The Monster of the Opera (1964)

aka The Vampire of the Opera

Original title: Il mostro dell’opera

Sandro (Marco Mariani) the somewhat hyperactive director of a modern dance troupe has finally found the right place to make his dream project come true. It’s a long-abandoned old theatre that comes with a caretaker who only speaks in dire warnings and insinuations. Obviously, the place is supposed to be cursed. So there surely isn’t a vampire running around behind the scenes just waiting to get his teeth into Sandro’s prima ballerina (or however you call the position in modern dance) Giulia (Barbara Hawards) and whoever else takes his fancy.

Apparently, Gilulia is somehow connected with the vampire’s great love who doomed him to his bloodsucking existence, and the rather strange events he begins inflicting on the dancers are part of some plan for eternally recurring vengeance. Well, either that, or he really likes to poke underdressed women with a humungous pitchfork.

The Monster of the Opera was directed by Renato Polselli. Given that he also brought us The Ballerina and the Vampire, a film not containing any ballerinas but quite a bit of dancing, it’s pretty clear that the man had a genuine interest in putting some (or a lot of) dancing into his gothic horror movies, an interest clearly going above and beyond the opportunity female dancers lend the exploitative mindset to put women in outfits you’d otherwise never get away with. Unlike the earlier ballerina movie, being a sleaze genuinely seems to be only the tiniest part of Polselli’s motive for all the dancing – rather, this appears to be a genuine attempt to use modern dance as a part of the horror business.

I’m not sure I’d quite call it a successful attempt. Particularly in the film’s early stages, there seems to be an overabundance of dance numbers, not all of which are terribly well integrated into the plot, and the heavy lifting for the horror parts of the film is done elsewhere. Namely, right at the start of the film, in an exceptionally nightmare-like, heavily expressionist vision/dream sequence Julia and the caretaker seem to share (the film keeps it somewhat ambiguous) that isn’t just incredible to look at as something that feels like a refugee from some fantastic lost masterpiece of expressionist silent horror filmmaking, all built out of shadow, over cranked and undercranked camera work and images taken directly out of one’s nightmares but which also prefigures the strange mood and nightmare logic the film will take on in its third act, after all the dance numbers and the lounging of half-naked 60s hotties is done with, and the very early 60s portrayal of artistic people being energetic is through.

Then, the film actually makes pretty brilliant use of the dancing as part of the plot, too, trapping the dancers on stage via invisible walls, threatening them to dance or get sucked dry or pitchforked by the vampire, and suggesting nothing so much as the mediaeval dancing sickness to the viewer, turning what was once sexy-ish and a bit exhausting truly macabre, and deeply strange in feel.

Which is more than enough reason to power through one dance number too many during the first two acts, and makes this a rather interesting example of various attempts to transplant Italian gothic horror into modern times.

Past Misdeeds: L'amante del vampiro (1960)

aka The Vampire and the Ballerina

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 presented with only  basic re-writes and 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.

Someone in a coat walks around the Italian countryside, sucking the blood of young women, turning them into his slaves through what rather looks like quality orgasms before the continued blood loss kills them. The country folk are convinced they are being terrorized by a vampire, but what they have of local authorities (including a doctor who can't tell bite wounds from scratch marks, and does not think an epidemic of anaemia among young women is anything worth investigating further) isn't interested in all that superstition, or is, like the police, curiously non-existent in the world of the film.

As luck will have it, a group of what the film calls ballet dancers after a definition that probably declares every dance taking place in a night club also to be ballet have come to a villa in the countryside to train a new choreography and to provide Luca (Isarco Ravaioli), the nephew of the slightly creepy owner of the villa, an opportunity to romance his very-soon-to-be fiancée, the dancer Francesca (Tina Gloriani). This set-up suggests quite a feast for a hungry heterosexual male bloodsucker.

For a time, it's all undisturbed dancing, lover's talk and listening to uncle's vampire tales for the girls, though. That is, until  Francesca, her now fiancée Luca, and her best friend Luisa (Hélène Rémy) are surprised by a storm while out walking and have to seek shelter in a supposedly empty castle. There, they meet two curious people: countess Alda (María Luisa Rolando) and her servant Herman (Walter Brandi), both dressed in fashion a few hundred years out of style, and moving as stiffly as, well, living corpses.

While at the castle, somebody takes a good bite out of Luisa's neck in a walk-in wardrobe, turning her into a rather enthusiastic Renfield, and Luca finds himself all too happy to be invited to return to Alda later the same night. My, you'd think there's something wrong with these people and their home…

I, like many a cult film fan, know and love L'amante's director Renato Polselli mostly for his perfectly insane, and wonderfully bizarre weird-out Gothic Black Magic Rites/The Reincarnation of Isabel, one among the weirdest films in a genre rich in weirdness. Compared to that piece of glorious incoherence, the film at hand is a rather logical and clear piece of filmmaking, even though every character - vampire or human - here does act completely and rather inexplicably foolish in at least one scene, and even the emotions of people not touched by the supernatural are turned to eleven all the time.

However, L*amante's narrative makes some basic sense, and I'm even willing to call some of the character motivations the script gives comprehensible, at least for some of the running time. Of course, this being an early Italian Gothic horror movie, I don't really care all that much how much sense the script makes or rather doesn't make, and am rather more interested in the film's mood of irreality.

Polselli shows himself quite adept in the creation of this mood of thick irreality, with many a beautifully composed shot of shadowy castles and graveyards, shadows on the walls, and whatever other traditional way of showing the audience that it has stepped into a place where the membrane between this world and another is particularly thin one might ask for in this regard. We are again in the realm of a very dream-like idea of what filmmaking means here, where pacing is sometimes erratic (some may say slow), people don't act like people generally do in real life, and where logic exists but only seems skewed to push the characters into the arms of the supernatural.

