Exorcismo (1975)

England, as seen through the eyes of Spanish horror filmmakers and fans in the mid-1970s. Ever since upper-class daughter Leila’s (Mercedes Molina aka Grace Mills) boyfriend has returned from Africa (sigh) and started to go with her to proper Satanic orgies, she hasn’t been the same. Her family is flustered by her newly acquired cynicism and grumpiness, her recreational drug use as well as her tendency to be quite uppity. Though, seeing that the family seems to exclusively consist of what you find when you look in the dictionary under “hypocritical bourgeoisie”, her rebellion wouldn’t actually need Satan as a reason.

However, Leila’s behaviour becomes increasingly unhinged, including things that suggest something a little more unnatural than a young woman fed up with her family. Fortunately for that family, they have somehow acquired vicar Adrian Dunning (Paul Naschy) as a family friend, and call him in to take care of spiritual business. Dunning, being much more liberal towards youth culture and changing moral standards than you’d expect, does at first not believe there’s much of occult import going on with Leila at all. Only once a series of mysterious murders of her peers and family starts and the supernatural manifestations become rather more extreme does he start to invoke the powers of his Lord.

Yep, Paul Naschy is playing a – clearly fighting fit – good-natured and thoughtful vicar in Juan Bosch’s Exorcismo (and of course also co-wrote the script), not exactly the sort of thing he did very often. Even more surprising, he’s not playing a vicar who is also beloved by all women as the perfect specimen of manliness, Naschy the writer clearly this time around putting some of the things Naschy the star loved to the side to do the story he has in mind proper justice.

On paper, this is of course just another attempt at riding the coattails of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, but really, for a film called “Exorcism”, there’s very little exorcism action going on here, with the sort of scenes that actual can remind one of the American film having been exiled to the last ten minutes or so. The possession stuff before the actual exorcism is rather more subdued than in the American film. For most of its running time, the Exorcismo plays out more like a giallo crossed with a handful of elements of the Dennis Wheatley style occult thriller (minus Wheatley’s politics), following Dunning’s – every giallo needs an amateur detective – investigation into the murders, Leila’s strange behaviour, and all the dirty secrets of her family. And because they are a bourgeois family in a giallo-alike, they have quite a few of them, and they do indeed fit into the exorcism angle quite well in the end. If this doesn’t sound terribly much like The Exorcist at all to you, you’re absolutely right. It’s not just that these are structurally very different films, either. Tonally, there’s little connecting the two films either, Bosch’s movie lacking the extremely reactionary spirit of the Friedkin film and instead focussing on a rather left-leaning critique of exactly those values the American film holds so dear, and with little genuine interest in religious doctrine. That’s obviously quite a bit more in my boathouse.

Quite a few Spanish horror films of this era, involving Naschy or not, can have a bit of a slapdash feel to it, with dubious pacing and moments where the film tells instead of shows what should be hugely important scenes. To my pleasant surprise, this is not at all the case here, and the narrative – as befits a film with a large mystery element – is actually rather well constructed, with everything the audience should see and hear actually happening in front of it, and a pace that’s perfect 70s mid-tempo. Of course, you can still see some of the film’s budgetary constraints, so some of the sets are cramped, leading to not terribly ideal framing, and some scenes really could have used another take. On the other hand, Bosch does display moments of fine creativity, staging various murders and Dunning’s final confrontation with Satan atmospherically, nodding to German expressionism and using all the colours we want from our 70s horror. It’s often surprisingly effective, which is certainly helped by a fine cast of Spanish actors playing sleazebags, Naschy showing a bit more of his sensitive side, and Molina doing fine work in the writhing, nasty screaming and screeching and evil looks departments.

A special mention should finally go to the satanic orgy sequences that up the sleaze factor a bit, feature nothing authentically occult whatsoever but do recommend themselves by their sheer absurdity as well as the surprising number of guys dressed like Zorro without the hat in them.


If that’s not enough to interest you in Exorcismo, dear imaginary reader, I don’t know what is.

Assignment Naschy: La Maldicion De La Bestia (1975)

aka Night of the Howling Beast

aka Hall of the Mountain King

aka Horror of the Werewolf

aka The Werewolf and the Yeti

In this edition of the long and continuity-challenged cycle of movies about poor beleaguered Waldemar Daninsky (Paul Naschy), our hero is a famous psychologist, anthropologist and adventurer. Because of his manifold talents, a certain Professor Lacombe (Josep Castillo Escalona) - coming with the mandatory young, pretty, and soon Wally-adoring daughter (Mercedes Molina) - asks for Waldemar's help mounting an expedition to continue the life's work of a now deceased colleague who was travelling Nepal looking for the Yeti. In fact, the dead scientist managed to find the animal, but making a photo of a yeti and then getting mauled to death by one is no proof for it's existence. Or something.

Anyway, Waldemar does of course agree to help out with the expedition. Once they have arrived in CataloniaNepal, the main body of the expedition stays behind while Waldemar strides forth heroically to find a pass to Yeti Central, an attempt that is the death of his only companion on this part of the journey, and nearly Waldemar's as well.

