#Voices from beyond professional#

Is this going to turn out to be his story? The Prologue suggested Lucy was going to be the focus of the plot and in our last glimpse of Mainardi, he was absolutely inert. The late Giorgio's intrusion into the scene comes as something of a surprise to us. 'Why an autopsy?' he asks, through the echoey megaphone ghosts and voice-overs generally use 'What did they do to me?' All at once, we overhear the dead man's thoughts (!) as the gurney passes. Out in the hall, Giorgio's body is wheeled by, covered in a sheet. The doctor is as unimpressed by Hilda's threats as we in the audience are unimpressed by the quality of the hospital's care. Doesn't the hospital know, she says, what a wealthy and powerful family the Mainardis are? Has nobody thought of the consequences they'd bring upon themselves for violating poor Giorgio's body like that? Why, the very idea.! These words bring Hilda out of any pretense of grief. Naturally, says the doctor, there will have to be an autopsy to determine the cause of Mainardi's sudden death. The doctors are consoling his (apparently) grief-stricken family: his wife, Lucy (the woman we saw in the prologue), whose tears mysteriously dry up when nobody is watching his stepmother, Hilda, an iron-fisted old harridan and Mario, Hilda's son by a different marriage, who is a talentless hanger-on. When next we see Mainardi, he is lying grey and still, his nostrils plugged with cotton, just before his body is to be moved to the morgue.

Mainardi is able to gasp one last word - 'Why?' - before he dies in a fountain of blood. Fulci's camera puts us behind the eyes of the dying man, as the doctors and nurses make futile, foolish attempts to tend to him. While his family watches at his hospital bedside, Mainardi vomits blood all over the pillow and sheets. Giorgio Mainardi, the man we saw in the opening dream sequence, is dying - and dying messily. As she leaves, the opening credits begin, to the accompaniment of an Italian children's song the camera slowly pans over some of the child's paintings, most of which show a scowling, angry figure looming over a small, helpless-looking figure that probably represents the child. She goes to check on her son, who is sleeping peacefully. but, as we guessed, it was all a dream: the woman wakes up, alone in her bed. Nevertheless, she seems to be able to see what is going on over on the other side of the house, so we begin to realize that this is her dream.Īs the mother 'watches' in horror, the man plunges the knife again and again into an unconvincing mannequin that's supposed to be the child's body. In fact, she seems to be paralyzed on the bed. The woman, evidently the child's mother, doesn't try to restrain him. The man reacts to the whining child with unexpected fury: he leaps from the bed, grabs a knife and stalks down a long hallway to the child's room. A man and a woman are having sex in a dimly lit bedroom, when they are interrupted by the sound of a little boy crying for his mother. but it's all undone by the stupidity of the script itself. even (dare I say it?) maturity of outlook. This is a shame, because (as is also the case with Aenigma) the ideas behind the screenplay carry a great deal of unexpected warmth and humanity. tries to pretend that it is a murder mystery, but the 'mystery' is so transparent it's insulting. nobody behaves as though they had the slightest bit of sense. Doctors, police, embalmers (especially embalmers).

#Voices from beyond professional#

takes place in the Idiot Universe, where there are no competent professional people of any kind. In the case of Voices., which is much more original in concept than Aenigma, the problem isn't the budget: it's the screenplay. but he had to realize these effects on the cheap, and as a result his set-pieces come off looking ridiculous. In Aenigma, Fulci aimed for sheer imaginative spectacle, including works of art that come to life, and an attack by snails. Here's an example of what Imean: Fulci's Aenigma (1987) is, in my opinion, the strongest of his late films, and would have been considerably more successful if its budget had not been so cripplingly low. So close was this project to Fulci's heart that he dedicated Voices from Beyond 'to my few real friends', and indeed the film seems in many ways calculated to frustrate and disappoint viewers who expected one of Fulci's typically bloodthirsty horror films.īut not all the disappointment is calculated.Īs was often the case with Fulci's later films, there is an enormous gap between the ideas of the film and their execution.

He not only directed the film, with his oldest daughter Camilla as Assistant Director he also co-wrote the screenplay (along with Piero Regnoli), which is adapted from one of his own published stories. Lucio Fulci had a deeper involvement in Voices from Beyond than in many of his other films.