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El extraño amor de los vampiros (1975)
Blood, romance and breasts.
By the mid '70s, the appeal of the gothic vampire movie was waning. Hammer studio spiced things up by adding plenty of sex and nudity, and if Hammer was doing it you can bet your bottom dollar that the European studios were doing it as well.
Directed by León Klimovsky, Night of the Walking Dead stars stunning Emma Cohen as Catherine, a terminally ill young woman who lives in a village plagued by vampires. Catherine is romanced by Count Rudolph de Winberg, the leader of the vampires, and gives herself to him (the lucky old bloodsucker!), but he refuses to turn her into one of the undead even though this would make her immortal. When Catherine dies, Rudolph decides that he has had enough of being a vampire and turns himself to a pile of ash by standing outside as the sun comes up.
From this synopsis, you can probably tell that this is less horror and more of a romance, albeit one with lots of hot women taking their clothes off. There are some cool scenes amongst the sappy stuff -- an assault on the villagers by the vampires, a wild vampire party, and the destruction of the vamps in their tombs via spikes in the forehead -- but with the love story overshadowing the scariness, I sometimes found my mind wandering.
Not a bad movie by any means and worth a go if you're into romantic horror like Embrace of the Vampire (1995) and Interview With The Vampire (1994) -- or if you just like boobies.
5.5/10, rounded up to 6 for absolute babe Cohen.
Deafula (1975)
You don't hear much about this one.
Diagnosed with a rare disease when born, Steve Adams (Peter Wolf) requires monthly blood transfusions from his father Reverand Adams (James Randall); failing that, he transforms into the vampire Deafula, for Steve's real father is none other than Count Dracula!
Produced for deaf and hard of hearing audiences, Deafula's cast uses sign language throughout (with a voiceover for those of us who don't understand sign language); this makes it an undeniably unique viewing experience, but one that I found extremely tedious, the whole movie being cheap and amateurishly made, with a terrible script, crap acting, a leaden pace, an embarrassingly naff vampire (that fake nose!), and long periods of total silence.
Deaf viewers may appreciate the effort made, but I imagine most people will struggle to stay awake. For me, this ranks up there with William Shatner's Incubus (which is entirely in Esperanto) as one of the strangest yet most boring horror oddities.
Exorcismo Negro (1974)
We Wish You a Marins Christmas, and a bloody New Year.
In the opening scene to The Bloody Exorcism, Brazilian horror director José Mojica Marins states that his infamous creation Coffin Joe is entirely fictional: HE is not Coffin Joe. However, in a plot device that reminds me a bit of Wes Craven's New Nightmare, the director discovers that his wicked character has become a reality and is trying to usher in a new era of evil by wedding his own daughter to the son of Satan with the help of a witch named Malvina.
In some ways, this film is riding the coat-tails of William Friedkin's The Exorcist, with Marins' friends becoming possessed when he visits them over the Christmas holidays. Those affected turn into deranged red-eyed zombies that speak in demonic voices. There's even a scene where one of the possessed women masturbates with a wooden pole. But this is also very much a Marins' movie meaning that it gets rather strange at times, particularly towards the end when Malvina's coven performs a diabolic wedding ceremony and the director throws in as much torture, dismemberment and cannibalism as he can (the gore is totally unconvincing but still entertaining).
As is often the case with Marins' movies, there are pacing issues, the film really dragging during the talky parts, and I found myself struggling to keep up with what was happening when the going got really weird. The director's films are certainly not for everyone, but if you've already acquired a taste for his particular brand of lunacy, then you'll no doubt lap up this one as well.
Qiu deng ye yu (1974)
What a cad.
All In The Dim Cold Night is a film of two halves. The first part is pure tragedy, heaping misery upon misery onto poor Tsio-O (Meng Chin), pretty daughter of Old Tu (Chung-Lien Chou). When Lord Chao (Yang Yueh) meets the young woman one night, he is smitten; returning soon after, he seduces Tsio-O, offering to make her his wife. However, when Chao gets a better offer -- the hand in marriage of the only daughter of a very wealthy man -- he reneges on his promise to Tsio-O. As if jilting her isn't bad enough, he also denies being the father of her unborn child.