Apart from this, L'amante surprised me with how heavily and openly sexualized vampirism in it already is for a movie of its time, and how much further even than Hammer's Horror of Dracula it goes this early in the vampire movie game, with so much writhing, breast-rubbing, and obvious orgasming from the female part of the cast that speaking of a "subtext" here would be utterly preposterous. In Polselli's film, vampirism is all about sexual dominance, a fact that is  even further emphasised (and pushed in the direction of the slightly perverse) by the ugliness of the (not exactly convincing) vampire make-up. It's not difficult to see this as a film about unhealthy sexual power structures, particularly once we find the main vampire staking his former victims so that they can't disturb his "mastership"(!), and learn he keeps his vampire lover locked up in their castle, only letting her feed indirectly by drinking his blood after he has gouged himself, which, in turn, is the cause of his ugliness. Consequently, it's hardly a surprise she attempts to use Luca to get rid of him and probably to find a more pliable partner, even though later developments in the film suggest the distribution of power between the two vampires might be a little more complicated, as it often goes in sexualized master/slave relationships.

Polselli's treatment of these elements is as on the nose as imaginable for a film made in 1960, and really makes the film's two supposedly titillating dance scenes look as if they were part of a different, much less interesting and daring movie made in a time when even the often sexually quite more progressive and open European cinema had to use attractive women in skimpy outfits dancing horribly as the best it could do for titillation. On the other hand, the return to the second half of the 50s (in Europe, not the Code-dominated USA, obviously) in between actively messed up sexuality does further increase the film's unreal mood.


Not that L'amante del vampiro really needed that, for it is already a wonderful example of Italian Gothic horror being weird without it.

On Exploder Button: L'amante del vampiro (1960)

Ah, Italian Gothic horror, what would I do without you? Probably not watch films about a group of "ballet dancers" encountering some surprisingly obviously sexual vampires, that's pretty sure. It would be a sad and empty life.

Fortunately, there are films like Renato Polselli's L'amante del vampiro (aka The Vampire and the Ballerina), as I explain in this week's column over at ExB.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,horror,gothic,renato polselli,hélène remy,walter brandi,tina gloriani,isarco ravaioli,maría luisa rolando,other places

Black Magic Rites (1973)

also known as The Reincarnation of Isabel

So, there's this castle somewhere. In the castle lives this guy with a mustache (Raul Lovecchio) who is often bathed in green and red light and who reads books that contain sentences like "Vampires need blood that's not contaminated by human semen.".

His cousin (possibly one of the dozen characters stumbling through the film, or not) sells his half of the family castle to another guy with a mustache. Second mustache guy moves in with his fiancee Laureen (Rita Calderoni) and a horde of people including Laureen's mother (I think) and a dozen or so young women (relation to everyone else unknown) who are really really into dropping their clothes, fetishistically fondling shawls, screaming hysterically and sex. Especially sex.

Unfortunately, the castle's cellar has a direct connection to The Underworld, where four guys dressed like the Satanist version of the Three Supermen (but with face paint) are performing sacrificial rituals to revive the the witch Isabella (also Rita Calderoni), who hangs crucified on a wall of The Underworld.

There are also vampires around, or one vampire who is possibly Count Dracula himself (Mickey Hargitay) or rather his reincarnation. Turns out everyone in the castle is the reincarnation of someone connected to the witch's death some centuries ago, therefore stuff happens to them. Some get killed, some are dragged into The Underworld, some get buried alive, all get naked (yes, even the ugly pudgy dude, sorry). Other stuff happens. The end.

I admit defeat here. Usually, I am able to distill a small amount of sense even out of the most bizarre Italian sleaze fests, but this thing beats me. I suspect Black Magic Rites was directed by Alfonso Brescia's even more insane evil twin after stealing the identity of Italian filione director Renato Polselli, but as far as I can tell, it might have been made by Nyarlathotep himself.

Though there is much going on during the course of the movie, nothing of it makes any sense at all, be it on a plot level, on a metaphorical level, or just on the level of plain human sanity. When the film "explains" what is happening (after about 50 minutes of flashbacks, dream sequences, possible dream sequences, sudden scenes of Italian sex farce stuff and, well, other stuff), everything makes even less sense.

Even if one starts from the theory that Polselli had a bunch of actors, a cool looking castle and a camera, but most certainly no script as mankind understands the word yet still proceeded to make a film just for the love of the naked female breast, this does not explain the obvious care put into the bizarre flash cutting, the film's sometimes meandering, sometimes jumping between "reality", "dream" and scenes that make no sense as either "reality" or "dream". Or, you know, anything else about this thing.

Really nothing about this film seems explicable in any sense of the word I know of. If the film's goal was just to show us as many naked women as possible, wouldn't there have been easier ways to do it? If the goal was to make a horror film, wouldn't even the Italian style of doing things quick and on the cheap have called for a bit more sense (or sensibility)? Why write a script (if there was one) in which every utterance makes no frigging sense at all, neither in the context of the things we see, nor in the context of people usually using language to communicate something or shout at each other on the Internet? Why set your actors up to act only through blank zoned-out staring or screaming melodramatic hysterics?

In the end Black Magic Rites comes to us as a true enigma, a "film" seemingly made for no audience one could conceive of, consciously or druggedly using stylistic techniques to put its viewers into a state of pure befuddlement, puzzling and bewildering even for the most hardened lover of puzzling and bewildering things. I probably don't have to say that I loved it in all its glorious, sloppy, nonsensical, breast-loving majesty.

Now, some of you, my (mostly silent) readers, might think that this write-up makes no sense at all. You might even feel a tad confused by it. Please be assured that this is only a fraction of the effect the film itself will have on you.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,renato polselli,mickey hargitay,reviews,horror,my brain just imploded