Past Misdeeds: Miami Golem (1985)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


War correspondent turned local TV reporter in Florida Craig Milford (David Warbeck) is sent to film the newest experiment of scientist Dr. Schweiker (Sergio Rossi), whom everyone calls - smiling as if it were the best of jokes - "that filthy Nazi". Schweiker has cloned and somehow genetically manipulated cells that were found inside of a meteorite. Schweiker's goal is to, um, you got me there.

A malfunction during Craig's highly scientific looking attempt at filming the alien cells nearly ends the film early by killing the poor dears. Fortunately, the cells miraculously revive and Craig is distracted from that particular strangeness by vague looking projections swirling around the lab, talking to him in a language he doesn't understand.

Our hero's not too fazed by stuff like this, shrugs the David Warbeck shrug, and goes home. Shortly after he's gone, Schweiker and his whole team are assassinated by the henchmen of evil rich guy Anderson (John Ireland), who also steal the cells while they’re at it. Anderson has a fiendish and absolutely sensible plan: to grow the cells into a monstrous creature completely under his control he will then use to blackmail governments into doing whatever he wants them to do, like giving him contractual work. I think bribery would be an easier way to achieve that particular goal, but then I'm not an evil capitalist. For some reason, Anderson thinks Craig - and not sanity - is a threat to these plans and commands further henchmen to kill the reporter too.

But Craig, once he's heard of the murders, gets himself a gun and demonstrates that shooting down helicopters with a revolver and being an all-around action hero are among the skills you learn as a war reporter.

When Craig's not involved in chases and shoot-outs, he tries to find out what the strange swirling things were trying to tell him. Fortunately, he meets Joanna Fitzgerald (Laura Trotter), a very helpful woman who recognizes the message as being in the language of sunken Atlantis. Or aliens. Or both.

In fact, Joanna is secretly working for a group of benevolent aliens who give her fantastic psychic abilities (none of which protect her from a gratuitous shower scene). The aliens have decided that Craig is The Chosen One™, destined to destroy the cells which of course belong to the most horrible and destructive creature ever to live. It's all in a day's work for David Warbeck, I suppose.

Quite at the end of his career, Italian director Alberto De Martino had to work from confusing scripts bizarrely unfit for someone who was always at his best when directing straight action material. Miami Golem's bizarre and generally random mix of Science Fiction, horror, action, and all kinds of 70s crackpottery (and all that in the mid 80s to boot) isn't as drugged up as that of De Martino's Pumaman was - but what is? - yet it's still pretty darn weird.

The film's first fifty minutes or so consist of cheap and silly but also pleasantly tightly realized action scenes, which are regularly broken up by long sequences of characters talking reams of ridiculous poppycock at each other. There's bad science, Atlantis, telepathy, telekinesis and people talking in that lovely Italian dub job manner that makes everyone sound as if they had learned cursing watching Ed Wood movies. It's enough to let anyone who has a heart and a brain cry tears of laughter and delight.

After those first fifty minutes are over, though, Miami Golem gets really weird. De Martino still shakes things up with decent action sequences, but most of the rest of the film is dedicated to melting its audience's brains with as much dead-pan ridiculousness as it can possibly offer.

Among the film's greatest moments belong a scene where an alien explains Craig's role as The Chosen One™ by stopping time and drawing our hero into a mirror dimension (or something) where it can take on Craig's appearance to talk to him, making the film's main expository scene one of (an obviously pretty amused) David Warbeck discussing THE END OF ALL CREATION with himself. No no no, I'm sure he's completely sane. Other high points of this phase of the film are many, many, many shots of actors and the embryo rubber doll in a jar that is the titular Miami Golem using mental powers at each other - leading to some lovely facial expressions and much VERY HARD STARING. And a blinking rubber embryo.

Even better are probably the scenes where the Golem/rubber embryo attacks Craig and Joanna with telekinesis, which is of course mostly demonstrated by the actors jumping around in the style of mildly excited St. Vitus's dance sufferers and stunt doubles looking nothing like the actors catapulting themselves against walls. This, dear friends and readers, is exactly what movies were invented for.


