INQUISICION (1976)

If no one expects the Spanish Inquisition, how is anyone gonna deal with the French Inquisition? That's the challenge of Jacinto Molina's directorial debut, a vehicle for his on-screen alter ego, Paul Naschy. Filmed in Spain while longtime dictator Francisco Franco was still dead, the production probably was careful not to give Spanish Catholicism a bad name. Naschy plays itinerant judge Bernard de Fossey, a hammer to witches who takes too much pleasure in his work. He struggles to suppress the sexual arousal he feels reading accounts of witches consorting with the Devil, and takes his distress out on accused witches who are almost invariably attractive and tortured in the nude. Bernard's not after your typical hag; that would kill his buzz more than he actually wants it killed.

Bernard stirs up hysteria when he arrives in town, especially when the boyfriend of Catherine (Daniel Giordano), a comely local lass, is murdered by hooded highwaymen. Obsessed with getting justice, Catherine consults an actual witch (Tota Alba) who shows her how to get in touch with Satan, who may, if he's in the mood, give her the key to the mystery. It's not quite that mysterious to us, because we've seen how Bernard looks at Catherine -- and veteran Naschy fans may have noticed something familiar about one of the highwayman's leaping attack on the victim. Sure enough, under the influence of a potion -- if not also Satan! -- Catherine envisions Bernard removing the hood. She decides to take the fight to him, fulfilling his own fears of temptation, but events quickly spiral out of either person's control.

One of the subplots in Molina's screenplay follows Renover (Antonio Iranzo), a one-eyed professional informer who spreads rumors of witchcraft out of misogynist resentment of women who won't give the poor scumbag a chance. When his aggressive advances on Catherine's friends end with two women dead and himself mortally wounded, he uses his ante-mortem statement to denounce Catherine and her witchy mentor. Bernard actually has tried to protect Catherine from prosecution but has no choice now but to put her through an ordeal. He seems taken by surprise when Catherine confesses, and then denounces him, after which damning corroborating evidence promptly appears to seal his fate. While Catherine goes to her death screaming in terror, Bernard seems resigned to his fate, if not relieved by it.

For an actor-turned-director Naschy/Molina was unusually self-effacing. I don't know how many people knew that Naschy and Molina, who'd already written many Naschy pictures, were one and the same, but I'd expect exploitation film producers not to take chances and tout director Naschy as the next Cornell Wilde or something similar. Make what you will of his creative split personality, but Inquisicion is clearly an ambitious work for a first-time director. Visually it's quite attractive in the way of many Euro horror films that take advantage of ancient locations, but also effectively expressionist in cinematographer Miguel Fernandez Mila's use of lurid reds in Catherine's vision of the Sabbat (with Bernard as the Devil) and Bernard's vision of Catherine as a crimson temptress. As a writer, Molina plots things fairly well, though his conclusion, with Catherine's denunciation following Renover's fatal encounter, feels anticlimactic, if only because we expect something more hair-raising from Paul Naschy. That he closes the film that way suggests that, despite the sleaze of the torture scenes, Molina saw this as something more than the typical Naschy vehicle.

Naschy's film is a late entry in a continental cycle of witchfinding pictures, a subset of a larger "history of cruelty" genre. While its torture scenes put it in the exploitation category alongside pictures like Jess Franco's Bloody Judge, Inquisicion sustains a more subtle ambiguity on the subject of witchcraft and the devil. The old witch is plainly a witch in the most mundane sense, knowledgeable about potions and such, but we're left to judge for ourselves, prompted by the film's one voice of reason, whether Catherine saw the Devil or not -- or whether Bernard even was in on killing Catherine's lover. Our only evidence for his guilt is Catherine's vision, the authority of which we're forced to question. If Catherine's community is cursed by anything, it's by a common human malice and hypocrisy that consumes clergy and laypeople alike. Overall it's an impressive debut, though it came a little too late in the history of Spanish horror for Naschy to build on it as he might have had he stepped up a few years earlier. It still goes down as one of both Molina and Naschy's best efforts.

DEVIL'S BRIDE (Tulen Morsian, 2016)

Saara Cantell's film turns a 17th century witch craze on a Swedish-ruled Finnish-speaking island into something of a Christian allegory. That's an interesting twist when most of the film feels like The Crucible with Abigail Williams -- the Winona Ryder character from the most recent movie version -- as the heroine. Anna (Tuulia Eloranta) lusts for a married man and tries to ruin his wife by accusing her of witchcraft. All she wants, though, is to drive the other woman from town, as Anna's own mentor, Valborg the midwife (Kaija Pakarinen) is banished early in the picture. It's not Anna's fault that the witch mania escalates to a lethal degree. The persecution is driven by hypocrisy and learned intolerance. The local pastor is the hypocrite, a serial rapist of young women whose main beef against Valborg seems to be that she performs abortions, presumably killing his children. The local judge (Magnus Krepper), for whose mother Anna works as a maid, is a pharisaical figure as intolerant of "superstition" as his like in future generations would be toward religion itself. He flaunts the latest thinking from academia, somehow more credulous toward rumors of witchcraft than the literature of his mother's time, which Anna, a bright girl, is able to read. As Valborg's banishment opens a flood of accusation, the patriarchs increasingly demand death for the accused, who in all too familiar fashion are tortured into confessing and denouncing others.

