Manhattan Baby (1982)

This movie has atmosphere. The story needed work. Acting is fine. Production is good.Good cinematography, and music will raise the ratings on this. The story needed more work. The acting was good. Fx were good. Great set designs. Take a look at the apartment and the antique shop.This is a B movie, the rating is a B – for the story, or 6. 7 given for balance.

First off, "Manhattan Baby" is not a very good title for this movie. There is no baby, though the film does take place in said city. Which is not very surprising, Fulci loved New York often filming scenes and such there even when the city itself was not prevalent in the plot. He also did not get permission to film there for the most part, hence the strange zombie scene on the bridge where the zombies are in a area not really known for having all that many people and traffic below was normal. Here the film starts in Egypt as a archaeologist proceed into a tomb that is cursed with one brave soul. Is this brave soul to become a lifelong friend of our hero? No, but he got the point of the film. While dad is exploring his daughter is handing money over to a woman who apparently went to "The Beyond", another of Fulci's films, perhaps his best. This woman had the creepy eyes and they played recycled music from that film throughout this one which either indicated the two films were somehow related, or they skimped on the music budget. They return to their home in New York where the dad is blind then better in a flash and the daughter and son are both acting strange. Part of the problem with this film, they indicate only the girl is being taken over, yet the boy too seems kind of strange. So we have the dad who refuses to believe anything strange is happening when one of the mom's coworkers simply vanishes and sand is left behind and we have a pointless scene of a security guard being killed in boring fashion. Where is the gore? Not much in it with the exception of the bird attack at the end, which at least the best kill was saved for last. Having very little plot worked for "The Beyond" as it had better pacing, kills were never all that far apart. Here the film drags, one to many shots of eyes, I realize it is his trademark, but here it just seems silly at times. This one just did not do it, it needed an explanation, all I know is that the medallion the girl had was somehow doing rather pointless things. Why? Who knows. The babysitter disappears and the boy seems partly responsible and seems to be just as possessed as the girl, but this is not explained either. Still, it had a nice flair and set up some interesting things, it just fails to deliver a really good payoff other than the bird attack. Then it ends in a generic fashion. I enjoyed some of the other supernatural horror films of Fulci's, but this one kind of ends up being pointless as while leaving things unexplained in "The Beyond" worked, it hinders this film.

For Fulci fans, this may be a bit disappointing considering the pace and the lack of heavy gore, but this is not to say that nothing strange or ominous happens during the course of the film. In fact, i thought some of the random and strange deaths were good payoffs in their own right (i had to rewind a few of them to see if I missed something - turns out i didn't). Manhattan Baby really plays out like a poor sibling to "The Beyond:" an evil curse is unleashed and people start dying in strange, inexplicable ways while story coherence takes a backseat. This movie even features a lot of the same music used in The Beyond, but the similarities don't end there. As is characteristic by Fulci, there is ample coverage of the actor's eyeballs in extreme close-up overused to a comical effect and features its share of poor dialogue, wooden acting and some over-the-top characterization as well. All the same, this was a noble attempt on the part of Fulci and screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti to try something different within the horror genre and not rely so much on the bloodletting. While I wouldn't call this a runaway success, it tends to work on its own terms and is very enjoyable indeed.

Susie Hacker, the daughter of an archaeologist, gets possessed by an malicious evil spirit after her dad accidentally unleashes it from it's Egyptian tomb, that also leaves him temporarily blind. Being a big fan of Lucio Fulci, I didn't mind, let's just say the looseness of the plot, quite the opposite I expected the plot not to make much sense and be full of holes. What I didn't expect was the film's disconcerting lack of the gooey red stuff. When one watches a Fulci film, one expects certain things to happen and the gore to flow. But aside from a few VERY few instances, they never happen in this movie. We're left with an overly long badly dubbed film, which while still interesting to watch for huge fans of the director, is still pretty boring at times. It seems to me that Fulci's films can be separated by this film. Look at the films before this one "Don't Torture a Duckling", "The House by the Cemetery", "The Beyond". "Lizard in a Woman's Skin", "New York Ripper", and other classics. Now look at this film and the ones that came after such as "Conquest", "The New Gladiators", "Cat In the Brain", and others. Fulci entered his third period of films with this one and it wasn't for the better.My Grade: D- DVD Extras: An 8 minute interview with Writer Dardano Saccheti; Talent bios; and Theatrical trailer