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Beyond The Darkness - aka "Buio Omega" (1979)

Dir: Joe D'Amato.

We open with a strangely out of place, and never followed up, scene of an old women sticking pins in a voodoo doll with a middle aged women sitting next to her sporting an evil grin. we then move to a young woman dying in Hospital, her name is Anna and her husband (we presume as this is never made clear) is a rich, clean cut handsome 22 year old named Frank, (and if you think he sounds too good you’d be right) who rushes to her side only to have Anna expire in his arms.

This leaves a very disturbed Frank (who’s hobby is taxidermy!) living with housekeeper Iris in his castle style hill-side mansion. We see that Iris is in fact the middle aged voodoo doll women, and it becomes clear, thanks to a delightfully sick breast feeding scene, that she has designs on Frank. Frank is a willing sexual partner but is still devoted to Anna.

Frank, while visiting Anna at the undertakers as she lies in her coffin, injects her corpse with embalming fluid. Unknown to him a man sees him do it.
Next thing Frank is exhuming Anna’s body and tucking it away in his van. Speeding back home he has a flat tire. He fixes it (as a police car drives past) and gets back in the van only to find that a dope smoking, hitchhiker from London called Jan (complete with a superbly over the topCockney accent) has invited herself to a lift.
With the police around, Frank has no choice but to put up with her.

He drives back home, leaving the sleeping Jan in the van, and starts to embalm/preserve Anna’s corpse. At one point Frank even eats Anna’s heart, complete with blood squirting from its arteries. Frank will show more cannibalistic traits later on!
But Jan walks in on the grizzly scene and Frank brutally attacks her. Iris comes upon Frankk trying to hide the body and takes control in the dismemberment and acid bath disposal of Jan's corpse.
All seems well in the land of the twisted until the man from the undertakers starts snooping around. This all leads to a body filled finale, that itself leads to a wonderfully mischievous and fitting twist ending.....

 

Place this sick little treat next to his notorious cult nasty "Emmanuelle in America" (with its taboo mix of sex, violence and pseudo snuff) and it’s clear that D’Amato could have joined Ruggero Deodato (though lacking Deodatos flair) as a creator of uncompromising, extreme cinema instead of being known as the hack Director of ‘sleep until the good bits’ movies like "Anthropophagous" and counterfeit U.S soft porn efforts like "11 Days, 11 Nights".

The story/screenplay by Giacomo Guerrini and Ottavio Fabbi creates a tale of bizarre, sexually twisted characters that lead a life of overwhelming perversions and cold-blooded desires. A subject D’Amato never flinches from, but as is typical of his work, he makes the first 20 minutes of the film drag terribly. And don't expect another "Nekromantik", despite the subject matter there are no overt sexual scenes with Anna's corpse, Frank does no more than give her a gentle kiss. She is treated more like an Idol to be worshipped than an object of lust.

The music by' Goblin' is effective, if rather passionless, and reminds you of their work on "Contamination" and Simonetti’s solo effort on Deodato’s "Body Count". The music was later borrowed for the possessed nun flick "The Other Hell". Also listen for voice artist Nick Alexander who normally dubs over Al Cliver’s (from "Zombie") voice. A sure sign you are in the wonderful world of Italian Trash Cinema!

There has been much speculation about the use of a real corpse in "Beyond the Darkness". D’Amato has always denied it, and such speculation can be dismissed as the typical rubbish put out by ‘them’ to make ‘us’ and our beloved genre look bad.
Saying that though...when a corpse is burnt, the tendons shrink and this pulls the body into a fetal position. I have never seen this detail reproduced in any film burn scene, but it happens in this movie when a corpse is cremated in an incinerator. It’s a grotesque sight (with D’Amato really sleazing it up with a zoom in on the nipple of a charred breast), and does add to the ‘did they or didn’t they’ myth.

Whatever the facts, this is, without question, an extreme film.
It’s not only the scenes of explicit gore and sadistic violence that give it its harsh edge (a person's fingernails are pulled out with pliers in an act of pure sadism and the corpse dismemberment is a sickening, uncompromising gore sequence) but the general atmosphere of dirty, twisted psychosis that permeates the entire production. D’Amato’s Cinematography is cold and ugly (perhaps this is intentional) but the castle/mansion adds some welcome post modern gothic atmosphere and the various shots of Anna’s ghostly corpse are morbidly effective.

The scenes involving the preparation of Anna's corpse deliver all the grotesque grue you could ask for, and it's with these scenes that the film kicks in to it’s extreme content. No detail is spared as the naked Anna is laid out, split open and is gutted. D’Amato never shys away from the nudity or the gore, and it looks like actual autopsy footage is inserted for the close up details.
This can’t hide the fact though that the movie wallows in it’s grotesque images, and the lack of any humour (cockney dubbing aside) makes for a film that not only sticks in the mind but also sticks in the throat.

This is a text book example of Italian sleaze and gore (let down only by some half asleep direction by D’Amato) but only for those with the strongest sensibilities.