To her credit, Anna is horrified by this. She never really wanted her supposed rival, Rakel (Elen Petersdottir) to die, and the death sentence pronounced on the innocent wife crushes Anna's spirit. She begs forgiveness of the prisoner, promising to baptize Rakel's newborn daughter and eventually (and blasphemously?) doing it herself, but Rakel is understandably reluctant to forgive. Guided by the judge's mother, whose wits remain sharp despite a stroke, Anna challenges the entire premise of the witch trials, only to have the old literature scoffed away by the judge -- who nevertheless suspects that something is fishy about the anti-witch evidence pushed by the pastor. Finally, there's only one thing Anna can do to save Rakel. It won't be enough to admit her original lie. She has to accept guilt for all the fantastical sins others have attributed to the other woman, or that Rakel has been forced to admit -- in effect, to confess to witchcraft and effectively sentence herself to death.

Cantell may be best known in her own country for a popular series of films about the friendship between two young girls, so Tulen Morsian must have been a profound change of pace for her and those familiar with her work. She nails the terrifying escalation of the witch-craze, from the minor tragedy of Valborg's banishment to brutal mass executions. These are the makings of a horror movie, but  Devil's Bride proves to be a powerful emotional experience as Anna accepts martyrdom -- though the film teases us with a legend of her miraculous escape -- in order to expiate her own sins and those of the entire community. The awakening of her sexuality initially drives Anna wild and makes her a menace, but the awakening of her conscience -- her true coming of age -- redeems what might have been written off as a misogynist stereotype and makes a real heroine of her.  Taking the viewpoint of an accuser strikes me as a novel approach for a witch-trial film, and the gamble of inviting identification with an apparent villain pays off emphatically. In many ways Tulen Morsian is as horrifying and infuriating as any film in its grim genre, but in a modest way, with less of the barnstorming bombast of The Crucible (which is still tremendously entertaining in its own right), it's one of the most sincerely moving of witch-trial films.

On the Big Screen: THE WITCH: A NEW-ENGLAND FOLKTALE (2015)

The Protestant Reformation opened the door to a priesthood of all believers, empowering anyone to interpret Scripture for himself (or herself!) Worse yet for those establishing or consolidating Protestant denominations, people claimed not just direct access to Scripture, but direct access to God. Authority preferred to believe that the work of revelation was done; it challenged those who claimed that God or the Holy Spirit communicated with them directly with the possibility that it was the devil talking. The patriarch of the doomed family in Robert Eggers' film hasn't necessarily claimed divine communication -- in fact he seems to hold a radical doubt about his own or other people's salvation -- but he has reached a point where he, and by extension his family, can't accept the authority of the local church fathers, and so, like many real families of 17th century New England, they are cast out to make their own way in the wilderness. In isolation they have only themselves from which to make the sacred drama that defined so many lives back then. There's something incestuous and almost cannibalistic about it, and maybe something fundamentally American that would make The Witch as much a prophetic film as a period piece.

Because Eggers has made a "Folktale," supposedly inspired and to an extent copied from contemporary documents, he has no obligation to whatever the "truth" was about witches in New England. You could watch this film and believe that belief in witches made them real, that the witch was a role someone had to play in the sacred drama of Puritan existence. Just as the man who thinks he hears God may hear the Devil, so those who separate or are separated from the mainstream faith community exist virtually next door to exiled or self-exiled witches. How different is this patriarch's "conceit" from the witches'? The Witch is a microcosm of the New England legend, the little family turning on itself amid simmering sensual tensions, the children (specifically the daughters, of course) accusing each other of witchcraft, with the folktale twist of genuine magickal menace in the woods just past the lonely family farm. A baby disappears in a virtual blink of an eye. The stakes are even higher than we moderns appreciate, since the baby hasn't been baptized and the family appears to believe in infant damnation as a corollary of original sin. Father (Ralph Ineson) can't assure his kids that they're saved, while sisters Mercy (Ellie Grainger) -- the younger, and a twin -- and Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), the elder, take turns pretending to be witches and accusing each other of witchery to tease and torment each other. Mercy and her twin brother have an unsettling devotion to the turbulent goat Black Phillip, while Thomasin, coming of age, is constantly unsettled, newly attentive to male flesh -- father's, brother's -- and other phenomena. Thomasin's increasingly an unsettling element in the family, one the parents consider purging by hiring her out as someone's maid, to help themselves make it through the winter after a poor harvest. As witchery outside grows more blatant and aggressive, the family grows more determined to find it in their own midst -- where, in fact, it is.

The Witch goes for dread more than scares, having few conventional horror cues until it gets diabolically busy toward the end. The wilderness without and the family drama within are ample if not equal sources of dread. The family is a disaster in the making from the beginning in its fanatic isolation and obsession with damnation, and the wilderness seems to respond to that by revealing witches. Black Phillip stands for the diabolic potential of the entire animal kingdom, if not the whole natural world, and it's almost certainly the greatest film performance ever given by a goat. Its human co-stars are uniformly plausible as people of the 17th century and convincing in their moments of hysteria. Their drive for isolation and their divinely or diabolically inspired impulse toward mutual recrimination -- their habit of seeing the devil in each other, of blaming one another for failures tantamount to damnation -- don't quite seem obsolete from today's perspective. Despite the antiquarian detail, part of the horror of The Witch comes from recognizing the forces that drive this family to destroy itself as elements that exist today, even if often stripped of their theological trappings. Don't get the idea that the film's a political statement; I don't think Eggers intended any such thing. But what he achieved is so effectively evocative that it's bound to resonate relevantly with many historically conscious or simply sensitive viewers. Horror fans should dig it for its dreadful escalation toward some intimately epic mayhem. Any sense of relevance they or the rest of us get out of it is a bonus.

