The Harvey Klinger Experience

The Skinny On... The Legend of Blood Castle

2009-07-10T11:29:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Bathory was the notorious 16th-century Hungarian countess who butchered hundreds of young girls and allegedly used their blood in an attempt to regain a youthful appearance. While the latter claim has been largely debunked, the story remains rich horror fodder that has spawned at least two excellent films: Peter Sadsy’s Countess Dracula, and Jorge Grau’s sublime The Legend of Blood Castle, a grim Spanish product which easily equals and in many ways surpasses Sadsy’s better-known Hammer entry.

While Countess Dracula focuses on Bathory herself, Grau adds a “sins-of-the-fathers” element (or “sins-of-the-mothers” if you wish) by focusing on the Countess’ granddaughter. Marquise Erzsébet suffers from the same doubts that plagued her infamous ancestor. Her husband Karl no longer shows any interest in her, which she attributes to her age. When the blood of a young girl accidentally splashes on her hand, she notices that it temporarily gives her skin a youthful appearance. In the meantime, the villagers have recently unearthed a supposed vampire, put the corpse on trial and beheaded it. Encouraged by her servant Marina, Erzsébet decides to exploit the superstition of the villagers by having Karl fake his own death so she can send him out to kidnap and kill young girls. The villagers are convinced another vampire is on the loose as Erzsébet receives the blood of Karl’s victims in copious amounts. Everything is going exceedingly well until Karl falls in love with one of his intended victims, which sends Erzsébet into a rage that ultimately leads to her downfall.

While Countess Dracula exploited the supernatural elements of an allegedly vampiric countess, The Legend of Blood Castle – despite its schlocky American title – is steeped in a grim realism that adds a great deal of resonance to the proceedings. Aside from one nightmarish vision in which Erzsébet sees her victims returning from the grave for retribution, there is really nothing supernatural in Grau’s film. The blood Erzsébet receives from her victims never makes her look any younger; any perceived improvement can only be attributed to her fragile mental state. The village “vampires” are nothing more than the recent dead who have unfortunately been branded bloodsuckers by overly impressionable citizens. Not only does Karl scoff at the villagers’ superstitious ways, but he and Erzsébet are able to exploit their beliefs to great benefit. The Legend of Blood Castle is in many ways an anti-supernatural film, graphically showing how the belief system of superstitious people can be used to control and exploit them. Grau even throws in a little swipe at Christianity, as the blood of the virgins is delivered to Erzsébet through a cutout of a cross in the ceiling.

Karl is an intriguing character. He shows no sexual interest in his wife, although she is still quite attractive, but is willing to fake his own death in order to aid a fantastical plan that he, as a realist, must know is ridiculous. It is clear he is willing to kill not for Erzsébet’s benefit, but to sate a strongly sadistic desire within himself. Early in the film he has near-sexual encounters with two women, but both end in mock homicidal gestures: In one scene he acts as if he’s going to choke the woman; in another he holds a dagger menacingly at the woman’s throat. He shows so little sexual desire throughout the film that one begins to wonder if he is homosexual. Even his brief fling at the end of the film ultimately ends in violence. Karl seems much more adept at – and satisfied by -- killing than lovemaking.

Erzsébet herself is not pictured as the monster of the history books. She is despondent over the lack of attention from Karl, and even though she perceives that virgin blood makes her look younger, she has no intention of acting on it. She tells Marina “It’s impossible.” It is Marina who encourages her to act, and Karl who provides the victims. Not that Erzsébet is an innocent. She does willingly accept the blood that Karl provides, and in an early scene she actually cuts a toddler (off-screen) with broken glass. All in all, Erzsébet seems more confused than evil. She is willing to overlook her atrocities in order to regain the love of her husband (though she never does). Fittingly, the fate of Marina – whose words were instrumental in goading Erzsébet into action – is to have her tongue cut out. Erzsébet is sentenced to be walled up in a single small room. The film’s last scene shows her before a mirror, studying her haggard countenance, trapped with her own unsightliness until death.

The Legend of Blood Castle (original title Ceremonia Sangrieta, which translates to the much more somber Blood Ceremony in English) is top-rate horror from one of Spain’s best (Grau also directed the superb Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue). Unfortunately, the recent MYA DVD release does not do it justice. The non-anamorphic transfer lacks detail and doesn’t translate Grau’s superb color schemes, and the English dubbing is leaden to say the least. A superior Spanish soundtrack is included, but it doesn’t have English sub-titles. MYA seems to tow a strict company line against English subtitles, which is inexplicable to me and many other fans of classic horror DVDs. And here’s the clincher: The climax of the film was evidently never dubbed into English, so the film switches to Spanish even on the English-language track. Unfortunately, many of the subtitles were totally unreadable on my disc – they just came out as squiggly lines. I am thrilled to have finally seen this excellent film, but the definitive DVD release is still in the future.

The Skinny On... The Beyond

2009-06-25T08:34:00.000-07:00

Considered a genius by some and a hack by many, director Lucio Fulci is responsible for a handful of the most notorious titles of late ‘70s, early ‘80s Italian horror, including Zombie (1979), City of the Living Dead (1980) and House by the Cemetery (1981). The Beyond (1981) is prime Fulci, an occasionally compelling, often head-scratching catalog of weirdness and brutality that epitomizes Fulci’s in-your-mutilated-face approach to horror.

The hackneyed story depicts a Louisiana hotel that serves as one of the seven doorways to hell. In a decently atmospheric prologue, a group of particularly vicious vigilantes arrive at the hotel by canoe to dispatch of a warlock named Schweik who paints strange pictures and has evidently found the key to hell. Why would 10 grown men row canoes across a pond barely larger than a football field instead of simply walking around it? Don’t ask silly questions. This is Lucio Fulci. This is The Beyond.

Cut 60 years in the future. Liza (Catherine MacColl) is renovating the same hotel (although the pond is nowhere in sight) when strange things begin to occur. A painter takes a mysterious fall off his scaffolding; a room bell rings though no one is occupying the hotel; and a plumber -- Joe the Plumber, in fact! – is gruesomely murdered by having his eyes gouged out while working in the basement. Par for the course for a Fulci film, the eye-gouging incident is treated with no more weight than the other two lesser events. Liza then meets a blind girl named Emily (I guess she’s blind – her irises are covered with ornate ivory-colored discs) who tells her about the decadent past of the hotel. As Liza investigates further with the help of Dr. John McCabe (David Warbeck), more people die incredibly gruesome deaths, including a jaw-dropping scene in which tarantulas mutilate a man’s face, and another in which a young girl watches her own mother turned to bloody grue by acid. In the end, Liza and John find themselves inside one of Schweik’s paintings, an endless and inescapable landscape of hell.

While Fulci’s loosely plotted and indescribably gory films might put off mainstream critics and audiences, there was literally more than meets the eye to the his directorial motives. Fulci has said that he wanted his films to be a sensory assault on the viewer, particularly an assault on the eyes. To that end, Fulci’s films often feature graphic violence on characters’ eyes, and The Beyond is his towering achievement in this area. No less than four characters have their eyes gouged out or otherwise graphically removed during the course of the film, whether by hand, spike or – for one unfortunate character – spiders. Compounding these scenes are multiple blind characters who are depicted with those weird ivory discs covering their eyes. No other Fulci film is infused with this amount of eye imagery or eye violence.

But Fulci doesn’t end his assault there. The film treats us to relentlessly graphic scenes of horrific gore, complete with stomach-churning sounds effects to enhance the experience. During scenes in which a character is flayed repeatedly, another is eaten by spiders, and another is ripped apart by a zombie dog, the music is turned off completely, replaced by sickening sound effects of ripping, chomping, and chewing. It is an unrelieved assault on the eyes and ears of the viewer, one that will either have you cringing in your seat or laughing nervously. Fulci adds other elements to increase the unease. We not only see a woman’s face eaten away by acid, we also see her horrified pre-adolescent daughter watch the entire event. This same girl has half her face blown off at the end of the film. Involving children in extreme violence is something few American horror directors would dare, but European directors like Fulci used it to highly disturbing effect.

Fulci is often accused of slavishly imitating George Romero’s zombie films, but this is actually quite unfair. In only one film – Zombie – do his walking dead have a taste for flesh. In City of the Living Dead, they are merely spectral spectators to a surreal apocalypse, and in House by the Cemetery the single “zombie’ isn’t even dead – he’s a 150-year old abomination who needs human blood to stay alive. The Beyond’s dead likewise do not eat the living. They threaten them a lot, often hovering around without moving much, and occasionally they will kill one, as when Joe the Plumber impales a poor housekeeper on a protruding spike. Yes, they can be killed only by a shot to the head, but they are otherwise quite dissimilar to the rampaging zombie hordes of Romero’s Dead films. BTW, the killing of zombies becomes particularly aggravating in The Beyond, as John never quite figures out that only a bullet to the head will do the trick. Literally every time he attempts to kill a zombie, he fires multiple ineffective shots into various parts of their anatomy before finally make the required head/kill shot. For warlock Schweik, he never figures it out, finally abandoning his weapon and running away. For a doctor, this guy is woefully unobservant.

As in just about every Fulci film, The Beyond is filled with mystifying moments. Though Joe the Plumber has clearly been murdered near the beginning of the film, the police are never called. We simply see his body in a hospital morgue a few scenes later. In fact, although there are countless gruesome murders throughout the film, the police never make a single appearance in The Beyond. After a young girl attends the funeral of both of her parents, she is bid goodbye by the funeral attendees and stands alone in the cemetery, evidently on her own at the tender age of 13. When housekeeper Martha finds Joe the Plumber’s body in the basement with his eyes gouged out, she barely registers a reaction. She is horrified to see a disfigured Schweik a few moments later, however. Why does one rotting corpse engender a horrified reaction when a freshly mutilated Joe the Plumber doesn’t? The answer is that Fulci is clearly aiming for an off-kilter, otherworldly atmosphere akin to Suspiria. He even borrows the friendly-dog-suddenly-turns-on-his-master trick from Dario Argento’s superior film, although this dog is turned into a zombie after grappling with one of the living dead in an exceptionally silly scene. In the end, Fulci doesn’t come close to achieving the nightmarish atmosphere of Suspiria, but give him credit for trying.

I watched The Beyond with its Italian soundtrack this time after reading that some of the sound effects were different than the English language track. Particularly effective are the whispers of the dead throughout the film, which are not heard on the English track. The climax was especially chilling, as the names of Liza and are John are whispered repeatedly as the two slowly realize they are trapped inside hell. Overall, I probably prefer the English dialogue track (both the leads spoke their lines in English), but the Italian effects track is definitely an upgrade. The Grindhouse DVD release – although using the same transfer as the old Anchor Bay DVD – does contain the Italian track with English sub-titles, so it’s worth checking out if you’ve never seen the film in its Italian incarnation.

The Skinny On... Nightmare City

2009-06-12T15:04:00.000-07:00

I’ll admit it -- I’m a sucker for zombie movies. And when it comes to old-fashioned, entrails-eating, blood-spurting hi-jinks, the Italian and Spanish zombie movies of the 1970’s and 1980’s are tough to beat. Doubling the fun is Nightmare City (1980), an Italian/Spanish co-production and a prime slab of Euro zombie beef. Umberto Lenzi’s oft-overlooked opus makes up for its rather meager monster makeup with unbridled energy and an onslaught of kinetic mayhem not seen again until 28 Days Later (2003).

Unless you’re a Rhodes Scholar or World Literature professor, you might have a hard time following the intricate plot, but here goes: Radioactivity turns a group of people into raging, blood-thirsty zombies. The people they attack then also turn into raging, blood-thirsty zombies. Regular people make a mad dash for the hills. The End.

OK, so the script for Nightmare City wouldn’t pass muster at a community college screenwriting class, but that’s not why we watch zombie movies. Nightmare City doesn’t waste time with character development or complex exposition; it just piles on one entertaining set piece after another. As the film begins a reporter played by the hirsute Hugo Stiglitz, who always seems to be mad about something though I’m never sure what, witnesses a cargo plane land unannounced at a city airport. Suddenly the plane doors open and gooey faced maniacs begin attacking everyone in sight. Immediately, you realize that these are not your Romero’s zombies. They look like they’ve been hit in the face with chunks of putrefying beef; they wield axes, guns, scythes and any other weapons they can get a hold of, and they run and jump like a world-class track team. These are some potent, high-energy, death-dealing maniacs, not zombies so much as highly athletic vampires (the radioactivity poisoning evidently creates the need for a continuous supply of fresh blood).