Miami Golem's air of heart-warming wonder is further strengthened by an acting ensemble willing and able to say the most ridiculous things with the straightest of faces and what looks like real enthusiasm to me. His enthusiasm is of course what made David Warbeck such a likeable leading man in most films of the Italian phase of his career. He clearly realized that he was usually acting in ridiculous nonsense, but didn't let that hinder him from putting as much energy into what he did on screen as possible, seemingly always having fun with his lot. If there's an ability ideally suited to letting a grown man upstage a rubber embryo in a jar, as Warbeck does here so beautifully, it is the man's gift of throwing himself into the job of having serious fun on screen.

Special Mission Lady Chaplin (1966)

Original title: Missione speciale Lady Chaplin

Minor evil mastermind Kobre Zoltan (Jacques Bergerac) plans fiendish things with a sunken US nuclear submarine. Most of the elements of his plan are executed by his right-hand woman, the titular Lady Chaplin (Daniela Bianchi), fashion designer, thief, and spy, and the kind of girl who wears a parachute under her clothes just in case her boss throws her out of a plane. She's what we in the Biz call true marriage material, and - one suspects given her actual competence compared to her boss's incompetence - the main reason for Zoltan's criminal success.

The CIA puts Dick Malloy (Ken Clark) on the case. Dick - despite working for the CIA repeatedly called a policeman in the film, by the way, which might hint at some character-changing shenanigans in the English dub - needs about half of the film to come to the no shit Sherlock realization that Zoltan doesn't want to steal the wreck of the sunken submarine, but has already absconded with what interests him about it: a bunch of nuclear missiles he is trying to sell to "a foreign power" represented by a certain Hilde (Helga Liné). And here I thought World War II was over.

Fortunately for the future of the Free World™, Dick has three things going for him: a) Zoltan is a raging incompetent, b) Dick is excellent at punching and shooting people and c) Lady Chaplin is all too willing to change sides when she realizes the authorities know about Zoltan's little plan. Or is she lying?

Special Mission Lady Chaplin is another highly entertaining Eurospy movie by Alberto De Martino that makes me wish the director had worked more in this particular genre. I'm not sure, though, how much of the film's entertainment value is his work, and how much that of the three action directors listed in the credits. In any case, much of what's fun about the film happens in the numerous and expected chases, shoot-outs and punch-offs.

De Martino and co. put a heavy emphasis on semi-gritty hand-to-hand fights that surprisingly do not include any fake martial arts performed by white non-martial artists. Instead they give Ken Clark - who might be not the greatest actor alive but is really good and even more enthusiastic at this sort of thing - and his co-actors and stunt people opportunity to throw themselves into somewhat rougher, and more stylishly filmed, interpretations of serial action. It's often really rather exhilarating.

In another surprise, at least half of the film's action happens in actual locations instead of the usual cardboard sets, which enables De Martino (or whoever was behind the camera of any given scene) to make the fights more dynamic and attractive simply by having more space for them to take place in; turns out verticality is a good thing in an action scene to have. It's all still clearly made on the kind of budget that probably wouldn't have paid for the hairdressers of a contemporary Bond movie, but De Martino really puts everything he can on screen and makes up for any theoretical problems the film's silly plot could cause with pacing and enthusiasm.

De Martino doesn't forget the second leg a Eurospy movie needs to stand on beside the action: women wearing various awesome fashion catastrophesilliness, curious plans, and gadgets. Lady Chaplin isn't quite as brainfart-y as some other Eurospy movies I love, but it's still a film where the villains smuggle experimental missile fuel (can't these "foreign powers" produce anything themselves!?) in form of atrocious red dresses that tend to explode when shot at, where murders are committed via armed wheelchair and taxi-shaped gas chamber, and where our hero appears to the prelude to the final fight with a harpoon gun that shoots explosive cartridges that can kill henchmen that haven't even been caught in the explosion. That's more than enough to keep me happy.