DAY OF WRATH (Vredens Dag, 1943)

The Nazis couldn't kid themselves the way Communists did sometimes. You could get away every so often with making a movie about witch-hunting in a Communist country as long as the authorities could tell themselves it wasn't about them, but about the supersitious bourgeois past. But when Carl Theodor Dreyer made a film that superficially concerned with witch-mania in old Denmark, the country's Nazi occupiers apparently assumed it was about them. Thought they apparently let the film play, they gave Dreyer enough grief that he fled to Sweden. On one level, you can see a Nazi's point. Vredens Dag describes a society where people are put to torture and compelled not just to admit ridiculous charges against themselves but to denounce others for equally ridiculous offenses. That touches a sore spot with fanatics everywhere. But Dreyer's film isn't exactly The Crucible. It isn't about a heroic refusal to make false denunciations. It's about the double standards that spare some while sending others to the stake, and it ends with someone making an uncoerced confession of a ludicrous crime.

Absalon (Thorkild Roose) is a middle-aged widowed pastor who has married again despite the disapproval of his elderly mother. He has a grown son, Martin (Preben Lerdoff Rye), who has a hard time thinking of Anne (Lisbeth Movin) as his mother. Once Martin is back from school, however, he has a hard time not thinking of Anne. Anne has an easy time thinking of Martin; the lad could give her the happiness Absalon doesn't seem capable of giving. The old man may be too preoccupied with his responsibilities as a minister to accused witches. He comes under pressure when the authorities catch an accused witch, Marthe (Anne Svierkier), hiding in his own house. The old hag had been picking herbs for Anne, who offered her shelter. Marthe thinks she has leverage on Absalon because he had once intervened to spare an accused witch who happened to be Anne's mother. Marthe insists that he intervene on her behalf or else she'll denounce Anne. Absalon refuses to comply but Marthe never follows through on her threat -- not under torture and not as she's sent to the stake. Not that you get much chance to rant there; in Denmark they drop you face first onto the bonfire. Meanwhile, Absalon's mother, who probably figures that Anne put some sort of spell on her son, now sees her working the same wiles on her grandson. All this stress is likely to drive poor Absalon to an early grave. If it happens, how much will Anne be to blame? And how do you characterize her offense in the idiom of 17th century Denmark. Could you call it anything else but witchcraft?...

While The Crucible focuses on the injustice of witch trials and builds up the background of accused and accusers to underscore the procedural injustice, Day of Wrath probes the intimate anxieties, rivalries and hatreds that must have seemed to simpler, superstitious generations like the devil at work in their hearts and minds. In its emphasis on overpowering urges and mortal consequences it resembles an American film noir, with Lisbeth Movin a worthy rival to Hollywood's femme-fatale specialists, more closely than it resembles a political allegory. Dreyer films the proceedings in an austere yet fluid style; his camera moves frequently without calling attention to its mobility. He doesn't fetishize the tortures of witchfinding, but the mere sight of fat old Marthe stripped topless for forceful interrogation is appallingly suggestive. Overall, Dreyer succeeds in creating a sense of lived-in antiquity and lets the actors do the rest. This is a film of memorable faces, with Movin, Roose and Sigrid Neiiendam as Absalon's mother making indelible impressions. Movin may have the more flamboyant role but Roose made the strongest impression on me. In many ways the image of a puritanical patriarch, he effectively embodies the contradictions and hypocrisies of his roles as confessor, counselor and comforter, spiritual leader and lonely man who's lost track of his longings. Nevertheless, the big moment and climactic mystery belong to Movin. Is her ultimate confession merely acquiescence to the inevitable once the wheels of injustice are set in motion, or is it a spontaneous confession of guilt, a revelation to herself of feelings she hadn't acknowledged for someone she'd wronged? Does she actually suddenly see herself as a witch, and what does the label mean to her? These questions transcend politics and elevate Dreyer's film above mere allegory. They remain relevant even when we don't call each other witches anymore, as long as we still seem capable of cursing each other merely by coexisting.

SIMON, KING OF THE WITCHES (1971)

He lives in a storm drain, so he has to go out when it rains, but Simon Sinestrari has a dream. Already one of the world's few genuine magicians by his own account, he hopes to become equal to the gods, and while banishing a glowing red orb he proclaims, "I am God!" Right there you see he isn't entirely full of it; he can banish a glowing red orb. But to most casual observers, Simon (Andrew Prine) is little more than a bum. The cops pick him up on one of his rainy walks and rifle his gear in search of drug paraphernalia before tossing him in the jug for vagrancy. There he befriends a naive young hustler of the sort you'd see in movies back then. Turk (George Paulsin) takes it for granted that Simon is what he says it is and invites him into the orbit of Hercules (Byron York), a wealthy patron of eccentrics. However patronized he may feel, Simon embraces any opportunity to make money, and he demands fair value for his work. When a contemptuous skeptic thinks to repay the assumed fraud in kind with a bad check that gets him arrested again, Simon demands compensation, but an increasingly bored Hercules asks why Simon doesn't use his vaunted powers to avenge himself. Simon takes that as a dare and asks if Hercules really wants him to curse the guy. Eager to see Simon put up or shut up, Hercules confirms the dare, and Simon announces that the offender will die within two days. Right on schedule, the writer of bad checks gets brained by a flower pot pushed from the roof of a tall building by a glowing red orb while the victim gazes upward as if paralyzed. Simon has just killed a man, but the most bother that causes is when Hercules finds himself haunted by a glowing red orb, and Simon takes care of that by releasing his onetime patron from his vow to share half the guilt for the curse. Then it's on to new adventures as Simon strives to charge a wand with occult energy, first by seducing a girl, then by menacing a gay man, so that he can claim his place among the gods at exactly 1:33 p.m. on an auspicious day. Imagine how he'd feel and what he'd do if he misses his appointment, and the police are to blame....