After witnessing the attack, reporter Dean returns to his TV station and, without saying a word to anyone, orders the technical director to interrupt an afternoon dance show so he can make an emergency news broadcast. The station’s executives rightly pull the plug on Dean’s report, which makes him even angrier and more indignant than before. Dean clearly needs to work on his people skills. We then cut back to the dancing program, one that makes Solid Gold look like the heyday of the Bolshevik Ballet, when suddenly zombies invade and do what everyone watching the show secretly wanted to do: Rip the dancers to shreds and drink their blood.

Hours after the initial attack, it now occurs to Dean that he might want to inform his wife of the looming danger. He calls the hospital where she works as a nurse and is indignant when told that she is in surgery and cannot come to the phone. Poor Dean. Stymied again. He rushes to the hospital just in time to witness another mass attack. As the zombie vampires hack, stab, shoot and otherwise pulverize everyone in sight, Dean is able to retrieve his wife, steal an ambulance and escape. The rest of the film follows the duo as they encounter more zombies while limp military men led by the impressively named but otherwise wholly inadequate General Murchison (Mel Ferrer) sit in their headquarters trying to figure out what to do.

At times, Nightmare City is like that dream in which something is endlessly chasing you. You run and run, tired as hell but helpless to stop, never knowing what’s behind you and not wanting to find out. There is real frisson to the zombie action; these aren’t just machete-wielding maniacs, they’re killing machines without a shred of humanity or compassion. Yes, the makeup is sloppy, goopy and for the most part laughable. The action is the thing here, and Lenzi pulls off some intensely unrelenting sequences that will have you squirming in your seat. For my money, Lenzi’s raucous zombie vampires are just as effective if not more so than the similarly raging creatures from Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later. Aided greatly by Stelvio Cipriano’s apocalyptic synthesizer-based score, Stiglitz’s perpetually angry leading man, some well-placed nudity, and buckets of gore, Nightmare City is an excellent entry in the Euro zombie cycle.

The Skinny On... Nightmare Castle

2009-06-04T11:01:00.000-07:00

Mario Bava kick-started the Italian gothic boom of the 1960’s with the baroque majesty of Black Sunday, which was followed by the exceptional work of Riccardo Freda (The Horrible Secret of Dr. Hichcock, The Ghost), the slow-moving but atmospheric films of Antonio Margheriti (Castle of Blood, The Long Hair of Death), and the sometimes inspired, sometimes insipid films of directors ranging from Giorgio Ferroni (Mill of the Stone Women) to Camillo Mastrocinque (Crypt of the Vampire) to Massimo Pupillo (Terror Creatures from the Grave). By the time Nightmare Castle was released in 1965, the genre was well worn if not verging on tired, but director Mario Caiano keeps the film fairly interesting by eschewing any pretense of great art in favor of a lush, sometimes garish soap opera atmosphere.

The familiar story opens with Dr. Stephen Arrowsmith (no, I’m not making that up) catching his wife Muriel and her lover David getting hot and heavy in the greenhouse. Mad with jealousy – and probably mad even without jealousy – Arrowsmith tortures Muriel and David in a dungeon located beneath the castle, and then electrocutes them in a spray of decidedly un-special effects. Before her demise, Muriel informs Arrowsmith that she had changed her will, and her vast inheritance will now go to her ditzy younger sister Jenny (Steele again, this time in a ridiculous blonde wig). No problem. Arrowsmith simply woos Jenny, marries her, and brings her back to the castle in order to drive her mad, have her committed to an insane asylum, and take all her money. Simple, huh? Unfortunately for Arrowsmith, the spirits of Muriel and David makes a triumphant return to thwart the good doctor’s plans.

Nightmare Castle has everything you would expect in an Italian gothic: A spooky castle, a cheating wife, revenge from beyond the grave, and horror icon Barbara Steele playing two roles. Did the lady ever portray a single character in any film? This is definitely one of Steele’s better acting showcases, not in the least because it is the only Italian gothic in which you can hear the actress’ own voice. Steele did the dubbing for Jenny (though, curiously, not for Muriel). The simultaneously desirable and cadaverous countenance of Steele has made her a genre icon, and she really gets to strut her stuff here, playing the lustful, vengeful Muriel to a tee, and doing a fine job as the laughably clueless Jenny. The blonde wig does her no favors, but Steele fans can grouse little about the amount of screen time the actress enjoys. Nightmare Castle is a Steele vehicle, plain and simple.

Though many viewers complain about the pacing in Nightmare Castle, I didn’t find it any slower than the films of Margheriti, Mastrocinque, or even Bava for that matter. But whereas Bava infused his films with richly textured photography and deliriously flamboyant images, Caiano plays things rather straight, achieving few of the striking visual moments that defined the gothic subgenre. The ending is quite well done, however, with a few deliciously creepy shots of the decaying Muriel and Davis returned from the grave and thirsty for revenge. The story is a real potboiler, with elements of infidelity, torture, murder, vengeance, and insanity. Arrowsmith has a predilection for electrocution, which he uses twice during the course of the film. Another lurid touch has the doctor using Muriel’s blood to give his haggard elderly servant Solange (the lovely Helga Line) a youthful appearance. He then strikes up an affair with the newly beautiful octogenarian. When a second transfusion using Jenny’s blood goes awry, Solange withers into a rotting corpse.

The film features the first horror score of Ennio Morricone, and while I’ve heard many praise the music, I found it erratic to say the least. While there are a few effective cues, the music is often bombastic and sometimes badly out of place. One piece in particular, which is quite reminiscent to the main theme of Stanley Kubrik’s Barry Lyndon, sounds like it belongs in another movie. Like Barry Lyndon, for instance. To hear this stately, prim music as mad doctors and ghosts roam around haunted castle is almost a disorienting experience.

Severin’s new DVD release of Nightmare Castle is simply terrific, with a beautiful transfer of the film, and, as mentioned, an English audio track that features Barbara Steele’s actual speaking voice. The DVD also includes a 30-minute interview with Steele in which she speaks about her career. Though Steele seems a tad embarrassed at her status as a horror icon (she speaks much more highly of Fellini than of Bava, for instance), she seems to be warming somewhat to her status as she grows older. Even she admits that while she made all kinds of films, it’s her horror output that everyone remembers. Shouldn’t that tell you something, Barb?

The Skinny On... Up

2009-06-01T13:03:00.000-07:00

You will find few if any movies on this blog that can be described as sweet, heartfelt or touching. These are words I do not use lightly to describe a movie (or anything else, for that matter), so when I find one for which those words not only apply but actually shortchange, I feel compelled to say a few words about it. So it is with Up, the effortlessly transcendent, nearly perfect new offering from Pixar Studios. Here’s a challenge: Take several elements riddled with cliché possibilities -- an old man disappointed in how his life has turned out; a chubby kid who is neglected by his father; a colorful bird with three chicks to care for; a cute, oh-so-lovable dog – and mix them into an unlikely fantasy/adventure complete with flying houses, talking dogs, and chocolate-eating foul. Now, make every one of those elements seem totally plausible, and use them to create a film that is moving without being maudlin, funny without being silly, and exciting without being dumb. Presto – you have Up. I had little expectations when I went to see Up with my two elementary-aged boys this weekend, but within the first 15 minutes – a stunning encapsulation of life from the wonder and exuberance of childhood to the grind and disappointments of adulthood to the loss and regrets of old age – I realized I was watching something special. And if I thought momentarily that the remainder of Up could not possibly equal that brilliant, heart-wrenching opening, the film quickly assuaged those worries. Up tells the story of Carl Fredericksen (Ed Asner), an elderly balloon vendor who loses his adventure-seeking wife Ellie before he is able to grant her lifelong wish of traveling to the wilderness of Paradise Falls in South America. After his wife’s death, Carl decides to complete the adventure by himself, tying thousands of balloons to his home and soaring into the sky. His plan is complicated when an eager neighborhood boy, Russell, becomes an unwitting stow-away. Arriving at the wrong end of Paradise Falls, a newly determined Carl decides to drag his home through the jungle and to the edge of falls, and that’s when the real adventures begin. It is pointless to delve further into the plot of Up, because words simply can’t convey the care, precision and heart that saturates every frame of the film. As with other Pixar films, Up is a visual feast, but the economy of the narrative and breadth of the emotional experience is unmatched in the studio’s catalog. I can name a handful of live-action films that have made me cry. Up did it multiple times. Not only is the filmmaking of the highest caliber, but the combination of exceptionally expressive animation and impeccable voice work by Asner makes Carl’s “performance” one of the finest – if not the finest – in the annals of animation. I can’t imagine seeing a better film than Up this year. It is a movie that is literally wonderful – that is, full of wonder – and brimming with unforgettable moments both large and small. Of all the lush visuals, hilarious gags, and heartfelt moments, one shot sticks with me more than any other: Two empty chairs belonging to Carl and Ellie, sitting on the edge of Paradise Falls, never to be used again. It’s as simple, beautiful and heartbreaking an image as the cinema can offer.

The Skinny On... The Curse of the Crying Woman

2009-05-20T09:24:00.000-07:00

The Crying Women (La Llorona) of Mexican folklore has been a staple of South-of-the-Border supernatural cinema since 1933, with The Curse of the Crying Woman (1963) being one of her finest film incarnations. Using as a template the classic Universal horror films and -- by extension -- the silent German Expressionistic films, Mexican horror films of the late 1950s and early 1960s are loaded with the crepuscular atmosphere of their esteemed models, but up the ante with either borderline creepy or hilariously silly monsters, along with the violence and shock effects increasingly expected by audiences of the time. The Curse of the Crying Woman falls somewhere in between the fairly serious El Vampiro and the frankly outlandish The Brainiac -- the best of both worlds as it were -- and remains a highly entertaining addition to the Mexican horror canon.

A carriage traverses a forest so desolate it makes the stark landscape in Son of Frankenstein look like the poppy fields of Oz by comparison. Suddenly we see a ghastly visage: A woman garbed in black, with empty pits for eyes, holding three vicious Doberman Pinschers and communicating silently with the heavily scarred, Hispanic version of Warren Oates. As the carriage approaches, the scarred man leaps out and kills the coachman and all the unfortunate travelers. As a young girl is crushed beneath the wheels of the carriage, the opening credits roll. Welcome to The Curse of the Crying Woman.

From here, the plot begins to resemble El Vampiro as Jaime (the ubiquitous Abel Salazar) and his wife Amelia travel to Amelia’s childhood home at the request of her aunt Selma. Once there, they receive a chilly welcome from none other than the scarred henchman from the opening scene, who basically tells them to go to their room and shut up until Selma returns. Things don’t warm up much upon her arrival as Selma begins playing one of the most depressing organ dirges imaginable in order to beckon Amelia downstairs. As Selma’s elegiac death march wafts through the house, Amelia eagerly skips downstairs with a huge smile on her face, prompting one to wonder what the hell this woman’s childhood was like. Amelia is surprised to see that Selma has not aged in the intervening 20 years (again, shades of El Vampiro), and is more than a little baffled by her cold demeanor, even telling her that “It seems like you’re another person.” Selma doesn’t mince words, telling Amelia that she has called her home in order to revive a centuries old-witch – La Llorona -- whose decaying skeleton hangs in her basement. To prove she’s not kidding around, Selma shows Amelia how she casts no reflection in a mirror and can walk through a giant spider web without disturbing it. Amelia is naturally aghast at the plans to revive La Llorona (it is her job to remove the sword that killed her as the clock strikes midnight), but Selma informs her that the witch’s blood runs through her veins, and she will succumb to spirit of La Llorona whether or not she wishes to.

From here it’s a race against time as Amelia is slowly infested with the spirit of La Llorona and Jaime runs around the hacienda trying to figure out what’s going on. On one visit upstairs, Jaime is attacked by a disfigured corpse-keeper type who turns out to be Selma’s long-lost husband Daniel. It seems that when a woman in the family turns to the dark side, her husband becomes a ghastly, whimpering monster. Evidently the same fate awaits Jaime if he cannot convince Amelia to resist the spirit of La Llorona. In a well-executed, suspenseful sequence, a huge bell begins to toll the midnight hour as Amelia is commanded by Selma to remove the sword from La Llorona, while Jaime – shackled and helpless – implores her to resist. Toll by toll, the sword is slowly removed, until finally Jaime’s declaration that “I’m your husband” convinces Amelia to stop just in time. As the house crumbles around them, Jaime and Amelia are able to escape, while Daniel returns to put Selma back in her rightful place.