The film's only major flaw lies in its main villain. Zoltan, to be perfectly honest, is a bit of a crap villain, lacking the menace or the cackling mania the bad guy in this kind of film needs. Instead, he's just a bit of a smug jerk (quite like the heroes of many Eurospy films are, actually) with big plans. It doesn't help that Jacques Bergerac's English language dubbing voice (going by the accents, at least some of the actors dubbed themselves, but he didn't) is provided by one of those guys…who…make curious pauses…at…the…most…inappropriate times. On the plus side, Daniela Bianchi (or should I say "former Bond girl Daniela Bianchi" which is certainly want the producers would want me to say?) seems to have a whale of a time kicking ass and wearing dubious fashion, as befits the title character of a film.

Lady Chaplin provides additional little jolts of joy with a fine, jazzy Bruno Nicolai score that would have me whistling the main theme if I did in fact whistle, and the appearance of various European genre movie mainstays like Evelyn Stewart and Helga Liné in smaller roles.

It's quite a package for anyone even slightly interested in Eurospy films.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,french movies,spanish movies,reviews,eurospy,alberto de martino,ken clark,daniela bianchi,jacques bergerac,helga liné,evelyn stewart

L'assassino… è al telefono (1972)

aka The Killer Is On The Phone

aka The Killer Is On The Telephone

Warning: spoilers are unavoidable in this case

When successful theatre actress Eleanor Loraine (Anne Heywood) arrives at the Bruges airport she accidentally meets a bald gentleman (Telly Savallas) whose mere appearance causes her to scream and faint. When Eleanor awakes, she has lost the memory of the last five years of her life. She neither remembers the supposedly accidental death of her boyfriend Peter five years earlier, nor the fact that she's married now, nor the reason for her sudden breakdown. Eleanor seems to have had a more minor case of amnesia after Peter's death, too, and clearly hasn't been in the best mental health despite professional success during the past few years, so her family and her acting partner Thomas Brown (Osvaldo Ruggieri) are rather slick and practiced in their attempts to help her come back to the present again, but Eleanor is understandably unwilling to trust anyone.

The only thing Eleanor is sure of is that she not only needs to remember the life she led in the past five years but finally has to remember the circumstances of Peter's death she repressed five years ago. This project would become all the more urgent for her if she knew what the audience knows - that the bald gentleman who caused all this is a professional killer, and that he is now stalking her, as if he'd feel the need to get rid of a witness to one of his murders…

Alberto De Martino's L'assassino (whose titular telephone habits aren't actually important to the movie's plot, by the way) is a giallo about confusion and uncertainty. Eleanor - as picture-perfectly played by Heywood - spends the largest part of the film utterly confounded by what is going on around her, unsure not only of the meaning and truth of her surroundings, but also of her own identity, trying to interpret herself and her life through what other people tell her and her fragmentarily returning memory. While the audience knows a bit more than Eleanor does, and can guess even more, that surplus knowledge is never concrete enough for us to feel superior and secure in that knowledge. We may be pretty sure that Telly Savalas's sneer is that of a killer, but we know as little as Eleanor does about how the world she tries to understand truly works.

One of the film's more ridiculous but effective moments comes when Eleanor confuses her real life with elements of a theatre role she was playing, an idea that is absolutely fantastic on a thematic level but becomes more problematic if one attempts to apply the rules of normal reality to it. Realistically, Eleanor should remember playing a femme fatale in a stage play, not being a femme fatale, even if one takes Eleanor as an intense lover of the Method.

It is, however, this feeling of irreality, of a lingering, dream-like confusion that makes it difficult to separate truth, dream, memory, and stage play from each other that is L'assassino's great strength. It's not about being realistic, but about sucking the audience into the same state of mind Eleanor - and sometimes, it seems, also the killer - is in. Here, the giallo is an engine of confusion and doubt that only works all the better because it leaves consensus reality behind.

De Martino's often stylish, sometimes melodramatic and sometimes surprisingly subtle direction furthers the project of turning the movie into something close to a dream. As photographed by Joe D'Amato in a very good mood, Bruges looks like the least real place on Earth, and therefore the perfect place for Heywood to look in turns confused and determined in while the Stelvio Cipriani score swoons rather hypnotically.