When the baby finally arrives, Old Tu tries to get rid of it by dumping it outside in the 'cold dim night'. Tsio-O finds her child and goes to the home of Lord Chao to try and get him to act responsibly, but he refuses to see her. In the morning, Tsio-O is found frozen clutching her dead baby. It's a wonderfully downbeat first act, but unfortunately the second half, in which Tsio-O's ghost takes revenge, isn't quite as effective. Illuminated by a green light and gliding silently about, the ghost is fairly cool, but the plot hereon is wholly predictable and repetitive, Tsio-O's creepy shenanigans soon becoming tedious. I don't think my enjoyment of the film was helped by awful picture quality and often illegible subtitles, but even cutting it some slack for these reasons, I cannot rate the film as a whole any higher than 5/10 (7/10 for the fist half and 3/10 for the second half).
La mesita del comedor (2022)
Butter fingers.
When my son was still a baby, I slipped while carrying him down the stairs. When I came to a stop at the bottom of the stairs, dazed and confused, I had a moment of sheer panic, thinking I may have let go of my son while falling. We were lucky - my natural instinct had been to hold on tight. I had a few bruises but my son was safe. It could have been a whole lot worse...
Jesús (David Pareja) buys an ugly glass-topped coffee table, against the wishes of his wife Maria (Estefanía de los Santos), and it turns out to be the worst decision of his life. Looking after his newborn son while Maria is at the shops, he has an accident, the glass on the coffee table shattering and decapitating his baby. What follows is a most uncomfortable watch, as Jesús - in a state of shock - is unable to come to terms with what has happened, fear and guilt eating away at him until he can take no more.
There was absolutely no way this film was going to end happily, writer director Caye Casas deliberately putting his viewers through the emotional wringer to leave them drained and exhausted. It's a well acted and smartly directed movie with touches of dark humour which serve to make the film an even more uncomfortable experience.
Definitely not recommended to new parents, but if you're in the mood for something challenging and bleak, The Coffee Table should do the trick.
8/10
N. B. Despite how it looks, the coffee table salesman is not played by Ron Jeremy and Jesús's brother is not David Baddiel.
La cruz del diablo (1975)
Not Gilling's worst film, but it's close.
The Devil's Cross features Templar knights who rise from the dead, but don't expect anything like Amando De Ossorio's entertaining Blind Dead movies: this film, by British director John Gilling, is a total snooze-fest. It's not Gilling's worst film - in my opinion, that has got to be Mother Riley Meets the Vampire - but it's not a great swan song for the man who also gave us the excellent Plague of the Zombies and the enjoyable The Flesh & The Fiends.
The film stars Ramiro Oliveros as pot-smoking author Alfred Dawson, who travels to Spain with his girlfriend Maria (Carmen Sevilla) to investigate the murder of his sister Justine. Alfred's enquiries lead him to the area known as The Cross of the Devil at the Mountain of Souls where, legend has it, the Templar knights rise from their graves on All Souls Day. Too much talk and a dreary pace make this movie a real chore to sit through, while the final act is a total letdown, the Templar knights not in the least bit scary (easily defeated by a stoner writer with zero experience in swordplay) and the identity of the killer coming as no surprise.
2/10.
Chi o suu bara (1974)
Japan has given us some classic horror films; this isn't one of them.
The Evil of Dracula is the third and last of director Michio Yamamoto's vampire movies, after The Vampire Doll (1970) and The Lake of Dracula (1971).
Toshio Kurosawa plays psychology teacher Shiraki, who takes a position at a girls school in the country only to discover that the principal is a vampire (NOT named Dracula, despite the film's American title). And to be honest, not a lot of interest happens, the entire film spent following Shiraki as he tries to unravel the mystery (not that there is much of a mystery to unravel) while unsuccessfully protecting three students from the principal (Shin Kishida), his undead wife (Mika Katsuragi) and their loyal assistant Yoshie (Katsuhiko Sasaki).
The vampires themselves are suitably menacing, the gloomy and atmospheric girls school makes for a creepy location, and the film does feature one or two original touches (the principal's vampire wife assuming the identity of one of the students by wearing her face as a mask is fun), but the weak script and slow pace means that this Japanese Hammer wannabe still lacks bite.