The Curse of the Crying Woman is a rather convoluted mish-mash of ideas, but it really delivers the gothic goods, from fog-laden landscapes and crumbling haciendas to rotting skeletons and cob-webbed dungeons, all filmed in the superbly atmospheric black-and-white photography that was a staple of Mexican horror cinema during this period. Visually, these films rival the great gothics of the teens, 20’s and 30’s. They are simply beautiful movies to watch.

The Curse of the Crying Woman seems a little confused about whether it’s a vampire movie or a witch movie, so it simply adopts motifs from both. Selma is basically a distaff Bela Lugosi. She casts no reflection, only appears at night, and can walk through a spider web with the best of them. For some reason, her eyes become black pits from time to time (clearly achieved by black cloth surrounded by some face makeup). It’s a spooky effect but becomes a little overused by the end of the film. Selma evidently doesn’t drink blood; it turns out she’s killing the descendants of the people who executed La Llorona and using their blood to help revive the centuries-old witch. Why she needs Amelia to remove the sword from La Llorona is never made clear (something about an old prophecy), and how Amelia becomes possessed by a witch who has not yet been revived is also never explained. Interestingly, it’s the return of patriarchal order that puts an end to Selma and La Llorona. Amelia ignores Jamie until he reminds her that “I’m your husband,” and Daniel returns to kill Selma, ending her maternal reign of terror. It is worth noting that the film pictures men under the rule of a maternal household as weak, pathetic creatures.

Casa Negra’s DVD of The Curse of the Crying Woman is truly breathtaking, with a stunning, uncut transfer of the film in its original Spanish language with easy-to-read English subtitles. An English-dubbed track is also included, but if you want to feel the full power of the film, watch it in its original language. Fast moving, atmospheric and loads of fun, The Curse of the Crying Woman is not to be missed by fans of classic horror.

Fantasy Drive-In Double Feature: Baby Cart at the River Styx & Night of the Comet

2009-05-12T13:39:00.000-07:00

Lone Wolf and Cub 2: Baby Cart at the River Styx

Less a movie than a symphony of highly visceral and intensely poetic violence, Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx was my first foray into the legendary Japanese gekiga (graphic novel) that spawned six movies, four plays and a TV series. The ongoing tale of disgraced former Shogun executioner Ogami Ittō and his toddler son Daigoro, who wander 18th century Japan battling foes of every shape and size, Baby Cart at the River Styx may be short on narrative coherence, but makes up for it with scene after scene of beautifully orchestrated, balletic blood-letting. If you ever wondered where Quinton Tarantino got some of his ideas for Kill Bill Vol. 1 – especially the final scene -- look no further. Itto engages enemies from the film’s first jaw-dropping scene, in which his splits the skull of a surprise attacker -- releasing a geyser of crimson blood -- as Daigoro looks on impassively. This image remains central throughout – Itto unleashing an almost supernatural physical prowess on enemy after enemy as his son watches placidly from a wooden carriage. After Itto dispatches his foes, he calmly resumes his life's journey, pushing Daigoro away from landscapes littered with severed limbs and dead bodies. In this film, Itto battles a group of lethal female assassins who are dead ringers for the Crazy 88’s in Kill Bill Vol. 1, and three brothers who are masters of various weaponry, one of which is a five-bladed hand dagger that looks strikingly similar to Freddy Krueger’s famed knife glove. Clearly molding Daigoro in his own image, Itto is not above using his son during battle, at one point pushing his cart into an army of awaiting ninja only to have sword blades pop from the wheels and slice off the feet of several would-be attackers. The film fluctuates from scenes of operatic violence to ones of quite introspection, including a charming sequence at an abandoned mill in which Diagoro cares for his wounded father by bringing him handfuls of water from a nearby stream. It’s a lovely, tender sequence that stands in stark contrast to the extreme violence surrounding it. Among the many visual delights is a montage of attacks along a picturesque bridge crossing, and a final desert sequence in which the three brothers seem to attack the sand itself, only to have blood bubble up from attackers hidden beneath the dunes. By eschewing any pretense of narrative reasoning, Baby Cart at the River Styx achieves an oneiric intensity that few films can match; it’s truly a breathtaking experience.

Night of the Comet

Time has a way of transforming the obnoxious into the nostalgic. If I had seen Night of the Comet when it was released in 1984, I have no doubt I would have hated it. An unlikely combination of apocalyptic zombie horror and Valley Girl-style comedy, Comet is a synth-choked slice of ‘80s cheese that would have been the proverbial fingernails-on-the-chalkboard to my 17-year-old Dawn of the Dead/Burial Ground/Zombie-loving self. Funny thing, though. I recently taped it as a lark on the MGM-HD channel, and this 42-year-old curmudgeon had a pretty good time with Night of the Comet. It’s far from a great movie, mind you, but as a piece of schlocky, leg warmers-era entertainment, it’s not bad at all. A comet transforms most of humanity into Biblical piles of dust, a few others into rampaging zombies, and spares anyone who happened to be enclosed in metal when it passed. This fortunate group includes two sisters, one a tough-talking theater usher and the other a boy-crazy cheerleader, a cute guy for the girls to fight over, and a group of research scientists who may or may not be trying control the spread of zombie-ism (a year before a similar group did the same in Day of the Dead). The girls duke it out with several decent looking dead people (beware the dreaded dream sequence, however), and then engage in a Dawn of the Dead-style mall war with a gang of homicidal punks, a scene that includes this priceless exchange after a punk rocker cold-bloodedly shoots one of his own friends:

Regina (lead girl): You’re crazy!

Punk Guy: I’m not crazy. I just don’t give a fuck.

The final third of the film takes place at the research facility, where the true intentions of the scientists come to horrific light. Borrowing from such films as The Omega Man, Dawn of the Dead, and any number of ‘80’s teen comedies, Night of the Comet is formulaic filmmaking from stem to stern, but is elevated by a solid, occasionally witty script, and good performances from leads Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney, both of whom resist the temptation to sink into vapid teen girl mode. In fact, Night of the Comet presages such films as Aliens and Terminator 2 in its depiction of a female lead – in this case two female leads – who are not only strong, but can legitimately kick ass. The script contains a few decent surprises, especially some nice misdirection involving the motives of the scientists, and writer/director Thom Eberhardt squeezes everything he can out of an obviously limited budget. The Bava-esque gel lighting in the research facility is an especially welcome touch. On the downside, the soundtrack’s incessant parade of grade-Z dance music will have you grinding your teeth before the first zombie attacks. The zombies themselves, while sporting pretty good makeup, are few and far between, appearing in just as many dream sequences as real-life scenes, and the film’s budget reduces the apocalypse to a few piles of dust and a perpetually orange sky, though the empty cityscapes are appropriately eerie. The film has an episodic feel, and the climax is anything but climactic, but overall Night of the Comets is a harmless, nostalgic trip back to a time the 17-year-old Skinny couldn’t wait to escape. Go figure.

The Skinny On... The She Beast

2009-05-07T07:03:00.000-07:00

The first full-length feature of cult legend Michael Reeves (he had directed portions of 1964’s Castle of the Living Dead), The She Beast (1966) is an interesting though far from perfect addition to the 1960’s witch revenge cycle. Its sometimes deft, often clumsy combination of horror and comedy is off-putting to many, but ultimately the film contains just enough powerful scenes to unveil Reeves as a top-shelf writer/director. He would go on to direct the fascinating sci-fi/horror hybrid The Sorcerers and the classic The Witchfinder General before committing suicide at the tender age of 25.

One of the last in a long line of witch-from-centuries-past-returns-to-avenge-her-execution films, The She Beast opens not with the witch’s execution, but with an inebriated Count Von Helsing (John Karlsen) stumbling home to read about the witch’s execution. At this point, the film cuts 200 years in the past, but Reeves has already signaled that tongue will be planted firmly in cheek for the duration. However, in terms of unfettered brutality, the execution scene rivals the similar one that opens The Witchfinder General. While the disfigured, screeching She Beast is clearly a supernatural entity, her cold-blooded execution via a tortuous dunking chair reveals her coldly indifferent tormentors to be just as inhumane as she.

Back in the present, British couple Veronica and Philip (Barbara Steele and Ian Ogilvy, a Reeves stalwart who appeared in all three of the director’s features) visit the same Transylvanian town, lose control of their car, and plunge into the lake in which the beast had met her demise. Phillip is able to escape, and a passing truck driver attempts to pull Veronica from the lake but retrieves the remains of the witch instead. Animated by Veronica’s spirit, she returns to life and begins to again wreak havoc in the village. Philip and Von Helsing are left to battle not only the wretched creature, but also authoritarian government officials -- resembling Moe, Larry and Curly as much as Stalin, Malenkov or Khrushchev – who grind into beaurocratic action after one too many murders in their district. After managing to subdue the officials and the beast, the duo perform another dunking, releasing Veronica from the witch’s spell.

The main problem with The She Beast – if you consider it a problem – is that the film has more comedic elements than horrific ones. Luckily, most of the humor works: The smug, witty conversation between Veronica and Philip; the lecherous communist innkeeper appropriately named Groper (memorably played by Mel Welles); the drunken, scatterbrained witch killer Von Helsing. The truck driver’s bafflement at Groper’s attraction to Veronica is mystifying until we realize that he has mistaken the indescribably haggish witch for her, a ludicrous conceit but funny just the same. Near the end of the film, Philip and Von Helsing drive amiably through the town with the horrendously scarred She Beast sedated and propped up in the back seat behind them, a sight gag of the first order. On the downside, the Keystone Kops-style car chase at the end of the film is dismal, exacerbated by the fact that it goes on far too long. Clearly padding, this is the scene most people point to when complaining about The She Beast, and rightfully so.

The horror elements, though far fewer in number, can be quite effective. The aforementioned execution is a truly powerful sequence as the witch, impaled on a scalding stake, wails in horrific pain as she is dunked repeatedly in the lake. The witch’s makeup, which makes her look like a withered, frizzy-haired Rondo Hatton, has received a lot of criticism over the years, but I found it to be fairly effective, especially when she bursts out of a dark cave to attack the villagers who had come to execute her. The creature may not be, as the tagline for the film promises, “deadlier the Dracula, wilder than the werewolf, more frightening than Frankenstein,” but she’s not bad.

Reeves also takes a few swipes at authoritarian government, picturing its citizens as either apathetic or perverted and its officials as hapless beaurocratic stooges. Groper bursts into Philip and Veronica’s room hoping to catch them in some carnal act, and later spies on them through an open window. His lecherous behavior takes a dark turn midway through the film when he attempts to rape his own niece. In an ironic contrast, the film’s prologue pictures the villagers uniting to track down and kill the witch, while in present day, attending a cockfight, they are oblivious to an epic good-vs-evil battle right outside their doors. The three government officials make all the wrong moves, remaining fixated on minute details while a massive supernatural tornado swirls around them.

The cast is uniformly excellent, although Steele is missing from a large part of the film’s middle section. The good news is that we are offered a brief but generous glimpse of her almost fully exposed breast before she disappears. Ogilvy displays the cool smugness that served him so well in the following year’s The Sorcerers, and Karlsen is hilarious as the stumbling, bumbling Count Von Helsing, a rather poor substitute for his dignified vampire-killing grandfather.

Dark Sky has just released The She Beast in a lovely anamorphic widescreen print that blows all previous video incarnations of the film out of the water. Reeves’ debut film is a polarizing one, but definitely worth seeing at least once. Afterwards, pop in The Witchfinder General and see what this enormously talented but sadly short-lived director was really capable of doing.