On the negative side, I could well have done without the evil lesbian explanation at the film's end, but then I'm not living in Italy in 1972. On the other hand (I think it's number three), this is a giallo where the heroine solves her problems under her own powers in the end, so L'assassino's politics aren't quite as conservative as one would fear. I'm not even sure that should come as much of a surprise in a film this devoted to letting its audience share the state of mind of said heroine.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,belgian movies,reviews,giallo,alberto de martino,anne heywood,telly savalas

In short: Upperseven (1966)

Original title: Upperseven, l'uomo da uccidere

aka The Spy With Ten Faces

aka The Man of a Thousand Masks

British super agent Paul Finney aka Upperseven (Paul Hubschmid) and freelance agent of evil Kobras (Nando Gazzolo) have been clashing repeatedly, even though poor Kobras doesn't even know his best enemy's face thanks to Upperseven's love for those spy movie rubber masks that perfectly simulate real faces.

Their enmity comes to a head when Kobras and his equally evil girlfriend Birgit (Vivi Bach) get involved in the plans of "an oriental country" to prevent the creation of Pan-Africa. These plans for some reason involve the poisoning of a Swiss water reservoir, the theft of US money, and the building of a rather fantastic missile base in Ghana.

Of course, Upperseven is on the case soon enough, using his ability to dress up as whatever seems appropriate or fun, and his other ability of being quite good at punching people in the face to save world peace. Our hero is assisted by CIA agent Helen (Karin Dor), an expert in needing to be rescued. Together, there's no trap they won't stumble into but survive. Will Rosalba Neri pop up in an inconsequential role? Will Upperseven disguise himself as Kobras and seduce Birgit while Helen waits for him in a cell during the course of the movie? Will the villains' lair explode? You bet.

Upperseven is a fine demonstration that the right director can make even the most threadbare Eurospy movie (this is an Italian/German co-production fortunately and obviously creatively dominated by the Italian side) a fun time for its audience.

And threadbare the movie really is: Italy has to stand in for half a dozen countries including Ghana, the film's secret spy lairs are made out of soundstages, warehouses and blinking lights, and the plot makes particularly little sense even in a genre that is based on turning the utter nonsense of the Bond movie plots into even greater nonsense.

On that surface level, the only thing Upperseven has going for it is a very game cast. Sure, one could argue that Hubschmid is a bit too suave, and Dor her usual pretty but totally boring self, but then one would have to find time for thoughts like this in a film as hell-bent on entertaining its audience with every Eurospy movie cliché available.

Director Alberto De Martino (a typical Italian genre director with a filmography containing much of the ridiculous and the boring, yet also of the sublimely ridiculous and the fun) obviously realized that the one thing standing between his film and a bored and frustrated audience was his willingness to never let his film stop throwing something cheaply entertaining at his audience for a single second. Consequently, De Martino bombards us with one enthusiastic fistfight, mock martial arts battle, car chase, motorcycle chase, scene of rubber mask wonder, change of country while actually staying in the same country, and so on and so forth after the other, all driven by an archetypical - and therefore wonderful - Bruno Nicolai score. Taken isolated from each other, there's nothing special about any of the film's elements, but De Martino presents them with so much conviction, sometimes with what feels like a barely held in check desperation to entertain, they can't help but add up to a hundred minutes of pure Eurospy fun.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,german movies,in short,eurospy,alberto de martino,paul hubschmid,karin dor,vivi bach,nando gazzolo,rosalba neri

On WTF: Miami Golem (1985)

If you thought Pumaman was the be all and end all of Alberto De Martino's late career phase, you just haven't encountered Miami Golem, a movie that is nearly as weird but not as boring.