La endemoniada (1975)
The Exorcist a la España.
Directed by Amando de Ossorio, who gave us the enjoyable The Loreley's Grasp and Tombs of the Blind Dead (and its less effective sequels), Demon Witch Child is clearly inspired by The Exorcist.
The plot sees the police arresting an old devil-worshipping gypsy hag who they suspect is involved with the abduction of a baby boy; rather than reveal the whereabouts of the child, the old crone throws herself out of a window, falling to her death, her spirit possessing the body of Susan (Marián Salgado), the young daughter of a local politician.
Before you can say Captain Howdy, Susan is swearing like a trooper, scuttling around the floor, levitating above her bed, and doing a 180 degree twist with her entire torso (a laughably bad visual effect). She even transforms into the old witch to perform the sacrifice of the missing baby.
It's not a very well made movie, but it is definitely good for a few laughs: Susan's father has a monumental comb over; the ex-girlfriend of Father Juan (Julián Mateos) blames his decision to become a priest for her turning to prostitution; a bunch of girls in a church sing a song with the lyrics 'Na na na na na na'; Susan crawls down a wall head-first and somehow her skirt defies gravity; and Susan (in witch form) castrates a man (off-screen) and sends his severed junk to his lover.
5.5/10, rounded up to 6 for not going down the cheesy happy ending route.
Il cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco, ovvero: Dracula in Brianza (1975)
Italian comedy: an acquired taste? (but one I am not keen to acquire).
Lucio Fulci is best known for his gory horror films of the seventies and eighties, but like most Italian directors of that era, he went where the money was, tackling whatever genre was currently in vogue. Dracula in the Provinces is a very silly sex comedy with just a smidge of horror, Lando Buzzanca starring as wealthy toothpaste factory owner Costante Nicosia, whose boorish behaviour sees him cursed by an elderly aunt. When Costante travels to Romania on business, he finds himself invited to the castle of Count Dragulescu (John Steiner) where he spends a night of drunken debauchery. The next morning he wakes up in bed with with the count and consequently believes that he is turning into a homosexual; however, on finding bite marks on his neck, he becomes worried that he is becoming a vampire.
According to IMDb's trivia, Lucio Fulci said Dracula in the Provinces was among his favourite films he directed. Of the thirty-two Fulci films I've seen, this is my LEAST favourite - I don't know whether much of the humour was lost in translation, but I found the film about as funny as a case of botulism. Buzzanca mugs his way through a series of desperately unfunny scenes, including Costante explaining his fears about turning gay to his doctor (Rossano Brazzi), visiting a con-artist wizard (Ciccio Ingrassia) to have the 'evil eye' curse removed, and going to a dominatrix (Moira Orfei). I spent the entire film clock-watching, longing for the whole thing to finish, but like watching a kettle waiting for it to boil, this just prolonged the agony. As bad as some of Fulci's horrors are (Manhattan Baby, Sodoma's Ghost, The Sweet House of Horrors), none of them are as utterly atrocious as this miserable movie. 1/10.
Abigail (2024)
When Abigail spins around, would that be a vampirouette?
In Abigail, a gang of desperate criminals kidnap a young girl unaware that their seemingly helpless ballerina hostage is in fact a savage vampire; it's the latest film from Radio Silence directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the guys who gave us Ready or Not and the last couple of Scream movies, and like those films, I thought that Abigail was simply average.
It aims to be a brainless popcorn horror, mixing laughs with the scares; brainless it most certainly is, but unfortunately the film is neither funny enough nor scary enough. And with the trailer having shown us most of the good bits, there are very few surprises to be had. It's a harmless enough way to kill a couple of hours, I suppose, and the occasional excess of splattery gore is enjoyable, but I had hoped to like the film a lot more than I did.
5.5/10, generously rounded up to 6 for Melissa Barrera, who deserves better than this.
The Spectre of Edgar Allan Poe (1974)
Squanders its Poe-tential.
The Spectre of Edgar Allan Poe is a fictional account of how the renowned writer came to be obsessed with death and the macabre.