Bruce Kessler's picaresque horror film is built around a genuinely unpredictable main character. I'm still not sure, however, if that's because writer Robert Phippeny (reputedly a practicing magician) and star Andrew Prine have tapped into an authentic ambiguity or ambivalence or because Phippeny lacked a consistent sense of Simon's personality. His opening address to the audience notwithstanding, Simon isn't the sort of flamboyant, affected personality one might expect in a "real" magician. He states his business in a flat, matter-of-fact way, and comes across most of the time as much as a curmudgeon as a mountebank. He regards the people around him with a detached, sardonic contempt that's appropriate for someone who sees others as means to his own delusional end. As a result, Simon is often a humorous character, as when he proposes a "magical" cure for Turk's inconvenient (but conveniently unillustrated) case of priapism. The overall tone of the film is quite satirical, sending up freak-chic poseurs like Hercules and the more blatant showmanship of rival magicians like the wiccan Sarah (Ultra Violet), whom Simon mocks by breaking a "witch's" broom to disrupt her ritual. Many reviewers describe Simon as a black comedy rather than a horror film, and that may explain why Simon's crimes don't provoke the horror they ought to. If everyone is fair game for mockery, it's hard to mourn for anyone.

That Phippeny and Kessler meant Simon as a satire of a subculture rather than a shocker is clear from the lackluster effects whenever Simon shows his real power. Magic is mostly a matter of glowing red orbs and other glowy effects, while the big "psychedelic" scene when Simon steps into a mirror in search of power is too derivative of the 2001:A Space Odyssey "trip" (Kessler reports that he employed some of the same FX people) to make any real impression. The effects are inevitably disappointing, but not inappropriate for a film built around a character with real magical powers who is also a loser. You get the feeling that Simon will never transcend his Skid Row milieu when you see how easily he can be distracted by the troubles of two drug-pusher pals into forgetting his scheduled assault on heaven. He can rage at the gods all he wants, but the gutter pulls on him too strongly. Prine pulls off what's asked of him; he makes you believe such people (albeit powerless) were wandering around California back then. If he has limitations, they seem to be Simon's as well. Apart from his performance, Simon works as an exploitation film thanks to plenty of irreverent nudity and sexual humor -- though some of that humor is ickily homophobic by today's standards. Some of it is spot on, though, as when a naked woman used as a living altar tries to shoo away a curious chauffeur-clad Turk by declaring, "I'm an occult object." The story falls apart toward the end when Simon curses the city by causing floods and framing officials for crimes and the curse rebounds awkwardly on him, but Simon, King of the Witches is a period artifact that's problematic in a consistently interesting way. It's less than it could be, but still more than meets the eye.

Director Kessler says the producers messed with his movie to turn it into an exploitation film. Judge for yourself by watching the oldschool ballyhoo on this trailer, uploaded to YouTube by jeffkostello.

Wendigo Meets TWINS OF EVIL (1971)

Hammer followed the success of Roy Ward Baker's The Vampire Lovers with Jimmy Sangster's Lust For a Vampire, a film my friend Wendigo has seen but once. Once was enough: the lead actress, though quite a looker, was no Ingrid Pitt when it came to talent or personality. Nothing about Lust impressed him, and to have the vampire woman lusting for a man violated the Carmilla concept. Whatever its original audience thought, Hammer persevered and put John Hough to work directing a third "Karnstein" film. This time, though, the British studio brought some extra exploitation inspiration to the project, merging their signature vampire product with the then-hot topic of witch-hunting. The result is a conceptually dynamic film that I prefer to Vampire Lovers, while Wendigo himself has some justified reservations.

The Collinson twins differentiate themselves gradually over the course of the film.

For most of the picture, the titular twins (played by pioneer twin Playmates Mary and Madelaine Collinson) take a back seat to a war of wills waged by witch-hunter Gustave Weil (Peter Cushing), the head of a torchbearing Brotherhood, and the decadent Count Karnstein (Damien Thomas). The Count routinely has his way with local women, doing who knows what in his castle, but the bourgeois Brotherhood can't touch him because, as an aristocrat, Karnstein enjoys the protection of the Holy Roman Emperor. The war of wills is a class war fueled by Weil's resentment of Karnstein's privileges -- and his sexual prowess, we can assume -- and Karnstein's libertine contempt for Weil's intolerant moralizing. In their first encounter, Karnstein looks more like a hero, since we've already grown suspicious that the Brotherhood is burning innocent women. We're inclined to think that Karnstein has Weil well pegged as the real villain of the piece. However, amid the witch-burning there's this nagging business of a vampire. Someone's in the woods biting necks. Who could that be?

Both Gustave Veil (Peter Cushing, above) and Count Karnstein (Damien Thomas, seated below) have sins to answer for, but is that poor schmuck with the bite on his neck (bottom) one of them?

Count Karnstein, perhaps? The answer seems to be no, at least at first. We see the Count become a vampire by performing a blood sacrifice to summon the spirit of his ancestress Mircalla/Carmilla for a round of necro-incest prior to the necessary bite, but that begs the question of who was biting folks before. Wendigo thinks it a major weakness of the picture that this question is never really answered. We may be meant to assume that Karnsteins are running around all over the place, but since we see no other vampires before the Count summons Mircalla, we can't draw any conclusions about the early vampire attacks with any certainty.