Fantasy Drive-In Double Feature: Night of the Devils & The Return of the Living Dead

2009-04-29T08:59:00.001-07:00

Night of the Devils

Aleksey Tolstoy’s vampire tale The Wurdulak has been translated to the big screen several times, the most notable being Mario Bava’s sublime version – featuring one of Boris Karloff’s finest performances -- in the classic omnibus film Black Sabbath. Night of the Devils (1972) is a seldom-seen telling of The Wurdulak that, while never reaching the hallucinatory heights of Bava’s version, is still a riveting piece of Euro-horror that benefits from solid performances, an eerily pulsing musical score, and some genuinely nightmarish imagery. Director Giorgi Ferroni, who was also responsible for the excellent Mill of the Stone Women (1960), begins the film with an expressionistic montage, apparently unrelated to the rest of the film, of beautiful nude women interspersed with disturbing death imagery, including powerfully surreal scenes of a women’s face exploding off her skull, and two skeleton-like figures hovering over a naked woman. After a largely irrelevant bracketing story set in a hospital, we get to the film proper, in which a traveler encounters car problems and finds himself trapped in a spooky, isolated forest with a family who seems to have a lot of secrets and even more fears. Eventually, we learn that a Wurdulak – a type of vampire who kills loved ones so they won’t be lonely -- lives in the forest and has killed several family members, after which they return to claim more of their kin. The traveler ultimately escapes the clutches of the beautiful young daughter and winds up in the hospital, only to find that her reach is longer than he imagined. Ferroni builds the tension to a palpable level as family members are infected one by one, leaving the rest to squabble among themselves. Even in the grainy, dark, washed-out, full-screen version of the film that I watched, Ferroni’s striking shot compositions and arresting imagery were abundantly evident: A creepy shot of two children and a doll peering out a window; a Wurdulak running in slow motion through the forest; a vampirized child viciously attacking her own mother, a staked Wurdulak decaying away. I look forward to the day when this fine film gets a legitimate DVD release in its proper aspect ratio.

The Return of the Living DeadI wasn’t a big fan of The Return of the Living Dead (1985) when it was released; in fact, my 18-year-old know-it-all self was downright hostile to the film. I was a fan of “true” zombie films like George Romero’s raw, ferocious Day of the Dead (released the same year). By comparison, Return was middling, trifling fare at best, clearly aimed at teenagers who were as collectively obnoxious as the ones featured in the film. Over the years, however, I have not only warmed to the film, I now count it as one the more enjoyable horrors of the 1980s. I still don’t think it’s a great zombie film, but I do put it on my short list of good horror comedies, along with Shaun of the Dead, Young Frankenstein and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. And while the teenagers are still pretty obnoxious, they do not detract from the real stars of the film – curiously for a teen-oriented film, the three adult characters played by James Karen, Clu Gallagher and Don Calfa. Karen is particular memorable. Playing the manager of medical supply company who unwittingly releases a chemical that reanimates the dead, he morphs from overly amiable to haplessly apoplectic with finely tuned comic precision. Realizing that the chemical is slowly turning him into a zombie, he devises a solution that is both grisly and oddly touching, carefully removing his wedding ring before making a fiery sacrifice. Calfa is also excellent as the mysterious, vaguely twisted pistol-packing mortician. When he tells Gallagher’s character that he “owes him a huge favor” after disposing the film’s first zombie in his cremation oven, one gets the feeling that he has something decidedly perverted in mind. His character is writer/director Dan O’Bannon’s second intriguing mortician of the decade (Jack Albertson played the godlike William G. Dobb’s in the superlative Dead and Buried, which was written by O’Bannon). The teens don’t fare quite as well, although Linnea Quigley’s naked cemetery dance is certainly one of the more memorable moments of ‘80s horror. And while the zombies aren’t anything special overall, the rubbery, decaying mess that shambles out of the military canister is truly something to behold. Most everything clicks in Return, a tight, fast-paced film that keeps the laughs coming, has a few moments of decent gore, and an abrupt, nihilistic ending that serves it well. Turns out I didn’t know everything at 18 after all…

The Skinny On... Veerana

2009-04-20T08:03:00.000-07:00

In terms of unbridled wackiness, Hindi movies are tough to beat. I thought Mexican horror films could be over the top until I saw Veerana (aka Vengeance of the Vampire), a delightfully schlocky and at times surprisingly effective horror-comedy-musical (all labels are equally valid) that moves at breakneck speed from cobwebbed tombs and disfigured demons to sunshiny songs and rotund comedians. Hidden amidst the endless zooms, zany sound effects, reverberating sopranos and inept comic relief is some pretty impressive montage-style filmmaking, with a few sequences that might even tickle George Romero’s editing fancy.

In the woods outside a remote Indian village, a witch seduces men to her isolated mansion and -- with the aid of an incessantly glowering evil priest and five craggy, pointy-headed monsters that look like rejects from It! -- turns into a hideous demon before tearing them to shreds. All is going well for the dentally challenged witch until macho-man Sameer intervenes, accompanying her home and even taking a bubble bath with her (!) before escorting her back to the village to be hung by the indignant town folk.

So has the film wrapped up after 10 minutes? Far from it. The evil priest is none too pleased with this turn of events, and decides to reanimate the witch’s spirit in the body of Sameer’s niece, Jasmine. After a hallucinogenic ceremony in a brightly colored dungeon replete with a giant spider web and grinning, horned devil statue, the reanimation is completed and Sameer receives his comeuppance at the hands of the Golem Quintet.

Several years later an adult Jasmine begins doing odd things like making plates fly through the air and turning her head around 360 degrees, and village men once again begin turning up murdered. Jasmine’s father, the town Thakur, begins to suspect his daughter might be guilty of more than just tearing the heads off her dolls or singing high-pitched songs when she’s alone in her room. In the meantime, Jasmine’s cousin (and Sameer’s daughter) brings home another piece of unfettered machismo after he rescues her from a hulking goon who resembles a cross between Richard Keil and that really tall guy from Yojimbo. The pair consummate their attraction by singing a jaw-dropping duet in which the primary lyrics, repeated ad naseum, are “Doo doo ba ba, doo doo ba ba” (my two boys howled with delight when I imparted this bit of information to them).

As if the plot weren’t complicated enough, we are also introduced to some comic relief – and I use that term loosely -- in the form of a chubby horror film director named Hitchcock, and a psychiatrist with a risibly fake Freudian beard who quickly diagnosis his patient as a witch and then catches the fastest train to Mumbai. All that’s left is for the group to banish the witch’s spirit from Jasmine for good. Returning to the deserted mansion, they are stunned to discover that Sameer wasn’t killed after all, and with his help they are able to defeat the forces of evil, trap the witch in her coffin, and bring her before a statue of Shiva for her ultimate penalty.

OK, Veerana may not be a great movie, but its entertainment quotient is off the chart. While the over-abundance of zoom shots might make you dizzy at times, the montage-style filmmaking -- basically using cuts and editing in lieu of tracking shots or camera movement – is at times surprisingly good, even Romero-esque. This type of filmmaking requires far more camera set-ups and then “builds” sequences through the editing process. Atmosphere is added by utilizing weird camera angles and striking shot compositions. While I’m certainly not implying that Veerana is a modern-day Battleship Potemkin or even Night of the Living Dead, I was quite impressed with the overall level of filmmaking.

The horror elements are solid, with a great-looking wicked witch, the silly golem-style monsters, the evil priest (who gives one of the great glowering performances in the history of cinema), a spooky mansion, and a dungeon with almost Bava-esque style gel lighting. While the shot of the witch suddenly turning her head to stare into the camera loses some of its power after the 133rd time it’s executed, she’s still a very effective, Evil Dead-style demon. Other film influences included The Exorcist (360 degree head turn), The Changeling (spooky rocking chair), and Poltergeist (staring into TV static).

While the film utilizes Hindu imagery, the theme of good vs. evil is basically the same as Christian-based western horror films. Instead of a cross, the witch is subdued by an “AUM” symbol, and she is ultimately destroyed when brought before a statue of Shiva. The theme of reincarnation is mentioned once during the film (after a man attempts to kill a cat, someone tells him he will come back as a dog), and is conveyed implicitly with the surprising “resurrection” of Sameer at the film’s climax. Otherwise, you would be hard-pressed to separate the look and feel of the film from western horrors.

Veerana is part of Mondo Macabro’s Bollywood Horror Collection, Part II (which also includes Purani Haveli). It’s a great-looking, full-frame version of one the rarer and more entertaining horror films you will see this or any other year. For a good time, call Veerana today.

Fantasy Drive-In Double Feature: Four Flies on Grey Velvet & Lady Frankenstein

2009-04-10T13:49:00.000-07:00

Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1972)
This long sought-after Dario Argento giallo has finally landed on DVD in America, albeit with some controversy. Quite the Hitchcockian enterprise, the film concerns rock drummer Roberto, who decides to confront a mysterious man who has been following him. Unfortunately, Roberto accidentally stabs the man during the confrontation, an act that is captured on film by someone wearing a decidedly eerie smiley-face mask. Roberto isn’t too upset by this turn of events until he starts receiving mysterious phone calls, some of the pictures of the murder turn up in his home during a party, and unexpected guests arrive -- in the middle of the night. As people start dropping like flies all around him, Roberto realizes he’s been set up from the beginning. But who has set him up – and why? While Four Flies on Grey Velvet doesn’t attain the stylish, gory, or shocking heights of Argento’s best work (Deep Red, Suspiria, Tenebre), it is actually a very enjoyable film with some great set pieces, although it is let down somewhat by a lackluster ending. Argento fans will appreciate the suspenseful build-ups to several murders, but might be disappointed in the relatively bloodless results. It wasn’t until Deep Red that Master Argento really let the red stuff flow. Still, Four Flies does contain some of the better-known elements that would infuse Argento’s later films: An unknown killer haunted by childhood trauma; long and suspenseful sequences in which the murderer tracks his victims; and creepy little touches like the smiley-face mask (presaging the dummy from Deep Red). The music, although not yet by The Goblins, is quite inventive and memorable. MYA’s DVD of Four Flies looks fantastic. However, fans are rightfully outraged by the English-language track, which is pitched far too low, making the men sound like Isaac Hayes and the women sound like Kathleen Turner (the current one – not the Body Heat one). To compound the error, MYA doesn’t provide English subtitles for the Italian-language track – which is pitched correctly! Aside from this extremely distracting audio snafu, the disc is a very welcome addition to the Argento DVD catalog.

Lady Frankenstein (1971)
The movie that features without a doubt the best-looking Frankenstein doctor and arguably the goofiest Frankenstein monster, Lady Frankenstein has attained a solid cult status thanks to countless showings on late-night TV during the 1970’s and 1980’s. The film stars the fetching Rosabla Neri as Dr. Frankenstein’s daughter Tania, who returns from medical school to follow in her father’s misguided footsteps. After Dad’s latest creation – a hulking, scarred, bulbous-headed maniac – dispatches of the good doctor and escapes into the countryside to wreak havoc, the beautiful daughter decides the best course of action is to create another monster to battle it. Mind you, Tania has never seen her father’s creation, and yet she makes no attempt to capture it or even follow it. Aided by her father’s besmirched assistant Charles, she decides instead on the most convoluted course of action imaginable: Seduce the handsome but dimwitted servant Thomas, have Charles suffocate him in the middle of lovemaking, implant Charles’ keen brain in Thomas’ muscular frame, and then have her new monster battle her father’s old one. Simple, huh? All this adds up to some good, old-fashioned Euro-trash, short on style but long on entertainment value. In the end, the Thomas/Charles hybrid is somehow able to defeat her father’s rampaging monster, but Tania learns just how powerful her own creation is as he makes vigorous love to her in celebration of their victory. As the house burns around them and the film slowly fades to black, her cries of ecstasy suddenly turn into cries of agony. Really, is it such a bad way to go?

The Skinny On... Blood and Lace

2009-03-31T12:29:00.000-07:00

You know you’re in for a treat when a movie starts with a graphic hammer murder. You know you’re in for something really special when said murder features the following twists:

· One of the intended victims, sleeping in bed, turns face up just before the attack.

· The murderer decides at the last moment to use the claw-side of the hammer.

Thus begins Blood and Lace (1971), a film in which a hammer blow to the back of the head just wouldn’t suffice, so we get a hammer claw to the face instead. Blood and Lace is a twisted little horror/exploitation sickie that has proven surprisingly influential, with echoes in films ranging from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) to Halloween (1978) to A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). It was also one of the first horror films to deconstruct the mythology of small-town America, paving the way for the rural horror wave of the 1970s, and contains a pervasive nihilism that remains disturbing to this day. Oh, and did I mention it was rated GP? That’s PG to you and me, and how this film received a PG rating when Midnight Cowboy received an X two years before is one of the great mysteries of cinema. By comparison, here is a list of some recent PG-rated movies: Monsters vs. Aliens, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Enchanted and Madagascar. That’s right, a movie with a bunch of talking animated animals has the same rating as a movie with themes of murder, rape, torture, necrophilia and incest. Good job, ratings board!

