Videovista has my review of Lucio Fulci’s Quella Villa accanto al Cimitero.

What surprised me most about this film was how genuinely weird it was.  By the early 1980s, the Italian film industry was doing a pretty god job of milking the ideas from successful genre films.  In some cases, they even released unofficial sequels to American films such as Night of the Living Dead (1968) and even Terminator (1984) – more about which can be found in the interesting if rather bizarre videologs put out by The Cinema Snob – Fulci was very much a part of this tradition and The House by the Cemetery was a part of a series of zombie films he made.  However, with little money and much repetition of subject matter, these Italian exploitation films had to find someway of getting themselves noticed and this seems to have spawned a culture of genre-bending where ideas were crammed together in interesting ways regardless of whether or not they made sense.

This hot house of creativity stands in stark contrast with the stagnant and moribund culture of gay indie cinema.  As proof, Videovista has my review of Chip Hale’s Mulligans (2008).  A review which marks round 273 in my on-going battle with TLA Releasing.