The Ghost of Vampires Past approaches Count Karnstein. Below, director John Hough makes the most of mirrors and mirror-related effects, including the Count's loss of his reflection as he becomes a vampire.

In any event, the battle between bourgeois morality and aristocratic depravity is played out in miniature between the newly-arrived Gellhorn twins. Maria (Mary) is the good girl, while Frieda (Madeline) is the wild child. Only Anton (David Warbeck), the choral instructor of the local Hammer Academy for Highly-Developed Young Ladies, senses the moral difference between the twins, and can thus tell them apart reliably when no one else can. Frieda resents the discipline imposed by Uncle Gustave and is attracted by the Count's decadent reputation. Maria isn't exactly happy with her uncle, but doesn't feel the same temptation to transgress out of spite that Frieda feels. Maria's too good for her own good. When Frieda runs off to spend a night with Karnstein and is turned into a vampire, Maria covers for her, convincing Gustave that she's Frieda and that Maria had run off for the night. For her trouble, Gustave beats "Frieda" with a belt and is sure to beat Maria in the morning to punish her. The real Frieda doesn't care.

Anton has been studying vampire lore, and tries to explain to Gustave that the local problem is vampires rather than witches, and that burning suspects will do no good. You get a sense that, on some level, Anton is simply trying to discourage Gustave from burning women. But when his sister turns up dead by neckbite (and not necessarily by Karnstein or Frieda) he makes vampire fighting a serious vocation. Gustave gets wise when he catches Frieda in the act, but convinces the Brotherhood to behave themselves and hold the vampiress in prison for a time. That gives Karnstein time to kidnap Maria and do the switcheroo, so that Maria is brought to the brink of burning before Anton convinces Gustave to give her the crucifix test again. A now quite repentant Gustave rallies the Brotherhood to join Anton in an assault on Karnstein castle to destroy the aristocrat and his evil acolytes once and for all. Normally Peter Cushing vs. vampires has a foregone conclusion, but this time around he may have too much to answer for....

Twins may not have as much nudity as one might hope for, but the final reel has plenty of gore to keep up Hammer's street cred.

Wendigo acknowledges that Twins has a lot going for it. It has a strong male cast, Cushing, Damien Thomas and Peter Warbeck all giving good performances grounded in the film's social and cultural context. The film is admirably ambiguous in making Cushing a virtual villain motivated by obvious jealousies and resentments who only gradually evolves into an antihero. Count Karnstein also evolves, or devolves, from a mere libertine skeptic who initially scoffs at a purported sacrifice to Satan into someone who embraces absolute evil as almost an aristocratic imperative. He looks like he'll be the antihero at first in that early confrontation with Gustave, but his aristocratic prejudices seem to doom him to wickedness. Amid the confusion, Anton emerges as the least ambiguous hero -- though I initially suspected him of being the original vampire. Wendigo also likes the way the conflict between the twins echoes that of Weil and Karnstein, with the sisters taking opposite extremes of fatal selfishness and almost-fatal selflessness. After stumbling with the first sequel, scripter Tudor Gates, who worked on all three Karnsteins, was really back on his game this time. Technically, Twins is a knockout, richly envisioned by Hough and usually realized evocatively by cinematographer Dick Bush and art director Roy Stannard. Interiors and exteriors are often quite striking, and Twins overall looks richer and more striking (whatever the difference in budget) than Vampire Lovers.

Wendigo wants to stress again how irritated he was by the film's failure to identify the original vampire. For him it's a major, almost crippling flaw of the story. If anything, the whole vampire angle is a weakness of this ostensible vampire movie. That's because he feels that both Frieda and Count Karnstein became less interesting once they became conventional vampire villains. He also feels that Hough bungles one major scene, the bedroom tussle between Anton and Frieda disguised as Maria. Shot with a handheld camera and a fisheye lens, it was probably meant to express immediacy, but in Wendigo's opinion it only looked amateurish and made Madelaine Collinson -- in her one nude scene -- look silly. Meanwhile, the business with Joachim, Karnstein's mute black servant, having to pantomime that the Brotherhood is advancing on the castle, looks goofy to say the least if not a little racist. Joachim gets his own back later with an impressive cleaver-to-the-head attack on a Brother. Finally, Harry Robinson's music is probably inappropriate in its own right, sounding more like a swashbuckler soundtrack, but his main theme now sounds alarming like the opening music for the Justice League cartoon series of a few years back. That's not Robinson's fault, but anyone who "recognizes" the music may have a hard time taking the film as seriously as it deserves.

While I've stated my preference for Twins over Lovers, Wendigo is reluctant to name a favorite of the two. The original film retains the overwhelming asset of Ingrid Pitt, while the stunt-cast Collinsons don't impress him as actors. Also, like Lust, Twins is almost lesbian-free, which is simply wrong, in Wendigo's opinion, for material derived from Carmilla. It also has less nudity in general, a fact that surprised and disappointed Wendigo somewhat. While this makes it look like he leans toward Lovers, he feels that the comparison is like apples vs. oranges. I'll accept that because Twins really took the Karnstein concept in a new direction and practically into a new genre. What keeps them together in a trilogy, beside the Karnstein name, is a concern with vampirism as an analog for sexual deviance, whether Lovers' obvious lesbianism or Twins' implicit libertinage. In the end, Wendigo likes both films for different reasons, flaws and all. Throw out the middle film and you have an admirable diptych of late Hammer nearly at its best.

