Wake, Sleeper, from the Dream of Reason: THE BEYOND (Final Girl Film Club)

"And you will face the sea of darkness, and all therein that may be explored"
--Narrator

Many are the oozing holes
in warlock faces, chained
with loud Italian pop balladry
adding irony- like Hercules,
and in that tinny moment comes
the smell unbearable of grindhomes gone,
explored like a black sea with grime for foam
and pink foam for blood, and a painting
for eternity.

Sweat and sex gone dried and musty,
cheap brown pot sprayed with formeldehyde
and smoked by old derelicts in the front rows,
two are snoring
as white-eyed girls on bridges stand
or spiders pull pink strands of latex from the lips
of fallen librarians
all commingles and conjoins in acrid haze
as eyes by rusty towel hook deface.

The floors sticky from syrup,
and fizzing hospital day-glo fluids,
and German signs taped to New Orleans doors
and lots of walking to familiar synth scores
(music by Fabio Frizzi)
girls in skirts approval wave,
zombies shamble to grooves forgot
and shepherds bite the throats of maids
out upon the docks before the ocean
between Italy and me
I'd like to spit
at Fulci!

Without the grindhouse smells, what is left
what survives the flood of datedness on DVD?
Seek you what dark sea pleasures you may find there
as the disc spins under the laser's reddened eye
like grey wheels spin over that long ass sea,
like flying spittle
aimed with undead shark fight accuracy
(oh wait that's Zombie)
aimed with all therein that may be explored
flies my pink foam spit
at Fulci!

(for Final Girl's Film Club): focus on Lucio Fulci's THE BEYOND.

NOTES:
Many people complain about this film that there is no story, it's just a series of gross out scenes, etc. What this poem intends to do is place the "Fulci Experience" in the proper grindhouse/drive-in context. The Beyond was never meant, perhaps, to be watched with a close eye, sober, at home, by yourself, taking notes. It was meant to be somewhere in a late night triple bill. You were supposed to be making out or shooting up for most of it, pausing only to occasionally look up at the carnage. One expects the film to provide continual spooky thrills and chills, not explanations or plot. Like Argento's SUSPIRIA-period films, it's more like an amusement park spook show than a movie, per se, and it's no doubt meant to be. Spookery is an international language, while plot and dialogue are easily lost in the international swinger audience shuffle.

The weird mix of English dub and German signs over American hospitals adds to the tower of babble effect: the visceral cinematic language of Fulci is above all anti-structuralist. Words are meaningless, often lies or esoteric curses, and once the border between life and death is crossed, all the world's a graveyard of the real.

In this poem I wanted to create that feeling of being immersed in the unpleasant but fascinating world of "ugly" cinema, the ground zero of sleaze where making out or getting high in the dark accompanies onscreen imagery of decapitation and gore, creating a sludgy feel of anger and rage, vented in this case at Fulci "across the sea" in much the same way the lynch mob travels across the river to burn and torture the warlock in the pre-credit sequence of the film. Once we step out of the normal tedium of parentally sanctioned reality, the movie warns us, there is no going back to the delusions of "reason."