalano has dedicated his life to study Nosferatu, and is more or less the equivalent of Van Helsing. I assume they had to add a different name due to copyright, who knows. He eats dinner with the same people we saw in the duck hunting-scene in the beginning, where he gives a quick and half-hearted lecture about vampires, before he gets escorted down into a crypt under the tunnels of the city where a casket from Transylvania is located. The legend says that Nosferatu is the one who’s buried in that casket. So why not just open it, put the stake through his chest, and just be done with it? You tell me…
