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 A girl in Egypt is on vacation and gets a "mysterious charm". This causes her
dad to go blind while he's inside a pyramid. Then they go back to Manhattan
and "a plague of supernatural evil and sudden violence follows." The "ancient
curse" has to be halted before it gets loose in New York. They say that this
is one of the last Lucio Fulci movies to ever be released in the United
States. 1982, 89 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
For those of you operating under the assumption that Italian gore director
Lucio Fulci's decline into hack (Cut it out!) director who was better skilled
at getting films made than at making good films, only began when he was at his
life's end in the late eighties and early nineties (see Aenigma for example or see Massacre , which he didn't make, but lifted scenes from), you'll be pleasantly surprised
to know that it had actually been going on for some time and that 1982's Manhattan Baby would have to be an early candidate for "Worst Fulci Ever!" (Hey, quit
pushing, there's plenty of room for the rest of you films, too!). This one
purports
to be some mambajamba about a stupid kid possessed by some stupid ancient
Egyptian entity from another stupid dimension, but the movie is actually this
and so
much less. In spite of the relative straightforwardness of that plot summary,
I was only able to crystalize it into that form after watching the interview
with screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti. We don't need to get into the fact that
Dardano is to Italian horror trash what Preston Sturges was to satirical comedy
of the early forties (except that Preston also directed), but let us run down
some of his more *ahem* memorable credits: A Blade In The Dark, Cannibal Apocalypse ,The New York Ripper, House By The Cemetery, Shock and one hundred and eighty-four more. Even though Dardano managed to clear
up this confusing movie for me by revealing that it was a million dollar movie
filmed with $300,000 (ack!), his in-depth, lengthy nine minute interview was
actually the best part of the DVD. In less than nine minutes (Quick Dardano
you're on the clock!) he manages to punk one of the producers for using him and
paying him peanuts, labels Fulci a misogynist who would violate a woman on film
if he had the chance, and brags about how this movie was a departure from the
classical horror movies he had been writing (you know - like Zombie).  The movie begins in Egypt, which Dardano tells us was tacked on to help sell
the movie abroad, like the guys in Spain would somehow find this hairball more
palatable with some shots of the pyramids inserted like a sandy catheter to
relieve the bladder problem this movie gave audiences everywhere but Italy. I
was lost pretty much from the beginning in this one, but what I was able to
pick up is that the Hacker family has gone to Egypt because dad is one of
those guys that snoops around tombs and unearths angry gods, ancient curses,
and strange purple laser beams that shoot you in the eyes blinding you. While
he's doing his Scorpion King thing (Some guy he's with even falls on spikes!),
his wife and daughter are hanging out in some other ruins and the kid gets a
strange
looking amulet from a blind woman. This amulet is of an open eye and seems to
be the same design that her father George saw when he got blasted in the
tomb. I guess the Egyptian location is a nice change of pace from all these
generic New York and Italian soundstage locations that Lucio loves, but
unfortunately this is last interesting thing in the movie. Now, we get to New
York where the Hacker family is having to adjust to some changes. First we
have George who has to wear gauze patches over his eyes because he's blind. His
doctor assures him that he'll get his vision back in about a year, so just give
it some time. Second, their son is a blonde haired tyke named Tommy, but we all
know
this little bugger as Bobby from House By The Cemetery ! After being teased with a Bobby cameo in A Blade In The Dark, we are treated to full out assault by him throughout this movie! It's good
to have a familiar, if wildly irritating presence in the film, but like most
good things in life, it's not all it's cracked up to be. For some stupid
reason, they've used someone else to dub his voice. Instead of that squeaky
girl voice we're used to, Bobby, I mean Tommy, now talks like he's a 25 year-old
convict. This provides the only creepy moments in the film. Well, that
and the Tampa Bay Rowdies pennant that hangs in his bedroom. The North American
Soccer League? Egads!  The movie starts really taking on water once they have the little girl get
herself possessed. I can barely remember what happened or why, but I do recall
that she
keep a really big black scorpion in her dresser next to her haunted amulet.