According to this film, the young Poe (Robert Walker Jr.) was in love with a woman named Lenore (Mary Grover), who one day suddenly dropped dead, or so it seemed. At Lenore's funeral, Poe hears screams coming from the coffin and it is discovered that the young woman is still alive. In a catatonic state of shock, Lenore is admitted to a private asylum under the care of Dr. Grimaldi (Cesar Romero), who secretly conducts experiments on his patients and whose sister Lisa is a pychopathic killer. Poe becomes suspicious, and with help from his friend Dr. Adam Forrest (Tom Drake), he investigates.
I really like the idea of Edgar Allan Poe becoming involved in real-life mysteries, uncovering macabre happenings which would serve as inspiration for his stories -- it would make for a great TV series. This film, however, doesn't do the idea justice. The direction is pedestrian, the pace dreary, the acting barely passable, and the script mostly involves the characters wandering around the dark corridors of the asylum -- so dark that it is often hard to see what is happening. The chills and scares are strictly PG. On the plus side, Walker makes for an effective Poe, looking very much like the author.
The Spectre of Edgar Allan Poe ends with Lenore dying for real (hacked to death by the axe-wielding Lisa), leaving Poe grief stricken, at least until he marries his 13-year-old cousin -- the only genuinely shocking thing about the whole film.
Les possédées du diable (1974)
Why does the name Linda keep cropping up in Franco films?
I imagine that Lorna the Exorcist was given its title to try and cash in on the success of The Exorcist (1973), but the film is actually a Faustian tale with very little in common with William Friedkin's movie.
Guy Delorme plays successful businessman Patrick Mariel, who suddenly changes a family vacation from St. Tropez to Camargue, much to the disappointment of his soon-to-be-18-year-old daughter Linda (Lina Romay). Once in Camargue, Patrick meets with a mysterious woman named Lorna (Pamela Stanford), who sports hideous eye make-up that resembles a cross between Captain Spaulding, a drag queen and Peter Criss from KISS. It turns out that Lorna is an emissary of Satan who, eighteen years earlier, promised Patrick wealth and success if he promised to hand over his then unborn daughter to Lorna once she reached her 18th birthday. Now the time has come for him to keep his end of the bargain but he is reluctant to do so.
Being a Franco film from the '70s, Lorna the Exorcist is chock full of the director's trademark tedious sex scenes (mostly lesbian), with even more of his in-your-face crotch shots than usual (I must have seen every inch of Romay's body in close-up by now). The frequent frottering and bumping and grinding is dull and repetitive and seriously hinders the storytelling. That said, there are two things about the film that are guaranteed to stick in the mind: the worst case of crabs imaginable, and the deflowering of Linda with a big stone dildo (possibly the most shocking scene I have witnessed in a Franco movie so far).
5/10 - At roughly 100 minutes, the uncut version of the film feels unnecessarily padded out with sex scenes and shots of '70s architecture.
Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary (1975)
No fangs required.
Was George Romero inspired by Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary when writing his unconventional 1977 vampire film Martin? The plots of the two films are alike and they share a similar grim and downbeat tone.
Directed by Juan López Moctezuma, the man responsible for cult classics The House of Madness and Alucarda, Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary stars the beautiful Cristina Ferrare as artist Mary, who is afflicted with a craving for human blood, the young woman drugging her victims and then stabbing them with her dagger-like hair pin.
After a chance encounter on a stormy night, drifter Ben Ryder (David Young) falls for Mary, unaware of her vampiric tendencies; as Mary continues her grisly murders, Ben finds himself targeted by the police who suspect him of being the killer. Meanwhile, a mysterious switchblade wielding figure dressed in black (clearly a fan of giallos) stalks Mary, his intentions unknown.
Mary is a long way from the traditional idea of a vampire: she isn't affected by sunlight, and one assumes that a crucifix, garlic and holy water would be no good against her either. She doesn't have supernatural strength, hence the need to drug her victims, and she doesn't possess fangs or wear a black cape. In fact, she is very much a tragic figure, cursed to kill, unable to resist her urges, even if it means destroying those she loves.
Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary is a refreshingly innovative take on the vampire genre for those tired with the standard gothic approach.