Here's a British trailer uploaded to YouTube by flotzcore.

THE WITCHES' HAMMER (Kladivo na carodejnice,1970)

In 1968 the Soviet Union put an abrupt end to the "Prague Spring" of Communist-ordained cultural and political liberalization in Czechoslovakia. That should have meant as abrupt an end to the "Czech New Wave" of exportable arthouse cinema, but the blossoming of the nation's film industry predated and for a time survived the political reforms characterized as "Communism with a human face." Otakar Vavra, who turns 100 next February, isn't considered a "new wave" director. A director since the 1930s, he actually taught many new-wave talents, most notably future Oscar-winner Milos Forman. He worked steadily through the Nazi occupation and the years of subjection to the Warsaw Pact -- a matter of luck or proof of an aptitude for accommodation. The mere existence of his Kladivo na carodejnice, and its appearance in the aftermath of the Soviet crackdown, is amazing. It's not the sort of film you'd expect a hardline Communist regime to allow in theaters, though there may be a difference between the way we see its subject matter and the way a Czech Communist would.

The Witches' Hammer (also known as Witchhhammer) takes its title from the Malleus Maleficarum, the infamous guidebook for witch-hunters, and takes its story from true events in the Habsburg Empire nearly contemporaneous with the Salem witch craze. The trouble begins when an old woman is caught stealing a consecrated host during Communion -- she takes it in her mouth without swallowing. Chided by church authorities, she admits that she intended to give it to a neighbor woman to feed to her cow, which had grown dry. The power of the host should restore the flow of milk, after all, and in return the crone would get a quart of peas. In the eyes of the authorities, superstitions like these are sinful, but where there's smoke there may be hellfire.

You can't expect a witch hunter to do his research and feed himself, much less wipe his mouth, all at the same time, can you?

The local countess calls for a witch hunter, and gets Boblig (Vladimir Smeral) who makes his terms clear immediately. Witch hunting is extensive and expensive work, he explains, and he'll need a staff and stipends appropriate to the scale of the work. For Boblig, it's a pure racket; he intends to milk the territory for all he can and live high on the hog all the while. No fanatic ascetic, he enjoys the attentions of a faithful stooge who feeds him while he reads and massages his tootsies when they're tired. To keep himself in business, he resorts to the usual business methods, torturing helpless old women into denouncing others and intimidating others with hints that they're soft on Satan. But the first public burning convinces Deacon Lautner (Elo Romancik) that innocent people have been killed and provokes a power struggle with the witch hunter.

Above, an act of faith. Below, doubt.

Apart from being filmed in stark monochrome, Kladivo has much in common with an international subgenre of witch-hunter films from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Boblig is a Moravian counterpart to Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General of Michael Reeves's cult film, while Lautner is a peer of Urban Grandier, the French priestly hero of Aldous Huxley's book and Ken Russell's film The Devils (of Loudon). For Americans, the witch-craze subject is an instant reminder of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, and Americans' interpretation of that play probably influenced my expectation of how Czechs would have interpreted The Witches' Hammer. There was never any question that Miller intended his play as an allegory of McCarthyism (though he managed, while adapting it into a 1990s screenplay, to make it relevant to modern molestation hysteria). The Crucible conditioned Americans to equate historical witch-hunting with the metaphorical witch hunts that had Commies for quarry. If anything, it's easier to equate witch hunts with the purges and terrors perpetrated by Leninist regimes throughout the 20th century. On that assumption, we might expect Czech audiences with fresh memories of Soviet repression, not to mention Czech censors and Soviet supervisors, to equate Czech witch hunting with its modern Communist equivalent. To western eyes, scenes like the one where condemned victims are prodded to thank the authorities for sentencing them to death practically beg for the sort of anti-totalitarian reading that we'd expect the totalitarians themselves to pick up on and nip in the bud.

A typical victim is trained to recite her confession correctly.

Well, didn't they? I don't know how extensive a release Kladivo got in its homeland, but it seems like the sort of film that shouldn't have been released at all. Perhaps the authorities assumed that different conclusions would be drawn by Czechs than Americans would draw. Vavra himself attempts to impose a specific anticlerical context on the story by cutting back repeatedly to the misogynist ranting of an anonymous hooded fanatic, while the picture closes with a confession that the church has failed mankind by failing to stop Boblig's spree. An anticlerical interpretation of a witch-hunt film is probably the natural one, after all, since repressive, ignorant clergy were the people directly to blame for the suffering of innocents. Audiences might not seek out symbolism or allegory from such a story, especially if they're like the audiences for some of the other witch-hunt films of the time, e.g. Mark of the Devil, that were primitive forms of torture porn.

Despite its origin in a Communist country and its proximity to art-house trends, The Witches' Hammer gives off a strong exploitation vibe. That vibe is never stronger than in its opening sequence, when the fanatic narrator's first misogynist rant is illustrated by scenes from a women's bath house full of nakedly bathing women. We'll have more nudity later -- one woman is stripped and inspected for a mark of the devil -- but the film's main focus is torture.

