Beyond the Darkness aka Buried Alive (Joe D'Amato, 1979)

Another weird, wild Italian horror film from the seemingly endless supply of weird, wild Italian horror films released between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s, Beyond the Darkness is a sick, twisted, unpredictable, and deeply strange Psycho-inspired shocker with a few truly disgusting scenes, lots of dark humor, some genuinely creepy scares, and plenty of atmosphere and detail. When I wasn't looking away in disgust, I really enjoyed this one.

I knew I was in for something quite a bit different than a routine slasher film when the first two post-credits scenes involved cult movie actress Franca Stoppi showing pictures of a happy couple to another woman, who then begins to violently stab a voodoo doll with pins while Stoppi grins malevolently, and a young man unloading the carcass of a baboon onto a medical table inside a sprawling Italian villa. "Hell yeah," I thought to myself. "Weird times are about to be had."

Those weird times soon begin to make some narrative sense (though I don't require narrative sense to enjoy a movie). Iris (Stoppi) is the housekeeper/caretaker of the villa, and the guardian/twisted mother figure of the young man who owns it (you guessed it, the guy with the baboon). That young man, Frank (Kieran Canter), inherited the villa from his parents, who died in a car accident when Frank was a tween. Now Frank is a young adult who enjoys taxidermy (the baboon finally makes sense), blank stares from his piercing blue eyes, and his fiancee Anna (Cinzia Monreale), the victim of the voodoo doll mischief. The voodoo soon works its magic, and Anna falls deathly ill. Frank pays a visit to her in the hospital, they make out, she dies. He watches her final moments with more arousal than grief, digs up her body after the funeral, removes her guts, replaces her real eyes with fakes, dresses her, and puts her in his double bed. Real normal shit.

Meanwhile, the jealous Iris manipulates and controls Frank, playing both the authoritarian mother figure and a weird sort of wife role, making him suck her breast and giving him hand jobs while he stares at his dead fiancee. You know, real normal shit. They strike up a deal where Frank will marry her on the condition that he keep his dead fiancee in the house. Frank also has a habit of luring attractive young women to the villa, and he and Iris murder them and dispose of their corpses in a variety of gruesome ways. Iris becomes more and more jealous of Anna's corpse, detectives come around looking for a missing jogger, and a suspicious funeral home employee secretly snoops around the premises on multiple occasions. Things come to a boiling point when Anna's twin sister Elena stops by the villa to say goodbye before leaving the country, leading to a pretty sweet shock ending.

Beyond the Darkness is a wild ride, with more humor than you would expect from the above plot synopsis (shout-out to the disco dancing scene and the hilarious boogie moves of actress Simonetta Allodi, credited as Disco Girl) and, as my wife pointed out after we watched it, lots of real-time detail, like a scene where Frank changes a flat tire and another scene where Iris tries on different dresses until she finds one she likes for the evening. The characters are interesting and unusual, and Stoppi is so weird and so great as Iris.

Beyond the Darkness also contains some supremo gross-out moments, which has led to much censorship of the film. I had to look away when Frank rips the fingernails off of one victim (finally found something that makes me as squeamish as hypodermic needles going into arm veins), but the film also includes gut and eyeball removal, sawing off of limbs, and the dissolving of bodies in acid. Maybe the grossest scene of all, though, contains no violence at all, and is merely a closeup of Iris enthusiastically and vigorously chowing down on a gruel-like stew after one of the murders. Get some table manners, Iris. This scene also grosses Frank out, and the guy loves gross shit. If you have the stomach for it, Beyond the Darkness is an unusual, character-filled, detail-packed horror movie.

Director Joe D'Amato had a long, prolific career in Italian cinema until his death from a heart attack in 1999 at the age of 62. He made a steady living as a cinematographer under his real name, Aristide Massaccesi, and his credits in this role add up to a whopping 169 films. He worked as a camera operator on 71 films, a screenwriter on 47, a producer on 27, an actor on 15, an editor on six, an assistant director on six, a crew member on another handful, and a director on a mind-boggling 197 films. No wonder the guy died of a heart attack.

In order to keep his various projects separate and keep working at the prolific pace he loved, D'Amato used a staggering number of pseudonyms for the staggering variety of genres he directed. He made horror films, spaghetti westerns, action movies, fantasy movies, softcore sex movies, and hardcore pornos under dozens of names, including Hugo Clevers, Raf de Palma, Dario Donati, Dirk Frey, Arizona Massachusett (lol), Igor Horwess, Zak Roberts, Chana Lee Sun, Robert Yip, and my favorite, only used once, Dick Spitfire. D'Amato was his horror name, and the one most often connected to his films today. His directing credits include such titles as More Sexy Canterbury Tales, Stay Away from Trinity ... When He Comes to Eldorado, God Is My Colt .45, Death Smiles on a Murderer, Papaya: Love Goddess of the Cannibals, Erotic Nights of the Living Dead, Porno Holocaust, Ator the Fighting Eagle, 2020 Texas Gladiators, Paprika: The Last Italian Whore, Sex Penitentiary, Lunch Party, Flamenco Ecstasy, Cop Sucker, House of Anal Perversions, and multiple entries in the Emanuelle series. It's Joe D'Amato's aka Arizona Massachusett's world, we only live in it.