Blood and Lace opens with the aforementioned POV hammer attack, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the opening sequence of John Carpenter’s Halloween. As they lay in bed, town prostitute Edna Masters and one of her clients are hacked mercilessly, leaving Edna’s teenage daughter Ellie a sudden orphan. Since she doesn’t know who or where her father is, Ellie becomes a ward of the state and is commissioned to the Deere Youth Home, an orphanage run by the nefarious Mrs. Deere (Gloria Grahame) with help from her sleazy handy man Tom (Len Lesser). Turns out Mrs. Deere provides certain favors to town social worker Mullins so that he will turn a blind eye to the poor conditions of the orphanage and the curiously blue-faced children who populate its infirmary. Why blue-faced? Because when a child tries to escape the Deere Youth Home, they are dispatched with extreme prejudice by Tom, stored in a walk-in freezer, and thawed out for Mullins’ monthly “inspections.”

Ellie doesn’t like any of this, but she does like stud orphan Walter, who casually tells her he’s slept with “hundreds” of girls. How he had access to that many sexual partners while being a ward of the Deere home is never explained, but he and Ellie strike up a relationship, which unfortunately leads to him thwarting every escape attempt she makes. Ellie discovers a starving girl being held in the attic and is almost raped by Tom, but good old Walter makes sure she is never able to flee the home, apprising Mrs. Deere of her escape plans on several occasions. In the meantime, Detective Carruthers (Vic Tayback), who is investigating Edna’s murder, pops in from time to time to check on Ellie, but his interest in the teenager seems a little seedy to say the least. A weird old guy wielding a hammer also shows up at the orphanage, staring at Ellie while she sleeps and tussling with Tom on another occasion. So has the murderer arrived to dispatch the one witness to his crime, or is there more than meets the eye at the Deere Home?

I would be remiss to delve any deeper into the plot of Blood and Lace, because it has some nice twists throughout and an ending that is both exquisitely vile and strangely apropos. The horror elements are solid, with several graphic murders, a dismembered hand and a freezer full of child corpses, but the abject bleakness of the film is what makes it truly memorable. The film does not have a single likable character. The woman who runs the orphanage is a sadistic (and possibly necrophilic) madwoman, the handyman is a drunken letch, the detective is a sleaze ball who is overtly interested in an under-aged girl, the social worker accepts sexual favors to ignore the plight of the orphans, and the “leading man” shows consistent weakness by refusing to escape and thwarting the escape attempts of others. Even Ellie is wholly unlikable, coming across as a spoiled, flirty brat who seems to be following in the footsteps of the very mother she detested. Although Edna Masters is murdered in the first scene, her persona hangs like a venereal disease over the entire film, with constant references to her multitudinous sexual partners and callous mistreatment of Ellie.

Blood and Lace opened the door for rural and/or small-town horrors like Last House on the Left, Deathdream, and – in particular – The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Not only is the seedy, unrelenting tone of Chainsaw quite similar to Blood and Lace, the character of Grandpa is a dead ringer for the mysterious old man who turns up at the orphanage:

Strikingly, both characters wield hammers during the course of their respective films. As mentioned, the POV hammer attack is a template for the opening scene of Halloween, and the red-and-green striped shirt of the (possible) killer became the trademark of A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger. For a film that a lot of people have never heard of, Blood and Lace has left quite a mark on the horror genre. It also boasts one of the most interesting casts of any horror film. You will remember Gloria Graham as Violet from It’s a Wonderful Life (looks like she should have left Bedford Falls after all); Vic Tayback as Mel in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and its TV spin-off Alice; and Len Lesser as Uncle Leo in Seinfeld (I kept waiting for him to say “Jerry, helloooooooooo!”). In addition, Dennis Christopher of Breaking Away fame plays one of the orphans. You would expect the cast in a blood-and-thunder exploitation film to abandon all subtlety, but they actually underplay their roles nicely. Graham and Tayback are particularly good, while Lesser does an admirable job conveying unfettered sleaziness.

Grim, gloomy, and deliciously nihilistic, Blood and Lace has carved a special place for itself in the horror pantheon. It’s borderline criminal that this exploitation gem has never received a legitimate DVD release, but it is available via gray market releases, including through ZDD Visual. Blood and Lace was my second purchase from ZDD, but alas it did not fare as well as The Horrible Secret of Dr. Hichcock. Full-frame, dark, and suffering from a jittery picture throughout (I assume due to PAL-NTSC conversion), this was a tough one to watch. Someone needs to get on the ball and release a decent version of this, the sickest of all PG-rated films.

Fantasy Drive-In Double Feature: Grave Robbers & The Long Hair of Death

2009-03-26T07:34:00.000-07:00

Let us continue our March of Italian and Mexican horrors with a fantasy Drive-In Double Feature:

Grave Robbers (1990)
A medieval monk turns to Satan and receives a battle-ax in the chest for his efforts. A few hundred years later, six young grave sackers stumble on (actually, fall in) his secret tomb, remove the ax, and unleash his vengeful spirit. Grave Robbers is sloppy, choppy and mostly incomprehensible, but that doesn’t mean it’s not loads of fun. A follow-up of sorts to Cemetery of Terror (it stars the same three girls who are dispatched by the dreaded Devlon), Grave Robbers does not quite reach the goofy, spooky heights of that supernatural slasher, but it definitely has its moments. The reincarnated monk is a hulking Mike Myers type, and director Ruben Galindo utilizes the actor’s large physique to good effect, especially when he rises up suddenly behind his unsuspecting victims. The gore is quite extreme (several severed limbs and a burst stomach a la Alien) but so unconvincing that you are more likely to laugh than cringe. Like Cemetery, the film kicks into gear from frame one and never lets up; the Friday the 13th franchise could learn a lot from the frenetic pace of these slashers. There’s also a nice splash of atmosphere that American slashers never seem to attain. The “grave” is actually a large medieval dungeon replete with cobwebs, tools of torture and ancient skeletons. On the other hand, the film contains continuity errors so glaring they would embarrass Ed Wood Jr., including one during the film’s climax in which a character boldly attacks the monster and is then shown reacting to his own courageous maneuver from the other side of the tomb. Stupefying? You bet. Entertaining as hell? Si, senor.

The Long Hair of Death (1964)
Tell me if this sounds familiar: An accused witch is burned at the stake, only to return years later to exact revenge on those who wronged her. It all started with Mario Bava’s Black Sunday in 1960, and the plot has been repeated ad naseum in horror films from Italy to England to America to Mexico. While it may not be particularly cutting-edge or inventive, The Long Hair of Death makes great use of its well-worn gothic formula, with plenty of shadowy B&W photography, cobwebbed crypts, and low-cut gowns. Throw in a corpse crawling with rodents and a borderline surreal reincarnation scene, and The Long Hair of Death becomes one of the more entertaining of the mid-60’s Italian gothics. The ubiquitous Barbara Steele once again plays the vengeful spirit (as an added bonus we catch a short glimpse of her body double’s bare breasts in this one), and the beautiful Halina Zaleweska plays her much put-upon sister. Director Antonio Margheriti demonstrates a real visual flair in several scenes, particularly the witch’s execution within a maze of burning brush, and the reincarnation scene in which a skeleton is re-formed with flesh during a raging thunderstorm. The film drags considerably during its final third, but all in all, this is a solid gothic outing, a deserving feature on our fantasy drive-in double bill.

Collector's Paradise

2009-03-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

The DVD revolution has been great for fans of horror and exploitation cinema, but there are always titles that – for one reason or another – escape official release, and that’s where a place like ZDD Visual Media comes into play. I read about ZDD recently while perusing the DVD Maniacs forum (which I highly recommend if you enjoy the kind of movies I write about here). ZDD is located in the U.K., but I decided to take a shot on their presentation of The Horrible Secret of Dr. Hichcock (1962), which I heard was quite impressive. The price was great (about $9 U.S. with $4 shipping), and I received the movie within five days. For my troubles, I was rewarded with a simply beautiful anamorphic widescreen DVD of Horrible Secret that far surpassed all other versions of the film I had ever seen. No, it’s not quite as good as a high-quality official release by a major studio, but it’s not far behind, and that’s saying something. ZDD currently has about 1700 titles, including quite a few that I’ve wanted to see for a long time: Blood and Lace (1971), Bloody Ceremony (1973 - a fully uncut composite), Lady Frankenstein (1971 - fully uncut composite), Night of the Devils (1972), and many more. From my fairly limited excursions into gray market DVDs, the quality, price and service of ZDD is unsurpassed.

The Skinny On... The Horrible Secret of Dr. Hichcock

2009-03-16T08:14:00.000-07:00

As perverse and poetic a horror movie as you are likely to find, The Horrible Secret of Dr. Hichcock (1962) is Riccardo Freda’s masterful ode to love, loss and necrophilia. Freda’s best film and a gothic masterpiece by any standard, the movie ranks with the best work of Mario Bava, Antonio Margheriti and Camillo Mastrocinque. But whereas those directors generally cloaked their horrors within supernatural themes and highly stylized visuals, Freda strips away all pretenses by largely eschewing dreamlike imagery to emphasize a robust, straightforward narrative. Accordingly, The Horrible Secret of Dr. Hichcock packs a powerful thematic punch that many other gothic horrors lack. Quite simply, it’s a great film from one of horror’s best directors.

In 1885 Victorian England, Dr. Bernard Hichcock (Robert Flemyng) accidentally kills his wife Margherita (Maria Teresa Vianello) with an overdose of anesthetic during a ritualistic sex game in which she is drugged into a deathlike state before the lovemaking process. Twelve years later, Hichcock returns to the home with his new wife Cynthia (Barbara Steele). As the doctor once again descends into his necrophilia fetish, Cynthia is left to contend with Martha (Harriet White Medin), the menacing housekeeper who keeps Margherita’s memory alive via huge portraits and unaccountably locked doors; Jezebel, Margherita’s vicious black cat; and a strange “other” woman, seen only fleetingly through windows and doorknobs, but seemingly ever-present and increasingly threatening. As her husband becomes more and more distant and eventually tries to slip her a glass of poison milk, Cynthia realizes that Dr. Hichcock has a death game in mind for her as well…

The Horrible Secret of Dr. Hichcock gets to the crux of its narrative with a clarity that is startling even to modern viewers. From the opening scene, we understand the film’s title is no lie. The good doctor’s secret is indeed a horrible one: He likes to have sex with dead people, or at the least people in a deathlike state. Freda doesn’t shirk away from the forbidden eroticism of Bernard and Margherita’s relationship, making Margherita a willing participant who is clearly aroused by their nightly ritual of love and death. It is telling that the film is set in Victorian England, where “decent” women tolerated rather than enjoyed sex. By “dying” for Bernard before the act of lovemaking, Madeline retains her virtue while still servicing his – and her – base desires. As the film progresses, the doctor’s appetite intensifies. In an amazingly explicit sequence, Hichcock visits a hospital morgue with the express intent of having sex with a female cadaver. Clearly aroused as he walks through the door (Freda underscores this beautifully by suddenly bathing his face in crimson light), Hichcock approaches the body, lowers the sheet, and begins to lovingly fondle the corpse before another doctor enters to put a merciful stop to the proceedings. A truly shocking image for a film of any year, this scene must have stunned audiences in 1962.

Much has been made of the film’s many reference to Alfred Hitchcock, from the lead character’s last name (his first name could also be a reference to Hitchcock’s favorite composer, Bernard Hermann), to the imposing portrait a la Rebecca, the poisoned milk from Notorious, and the overall thematic similarity to Vertigo (although Horrible Secret is a great deal more thematically straight-forward than Hitchcock’s film). Other film references can be found as well, especially from Vampyr. Freda suffuses Horrible Secret with images of death strikingly similar to Carl Dreyer’s classic: cemeteries, skulls, graves, coffins, funeral processions, a bottle of poison, and the living dead. The windowed coffin in which Cynthia finds herself trapped is an overt homage to Dreyer’s great film. Horrible Secret has been a quite influential film in its own right. The many shots of Margherita’s feet shambling through the house and grounds are highly reminiscent of the child ghost in Bava’s Kill Baby Kill; and her mad cackling during the film’s climax sounds almost identical to the ghost of the old woman in The Shining. The gruesome shot of Cynthia hanging upside down and dripping blood on the floor below was repeated by Terence Fisher for the vampire’s resurrection in Dracula, Prince of Darkness.

While Freda maintains a fairly subdued visual tone, the film is not without its share of expressionistic touches. Several scenes use crimson red or turquoise green lighting to underscoring sexual desire or fear respectively. More interestingly, Hichcock’s home is populated with extremely narrow staircases, hallways, and tunnels, which Freda frequently uses to enclose Steele, giving the impression that she is always passing through something. Often, Margherita is on the other side of those passageways, making the home is a series of unavoidable bridges that will lead Cynthia from this side – the side of the living -- to Margherita’s side – the side of the dead. Freda completes this imagery with multiple shots in which Cynthia spies Margherita through windows and doorknobs, again implying that she is “looking through” to the other side.