If you jump over to my column on WTF-Film, I'm going to tell you all about it.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,alberto de martino,david warbeck,laura trotter,john ireland,sf,action,horror. reviews

The Man With Icy Eyes

Original title: L'uomo dagli occhi di ghiaccio

Albuquerque, New Mexico. Senator Robertson is shot by an assassin in front of his own house. The killer absconds with a mysterious suitcase the politician was carrying. Very soon, the police suspect Mexican American Valdez of the deed. The man does after all have enough reasons (some of them political) to hate the senator, and there's enough circumstantial evidence to put the responsibility for Robertson's death on him. Valdez not being white sure doesn't hurt, either.

Italian American reporter Eddie Mills (Antonio Sabato) is working the case with some excitement, hoping to use it as leverage for a professional breakthrough that until now hasn't been coming for him because he's not white enough, either. Mills soon realizes that the most interesting aspect of the case is what happened to the suitcase Valdez supposedly took from Robertson. Because the police couldn't find it among the belongings of their preferred killer, they theorize the existence of an unseen accomplice in the deed. Mills decides to look for that man, and in his search finds the model Anne Sachs (Barbara Bouchet), who - as it turns out - was close to the senator's home when he was shot. Conveniently, Anne witnessed Valdez giving the suitcase to another man, soon to be dubbed "the man with the icy eyes". Though nobody manages to find this mysterious accomplice, Anne's statement will be an important factor in a trial that sees Valdez convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

Eddie's editor John Hammond (Victor Buono actually bothering to act here, giving his character something I'd describe as "sardonic warmth") has his doubts about Anne's veracity, but his and Eddie's inquiries in this regard lead nowhere.

Only months later, on the day of Valdez' execution, new information convinces Eddie and Hammond that Anne has been lying all this time and they themselves might be partly responsible for bringing an innocent man to the gas chamber by having given her lies additional authority. In a race against time, haunted by a doubtful prophecy of death and some very real death threats, the reporter and his boss are trying to expose the true killer.

If you are one of those people who dislike the giallo genre for its setting of mood and ambiguity before a straightforward narrative, you might be positively surprised by The Man With Icy Eyes. In fact, Alberto De Martino's film is so straightforward that it often seems to come down more on the side of a conventional thriller than that of the giallo. Fortunately, The Man does err often enough from the more predictable path of the less Italian genre to stay interesting. There's that whole bizarre subplot about Robertson's astrologer prophesising Eddie's death at midnight after two other people have been murdered that is in part a red herring, in part a rather peculiar way to ratchet up the film's tension. That part of the plot feels as if someone had planted a piece of Cornell Woolrich where it wouldn't naturally belong just to make the landscape more interesting. It certainly keeps the film from becoming too obvious.

De Martino's direction is also quite straightforward for the genre he's working in. He puts the genre's usual (and lovely) stylistic excesses on the backburner and presents the plot as if his film were an action movie, just with more talk and less action. When the opportunity to include a fistfight (with Victor Buono pretending to hit people, even!) or a short chase sequence arises, De Martino's the right guy to make it tight and exciting, though.

While the script (as usual for an Italian genre film credited to half a dozen people, but turning out much more coherent than one would expect after hearing that) doesn't exactly burst with originality, it has its interesting elements. The film might not dive very deeply into the race and class aspects of the tale it tells, yet it does make clever enough use of it as an obvious part of the world its story takes place in. It also certainly isn't an accident that both Valdez and Eddie have a tougher life on account of their darker skin, giving the whole plot a vibe of Eddie throwing another man with whom he has more in common than with the people he works for to the wolves for his own betterment in a classic case of the disenfranchised getting complicit in their own demise. The film never gets too explicit about these connection, though - I'm not sure if distractibility or an attempt at subtlety is the reason for it, but there you have it.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,giallo,alberto de martino,antonio sabato,barbara bouchet,victor buono,reviews

Blood Link (1982)

Craig Manning (Michael Moriarty) is a successful doctor whose medical research aiming at some sort of diffuse self-realization leads him into self-experimentation with his self-invented mix of acupuncture and electro shock, not exactly to the delight of his girlfriend and colleague Julie Warren (Penelope Milford).

