A man assessing the antiques in an old mansion somewhere in rural Spain disappears; then the woman called in to do his job disappears as well. The company both worked for doesn’t like the police but calls in a private detective who will spend a very long train journey listening to a melodramatic flashback about the sordid history of the house with cameos by Aleister Crowley, Lizzie Borden, Bram Stoker and poor H.P. Lovecraft, as if his actual life hadn’t been crappy enough. People run through the woods. A guy talks to manikins. Cthulhu is embarrassed by a really bad cult. Three hours of my life just disappeared.
On paper, I should be all over this. Cthulhu Mythos stuff, the late 19th Century occult boom and Gothic horror, all the things this film in two long and tedious parts is built on are pretty much catnip to me. Add to it the – I think – final appearance of the great Paul Naschy as loveable butler, and I should be in some sort of movie heaven singing the praises of some deity, at the very least.
Unfortunately, what La herencia Valdemar truly is, is tepid, overlong and boring, a film so lacking in control it feels the need to bloat up a ninety minute story into two ninety minute films full of pointless overlong scenes of nothing of import happening, and a lot of side-business that should have ended on the editing room floor. You’d think the filmmakers would have noticed they had a problem when they could summarize film one at the beginning of film two in about a minute without leaving out anything important, but then you’d probably think people with enough of a budget for the films’ very pretty photography and set design would have enough of a clue not to let their work pointlessly sprawl into various flashbacks, add lots of characters with no use to the story at hand at all, and would actually not let every scene run on and on and on and on for what feels like hours.
Tonally, the films are just as much of a mess, wildly meandering from way-to-overcooked melodrama to “ironic” winking at the audience, pointless attempts at the grotesque, and sheer stupidity, resulting in a double-film nobody involved – certainly not director José Luis Alemán – seems to have any control over, nor even just a simple idea of what kind of film this is actually supposed to be.
I do assume the idea wasn’t to make a draggy, boring and tedious one, at least, though that’s exactly what I just waded through.
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2 comments:
I watched the two parts back-to-back on a lazy wintry Sunday morning. I agree with everything you've said about the poor film-making skills/choices involved, and yet I was never bored, though I have no idea why. It surely felt more like a Gothic made-for-TV-miniseries than two films, and since I tend to watch TV series in large chunks as opposed to individual episodes, perhaps my tolerance has built up to a true immunity.
If I had the proper video editing software, I'd de-bloat it to 85 minutes.
And the most frightening thing was how ill poor Paul Naschy looked in poor two.
Lucky you! I'm actually glad the film did entertain someone.
I tend to binge watch TV shows, myself, so you're perhaps just less likely to be bothered by these films' particular type of boredom?
Yeah, watching Naschy here was sad, but on the other hand, I suspect he was the type of man who wanted to be on screen right up until the end.
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