Thumbscrews are liberally applied and feet are cruelly booted. Where Vavra differs from more thoroughly exploitative directors, however, is his refusal to fetishize torture. The typical victim of torture in his film, for instance, is a haggard old woman rather than a nubile, heavy-breathing wench. There's no catering to sadistic fantasies; only a grim, unrelenting exhibition of cruelty, with no payback or comeuppance for the witch hunter at the end. The horror of it is the apparent impossibility of justice and the helplessness of anyone, even a man of power, who takes the side of justice in an unjust world. Its implicit message of the impossibility of resistance may actually have made Kladivo more compatible to the authorities, much as the Chinese government had no problem with Curse of the Golden Flower's portrayal of a vicious ruler so long as the story made clear that resistance to him was hopeless.

Vavra's grim monochrome presentation elevates the stark story above exploitation, while the grimmer facts of history deny audiences the emotional satisfaction that an exploitation film ought to deliver. His film might still have gone over in the evil-wins environment of Seventies cinema, but its exploitation elements are probably coincidental, a late instance of the thematic convergence of art and exploitation upon subject matter outside the commercial mainstream. I like The Witches' Hammer; it's well acted and well shot and is bracing in its uncompromising chronicle of atrocity. But I don't know if many people will find such a bleak story entertaining; some may find it oppressively demoralizing. But if you liked Witchfinder General or The Devils, Vavra's film, if less flamboyantly acted than the former and less daringly visionary than the latter, is still worthy company for both.

BLOOD SABBATH (1972)

All work and no play makes Samuel a dull boy, so I've taken a brief break from my current preoccupation with The Canon to look for something a bit more wild. It didn't take long to find that something. What I found was this trippy bit of hippie horror from a then-still-rare female director, and what kept me watching was an obvious directorial enthusiasm that transcended and nearly made a virtue of the film's budgetary limitations -- and a relentless tide of female nudity.

One detail that gives Blood Sabbath a bit of historical interest, for historians of trash pop culture, is the star turn by Tony Geary, later to be daytime television's most popular rapist. Here he's David, a young man with a guitar wandering the countryside. He's a classic American loner and isolato, so much an outsider that hippies pick on him. Does he want a beer, they ask him from their hippie van, only to spray the can in his face and flash boobs at him as they drive away.

Those damn hippies. A body can't sleep in the forest without them making noise with their wild parties and all that loud nudity. They won't even leave a man alone! Four naked women pounce upon the reposing David; his response is, basically: "What the hell? Ow! Leave me alone!" Now, many reviewers on IMDB have questioned why this young man should recoil so when presented with such a bounty, but I have to say that the critics are absolutely right. But we can't stop David from running away like it was Sadie Hawkins Day, tripping on a rock, and falling into a river. "Is he dead?" the hippie girls ask, but they lose interest before reaching a decision.

David (Tony Geary) fights his way free of a nubile wall of flesh in Blood Sabbath. Idiot.

David comes to on the riverbank and finds another woman, a clothed woman, bending over him. This he likes, whether because she's clothed or because there's just one of her. Indeed, he's smitten and wants her to keep him company. She'd like to, she says, but she can't stay, and into the water she goes. The next thing Dave knows, he's looking into the grizzled face of Lonzo, a local codger, who asks our hero where he's from. "I'm from Vietnam," David answers. So we know that he has issues. Indeed, these issues will manifest themselves a few times more later in the film. So he's a troubled Vietnam vet, but that's okay, because the clothed girl, Yyala, happens to be a water-nymph. So what we have shaping up here, in high-concept terms, is something like Jacob's Ladder meets Splash.

So she's a nymph. You could do worse. There are witches in the vicinity you see, and you know David wouldn't like them because those evil, attractive young women go about butt naked most of the time. But hanging with the nymph has its own complications.

Yyala: You are of the land, and I am of the sea. You have a soul, David, and I do not. I may not love anyone who has a soul.


David: I can't just give up my soul....Even if I wanted to get rid of my soul I wouldn't know how. But you must know a way!

Yyala: The danger is too great.

Dave's determination to be rid of his soul (you know, the better to love somebody) grows stronger with time, but advice is hard to come by. "Don't ask me about souls!" an irate Lonzo protests, "What do I know about souls?" "Well, who else can I ask?" David complains. Well, what makes him think Lonzo would know anything about the subject. Might it be that Lonzo annually collects a girl child from his village and leaves it up on the mountain for the witches to collect? And what has that to do with Dave's flashback to 'Nam, where he apparently killed a child?

As Blood Sabbath shows, one of the reasons the U.S. lost in Vietnam was because brave warriors like David often had to fight without any visible support. The war effort probably had hardly more budget than this movie did.

During a visit to the village festival, Dave plays a hunch and strikes up a conversation with the local Padre. "You know all about souls, don't you, and how to save them?" he inquires, "Would you know how to go about losing one?" The Padre (I capitalize it because this is all the name he gets in the movie) replies wisely, "Has the tequila gone to your head?" When David persists, the man of God has himself a little conniption fit, calling our hero a freak (well?) and driving him out of the cantina. Like he has a right to be righteous. It turns out that he has some sort of modus vivendi with Alotta, Queen of Witches. There's something about Dyanne Thorne, I guess, that makes a mere name inadequate. She needs a good epithet like "Queen of Witches" or "Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks." She has naked witches on call to entertain the Padre, but he's not in the mood tonight. "Are you resuming the BLOOD SACRIFICE!?" he challenges.

Alotta, Queen of Witches (Dyanne Thorne) knows how to treat guests, but one of the peculiarities of Blood Sabbath is the fact that no one, apparently, likes to be surrounded by horny, naked women.