After some exhausted stumbling through Catanepalia, Waldemar comes upon an inhabited cave, where two women pray to Black Kali and a stone sarcophagus with an arrow in it. Despite saving Waldemar's life and starting a freaky threesome, the two don't have his best interests at heart, for they are cannibalistic witches with lycanthropic tendencies (or something of the sort), and they are planning to turn Waldemar into their companion (he will be an avid lover, or so they say). That arrow sticking out of the sarcophagus comes in handy once Waldemar has found out that his hosts aren't exactly human, but even though he manages to kill the women, one of them gives him a good and proper bite that of course infects our hero with the curse of the wolfman.

While all this has been happening to Waldemar, the rest of the expedition has decided to follow their disappeared friend, but soon find themselves under attack by bandits working for the local potentate, Sekkar Khan (Luis Induni). These bandits are of the "torture the young men, rape and kidnap the women and just kidnap the wise old men" persuasion, so it's no surprise that soon enough not many members of the expedition are left. The Professor, Waldemar's buddy Larry Talbot(!) (Gil Vidal), and Talbot's girlfriend Melody (Veronica Miriel) are captured and brought to the Khan's palace. Sylvia manages to escape only to run straight into the arms of another rape-y group of the bad guys.

Fortunately, it is then that Waldemar re-appears. Even though it is daylight, he's walking around in wolfman form and he's not at all in the mood for rapists. Soon after taking care of Sylvia's attackers, our hero loses his fur again, so it's time for him and Sylvia to try and rescue their kidnapped friends. There are also still a wise monk, more kidnappings, an evil witch/mad scientist named Wandessa (Silvia Solar), some Naschy-style swashbuckling, a short Wolfman versus Yeti fight and a surprise ending waiting in the couple's future.

After the rather boring gothic horror of El Retorno de Walpurgis, actor/scriptwriter and professional wolfman Paul Naschy brought his series of Waldemar Daninsky movies back to their roots, that is to say, into the realm of pulp craziness where he - as I now realize - ruled supreme.

This time around, Naschy has decided to spice up his stew of supernatural silliness with a dollop of adventure movie tropes, and cut down on Waldemar's self-pity. Even though Naschy possibly made the latter decision only because there was no space for the usual whining scenes in his film's allotted running time, it turns Waldemar into a more sympathetic character than he usually is for me; there is a time and place for whining about being a werewolf, but it's pretty difficult to see Waldemar as a tragic figure when he never seems to spend a single thought on the people he killed.

Watching Maldicion, I was also pretty surprised by the film's ending, or rather, I was surprised that Naschy didn't hold to his established formula for the ending this time around, but actually went for something a bit more friendly for this more deserving Waldemar. I don't know if Naschy had an especially optimistic year in '75, if he just wanted to shake things up a little, or if the film's ending was producer mandated; I do know that I like this change, even though I'm a pessimist at heart.

As a writer, Naschy had become quite a bit more proficient at this point in the Daninsky cycle. Sure, especially the film's beginning still features scenes of people telling each other parts of the plot, but generally, Naschy now prefers to show us potentially awesome things instead of just telling us about them. Structurally, Maldicion is still a bit of a mess, but it's one because Naschy has stuffed it full of, well, everything.

While this grab-bag approach to plot (or "plot") construction may be rather problematic if you believe only in the tight, the clear, and the coherent, I can't help but admire it, for I think this approach is based on Naschy's unwillingness to just repeat his favourite elements of a certain Universal movie. It's an attempt to liven things up, even if the narrative has to get crazier with each film and Naschy has to go to more ridiculous lengths with each film, this time around ending up with a film containing witches, werewolves, warlords, yetis, kindly monks and everything else that's wonderful and cheap.

All of this is of course very very silly, a silliness that is further emphasised by the film's brazen attempt to sell late-autumnal/early winter Catalonia as Nepal without even trying a bit of movie magic to make it look that way. The whole adventure movie element, with its bizarre ideas about local dress and culture, is a lot like little kids pretending to be Cowboys and Indians, which of course means that it's much more enjoyable than more earnest attempts would be, at least in the context of a Dansinky movie. Plus, the parts of Catalonia this was filmed in are very picturesque places for a wolfman to wander through, Nepal or not.

But even if you don't like to look at the pretty landscape or to laugh about not-Nepal, Naschy is trying his hardest to find something that might entertain you, so there's his wolfman, a bit of swashbuckling, some near-nudity, somewhat freaky sexiness, utter confusion, some curious Buddhism, a handful of moments of a certain ickiness, romance, a yeti, various witches and half-witches, multi-coloured fluids, a real deus ex machina, a very colourful (remember when movies weren't avoiding colours?) cave, "native" dancing, etc. and so on and so forth, all held together with a shoe-string budget (I suspect) and a clear and wonderful feeling of enthusiasm. Whatever you like in your pulp entertainment, Paul Naschy, director Miguel Iglesias, and La Maldicion de la Bestia have your back, and they have it gladly.

 

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