The House of Seven Corpses (1974)
Eight graves! Seven bodies! One bad film!
If there's one thing I have learnt from horror films, it's that reciting a passage out loud from an ancient book of the occult isn't a good idea: it has the tendency to summon dark forces and resurrect the dead. That's what happens in House of the Seven Corpses, but not until well over an hour has been spent watching a film crew making their own crappy horror movie.
At first, these behind the scenes glimpses into the world of low-budget film-making are fairly intriguing but one soon longs for them to call it a wrap on the film within the film and get on with delivering the real horror. Unfortunately, when the recitation of words from The Tibetan Book of the Dead does finally conjure up a zombie, House of the Seven Corpses descends into a chaotic mess of poorly staged and badly acted death scenes and any semblance of narrative cohesion goes out the window, the final twenty minutes making no sense whatsoever.
And we never do find out who killed the cat.
Faith Domergue, of sci-fi classic This Island Earth, plays ageing star Gayle Dorian, John Ireland is tyrannical director Eric Hartman, and horror legend John Carradine is the creepy caretaker of the titular house, but all three are slumming it. Carol Wells adds some much needed glamour as beautiful blonde actress Anne.
N. B. If the opening scene is part of the 'film within a film' being made in the house, how did they achieve that terrible visual effect (the demonic face within the circle on the floor) without going into post production? Now that's what I call movie magic!
Homebodies (1974)
Out with the old...
When a group of pensioners living in an apartment building are served with eviction notices, the property to be demolished to make way for a new development, they take matters into their own hands. They begin by sabotaging the construction site of an existing development to halt progress, causing several deaths in doing so, and then turn to murdering the corporate bigwigs who are trying to turf them out of their homes. However, not all of the oldies are happy with the extreme measures being taken, and eventually they turn on each other.
Homebodies is a bit like Spielberg produced dud *batteries not included, but without the stupid teeny-tiny flying saucers and a whole lot darker, this film's OAPs committing acts of extreme violence when threatened with relocation. There's a wide streak of black humour running through the film that makes it a whole lot of ghoulish fun, starting off on the right foot with potty pensioner Mattie happily popping prunes while watching a macho construction worker fall to his death. As daft as the film is at times, it's not without its shocking moments: the stabbing of heartless Miss Pollack (Linda Marsh) is a well-executed jolt, while the drowning of construction boss Mr. Crawford in cement is genuinely disturbing. Even a very silly chase scene involving pedalos manages to be strangely unsettling.
Great performances from the seasoned cast and a sharp script that drives home how our elderly are often treated as an inconvenience rather than given the respect they deserve all adds up to a thought provoking, perverse and wonderfully unique cult horror.
Gu jing you hun (1974)
Watch A Chinese Ghost Story instead.
A scholar falling for a beautiful young woman who turns out to be a ghost is a common theme in Chinese storytelling: it was used to great effect in one of my favourite Hong Kong movies, A Chinese Ghost Story (1987), which boasted stylish direction, excellent cinematography, and loads of impressive '80s special effects. Ghost of the Mirror also employs this familiar basic plot, but lacking A Chinese Ghost Story's visual splendour and practical effects, the film is something of a dull affair. The charms of a young Brigitte Lin only gets you so far...
Chun Shih plays a young noble tasked with making copies of the Buddhist scriptures; to ensure the peace and quiet necessary for such an undertaking, he moves into a deserted old house that has a sinister history - several people have fallen to their death in the well, although their bodies have never been found. While carrying out his work, the scholar encounters a young woman, Su-su (Lin), who turns out to be a ghost under the control of an evil dragon.
Unfortunately, said dragon only turns up at the very end of the film and is glimpsed in very brief shots; the majority of the film is as laborious as writing out scriptures one hundred times - slow, meandering and devoid of interest, the young noble diligently performing his duty while Su-su tries to convince him to help her escape from the dragon. After an hour and a half of tedium, the dragon attacks and whisks away Su-su, leaving the scholar on his lonesome... a pointless ending to an unremarkable film.
3.5 out of 10, generously rounded up to 4 for the very cute Lin.
Ghost Story (1974)
Very unlikely to spook you.