Although Freda emphasizes a strong narrative first and foremost, the film contains numerous striking visuals: Cynthia’s first glimpse of a shrouded Margherita in a rain-swept garden; her terrifying journey through the home’s dank hidden passageways; the hideously hag-like Margherita appearing suddenly from the shadows after Cynthia escapes her premature burial; and the fiery climax in which, fittingly, the marital bed of Hichcock and Margherita is the focal point of the flames.

The Horrible Secret of Dr. Hichcock benefits from a particularly strong cast. Robert Flemyng is superb as Dr. Hichcock, never allowing the character to become a one-dimensional maniac. Although he is cold, distant and menacing with Cynthia, his horrified reaction to accidentally killing Margherita reveals a deep, abiding love. Hichcock is no doubt deranged, but the loss of his beloved wife shades him with a tragic desperation. Steele – who for once doesn’t have to play the dual role of heroine/villain -- is quite good as the perpetually threatened innocent. Appearing here as Harriet White, Harriet Medin launched an entire career of playing menacing maids, a role she would more or less repeat in Bava’s Black Sabbath, The Whip and the Body, and Blood and Black Lace; and in Freda’s unofficial sequel to this film, The Ghost.

Previously, I had only seen The Horrible Secret of Dr. Hichcock via extremely grainy, full-frame gray market videos with terrible English-language dubs. However, ZDD Visual Media in the UK now offers a beautiful, anamorphic widescreen DVD of the film in its original Italian language and English subtitles. If you’ve never seen the film in this format, trust me, you’ve never seen the film. Highly recommended for fans of horror, Italian cinema, or film in general.

The Skinny On... Vacation of Terror

2009-03-10T08:23:00.000-07:00

I’m a big fan of the Mexican supernatural slashers Cemetery of Terror (1985) and Grave Robbers (1990), so when I saw that BCI/Diemos had released a seven-feature set (Horror from South of the Border Volume 1) including those two and five other Mexican delights, I accessed my Amazon account without delay. Four days later, I am one happy camper. Of the five other movies on the set -- Vacation of Terror (1989), Vacation of Terror II (1989), Hell’s Trap (1990), The Demon Rat (1991) and Don’t Panic (1989) – I decided on Vacation of Terror for my first viewing. While not nearly as successful as Cemetery of Terror or Grave Robbers, Vacation of Terror is still an enjoyable if somewhat incomprehensible mishmash of elements from such films as City of the Dead (1960), The Omen (1976), The Amityville Horror (1979) and Poltergeist (1982). Throw in some indescribably over-the-top late-80s hair and fashion and you have 90 minutes of popcorn movie bliss.

In a pre-credit sequence lifted from City of the Dead – which itself had been lifted from Black Sunday (1960) – a witch is burned at the stake in a small Mexican village. Before meeting her demise, the witch curses the villagers and their ancestors, but they appear to have the last laugh after sealing all her possessions -- including a satanic medallion and an ugly doll – in an abandoned well. Evidently, this prevents any chance of the witch exacting her revenge (don’t ask me how, it just does).

One hundred years later, amiable family man Fernando takes his wife Lorena, their three children (creepy little girl Gaby and two twin boys), niece Paulina, and Paulina’s uber-goofy boyfriend Julio to a newly bought vacation home, which unbeknownst to them was built on the very the site of the witch’s execution. Things immediately get weird when one of the children gets stuck in a tree for no apparent reason (“the tree won’t let me down”), and then really ramp up after Gaby falls into the well and finds the witch’s doll. Julio had somehow previously gained possession of the satanic medallion (which he hung on the review mirror of his pick-up truck!) and this wicked combination unleashes the spirit of the witch within the doll. Now we are treated to all sorts of supernatural occurrences, including bubbling tummies, bleeding walls, a rat-infested refrigerator, and the dreaded remote-control toys that move themselves. Preceding every strange event is a shot of the doll’s eyes moving sideways, punctuated on the soundtrack by something that sounds suspiciously like a cat stuck inside a piano.

After Fernando takes his wife to the hospital to treat her odd stomach issues, Julio and Paulina are subjected to increasingly strange happenings in between make-out sessions. Paulina is attacked by two snakes and a tarantula (not exactly a barrage of terror), and Julio is punctured rather gorily by a couple of flying knives. Finally, Paulina is able to retrieve the doll and the satanic medallion and cast them into the fireplace. This causes the entire house to catch fire and crumble, but luckily everyone is able escape, Julio and his acid-washed jeans making it out just in the nick of time. Cue the obligatory epilogue in which a realtor shows the house to another family, and their little girl finds a doll sitting on the staircase…

Aside from a fairly gory knifing toward the film’s end, Vacation of Terror is pretty tepid stuff. But like most Mexican horror films of this era, it has a decent amount of creepy atmosphere and loads of entertainment value. Look, when a movie has a character who looks like this, it has to have some redeeming value:

Vacation of Terror never slows down long enough for one to pick out the glaring inconsistencies, or to mull over the abject cheapness of the effects. Most of the horrors are borrowed: The tree from Poltergeist, the bleeding walls from The Amityville Horror, the creepy kid from The Omen, the doll from Dolls, and the witch from about 20 gothic horror movies in the 1960’s. However, director Rene Cardona III keeps the pace brisk, and infuses the house and surrounding property with enough spooky ambiance to keep things relatively interesting. It looks like they were able to rent the fog machine for at least a day or two.

Not exactly a masterpiece, Vacation of Terror is fun and harmless, and – from what I’ve read – it seems to have spawned a superior, head-spinning sequel. I’ll review that soon, but up next, some more Italian gothic horror from one of the pioneering directors in the genre – Riccardo Freda.

The Skinny On... Revenge of the Zombies

2009-03-05T12:37:00.000-08:00

I was perusing my movie channels the other day and discovered that MGM HD is airing Revenge of the Zombies, the 1943 zombie/espionage/comedy hybrid from Monogram Studios. Exactly why a Monogram programmer is playing on the MGM channel is beyond me, because no two studios could be more dissimilar. In the 1940’s, MGM was the cream of the Hollywood crop, brimming with big stars, great directors and endless resources. Monogram, on the other hand, was firmly entrenched in Poverty Row, brimming with no-names, has-beens and stock footage. However, Revenge of the Zombies is a fun low-budget shocker, and the transfer of the film currently airing on MGM HD is nothing short of stunning. I seriously doubt Revenge of the Zombies ever looked this good upon its initial release, and the pristine clarity reveals that director Steve Sekely managed to infuse some fairly decent visuals and even a handful of creative touches in a film that abounds with bad acting, inexplicable plot turns, and bordering-on-racist comic relief courtesy of Mantan Moreland.

The simultaneously hackneyed and overly complex plot involves Nazi scientist Dr. Altermann (John Carradine), who is trying to create an army of zombies in rural Louisiana. Thus far his “army” consists of a Don King look-alike and a couple of skinny white guys. The terribly shortsighted doctor decides his wife Lila would make a good subject and he zombifies her as well. However, his master plan is threatened when his wife’s brother and a couple of friends drop in to check on her. While their driver Jeff (Moreland) has humorous encounters with assorted zombies and corpses, the trio discovers what their unfriendly host is planning, and in the end manage to put a stop to his unstoppable army of the dead with a little help from the zombies themselves.

Poverty Row movies often sound more entertaining than they actually are, but Revenge of the Zombies is a relatively fast-moving film with a couple of spooky moments and some guilty laughs, aided nicely by the talents of 1940’s stalwarts Carradine and Moreland. Sekely – who later directed Day of the Triffids (1963) – creates some decent atmosphere in the shadowy swamplands, and the photography in Altermann’s laboratory borders on chiaroscuro at times. Sekely also takes a little more care than you might expect with camera placement, framing the evil doctor nicely amidst his laboratory instruments, and instilling the admittedly silly looking zombies with as much sinister ambiance as possible. Carradine is always a pleasure to watch, and Moreland is actually quite funny if you can get past the dated simpering of his “scared black guy” act. At one point, Jeff retrieves his friends after he finds a corpse in the trunk of his car. But just as the group comes outside, the car pulls away. Without missing a beat, Jeff cracks “He was in no condition to drive.”

OK, so it’s not Preston Sturges. It’s still funny to me.

The film clearly cribs elements from the far superior I Walked with a Zombie (released earlier the same year), particularly in the character of Lila, who is basically Jessica Holland if she spoke through a tin can. One of the characters is named Rand (a la Wesley and Mrs.), and the outdoor photography owes a great debt to Val Lewton’s somber masterpiece. The lead zombie Lazarus is an extremely poor cousin of Carrefour.

Of course, you will have to muddle through typically mystifying Monogram plot points, as when the brother and his friend inexplicably switch identities when introducing themselves to Dr. Altermann (they admit to the deceit halfway through the film and it has absolutely no bearing on the plot), or when three lucid men watch Lila rise from her coffin and leave the room, but are somehow convinced later that they must have “imagined” the incident. The funniest plot development is when Dr. Altermann discovers that his mind control extends to every zombie except one – his wife. In every husband’s worst nightmare, Lila spearheads the zombie revolt that leads to Altermann’s swampy demise. While I’m certain it wasn’t intentional, there is an odd poetry to the Nazi doctor receiving his comeuppance from a group primarily composed of minorities.

Revenge of the Zombies is certainly no classic, and the version airing on MGM HD looks a lot better than the film probably deserves, but it’s definitely worth a peek for fans of not-so-classic but loads-of-fun horror.

The Skinny On... An Angel for Satan

2009-03-03T07:30:00.000-08:00

March is a magical month of leprechauns, shamrocks, four-leaf clovers and Irish ale. But I hate all that crap, so let’s celebrate March with some tasty Italian and Mexican horrors, starting with the rarely seen Barbara Steele feature An Angel for Satan (1966). Midnight Choir recently released this – Steele’s last Italian gothic -- as a double feature with The Long Hair of Death, another Steele vehicle from 1964. Rumors are circulating that the Midnight Choir DVD might not be an authorized release (can you say “bootleg”?), so pick it up while you can.

In a small 19th-century Italian village, Count Montebruno (Claudio Gora) commissions handsome young artist Roberto Morigi (Anthony Steffen) to restore the statue of a beautiful woman after it is dredged up from the town’s picturesque lake. The townspeople believe the statue is cursed, and sure enough the two fishermen who pulled it from the lake soon drown under mysterious circumstances. Dismissing the deaths and the curse, Morigi continues his work unabated -- even after he receives a viscous beating from superstitious town tough Carlo (Mario Brega). In the meantime, the Count’s niece Harriet (Steele) returns to town after a 15-year absence. The beautiful Harriet bears a striking resemblance to the statue (which pictures one of her ancestors), and Morigi – along with half of the town’s male population -- is immediately taken with her.

Harriet seems benevolent at first, but a dark side soon emerges, one that seems intent on destroying the very fabric of the town’s social order. Morigi is taken aback by Harriet’s bizarre mood swings, and is even more confused when the dark side of Harriet insists on being called Belinda. We soon learn that Belinda was the homely sibling of the statue’s original subject, and was blinded by a jealous rage at the attention her beautiful sister engendered. Now, Harriet/Belinda cuts a bitterly destructive swath through the town, seducing several of the town’s men and then using her powerful sexuality to crush them, their girlfriends, even their entire families. Is Harriet really possessed by the spirit of a long-dead woman – or does a more prosaic yet no less sinister answer reside at the Count’s estate?

On the surface, An Angel for Satan sounds a lot like other Steele movies, namely Black Sunday (1960) and the other film on this DVD, The Long Hair of Death. Steele plays a dual role in all three films – one part doe-eyed innocent, the other malevolent vixen. The specter of the past hangs over each film in the form of a vengeful spirit, in this case visualized poetically through the lake statue. In each film Steele’s evil side (which in Angel is a potent and aggressive sexuality) must be vanquished by the film’s hero in order to re-establish the social norm. Of course, all three films are black-and-white Italian horror with the expected gothic trappings.

