The horrors conclude

The final count for Horror Movie October:  29.  It wasn’t quite the 31 I was shooting for, but ah, well.  I didn’t have any money riding on it.

The final weekend of movie watching consisted only of movies I’d seen before and enjoyed.  I started by continuing my Christopher Lee – Dracula viewing with Taste the Blood of Dracula. The fourth in the series takes up where number three left off:  with Dracula writhing after being impaled by a cross.  Soon he is a mere puddle of blood which turns into a powder.

A curio dealer who witnessed the “death” takes Dracula’s possessions (cape, etc.) as well as a vial of the powdery blood.  Eventually, he sells the lot to three wealthy gentlemen who are seemingly the cream of society but actually love debauchery.  A Satanist promises them a new level of dark pleasures and uses a combination of his blood and the Dracula powder to create a rather repellent bloody beverage.  Not all goes as planned.  The Satanist is soon dead, but Dracula has replaced him.  He proceeds to prey on the three gentlemen, enslaving one of their daughters in the process.

As is typically the case, the redheads and occasional brunettes (especially if they’re named Lucy) tend to fare far worse than the blondes; also, the promise of salvation through Christianity is heavily played on, leaving the climax a bit underwhelming.  Nonetheless, it’s worth a watch:  Quality 5/10, Fun 6/10.

Following this movie was Scars of Dracula, which doesn’t really fit fully in the continuity of the previous movies.  Yes, it starts with Dracula being resurrected by a vampire bat, but then it relocates to a new castle unlike the previous one.  A young man, fleeing from a false rape charge, winds up Dracula’s captive.  His brother and brother’s girlfriend try to find him.  Since she’s blonde, you know she’ll come out okay, but pity the poor raven-haired barmaid.  This one also features former Dr. Who star Patrick Troughton as Dracula’s servant.  Unlike previous movies, Dracula controls animals in this one, particularly bats.  Though generally considered one of the lesser movies in the sequence, I like it.  Quality 6/10, Fun 7/10.

After this movie was a pair of Vincent Price movies.  Theater of Blood is arguably his best, one that allows Price to ham it up as the vengeful Shakespearean actor Edward Lionheart out to get the critics who deprived him of an award he felt he deserved.  Each of the deaths is based on a Shakespeare play, starting with Julius Caesar.  Diana Rigg looks and acts wonderful as Edward’s daughter and partner-in-crime, Edwina.  This movie is filled with dark humor and is an ideal companion piece to The Abominable Dr. Phibes with its similar plot.  Quality: 8/10, Fun 9/10.

Price plays a much grimmer character in Pit and the Pendulum, one of Roger Corman’s Poe adaptations.  In this movie, Price plays the son of a Spanish Inquisitor who is haunted by the ghost of his late wife, played by horror queen Barbara Steele.  It’s actually a ruse played by the wife to drive Price catatonic with insanity, but the plan will backfire.  Her final fate is a truly grim one.  And yes, there is a pit and a very deadly pendulum.  Quality 6/10, Fun 7/10.

Black Sunday, aka, The Mask of Satan, also stars Steele in the role that made her a queen of horror.  She plays two roles:  that of an evil witch who after two centuries, is not as dead as people think, and her young and good-hearted relative who offers the witch a chance at resurrection.  This delightfully moody movie was Mario Bava’s first horror film, and like with Steele, would start a career in the genre.  Quality 7/10, Fun 8/10.

Next on the list was the long-anticipated and well-worth-the-wait Island of Lost Souls.  Among the classic monster movies of the 1930s (Frankenstein, Dracula, The Invisible Man, The Mummy, etc.), Island of Lost Souls stood out as being unavailable on DVD.  And being made in 1932, it is a pre-Code film and it shows.  If it was made five years later, it would have been substantially watered down.

Based on H.G. Wells’s novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, Island of Lost Souls deals with the hero being stuck on the title isle.  At first, it seems like Moreau is performing terrible experiments on men, but he is actually transforming animals into human form, with mixed results.  Moreau (played wonderfully by Charles Laughton) is a god among his subjects, and he relishes the role.  He is also intent on a new experiment:  mating the hero with the Panther Woman (who looks almost human).  When that fails, he engineers an attempted rape of the hero’s fiancee by an animal-man.  This is all the sort of material that would never fly once the Production Code kicked in.  This is a nice gem and one of the classics of the era.  Quality 8/10, Fun 10/10.