Behind this film's uninspired title lies a really uninspired storyline: in the early 1930s, three university acquaintances convene at an old country house for a few days of hunting but one of the men discovers that the building in which they are staying is haunted. Now this well-worn plot might not have been so bad had director Stephen Weeks cranked up the tension and gone all out with the scares, but his film delivers tepid chills and zero suspense and is unlikely to unsettle all but the most lily-livered of viewers.
It doesn't help that the three central characters are such an unlikeable bunch: there's effeminate fop McFayden (Murray Melvin) who lies about the true reason for the reunion; Duller (Vivian MacKerrell), who is rude and arrogant; and wimpy Talbot (Larry Dann), who is afraid to tell the others about what he is seeing and hearing in the old house. In a series of 'visions', Talbot sees glimpses of the past, when a previous occupant of the house, Robert (Leigh Lawson), committed his own sister Sophy (Marianne Faithfull) to a nearby loony bin -- because he had incestuous feelings for her. Sophie gets her chance for revenge when the lunatics break out of the asylum and she is able to pay Robert a visit...
Ghost Story is so trite that it even resorts to that hoary old horror cliche, the creepy doll, which appears to be possessed by Sophy's spirit and ultimately kills Talbot and McFayden. Why? I haven't the foggiest, but I didn't really care -- I was just happy that the film was finally over.
Bade Miyan Chote Miyan (2024)
A real review.
Fifty-four reviews so far for Bade Miyan Chote Miyan and fifty-two of those have rated the film 10/10 - not at all suspicious. I had fun with the film, which is 158 minutes of ridiculously over-the-top craziness, delivering plenty of bang for your buck, but it hardly sets new standards for action cinema.
Akshay Kumar and Tiger Shroff play Firoz and Rakesh, two court-martialled Indian soldiers called back into action to try and stop masked villain Mr. X from starting a war with Pakistan and China. The heroes' masked nemesis is an old friend named Kabir (Prithviraj Sukumaran) who turned rogue after his project to create invincible cloned soldiers for the Indian army was rejected and shut down.
As is often the case with this type of film, there are themes of friendship, loyalty, morality and national pride (jingoism), but the focus is on delivering as much action as possible, with zero concern for logic or the laws of physics; and it wouldn't be Bollywood if we didn't get the occasional impromptu song and dance routine as well.
The fighting and stunt work is far-fetched but expertly handled, with Kumar and Shroff punching, kicking and shooting their way through countless bad guys but suffering little more than a few scratches themselves. As a Brit, I particularly enjoyed the scenes set in London (although I don't ever recall seeing advertising hoardings for an Indian tile company in Waterloo Station).
Providing the eye candy are Manushi Chhillar as tough agent Misha and Alaya F as bespectacled boffin Pam, the Indian female equivalent of Benji from Mission Impossible.
6.5/10, rounded up to 7 for the bit where Firoz rides his motorbike into an enemy helicopter, leaping to safety onto the roof of a speeding truck, and for the part where Rakesh runs along the side of an overturned gas tanker about to collide with a power station, jumping from the lorry into a jeep just before it explodes.
The Gardener (1974)
Blooming strange.
Having left Andy Warhol's 'factory', model turned actor Joe Dallesandro appeared in this rather weird horror film in which he plays the titular gardener, Carl, who is hired by wealthy housewife Ellen Bennett (Katharine Houghton) to work his horticultural magic on her garden (oo-err!). Carl's amazing flowers seem to exert a strange influence over Ellen, who eventually begins to suspect that there is something sinister about her new employee. She investigates and discovers that Carl's previous employers have either gone crazy or died. It eventually turns out that her gardener is a tree (which might explain Dallesandro's wooden acting!).
Not in the slightest bit scary, but possessing of an eerie atmosphere, this film largely exists to exploit Dallesandro's sex appeal, the actor shirtless for the entire film, and in the buff for several scenes. The rest of the cast acquit themselves well enough, with Rita Gam stealing the show as Ellen's best friend Helena, who would like the green-fingered hunk to tend to HER herbacious borders. Not a great film, with a bit too much talk and not enough horror, its obscurity is understandable, but it's worth a go if you're looking for something a little off the beaten (garden) path.