But Angel plays quite differently than the other two films, resembling a darkly sexual melodrama more than a straight-up horror film. Director Camillo Mastrocinque, who directed the not dissimilar Crypt of the Vampire (1963), utilizes a great deal of location shooting that gives the film a less stylized, more prosaic look. The photography can be quite beautiful at times, particularly when Mastrocinque’s camera prowls the misty lake or the shadowy corridors of the Count’s manor, but the visuals never approach the deliriously surreal levels of a director like Mario Bava. Also, there aren’t a lot of memorable set pieces in Angel. Anyone hoping for a witch burning, or a resurrection scene in a crumbling crypt, or even a single gory murder will be quite disappointed. The film’s lone scene involving the “spirit” is when Harriet is beckoned through the halls by a disembodied voice, only to find herself in an attic room with an old painting of Belinda. We are shown only the aftermath of the murders with few details. The film seems to remain on one level throughout, as if Mastrocinque was attempting to mesmerize rather than horrify his audience. I’m not sure if he was wholly successful in the former, but he certainly failed in the latter.

That being said, Angel does contain some fascinating surprises for the patient viewer – and you better be patient, because in the tradition of all good Euro-horror, it’s a sloooooooow moving film. However, it does take several startling turns toward the end as Belinda’s schemes lead to unexpectedly grim consequences. Two scenes in particular -- one involving the naïve schoolteacher and another involving Carlo’s family -- are shockingly dark and not soon forgotten. The film’s final twist is a good one, although it does culminate in a rather clumsy and forgettable climax. Steele is excellent in her dual roles -- simultaneously desirable and terrifying, with a face that somehow conveys innocence, sexuality and death at once. While there is no actual nudity in the film, a highly charged eroticism arises from Harriet/Belinda’s powerfully destructive desirability as Steele brazenly sheds her clothes in several scenes, and spends much of the other time in diaphanous and gloriously revealing nightgowns. An Angel for Satan was clearly made for Steele; it is not hard to see why she has become such a long-lasting cult figure.

I’ll post on The Long Hair of Death soon, but up next, some South-of-the-Border horrors from the 1980’s – Vacation of Terror.

Legend of Blood Castle -- Finally!

2009-02-24T14:15:00.000-08:00

YES!

MYA has just announced the release of Jorge Grau’s long sought-after Legend of Blood Castle (1973)-- at least long sought-after by me -- on May 19. Also known as Ceremonia Sangrienta and Blood Castle, Grau’s film is considered one of the best accounts of the infamous 16th-century Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who murdered hundreds of young girls in order to bathe in their blood. Sound tantalizing? Here’s the MYA DVD description:

THE LEGEND OF BLOOD CASTLE. When Countess Erzsebet Bathory (Lucia Bosé) is accidentally splattered with some blood drops from one of her nubile maidservants, the Countess finds out that the blood can preserve her skin young and beautiful. Compelled to kill innocent young girls to use their blood, the Countess is helped by her husband Karl (Espartaco Santoni), who fakes his own death and pretends to be a vampire to fool the superstitious villagers about the source of the exsanguinations. In the meantime Karl finds himself attracted to Marina (Ewa Aulin), the young daughter of a local innkeeper, perhaps another victim for the Countess. Sell Points/Extras Features: Believed one of the best adaptation of Elizabeth Báthory’s legend, this is one of the most disturbing and chilling movies from Spanish horror cult director Jorge Grau (Let Sleeping Corpses Lie). The Legend of Blood Castle is presented in its original full Spanish edit. Deleted and alternate (more explicit) scenes are included as extra contents. Extra: Deleted scenes, Alternate scenes, Italian opening credits, Poster gallery.

Grau also directed the superior zombie flick Let Sleep Corpses Lie around this same time, so my hopes are sky-high for this release. Thank you, MYA!

The Skinny On... Audrey Rose

2009-02-20T08:06:00.000-08:00

Long before helming such big-budget hits as West Side Story, The Sound of Music, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Robert Wise directed two of the best entries from Val Lewton’s RKO horror series of the 1940’s: The Curse of the Cat People (1943) and The Body Snatcher (1945). Lewton’s “less-is-more” approach surfaced in much of Wise’s later genre work, including the over-appreciated The Haunting (1963) and the lesser-known Audrey Rose (1977), one of Wise’s last films. A variation of the child-possession theme so prevalent during the 1970’s, Audrey Rose can be seen as a sort of Exorcist-lite for about half of its running time, before it suddenly takes a jarring nosedive into some pseudo-mystical, metaphysical nonsense. Unfortunately, Audrey Rose is not one of those movies that takes an incredibly silly premise and makes it totally plausible. It just makes it slightly less silly.

Marsha Mason and John Beck play Janice and Bill Templeton, a well-to-do Manhattan couple with an 11-year-old daughter, Ivy (Susan Swift). The couple begins to notice a suspiciously over-bearded man who seems to be following them and showing a special interest in Ivy. This turns out to be Elliot Hoover (played by a very seedy-looking Anthony Hopkins), who shaves his beard and tells the couple he believes Ivy is the reincarnated spirit of his daughter Audrey Rose, who just happened to die in a car accident seconds before Ivy was born. Bill dismisses Hoover as a madman, but Janice is troubled by Hoover’s story, especially when Ivy begins having horrible nightmares in which she seems to be trapped in something and calls out incessantly for her daddy. In one these dreams, her hands are burned for no apparent reason, and Hoover is quick to point out that Audrey Rose burned to death in the car accident. Hoover also seems to be the only person who can placate Ivy during these episodes.

Bill is long on mustache and short on patience, and one night Hoover has enough of his temper tantrums and kidnaps Ivy, after which he is arrested in his apartment (which happens to be in the same building – not a very good plan). Up to this point, Audrey Rose is a decent, old-fashioned horror film, short on scares but well crafted and aided nicely by its professional cast. Now, however, we enter La-La Land, as the next scene shows the entire group at Hoover’s kidnapping trial. The twist? Hoover’s lawyer is trying to convince the jury that his client is innocent because Ivy really is the reincarnation of Audrey Rose, even going to such lengths as calling so-called “experts” of the Hindu religion to the stand.

Sigh.

I can and do suspend my disbelief during a horror film. But when you set up a reality-based movie for the first hour and then expect me to believe an American court would entertain such a ludicrous argument for even a moment, you’ve lost me. Big time. As the trial winds on, Audrey’s behavior becomes increasingly bizarre. Staring at herself in a mirror and calling “Audrey Rose? Audrey Rose?” is one thing, but after she walks into a bonfire at school, Janice becomes convinced that Hoover is right, and testifies so. Bill has had enough of the nonsense, and he arranges a hypnotism session to prove that Ivy is not possessed. As the judge and jury look on, Ivy is taken deeper and deeper into her past, until the truth is finally revealed in one of the least exciting climaxes I can recall in a major horror film.

Audrey Rose is not exactly a bad movie – in fact, it starts out fairly well. Professionalism is a given with a director of Wise’s caliber, and the film is well made with nicely saturated photography, excellent sets and a good cast. Wise pulls off some fairly effective scenes without ever succumbing to the thunder-and-lightning histrionics of such films as The Exorcist or The Omen. One of Ivy’s dream episodes is shot almost exclusively through rain-streaked windows, an eerie effect that also adds an element of voyeurism to the scene. Wise also uses Ivy’s oddly elongated physique to create several creepy scenes, notably one in which she shambles out of her room behind an unaware visitor, and another in which she stares at herself in the mirror while calling out the name of the spirit supposedly infested within her.

But once the film concedes reincarnation as fact – and expects the viewer to do the same – it becomes a plodding series of court scenes and family squabbles punctuated by far too few scares. Mason proves herself one of the best spontaneous criers of ‘70s cinema, and Hopkins gives a nice audition for his role as Hannibal Lector 15 years later. Hoover is no homicidal maniac, but he looks an awful lot like one. Beck’s prominent jaw line is surpassed only by his gargantuan mustache; he spends most of the film yelling at people. Swift is an odd-looking girl, which works well for the part, but she’s hampered by a script in which she’s forced to repeat lines over and over again. Her dreams as Audrey Rose become ponderous, grating affairs as she repeats “Daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy” interminably, and the climactic hypnotism scene is a series of the same as she shrilly calls “Mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy” and “Daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy” until you just want to scream, SHUT UP ALREADY.

If you want to see a superior film about the trials and tribulations of childhood, check out Wise’s transcendently beautiful Curse of the Cat People. If you want to see a validation of some woefully illogical mysticism disguised as a horror film, see Audrey Rose.

The Skinny On... Dead and Buried

2009-02-09T09:58:00.000-08:00

In 1972’s excellent Raw Meat, director/writer Gary Sherman dug under the surface of New York City – literally – to find a family of disfigured but strangely sympathetic cannibals living in long-abandoned subway tunnels. In the even better Dead and Buried (1981), Sherman digs under the figurative surface of a Rockwell/Capra-style small town to find the monsters lurking inside ostensibly normal residents. Inventive, stylish and eerie in the extreme, Dead and Buried is one of the lesser-known treasures of ‘80s horror, a macabre black comedy that peels away the skin of Reagan’s apple-pie America to reveal the poison pulp hidden inside.

Potter’s Bluff is a small coastal town whose very name hints at the corrupted Capra-ism adopted by its residents. The fact that this is no Bedford Falls is slammed home gruesomely in the film’s first scene, which unfolds in such a surprising way that I would be remiss to detail it here. Suffice it to say that the townspeople of Potter’s Bluff are seen committing several gory murders, the victims of which are then transported to the funeral home of one William G. Dobbs (Jack Albertson), who delights in his ability to restore the disfigured dead to a presentable state for burial. Potter’s Bluff police chief Dan Gillis (James Farentino) is baffled by the murders, but is even more baffled when the victims apparently re-appear later as Potter’s Bluff residents. Gillis has problems on the home front as well, where his curiously detached wife Janet (Melody Anderson) reads books on witchcraft and seems to be lying about her knowledge of the murders. As more victims pile up, Gillis realizes the clues all lead back to either his wife or the Dobbs funeral home, and that the egomaniacal embalmer might be doing much more than restoring bodies for burial…

From its ironic title (no one is every buried in Potter’s Bluff) to its M. Night Shyamalan ending (18 years before The Sixth Sense), Dead and Buried combines macabre humor and legitimately surprising plots twists to create one of best narrative horror films of the 1980’s. The film is a mystery in which we know the killers but are unsure of the motive until the final scene. To accentuate the perverted Capra-esque ambiance, the townspeople all look like they could have stepped out of a 1940’s RKO programmer. They even have old-fashioned names like Betty, Janet, Ben and Jimmy. But beneath the vapid smiles and well-scrubbed faces are ruthless, unfeeling killers who murder without provocation and gleefully capture their homicidal escapades on film. The sheer senselessness of the killings is disturbing enough, but the All-American facades of the killers add an extra layer of perversity. Like most American societies in which “family values” are prioritized – from Eisenhower to Reagan to Bush Jr. -- human life seems to be the least important of said values.

While the small-town atmosphere harks back to Capra, undertaker William G. Dobbs recalls a character from another classic film – Fred C. Dobbs from Treasure of the Sierra Madre. In addition to the similarity in names, both characters fall victim to an ill-conceived ambition that warps their perspective. The Dobbs of Dead and Buried isn’t greedy for material fortune, however. The unseemly pride he takes in restoring the disfigured dead leads to that time-honored genre motive of man meddling in god’s domain. Dobbs would identify well with the classic line from Frankenstein: “In the name of god, now I know what it’s like to be god.”

Ironic social commentary notwithstanding, Dead and Buried is first and foremost a good, old-fashioned horror film with several jump-out-of-your-seat moments, excellent make-up and effects from the great Stan Winston, and moody photography from Steve Poster. Sherman starts things with a bang and keeps the action moving until the final shocking freeze frame. The film’s one glaring weakness is Farentino as the Sheriff Gillis. Although he is adequate for the majority of the film, he simply can’t handle the dramatic turns during the finale. His inept histrionics make one long for one of the more competent B-movie actors of the era (John Saxon, anyone?).

Blue Underground just released Dead and Buried on Blu-Ray DVD, but thus far I have seen only the standard version. The transfer on the standard DVD is pretty grainy and even a little murky in places, but I must say that the imperfections actually enhance the spooky atmosphere. The Blu-Ray disc might be cleaner version, but I’m not sure that would necessarily benefit Sherman's minor classic.

The Skinny On... My Bloody Valentine

2009-01-30T12:16:00.000-08:00

What do automobiles and slasher films have in common? When it comes to quality, don’t buy American.