Caused by his SCIENCE!, Craig starts to have strange dreams in which he seems himself murdering women who are all at the tail end of middle age. As if that weren't disturbing enough, Craig's dreams of murder soon turn into day dreams, complete with sleepwalking. The doctor has the strange feeling that he is not just experiencing violent fantasies produced by his own experimental treatment and the depths of his subconscious, but has opened the door to someone else's mind. Craig is quite convinced that the person whose deeds he witnesses is his Siamese twin brother Keith, and that his brother can sometimes see through his eyes too (how that's supposed to work without Keith having undergone Craig's treatment, I surely don't know). Keith, however, is supposed to have died at the age of seventeen in a fire that also killed the brothers' foster father. Still, Craig visits his foster mother Mrs Thomason in the home for the elderly she's now being treated in to ask a few poignant questions about Keith's dead. Turns out that Mrs Thomason was lying about Craig's brother all these years to protect him from police interest.

Now that Craig is sure his brother is alive, he just has to meet him and somehow "save" him from his murderous impulses. A new vision soon shows him that Keith is in Hamburg, so Craig decides to look for him there. This is of course a very bad idea, and before you can say "I toldya", Keith sets a plan in motion that will put the blame for his murders on his innocent brother.

The old tale of the good twin and the evil twin already had survived more variations than anyone should care to count when Alberto De Martino made this thriller, yet it is one of those basic set-ups which - if treated with care - have so much thematic resonance that they are always worth exploring.

It's also the sort of set-up that gives a willing actor an opportunity to really do some Acting. One can do that subtly, showing the on the surface identical twins to be completely different persons through slight gestures and minimal changes in posture and voice, or one can do it like Michael Moriarty does here, by wildly chewing the scenery as if it were the only thing standing between one and starvation. That's not really a criticism of Moriarty's performance here, mind you. Rather, the broadness of his performance fits perfectly to Blood Link's not exactly subtle script that mostly goes into the most obvious directions, but at least goes there with enough conviction and technical to make for an interesting film.

For most of the time, Blood Link is also a relatively logical film, at least if you're willing to buy into the whole good twin/evil twin business and into the telepathy. In an Italian film of this era, that's about as naturalistic and un-dreamlike as it gets. Only in the final twenty minutes, the script gives up on reality as I know it completely, and goes for a sleazy yet fitting finale that's based on Keith's impotence, only to end on a not very well prepared but really disturbing scene where the differences between the brothers have completely disappeared.

The ending would really work better for a film that's more dreamlike than the often rather straightforward Blood Link. This straightforwardness, however, comes with the territory of the film's director Alberto De Martino. De Martino is the kind of guy who is always able to make solid and well-paced films, yet his films seldom prove to be mad enough to be completely to my (admittedly sometimes dubious) tastes. In fact, Blood Link is probably as weird as it gets for De Martino (unless a until now unseen by me film will prove me wrong), and might be a film to watch especially for those viewers who can't cope with more dreamlike Italian films.

Even if you can cope with less normal films, though, there's no reason to avoid this one. It is a perfectly fine thriller with a perfectly hysterical lead performance.

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,alberto de martino,michael moriarty,reviews,thriller

In short: Medusa Against The Son Of Hercules (1963)

This Alberto De Martino-directed peplum does some rather peculiar things with poor old Perseus (Richard Harrison, as always very good at the physical parts of his role). For one, it makes his adventures much less fantastic and decidedly lacking in gifts from the gods.

It's not a bad movie, though. De Martino has always been quite good at keeping the cheapskate action up and varied, and does so here, avoiding the dullness some of the lesser peplums suffer from. Although the larger battle scenes and the special effects are held back by the film's impoverished production values, I can't deny the its sense of forward momentum, nor the primal, Tarzan-like call of scenes of men throwing each other through the air or whipping each other.

De Martino is less successful at filming drama, which in his interpretation means having people shout dramatically at each other while wringing their hands, or at creating the sort of dream-like mood the more fantastic elements of the film could use to be a little less ridiculous than they are. Not that I'm complaining about the film's use of two excellent, nearly motionless rubber monsters in ill-advisedly bright lighting. Or am I?