La comtesse perverse (1975)
The buildings were cool, I suppose.
Sylvia (Lina Romay) is lured to the private island of Count and Countess Zaroff (Howard Vernon and Alice Arno), where she becomes the latest unwilling participant in the aristocrats' sport: hunting humans (and then eating them).
Countess Perverse is The Most Dangerous Game as envisioned by prolific Spanish sleaze merchant Jess Franco. With the hunter and the hunted both women, and both stark naked during the hunt, this could have been a hugely enjoyable slice of exploitative trash, but Franco seems less interested in the battle to the death between humans than he is in gratuitous sex, the majority of his film consisting of long, boring softcore romps, with the action occasionally straying into hardcore territory. There's countless crotch shots, lesbian couplings, and lots of bumping and grinding, with even Franco regular Howard Vernon getting in on the action (not a pleasant sight!) - all shot in Franco's trademark blurry, erratic fashion. Of the 87 minute runtime, at least 70 minutes are wasted on this tedious 'erotica' before we finally get to the hunt, which is just as badly directed as the rest of the film.
As if Countess Perverse wasn't bad enough, Franco tacks on a ridiculous 'it was all a dream' style happy ending that it beyond ridiculous.
2/10 - both points awarded for the interesting architecture. If one can say anything about Franco, it's that he certainly had an eye for an impressive location.
The First Omen (2024)
The prequel no-one asked for.
The First Omen is a lot like Immaculate, only nowhere near as good.
In Immaculate, a group of devious Catholics in an Italian convent conspire to bring about the second coming of Christ by impregnating an unsuspecting novice nun with a baby engineered from Jesus's DNA; there's a twisted logic to this, but the way they go about things is horrific.
In The First Omen, a group of devious Catholics in an Italian convent, faced with losing power over the general populace, conspire to bring about the birth of The Antichrist with the hope of scaring people back to religion; the logic here is less convincing. Would people who have dedicated their lives to serving God really make a deal with the devil? How could they ever hope to control the Antichrist once he is born? Would their God approve of them unleashing such evil upon the Earth? And how did they get hold of the devil in the first place in order to secure his co-operation?
These awkward questions aside, The First Omen is a disappointing watch thanks to an incredibly slow pace, an overlong runtime of two hours, lacklustre death scenes with an over-reliance on unconvincing CGI (the fire effects on the burning nun were terrible), predictable jump scares, and the fact that the film posits that the devil's acolytes in the original The Omen weren't Satanists after all, but rather crazy, power hungry Catholics. Such retconning of the plot is disrespectful to Richard Donner's brilliant original horror classic.
3.5/10, rounded down to 3 for making me laugh a couple of times: Margaret's lame attempt at covering some stolen files with a tiny blanket, the embarrassingly contrived shot of some candles and lights arranged to resemble a demonic face, and the hilarious scene where Margaret hugs a dying man crushed by a car and comes away holding just his torso.
Blood (1973)
Bloody awful, more like.
Blood is another one of Andy Milligan's coma-inducing home-made horrors that tests the patience with its leaden pacing, awful direction, overly verbose script and wooden acting.
Stephen Thrower, author of Nightmare USA, praises Milligan for being a true auteur, with a style that distinguishes his work from other directors. This I cannot deny - Milligan's method of film-making is certainly unique - but everything that Thrower enjoys about his films, I find insufferable. Made on an extremely low budget, Milligan's movies are on a par with amateur dramatics productions, and as much as I appreciate trashy films, they're just too badly made and incredibly dull for me to enjoy.
Milligan certainly gives it his best shot, with a schlocky plot that sees the wolfman's son, Lawrence (Allan Berendt), and his vampire wife Regina (Hope Stansbury), the daughter of Dracula, cultivating carnivorous plants in order to try and cure Regina's malady. Along the way, we also get a bit of incest and some cheesy gore, all of which should add up to a good time, but Milligan's lifeless direction and the dialogue heavy script prevent this from being the entertaining cheeze-fest that it could have been (in the hands of a better film-maker).
