4. Beyond The Darkness (1979)
REPRESENTING ITALY Frank is a rich young heir and taxidermist who is utterly heartbroken when his girlfriend Anna dies. It is heavily implied that Frank's housekeeper (who is obsessed with him) knocked off Anna through voodoo doll capers. Frank is not going to let a little thing like death keep him apart from Anna. He digs her up, brings her home and then embalms her. She lies in state, just like Lenin, in Frank's bedroom. Frank meets other girls - but they do not measure up to Anna. Therefore he kills them in a horrible fashion and involves his housekeeper in the disposal of the bodies and covering his tracks. The housekeeper seems to think that because of her love and loyalty, she deserves to be Frank's wife. She brings a whole bunch of her weird relatives to dinner and announces that she and Frank are to be engaged. Frank flat out denies this and before you can say the words 'Italian sleaze', his scorned housekeeper comes at him with a bloody big meat cleaver. Directed by Joe D'Amato, that fact alone ensures that there will be buckets of sleaze galore in Beyond the Darkness. With its essential theme of necrophilia (although we do not see Frank hump Anna's corpse but she is there in his bedroom) D'Amato weaves a very sleazy web of murder and mutilation - a young girl has her nails pulled out and another woman is subject to an attack of zombie proportions when Frank takes a bite out of her neck. All of the violence is very gratuitous, nasty and serves no real purpose except to nauseate the viewer. And this, my friends, makes it one of the top Italian sleaze epics.