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The cracked clock and the jazz funeral form the basis of the metaphysical swamp, cf. Harvey's Carnival of Souls. It opens on a Louisiana graveyard and proceeds as a very long day of blocked roads and detours for the real-estate businessman (John Savage), a Möbius strip of pavement and verdure. The sleek beauty in the crimson car (Sandi Schultz) materializes to invite him to a motel and vanishes with a lipstick message on the mirror, "see you at the crossroads." Interiors are jaundiced, streets are spectral, the highway is an unending stretch where a hearse won't make way. There's a familiar name on the coffin inside, a stop at the mortuary merely muddies the waters. "It's a secret. You'll find out eventually." The most Borgesian of films, a perversely ethereal meander after a life of viscera, Lucio Fulci's wry last shock. A succinct surrealism envelops all, from a note of Huston's The Asphalt Jungle at the honky-tonk jukebox to a scan of obituaries as a newspaper-seller plays the washboard. The ground may at any time give in under the protagonist's wheels, blasting light in the sky is the sole constant: "When is the fucking sun gonna go down?" A hitchhiker's exposed thighs can scarcely compete with the limo carrying your corpse, embalmed is the flesh on the protagonist's mind, a visit to the fortune-teller indicates Hitchcock's Family Plot. The slowest burner, lit by the contemplation of a filmmaker with one foot already in the next world. The rendezvous with the lady is kept after a fashion, "since you're dying to know..." With Richard Castleman, Jennifer Loeb, Elizabeth Chugden, Joe "Cool" Davis, and Mary Coulson.
--- Fernando F. Croce |