Leofwine_draca
More filth from the mad mind of exploitation director Joe D'Amato, a purveyor of sleaze who nonetheless made a good few guilty pleasures during his long career – ENDGAME being the most notable of them. Sadly, this grisly effort is a thoroughly boring affair, dealing as it does with a sociopathic killer who merrily bumps off a string of nubile, naked women. Despite the slow start, this is a film which crams in the bloodshed with a sickening regularity, yet at the end of the day the film is just boring.A series of graphic and sadistic murders takes place, where our young protagonist pulls the fingernails from screaming women before dissolving them in an acid bath. He disembowels his dead girlfriend and sews her back up, and later on develops a taste for human flesh before finally getting his comeuppance at the hands of a macabre mother-figure. The special effects are pretty realistic, so only strong stomachs need apply for this one – D'Amato ended up in court after being accused of using a real dead body in the movie (no such thing of course). In other respects though, it is routine sex-n-violence epic, where the only good acting of note comes from the elderly detective investigating the killer.
lastliberal
Alright, I've been warned. This piece of Euro trash by Joe D'Amato, made 30 years before Tokyo Gore Police, is supposed to be the ultimate in gore and horror. We will see.Frank (Kieran Canter) loses his fiancée Anna (Cinzia Monreale) through voodoo done by his housekeeper Iris (Franca Stoppi), who still breast feeds him even though he is an adult.He steals Anna's body after burial to bring home and preserve (he's a taxidermist). While he is gutting her, he stops to nibble on her heart.Oh yeah, he did pick up a hitchhiker (Lucia D'Elia), who's sleeping in his car. She wakes at the wrong time, and suffers for it, with Iris assisting in the bloody, and mighty disgusting, disposition of the body.His dispatch of a jogger (Anna Cardini) was equally gruesome. Guess she didn't like having sex next to his fiancée.He picks up a girl (Simonetta Allodi) from a disco and is getting ready for a good time, when Anna's twin sister Elena knocks at the door.Things come to a head, and the housekeeper is wackier than Frank. They have a fight that really gets bloody and gory.The ending was a real surprise.No, this can't compare with Japaense gore, but it was a good flick.
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
Michael_Elliott
Beyond the Darkness (1979) *** 1/2 (out of 4) D'Amato's rather notorious gore feast is a strange mix of downright nastiness and a twisted love story. A young man's one and only love dies so he digs her up, dissects her and pretends she's still alive. While doing all of this other women pop up in his life but they will need to be murdered. This is an extremely twisted, sick and at times downright disgusting film from the master of sleaze. There are countless sleaze movies out there but this one here features gore, nudity, sex, cannibalism, chopped up body parts, parts melting in acid, dissections, necrophilia and this is just the start of things. This movie is banned throughout the world and it's easy to see why because I'm sure there are very few who will be able to stomach everything that goes on here. I'd guess that most people won't make it past the twenty-minute mark when we get a dissection scene that looks very real and I'm going to guess that some real animal intestines were used. This is followed by a scene of a woman being cut up only to be thrown into a tub of acid. And we still haven't gotten to some of the sicker things. What I enjoyed most about the film is that underneath all the gore it does have somewhat of a heart in seeing this guy, obviously a nut, going through all this trouble to try and be with the one he loves. Original title: Buio Omega.
AD