While I'd rather avoid talking about the half-paralyzed dragon Perseus kills in an underwater sequence in which I couldn't see anything beyond milky shadows, I have a certain degree of respect for the medusa sequence. It has an excellent matte painting (probably by Mario Bava's dad Eugenio) dominating the background, some surprisingly cool looking statues and it rethinks the medusa as a slithering rubber tree thing with a single, glowing eye, which shows more creativity in five minutes than the Clash of the Titans remake does in its whole running time. Really, what more could one ask of a film?

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,peplum,alberto de martino,richard harrison

Revenge of Three Films Make A Post

Django Shoots First (1966): One of the dozens of Djangos who roam the Italian West (played by Glenn Saxson) takes vengeance for his murdered and double-crossed father and gets rich in the process. The film is a bit too lighthearted for my tastes in Spaghetti Western and lacks emotional resonance even in the moments when it should have it. None of the actors are all that memorable (especially not the zero sum of a Django) apart from Evelyn Stewart in the sort of femme fatale role she could probably do in her sleep. But director Alberto De Martino does have enough of a knack for action scenes to make for a passably diverting little movie. Unless you dislike bar brawls, that is.

 

Devil Species (2004): A scientist turns into a snake monster thanks to the combination of the poison of the Devil Snake and a new experimental serum. He of course goes on a very cost-conscious rampage, while some (okay, one) of his victims turn into snake person zombies. This mildly entertaining Thai monster movie (directed by someone with the most excellent name of Poom Opium) would feel right at home on the SciFi Channel, if it didn't eschew crappy CGI for not completely ineffective practical effects and if not for the American mainstream's fear of non-white people playing the lead roles in a movie.

 

Three On A Meathook (1972): William "Grizzly" Girdler's debut film meanders between proto-slasher and 70s independent psycho killer movie. Too bad that it's so boring in every aspect. Girdler's static and unimaginative direction can't even milk shots of the less savory parts of Louisville or terrible crimes of interior decoration properly for mood or life. The title's great, though.

 

Technorati-Tags: in short,thai movies,american movies,italian movies,horror,spaghetti western,william girdler,alberto de martino

The Horror!? 85: The Blancheville Monster (1964)

A few days before her 21st birthday, Emily de Blancheville (Ombretta Colli) returns to the castle of her family. Her college friend Alice Taylor (Iran Eory) and Alice's brother John (Vanni Materassi), who is in love with Emily accompany her. Shortly after they have arrived at the castle, the strangest things begin to happen. Elephant noises turn out to be the product of Father de Blancheville, thought dead by Emily.

In truth, her brother Rodrigue (Gerard Tichy) lied about their father's dead to spare Emily the shock of learning that her dear father wasn't only terribly disfigured in a fire, but also lost his mind and now dreams of killing his daughter right before her birthday to lift a not really specified "family curse".

Of course the mad old man escapes and starts to threaten more than just his daughter's life. Or is it possible that the shifty acting Dr. Lerouge (Leo Anchoriz), who seems to share secrets with the new housekeeper (Helga Line) is the one who uses remote hypnotic powers to lure the young woman into danger?

If a cliché exists in Gothic Horror movies, you will find it here. It feels as if the Corbucci brothers who wrote the script had used a checklist and wouldn't stop until they could squeeze every single Gothic element known to science into their script.

It's a tactic that doesn't usually help to create masterworks, and of course The Blancheville Monster is none either. What it is, is a living lexicon of its genre full of melodrama and slightly over the top acting, but also some fine mood pieces by director Alberto De Martino.

De Martino was no Mario Bava, not even an Antonio Margheriti, still he was able to somehow keep the disparate mixture of fainting spells, "are you sure it wasn't a dream"s, hypnosis, premature burials, disfigured madmen, evil plots, absurdly sinister looks, puzzling non-logic and American accents for people who are supposed to be quite posh, from completely falling apart.

This does not lead to the kind of movie I would recommend to people who don't have a certain affinity for Gothics, but people who do should have at least a little fun.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,horror,gothic,sergio corbucci,alberto de martino,reviews