You see, this sacrifice thing normally isn't as bad as it may have first sounded. As Lonzo finally explains it to David, he leaves the girl on the mountain, the witches pick her up, remove her soul, and raise her to be one of them. Where's the harm --but let's backtrack a moment. "Remove her soul?" Why, I think that's a little light bulb buzzing to life above our hero's head. Why couldn't he take the place of this year's little girl and get a free soul-ectomy. Then he and Yyala could be together forever and ever and ever and ever.

By normal standards, Dave, being a grown man and all, isn't exactly junior witch material. But Alotta (Q.O.W.) takes the offer anyway, though she doesn't care for the whole running-off-with-the-water-nymph idea. "Yyala is inconstant and short-loving," she warns, while I guess she or any of her subordinates would love him long time. Whatever. Dave will work out the contradictions later. For now, his mighty word is, "Yes, take my soul, damn you!"

It's time for a solemn ritual of the witches: the soul-ectomy. You can tell it's a serious occasion because the witches dress for the occasion in bikini bottoms. So clad, they warm things up with some sacred hoochie-koochie dancing before Alotta brings David to the altar. He is laid out, albeit with a discreet covering over the crotch, and the ladies love him up to the point where his double-exposure self (uncovered) up and leaves the room. From this point, David is "free," as he proves by romping around in the woods until the procession of witches, a bit more clad this time, catches up with him. Now we're really serious, for this is the BLOOD SACRIFICE that the Padre fretted about. It's the turn of one of the witches to be laid out on the altar, but there's no loving up for her (and the lack of witch-on-witch action is a grave omission from this film; the closest we get is another witch straddling the victim on the altar and screaming); only a dagger in the throat. Blood fills a ceremonial goblet for Dave to drink from. Feeling quite soulless now, he dashes off to Yyala. Soulless herself, she is nevertheless quite repulsed by the sight of Dave's bloodstained mouth, and just like any bourgeois square water-nymph she runs away in terror.

Once again our hero needs advice. He turns to Alotta this time, and her advice is that he should kill her enemy the Padre and bring the man's head to her. Then Yyala will be his! This request seems odd because earlier we had seen Alotta cursing the Padre and stabbing at a Padre voodoo doll. For all we knew that had accomplished something, but apparently not. He's in his bedroom staring into space as Dave arrives, and the next thing we know Alotta is the proud owner of a fresh head.

"I knew him, Lonzo, a fellow of...Actually, his jest was pretty damn finite."

Things get just a little complicated from this point. For starters, Dave is in a seriously deranged state in which he can't tell Yyala and Alotta apart. In addition, Lonzo finds out about the head and chastises Alotta about it, only to be told by her that Yyala killed the Padre. Alotta wouldn't lie, of course, so the wrathful Lonzo heads out to kill her. Fortunately, Dave intervenes, and Lonzo turns his pointed attentions his way. Fortunately for Dave, Yyala intervenes and stabs Lonzo in the back. For two soulless people our lovers are rather remorseful about this. Yyala in particular bawls over the deed, while David has another flashback.

At a certain point, there's nothing for a flashback-riddled vet to do but kill the villain. But he can't do it without Alotta getting off a final curse; "I call upon your own people to come and kill you!" At which point comes one final flashback in which Soldier Dave radios HQ to tell them that their planes are bombing "your own people." I foolishly had the idea that we were going to get some kind of Nam zombie climax, but by "your own people" the Queen of Witches meant that the instrument of her revenge would be that van full of hippies from the start of the picture. But will her revenge really be that bad for Dave?...

Brianne Murphy, the director of Blood Sabbath, helmed only one other film, spending most of her career as a cinematographer for television. The other film, To Die, To Sleep, was made 22 years later and sounds about as opposite to Blood Sabbath as you can get, but I guess a lot of people grew out of that period in their lives. Still, on the strength of this movie the fact that Murphy didn't work more in the Seventies is regrettable. She knew how to keep a cheap film looking busy with frantic activity and regular outbursts of mass female nudity. As the story gets nuttier, she rose to the occasion in portraying David's delirium. For this she had Tony Geary to thank for bringing the enthusiasm of youth to his role. Like many of the actors, he tends to shout his lines, but this is the sort of film that needs to be hysterical, so there was no point holding him back. Had he more craft at this point in his career, the film would probably have been less entertaining. The only performer who really drops the ball in this regard is Susan Damante, making her movie debut as Yyala. It didn't exactly shock me to learn that she went on to star in the Wilderness Family movies, since those sound better suited to her. For an exotic creature, she was much too mundane, though according to the film's odd logic that seemed to be what attracted David to her. I suppose your traditional woodland sprites or pixies really couldn't compete with hippies for pure exoticism in those days. It's ironic that we regard hippies themselves today as little more than simple woodland creatures. Actually, that makes the combination of hippies and nymphs and witches a better fit than it may have seemed at the time.

I can't really comment on the cinematography because I saw a crappy print, but where this film really punches above its weight is on the musical side. IMDB informs me that the "BAX" to whom the score is credited is none other than Les Baxter of AIP fame, and he nails the notes to match the stark yet wacky imagery throughout the film, from hippie ballads to psycho-syntho trip music. I'd almost say that the film is more worth a listen than a viewing, except that the lavish nudity, quasi-supernatural violence and over-the-top acting, at the very least, makes it very watchable for citizens of the wild world of cinema.

Blood Sabbath can be viewed online on membership sites like Movieflix or Veoh, and can probably be found pretty cheaply otherwise. The only clip I could find on YouTube is dubbed into Spanish, so my poor captures will have to suffice as hints of the naked weirdness on display in this charmingly twisted little film.