I’ll admit from the outset that I’m not the biggest fan of the slasher genre. The glut of ‘80s tripe – typified by the leaden Friday the 13th series – has left a bad taste in my mouth for years. But if you venture outside the largely unimaginative American efforts, you can find some hidden treasures of the genre. Of course, masterful Italian director Mario Bava started the whole blooming mess with his epoch Bay of Blood (1970), still the slasher gold standard. Our south-of-the-border compadres made several intriguing supernatural slashers in the mid-1980’s (Cemetery of Terror and Grave Robbers are two of the best). And to the north, Bob Clark’s seminal Black Christmas (1975) and George Mihalka’s My Bloody Valentine (1981) demonstrate that Canadian directors were capable of making body-count movies in which the viewer actually cares about the bodies – something that never occurred to myriad American directors. With the release of the My Bloody Valentine remake (in 3-D no less!) and a brand new, uncut DVD of the original, I couldn’t pass on the opportunity to post on this interesting – though far from perfect – slasher entry.

The film begins with some small-town coal miners discussing an upcoming Valentine dance. Since every slasher movie is obliged to have a back-story, we soon learn that there was a cave-in at the mine on Valentines Day 20 years earlier. While the townspeople partied unaware, all but one of the miners – Harry Warden --suffocated. When rescuers finally arrived, they found a now-insane Harry chomping on the arm of one of his unfortunate fellow miners. The next year Harry gets his revenge by murdering those he deems responsible for the cave-in, and he is promptly shipped off to a mental institution.

Deciding collectively that Valentine’s Day has been a less-than-stellar holiday, the townspeople haven’t held a dance of that day for the last 19 years. But time heals all wounds, and the dance is back on for this year. That is, until dead bodies start turning up – minus hearts. The mayor and police chief assume Harry is back and is killing again, so they cancel the dance. Undaunted, the young miners decide to hold a party at the mine itself. While most party in the headquarters upstairs, three couples decide to venture into the mine for a tour. As you can probably guess, the murderer shows up and starts disposing of young miners and their girlfriends in a variety of ways. Two miners who have been fighting over the same girl descend into the mine to save the six, but we soon learn that it might not be Harry doing all this killing – it might be one of them.

My Bloody Valentine isn’t the scariest, bloodiest, or most inventive slasher movie, but it is a tight, fast-paced film with likable characters and some nicely atmospheric locales. In most slasher films, I applaud when the insipid characters are finally hacked, stabbed, beaten or shot. In My Bloody Valentine, I actually cared about the characters. In fact, I felt a slight pang of sorrow when a few of them were murdered. What a novelty. The identity of the killer – which I won’t reveal here – is also nicely handled and will have you guessing until the final confrontation. While the film isn’t loaded with great set pieces, there are a few memorable murders, the most notable being a load of laundry that goes horribly wrong, and a tense stalking scene during which uniforms on hooks keep dropping around the perplexed victim. The final sequence in the mineshaft is both atmospheric and claustrophobic, with the killer seemingly around every corner. One image of the masked killer emerging from a dark mine shaft and walking directly into the camera is quite startling.

The main problem with My Bloody Valentine is that most of the killings are rather dull and anticlimactic, even in the uncut version. Too often we see the aftermath of a killing – and sometimes we don’t even see much of that. In one scene a miner discovers his murdered girlfriend in the shower room. We see his mortified expression, and we see a little of the victim’s face, but it’s never clear how she died or why she is now standing upright in the shower. A little more information would have been helpful. (Edited to add: I just saw a still photograph of the victim in this scene being hung from a shower fixture -- a scene that was not in the “uncut” DVD). Other scenes are just bland, as when one victim’s head is dunked into a pan of boiling water (the scene cuts just as his face is submerged), and we see the bloodless aftermath of two lovers who have been shiska-bobbed (in a scene stolen directly from Bay of Blood).

So while it may not be a classic, for the ugly little stepsister of horror subgenres – the slasher -- My Bloody Valentine is a definite winner.

The Skinny On... The Most Dangerous Game

2009-01-30T06:45:00.000-08:00

In early 1932, a few months before she was pursued through the jungle by a giant, raging ape, Fay Wray was pursued through the same jungle by a sadistic, deranged Russian.

And you thought you were having a rough year.

The Most Dangerous Game was Ernest Schoedsack’s prelude to King Kong, a smaller though no less potent account of the savage nature of man. A dark, literate version of Richard Connell’s short story “The Hounds of Zaroff,” The Most Dangerous Game is one of the lesser-known entries of classic horror’s superior pre-Hays Code period. While it might not have the razzle-dazzle of Kong, it remains one of the most startlingly authentic odes to sadism that the genre has ever offered.

After the ship on which he is sailing crashes on an uncharted reef, world-renowned big game hunter Bob Rainsford washes up on a small tropical island. Venturing inland, Rainsford is surprised by the surreal sight of a gothic castle amidst the thick jungle foliage. Inside this unlikely fortress he meets Count Zaroff, a Russian aristocrat who escaped the revolution years before and – for reasons unknown – has settled on this tiny tropical island with a few servants and a pack of hunting dogs.

The reasons become a little clearer after Rainsford meets two other shipwreck survivors inside the castle, brother and sister Martin and Eve Trowbridge. The curious thing is, they’re from a different ship. With a mysterious smile, Zaroff concedes that there are numerous shipwrecks around the island. Zaroff – a hunter himself – is keenly interested in Rainsford’s hunting prowess, and indicates that he has discovered a “new sensation” in the sport. He doesn’t elaborate, however, and later that night a thoroughly inebriated Martin Trowbridge disappears from the castle. Already suspicious of Zaroff, Eve convinces Rainsford to investigate, and the duo stumble upon their host’s trophy room -- complete with a human head framed and hanging on the wall and another floating in a tank, presumably awaiting the mummification and mounting process. Zaroff enters and reveals his “new sensation”: Engineering shipwrecks via some misplaced buoys, he hunts anyone strong enough to make it to his island. He gives his prey (“the most dangerous game”) a four-hour head start, and if they can survive until dawn, he sets them free. To date, no one has been set free. This sets up the final half of the film, in which Zaroff hunts Bob and Eve for the highest of stakes – Bob’s life and Eve’s, uh, virtue.

The Most Dangerous Game opens with a conversation upon the doomed ship in which some of his fellow shipmates question Rainsford’s affection for the hunt:

“I was just pondering the inconsistency of civilization,” says one. “The beast of the jungle, who kills for food, is called savage. Man, who hunts just for sport, is called civilized.”

Replies Rainsford: “The world is divided into two kinds of people – the hunter and the hunted. Luckily, I’m a hunter – and nothing’s ever going to change that.”

It’s at that moment that the ironic hand of fate intervenes and the ship crashes. Since this is pre-code horror, we are treated to some fairly grisly scenes of men being doused by boiling water and others being attacked by sharks before Rainsford alone is able to make it to Zaroff’s island. Other pre-code delights include the gruesome trophy room with its decapitated human heads, one of Zaroff’s servants being impaled on a spear via a Rainsford booby trap, and Fay Wray’s dress becoming wetter and more revealing as the film progresses (just as it did in Kong).

Zaroff – played by Leslie Banks – is one of the more intriguing villains from this period. One part cultured count (he wears a tuxedo, plays classical piano and refers to his fellow countrymen as “mostly savages”) and one part ruthless sadist (he refers to the hunt as “outdoor chess” and clearly plans to take Eve for his prize after disposing of Rainsford), Bank’s devilish count cuts a striking figure. More interestingly, his slightly effeminate manner and relative disinterest in the opposite sex (he concedes at one point that he is only aroused by women after his “blood has been quickened by the hunt”) suggests a latent homosexuality. The Russian-born Zaroff and his extremely Slavic servants were in keeping with the general xenophobia of the time, one that was reflected in other horror films like Dracula, The Mask of Fu Manchu, Island of Lost Souls and many more.

Co-directed by Schoedsack and Irving Pitchel (who would later make a unforgettable appearance in Dracula’s Daughter), The Most Dangerous Game contains some striking camera work, including a breathtaking crane shot that starts atop a high staircase and ends in a close-up of Zaroff, and excellent action scenes on the same jungle sets later used for Kong. In fact, one tracking shot of Wray running through a misty swamp directly into the camera is almost identical to a shot in Kong. The huge log also makes an appearance, though it is unclear whether giant spiders live below.

The Skinny On... Inferno

2009-01-27T10:10:00.000-08:00

I haven’t been able to write as much lately because my company is in the process of downsizing. So as I contemplate how to fit an entire warehouse into half a garage, I thought I would do a short post on Inferno (1980), the second installment in Dario Argento’s “Three Mothers” witchcraft trilogy that started with Suspiria (1977) and culminated in last year’s Mother of Tears.

Echoing Rosemary’s Baby and The Sentinel, the action this time is centered on an apartment building in New York City. Resident Rose Elliot (Irena Miracle), rightfully suspicious of the sparsely populated building, stumbles upon a book titled The Three Mothers that seems to indicate supernatural goings on. Launching an ill-conceived investigation, Rose finds a water hole in the basement of the apartment building, underneath which is a fully decorated apartment inhabited by rotting corpses. Troubled by this turn of events, Rose writes her brother Mark (Leigh McCloskey) in Rome (!), but the letter is intercepted by his annoying friend Sara (Eleonaro Giorgi), who is fascinated by the tale. Sara visits her local library looking for a copy of The Three Mothers, but somehow ends up in a medieval witch’s chamber. Barely escaping, she takes refuge in her friend Carlo’s apartment, where both end up on the wrong side of a deliciously orchestrated, classic Argento slice-and-dice. With Sara dead and Rose missing, Mark travels to New York to investigate, where he becomes fully embroiled in the devilish proceedings.

While never reaching the hallucinatory heights of Suspiria, Inferno is nonetheless a solid Argento outing. Its strengths include a several superbly executed sequences (Rose’s suspenseful swim in the surreal underwater apartment; the double murder of Sara and Carlo; and the stunningly unexpected death of antique dealer Mr. Kazanian), and some excellent art direction, lighting and effects work by the uncredited Mario Bava. Unfortunately, the film also has some glaring weaknesses. While Inferno attempts to achieve the same off-kilter, oneiric ambiance of Suspiria, the proceedings feel a little forced this time. The bombastic musical score by Keith Emerson doesn’t help, and makes one sorely long for the evocative, dynamic soundtrack of Suspiria. McCloskey is about as bland a leading man as you will find; he doesn’t come close to matching Jessica Harper’s frail yet resilient heroine in Suspiria. While tight plots are never Argento’s forte, Inferno is notoriously nonsensical and will leave you scratching your head in many scenes (first and foremost might be the fact that a large New York City apartment building seems to have about three residents, and the surrounding neighborhood is similarly desolate). Finally, the fiery denouement, while staged nicely, is fairly anticlimactic and uneventful.

Overall, Inferno is a fascinating but flawed exercise from one of the genre’s most flamboyant stylists. With Argento’s Four Flies on Gray Velvet set to hit stores soon, I will visit some more of his work in the coming weeks. In my garage. Staring at a wall. No government bail outs for this boy.

The She Beast on April 28

2009-01-20T13:04:00.000-08:00

Dark Sky Films will continue what looks to be a banner year for genre DVD when they release the first film of legendary director Michael Reeves, The She Beast (1966), on April 28. Reeves directed the fascinating horror/sci-fi hybrid The Sorcerers (1967 - see my review here) and is best known for the classic The Witchfinder General (1968), after which he cemented his cult status by committing suicide. While The She Beast doesn’t enjoy the reputation of his other films, it will be nice to finally have a decent version of it for evaluation. The plot sounds like a cross between Black Sunday (1960) and City of the Dead (1960), and the film is greatly aided by the presence of horror legends Barbara Steele and Ian Ogilvy (who appeared in all three of Reeves’ films).

From the Dark Sky website description:

A small town in 18th century Transylvania is being terrorized by an evil witch. When a child is brutally attacked, the villagers capture the fiend and sentence her to death by dunking chair, but not before she casts a curse on them and their descendants. Two hundred years later, young newlyweds Veronica (Barbara Steele, BLACK SUNDAY) and Philip (Ian Ogilvy, AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS) pass through the town on a tour of the Carpathians, only to have their car pulled into a lake by an unseen force. A passing truck driver quickly rescues two bodies from the wreck. One is Philip, battered but alive, and the other is... the witch, back from the dead to wreak havoc on the town once again! Can Philip and his newfound friend, the great grandson of Professor Van Helsing, capture the witch and bring back Veronica?

• New 16x9 'Scope transfer from extremely rare vault materials
• Directed by Michael Reeves (Witchfinder General)
• Starring Barbara Steele (Black Sunday, Castle of Blood)
• New commentary created exclusively for this release
• SRP: $14.98