The scorpion didn't really seem to get as much play as you would hope and in
spite of the picture on the back of the DVD box, I don't remember at any time
that little Bobby ever was wearing the dang thing on his head. Every now and
again something would happen and this door in Susie's room would glow and some
dork like her or Bobby would go on through it. This always resulted in a lot
of screaming and once when Bobby (he'll always be Bobby to his fans) goes
through it, he disappears and a message appears on a mirror saying "help me
daddy." It was written in cursive and in English so I know there was no way
Bobby could have written it and that it must be a message from some alternate
universe. Of course, since Bobby's daddy was blind (shoot, Bobby if you had
put that sucker out there in Braille, you might have had something there) it
was pretty pointless. It was also pretty pointless because later Bobby came
back with no apparent ill effects. It's also about this time when George is
looking around for Bobby in his house that he gets shot in the eyes with the
purple laser beams again. This time it restores his sight. You've probably
already puzzled out that that made little to zero sense and it's only the most
purple of problems this movie suffers from. Later the kids play hide and seek
with their baby sitter and they end up losing her because she takes a trip, if
you know what I mean, and her stinky corpse turns up toward the end of the
movie. There is also a fellow worker of the wife that takes his own little
trip and
we see him laying there in the Egyptian desert as lifeless as this script . 
Those of you with long attention spans and/or no life who are still along for
this desiccated ride may be asking what's going on here. Well, that's a good
question and I would have to tell you that some type of evil spirit is
manifesting itself through the eye and into little Susie and this somehow
allows a doorway to somewhere open up and suck people into it and they die. I
guess. There's also a killer cobra running around biting co-workers of George,
so I wasn't real sure how that fit in to things, but there was scene where they
took Susie to the doctor and her x-ray showed a cobra inside her stomach (So
that's were that went!). The only possible reason for this was that she was
really upset that it killed her dad's friend so she ate it all up! Right? As
a parent of a kid that's possessed by the evil eye of some old crabby Egyptian
god, I would really have a lot concerns and questions, but my biggest beef
would be that every time that dopey girl used her nefarious super powers she was
leaving Egyptian sand all over the bedroom floor. Oh, and these are the kind
of parents that take a sample of the sand and get it tested (My God! It's full
of silt from the Nile! Quick, test this lint I scrapped out of my belly
button! Heavens! It's full of pita bread!). Somewhere among all this overripe
baloney the parents get a clue in the form of a photo of the amulet with the
name of some dude on the back of it. They visit this guy and he was running a
taxidermy/ghostbusting store or something and tells George that his kid is
possessed or maybe he doesn't, I could never keep him straight with the two
other guys
with beards that had already been killed. Somehow, he convinces the parents to
let him see the girl. This ends as most of these idiotic exorcist episodes do
- with exorcist dude rolling around on the floor, blood oozing from his head.
But he's pretty tough because he survives it and says that he has transferred
the evil from her to him or he's got full medical coverage or something. A movie such as this one could only end with an extended slow motion attack of
stuffed and mounted birds on this exorcist guy. Before you even ask, yes, you
could see the strings holding these fake birds up sometimes. This guy gets all
manner of gunk pecked out of his head and you'll cringe when you realize how
utterly lame it is to be watching stuffed birds beat up a grown man, at least
until you remember all those little snails sliming that woman to death in Aenigma. He dies and the movie ends with daddy chucking the amulet into the river and
some other girl getting in back in Egypt thus continuing the cycle of abuse
inflicted on the audience. Dardano attempts to justify these trite endings by
waxing philosophically about the difference between Italian Catholics and
English Protestants. I ain't neither one of them, so to me, it's just
derivative drivel. Dardano should probably bear most of the responsibility for
this movie being as badly plotted as it is. Fulci didn't do us any favors, his
typical camera tricks either absent or just annoying (the close-up shot of
someone's eyes only works so many times), but this story is a mess. Nothing
was ever explained about why any of this was happening. I had no idea how the
purple laser beams fit in and why they blinded him and then unblinded him. I
had no idea why an exorcism would work on this girl or why this one guy even
knew to do it or how to do it. I had no idea why the kids were okay when they
went through the glowing door and the others ended up dead. I had no idea what
this evil force was trying to do (kill whomever went into the kids' room?"). I
surely had no idea that NASL ever had a franchise in Tampa Bay, but at least
that's not as laboriously nonsensical as the rest of the jumbled up rip offs of
other horror movies (conveniently listed on the back of the DVD for ya). And
after watching all of this, I got a sneaking suspicion that neither Lucio nor
Dardano had any earthly idea what they were doing. If any of you Italian
Catholics or English Protestants figure it out, let the rest of us in on it,
too.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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