Scott LeBrun
Out of the handful of horror pictures that the legendary exploitation director made, this has got to be the best in terms of general nastiness. In fact, it's more than nasty, it's downright disturbing at times. The performances are quite good, and D'Amato treats his subjects and his main character with some sensitivity. As mad as he is, one can't help but feel a degree of sympathy for our tormented lead. As a prominent theme here is that of being unable to let go and move on, we can understand how he feels. Yet, of course, we still gape at the deeds that are committed.Handsome Kieran Canter stars as Frank Wyler, a young man who simply can't deal with the death of his beloved girlfriend Anna (Cinzia Monreale). It gets to the point where he steals her corpse and brings it back to his villa. He preserves her body to the best of his ability, while all this time his devilish housekeeper Iris (Franca Stoppi) helps him without batting an eye. She's *very* devoted to him, you see. Unfortunately, Franks' rage compels him to kill young women who are either in his vicinity or just get in his way.Supplemented by a very catchy score by Goblin that has its beautiful moments as well, "Buio Omega" has some very good gore. The acid bath sequence is memorable, as is the moment where an unfortunate victims' fingernails are forcibly removed with pliers. Fans of trashy Italian cinema will also love seeing Frank actually suck from Iris's breasts. Canter does a fine job in the lead, and the lovely Monreale ends up getting to play a dual role (she went on to act in Lucio Fulcis' renowned "The Beyond"). The real scene stealer of this film is Stoppi, who's deliciously unhinged. D'Amato also shot the film himself, using his real name of Aristide Massaccesi.Somber and depraved, Italian horror lovers generally consider this to be D'Amatos' best genre effort.Seven out of 10.
jaibo
D'Amato's notorious horror film is a glorious amalgam of Poe (The Premature Burial), Franju's Les yeux sans visage, Hitchock's Psycho and the furthest reaches of Freudian psychology, with the Oedipus complex finding its climax in an act of castration by the mother imago. It's a compelling and repellent film, an astonishing feat of visual storytelling and an overwhelming mesh of stunning cinematography, fierce editing and driving disco-infused score courtesy of The Goblin. D'Amato manages to both create one of the most punishing nasties in the horror cannon whilst at the same time leaving us with some truly visionary images of twisted love, obsession, death and decay.The story, unlikely to the rational mind but with the clarity of a dream, tells of a young orphaned heir to a fortune, living in a mansion and spending his time at his favourite pursuit, taxidermy. His insane governess/surrogate mother colludes with an occultist to put the voodoo on the heir's fiancée, causing the beautiful girl's death, which coincides with a kiss he gives her on her hospital bed. Breastfeeding by his governess does little to console our hero, so he disinters his beloved's corpse, brings it home and stuffs it as he has been stuffing various animals. Yet, as so often in drama, one crime leads to another and another, as various young women have to be dispatched after they stumble on his secret. But this state of affairs can't continue, and society in the shape of a greedy mortician who witnessed the body stealing gradually catches up with him, but normality is only restored by the death of our hero and his mad "mother"; her last act is to castrate her errant son.The heir's predicament is visceral and in some ways universal. He wants rationality and normality but is thwarted by the governess, who represents dark forces and old magical ways (there's a touch of Medea about her). Her spell prevents him from being with his perfect love, but she aids and abets him in maintaining the embalmed corpse of that dream, at the same time as protecting him from the outside world. One extraordinary scene has the heir bringing a young woman into his bedroom and making love to her in the bed next to the stuffed cadaver of his betrothed – he ruts on top of the new girl whilst staying fixated on the old, and when the new girl notices the corpse in the bed, she screams and meets her end by being ravaged, bitten and partially devoured by the crazed young man.The taxidermy sequence is stomach-churning in its explicitness, and was notorious at the time of release because of rumours D'Amato had used read corpses in the filming. Cuts are explicitly studied by the camera, entrails are unravelled from the stomach, the heart is removed, kissed and bitten into by the love-sick male. To love somebody is to love their body, but the implications of this when the body is deceased is a horrific extension of the loving instinct, and what gives the film its power. The film concentrates on the fate of the body after death, with burials, cremations, dismemberments, taxidermy, rendering in acid all shown in lurid detail. The film is partially about the sea changes that these processes wreak on the body. The most striking of these is the acid bath, where the fleshy corpse of a victim is submerged only for the head to rise again, just a pair of eyes in and a ragged mop on a grinning skull, the death's head. The rendered remains are finally poured into the garden, to disappear into the ground of an unconcerned nature. The film confronts the most terrible truths about death, the body, desire and warped human relationships, and shows us no way out other than death.Eventually, the dead fiancée's sister shows up at the mansion and things come to a head. The heir seems to realise that the living thing is better than the dead, but the governess won't allow this, emblematic guardian against life that she is, and she runs at the heir with a knife looking exactly like Norman Bates dressed as his mother. The knife cuts into the young man's sex, the fruition of that castration anxiety which Freud posited as a deep-seated fear in boys and young men. He and the crazy faux-mother rip and bite each other, bringing both of them to their doom. The mortician finds what he takes to be the stolen corpse, and returns it to its coffin, but it's the living sister (mortified into a state of paralytic shock), and she finally bursts from the grave, maddened with horror.That crazed lady escaping from the jaws of death, reborn from the coffin, is the visual paradigm of the audience at the end of this stunning film – a movie which truly takes us beyond the darkness and brings to light the rotten, the warped, the weird and the dissolutions which we'd prefer not to be confronted with, except in the genre of horror, of which this is surely a masterpiece.
Claudio Carvalho
When the wealthy orphan taxidermist Frank Wyler (Kieran Canter) loses his beloved fiancée Anna Völkl (Cinzia Monreale), victim of voodoo conducted by his jealous housemaid Iris (Franca Stoppi), he robs her corpse, embalms and brings to the bed in his room. He does not overcome his feelings for her, killing every woman he has some involvement. Meanwhile Iris wants to marry Frank and helps him to dispose the bodies.The sick, twisted and kinky "Buio Omega" has all sort of perversions and disgusting scenes, with sequences of necrophilia, mutilation, torture and embalming. However, the characters are awfully developed, and the viewer never knows, for example, whether Frank changed his behavior after the death of Anna, or he was indeed a twisted character. The weird Iris is also badly developed. The graphic and gore scenes are among the nastiest I have ever seen in a film. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): Not Available