Finally, what Halloween month would be complete without Halloween?  Yes, there were slasher movies before this one, but this movie really made the slasher flick a genre.  As has been pointed out by many people many times, this film is almost completely bloodless, relying on suspense where others would rely on gore.  In fact, after Michael Myers kills his sister in the movie’s prologue, there is virtually no violence till the last half hour.  At the time, Donald Pleasance got the top billing, but it winds up being Jamie Lee Curtis who’s the star in what was her movie debut.  Quality 8/10, Fun 9/10.

Euro-horror triple play!

Is it Eurohorror, Euro Horror or Euro-horror?  Sources vary, so I’ll stick with the hyphenated version for the moment (though I reserve the right to change my mind later).  What is Euro-horror?  Exactly what’d you think, horror films from Europe, particularly non-English fare.

Of course, if you take English out of the equation, you know that few of these films are going to hit it big in the U.S., where for most viewers, dubbing is considered bad and subtitles to be avoided at all costs (“if I wanted to read, I wouldn’t have gone to the movies!”).  Too bad, because among all the Euro-horror schlock (not helped by low (by U.S. standards) budgets), there are some gems.

Not that I got any of the gems recently.  I guess I shouldn’t have expected much when the director of two of these three movies was Jesus (aka Jess) Franco, the prolific and consistently mediocre director from Spain.  I’ve seen other Franco movies:  the Orloff boxed set consisted of four movies, each weaker than the last.  His Fu Manchu movies are little better, though like his Count Dracula, he is blessed with Christopher Lee to make at least a rayon purse out of a sow’s ear. 

What to expect when watching a Franco movie?  Minimal special effects and so-so writing.  The biggest strength seems to be his location shooting.  A big advantage that Euro-horror has is that it’s shot in a region with a long history, therefore plenty of creepy old buildings.  First of my recent Franco viewings was The Rites of Frankenstein.  Like many Euro-horror flicks, this one has multiple titles, but this was the one on my DVD.

The movie starts with one of the Frankenstein family energizing the familiar monster.  He is hardly able to relish his triumph when he is attacked by a half-woman, half-bird who is also a vampire.  She works for the wizard Cagliostro who has his own plan to take over the world with the help of his zombie army.  He is using Frankenstein’s machinery to create the perfect woman, who will mate with the monster to create a new race to replace humans.  Frankenstein’s daughter and a local doctor try and stop him.  Meanwhile, a gypsy girl hears Cagliostro calling to her, but she does little in the movie other than walk around and bemoan her fate.  Plotwise, this movie is almost okay, but Franco is adept at making the movie muddled and rather boring.

Rites of Frankenstein is what I think of as a Kitchen Sink movie, in the sense that Franco throws in everything but the kitchen sink and hopes it will somehow turn into a good movie.  He fails.  My version, admittedly, was clearly edited, as the gratuitous nudity that Franco typically throws in appeared to be missing; the DVD extra did show alternate, poorly preserved takes that showed that Franco did indeed have the nudity in a different version.    Quality 3/10, Fun 3/10

The other Franco film, Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein is so muddled that it makes Rites seem clear and intelligent in comparison.  From what I can gather, Frankenstein enslaves Dracula, the easier to create other vampires.  Another vampire – a blond woman – also wanders around drinking blood but not really contributing to the story.  The Frankenstein monster is around causing trouble, and in the last reel, a mangy wolfman appears for some inexplicable reason to fight for the good guys. Quality 2/10, Fun 3/10.

Finally, there was The Vampires Night Orgy, a movie that certainly didn’t live up to its title.  Another apparently Spanish film, this has a busload of people getting stuck in a small out-of-the-way town which happens to be filled with vampires.  It is very reminiscent of 2000 Maniacs, even to the final scene.   There is little blood and certainly no orgy, but the movie does have a couple decent moments.  Refreshingly, the little girl, who in most movies would get herself into trouble and endanger everyone else when she needs to be rescued, doesn’t play to the cliché.  Instead, when she gets into danger, no one rescues her.  Quality 3/10, Fun 4/10.

In short, Euro-horror is neither better or worse than American horror, merely different.  For all the knocking I do of these three movies, there are some real gems of Euro-horror.  In particular, the works of Mario Bava are typically brilliant.  I especially recommend Black Sunday, Black Sabbath, Blood and Black Lace and Twitch of the Death Nerve.  Dario Argento has his successes too, most notably Suspiria.