2.5/10, rounded down to 2 for the mouse/meat cleaver scene, which I suspect wasn't a special effect.
El asesino de muñecas (1975)
Dolly good fun.
After his sister died, Paul (David Rocha) was raised as a girl by his grieving mother, who made her son wear dresses and gave him dolls to play with; now, as a young man, Paul is very disturbed, wearing a doll mask and wig to go out and kill women, who he mistakes for mannequins. When not out murdering, gardener's son Paul is busy trying to avoid the advances of his boss, Condesa Olivia (Helga Liné), while romancing her pretty daughter Audrey (Inma de Santis). Of course, Paul's love for Audrey is doomed since he struggles to tell her apart from the mannequins he despises.
If you're a fan of really odd films, then The Killer of Dolls is a must see: the plot is extremely bizarre, with plenty of random weirdness (my favourite scene: the hippy rock band who appear out of nowhere to perform a groovy song), but it is the central performance by Rocha that makes the film something really special. Rocha's acting technique is truly remarkable, the guy doing nothing the way one might expect: he stands strangely, he runs strangely, he kisses strangely, he showers strangely, he laughs strangely. In short, he's bloody strange, which is great because his character is not exactly normal (his best friend is a little kid in tiny shorts who likes to burn dolls!).
Writer/director Miguel Madrid delivers a few brutal death scenes - a decapitation, a stabbing with scissors, and a sharp garden implement in the face - but the effects are laughably cheap: when Audrey is shown after having had her heart removed, the wound is wholly unconvincing and de Santis is clearly moving.
If I'm totally honest, this is not a good film, but I had such a fun time with the insanely daft nature of the whole thing that I can't bring myself to rate it poorly. 7.5/10, rounded up to 8 for that song, and the hilarious dancing that goes with it.
Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe (1973)
Horror mit bratwurst.
Ulli Lommel is best known to horror fans as the director of schlocky '80s video nasty' The Boogey Man' and its unbelievably bad sequel, Revenge of the Bogeyman.
While far from gory, this earlier film from Lommel manages to be far more disturbing than either Boogey Man movie: produced by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, The Tenderness of the Wolves is based on real-life serial killer Fritz Haarmann, a predatory, homosexual criminal turned police informant who is believed to have killed between 50 and 70 boys and young men before finally being apprehended by the police and sentenced to death.
Kurt Raab's realistic portrayal of this deeply disturbed individual makes for uncomfortable viewing, especially if you're not keen on German 'sausage' (and by 'sausage', I mean male genitalia). And talking of meat products, Fritz was rumoured to have disposed of some of his victims' flesh by selling it on the black market as pork.
Compared to his later work, The Tenderness of the Wolves is stylishly shot and, male nudity aside, surprisingly restrained, the director opting to suggest the gruesome nature of Fritz's crimes rather than show it in gory detail. For some, this approach will prove frustratingly dull, but there's always Marion Dora's 2006 film Cannibal (based on real-life cannibal Armin Meiwes) if you're hankering after a more graphic account of a German nut-job*.
*Lommel also made a film inspired by Meiwes - Diary of a Cannibal (2007) - but I haven't seen that yet. The general consensus seems to be that it's not great.
Monkey Man (2024)
Dev Patel, action star.
If you had told me a year ago that Dev Patel would play India's answer to John Wick, I would have thought you were crazy, but here we are with Monkey Man, in which the actor directs himself as a man determined to take revenge on the people who murdered his mother and stole their land.
The film features plenty of brutal fight action - a mix of gun play and hand to hand combat - but Patel succumbs to that irritating trend - shaky cam with rapid editing; I'm sure this technique hides a multitude of sins, but it always feels a bit like a cop out to me and makes it rather difficult to follow the action. Monkey Man also suffers from erratic pacing, with lulls in the action that go on for a tad too long. If Patel had had the confidence to shoot his fight scenes in a less chaotic manner and had kept the pace more consistent, I think the film would have been better for it.
That said, I didn't dislike the movie as a whole - Patel does well in his role as avenging angel and the level of violence is impressive. I definitely had far more fun with Monkey Man than either of the other two big screen releases I have seen recently: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and Godzilla x Kong, both of which were hugely disappointing.