In short: Malenka (1969)

Warning: I’m going to spoil the ending, but it really is the ending’s fault!

aka Fangs of the Living Dead (which is a recut version)

Model Sylvia (Anita Ekberg) is really, really happy that her mother died and left her a castle situated in the European version of backlot Europe as well as the title of countess. To be fair, Sylvia never knew her mom and has been raised by her father who never spoke of his marriage and the past, but still…

Keeping with her sociopathic streak, Sylvia has no problem at all in leaving her fiancée Piero (Gianni Medici or “John Hamilton”, if you prefer) in the loving care of his insufferable comic relief buddy Max (César Benet) just a couple of weeks before she’s supposed to get married to him. Arriving at the town below her shiny new old castle, she’s first greeted with the usual gothic horror welcome in the local inn, villagers in this place not just staring and muttering but also taking huge back steps. Things only improve slightly at the castle. Her uncle (Julián Ugarte) is living there right now with a couple of very rude servants and one Blinka (Adriana Ambesi), owner of some very cleavage heavy gowns and a pair of fangs.

Dear uncle is a bit of a weirdo himself, never getting up before nightfall, telling vague stories about an evil ancestor named Malenka who looked exactly like Sylvia with a different hair colour. We all know where this is going, until the film crashes down in a risible “it’s all a plan to drive Sylvia insane” ending that’ll make you want to punch director/writer Amando de Ossorio somewhere more painful than his face.

To be fair to de Ossorio (who as we know would improve doing this sort of thing in the future), this was his first horror movie, and the gothic horror styles the film is working in were relatively new to Spanish cinema at this point in time, so I can excuse some wavering in the script. The idiotic plan for driving Sylvia insane, though, there’s no way to excuse, for it makes no sense, needs a whole village full of idiots and decades of preparation that must have started before Sylvia was even born.

Sylvia as portrayed by Ekberg doesn’t make for a great heroine either. She’s superficial, has not a single interesting character trait, and Ekberg’s performance is absolutely terrible, full of the shrillest, fakest emotion you’ll find outside of a political rally, weird facial contortions and a complete lack of believable humanity. Not that anyone else here is much better, mind you.

At least the film does tend to be pretty to look at. De Ossorio gets some good visual mileage out of the castle and decent interior sets,  and the colours pop in a very 1969 way. Which can be enough to endear a film to me, but in this case, the script and the acting (let’s not even talk about the fearless vampire hunter duo of Piero and Max) seem to go out of their way to be actively annoying and downright stupid.