In short: The Sea Serpent (1985)

aka Hydra, the Sea Serpent

Original title: Serpiente de mar

The Sea Serpent concerns a giant sea serpent (surprise) created by an experimental H-bomb (cue five minutes or so of hilariously silly and contrived “coded” language between pilots and their home base, which does not look like a room in a military installation at all). A trio, sometimes quartet, of weirdos who witness various serpent attacks - a particularly grumpy looking Ray Milland, Timothy Bottoms, Taryn Power and Jared Martin as the on-again, off-again friend/enemy who believes Bottoms is responsible for the death of his brother only to join the fight once he finally sees the serpent as well.

If you’d tell me there were two Spanish genre directors called Amando de Ossorio, I’d absolutely want to believe you. It’s a more interesting explanation for the insanely varied quality of his work than the truth of luck, opportunity and what probably wasn’t a willingness to gilden any old crap.

Alas, this one was made by the lesser de Ossorio, so if you’re coming in expecting some moody sea serpent action, a bit – or a lot of – sleaze, and other more serious joys of a giant monster movie, you’ll be sorely disappointed. To be fair, given the quality of the sea serpent puppet, de Ossorio does his best with it, letting the adorable thing squish lighthouses or molest ships as often as he can afford it. Which, alas, isn’t all that often.

Thus much of the film has to be filled with the sort of cheap business you get up to when you have no budget for anything of visual interest and only a limited degree of imagination available. This starts with the much too long military code babble sequence and will continue through boring human interest – why the hell was the brother of Martin’s character not at least killed by the sea serpent instead of bad luck to make things at least a little less random and more dramatic? –, a conspiracy angle that makes little sense and is dropped whenever the film gets bored with it, and exciting sequences like Bottoms breaking Power out of a psychiatric clinic by putting her into a white coat and then simply wandering off with her until they encounter a guard who is beaten by some absurdly awkward flirting. An exciting giant monster movie, this is not.

Having said that, I can’t pretend I didn’t enjoy my time with The Sea Serpent. There’s certainly something about the crappiness of the monster that’s more charming than annoying, and the superfluous business between the monster scenes is certainly neither clever nor relevant but also kind of fun if you’re in the mood for filler instead of a main course.

Demon Witch Child (1975)

aka The Possessed

Original title: La endemoniada

Mr. Barnes (Ángel del Pozo) rules his Spanish town with a bit of an iron hand, it seems. When a baby disappears, he suggests (ahem) a group of wandering “gypsies” (I use this term because “Romani” seems to be a completely inappropriate description for what we see in the film) is at fault. As will turn out soon enough, he’s absolutely right, because these aren’t your typical travelling folk, but actually a wandering Satanic cult led by an old woman with a very distinctive face who calls herself Mother Gautère (Tota Alba). The bumbling and ineffective chief of police (Fernando Sancho) and his henchpeople manage to arrest the old gal, surprisingly enough, but during interrogation, she jumps out of a window, committing suicide before she can be injected with pentothal.

Of course, Mother Gautère’s second in command (Kali Hansa) swears vengeance, especially on Mr Barnes and his family. Rather quickly, Barnes’s daughter Susan (Marián Salgado) is possessed by the spirit of Mother Gautère herself, sacrificing babies, imitating voices and strangling men many times her weight. Only the local young priest, Father Juan (Julián Mateos) can help, but he is regularly distracted by some melodrama between him and the woman he left to turn to the priesthood, and her disappointed life as a prostitute.

I’ve repeatedly gone on record with my general dislike for William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Its fears and theological arguments don’t work for this hard-headed atheist, and it is because it is as serious and well-made a film actually about its themes as it is that it also doesn’t work as a horror movie for me.

Fortunately, there’s a whole load of cheap, trashy and deeply unserious films inspired by/ripping off elements of Friedkin’s film I am able to enjoy. Amando “Blind Dead” de Ossorio’s Spanish example of the form, Demon Witch Child, certainly is cheep and trashy, as well as pulpy, sometimes hilariously mean-spirited, and a lot of fun for my by these virtues. I could have done without the business about the Father Juan’s prostitute troubles (alternatively, this element of the film could have simply been better written, but let’s not be unrealistic here), and the whole “travelling folk as baby murdering Satan worshippers” angle is rather distasteful, but otherwise, what’s not to like?

To whit: apart from the more usual possession business with floating, head rotating and spitting, possessed Susan is a bit more proactive than many of her peers. She regularly takes on the face of Mother Gautère and goes out strangling people, who are properly freaked out by the surprisingly creepy “old face on child’s body” make-up. She also likes to have her little jokes. So an implied after-murder castration (whose beginning even suggests a bit of necrophilia de Ossorio apparently decided to leave to Italian filmmakers), and gifting the nicely packaged, ahem, package to the victim’s fiancée is all in her program, as are voice imitation to confuse all kinds of matters and other general nastiness.

All of which is filmed in a manner rather typical of many de Ossorio films I’ve seen, where about half of the scenes look incredibly shoddily blocked and staged and edited with a hatchet, whereas the other half is full of Dutch angles, threatening camera movements and every other trick to make a scene creepy you can use when you don’t have much of a budget. Thankfully, the film’s general air of unhealthy imagination and its lurid energy are more than enough to help one through the rough patches, and enjoy the weird and inspired scenes of witch-faced children and Dracula-style wallcrawling.

In short: Malenka (1969)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Night of the Seagulls (1975)

Original title: La noche de las gaviotas

Dr. Henry Stein (Victor Petit) and his wife Joan (María Kosty) are sent to an out of the way coastal village where Henry is to replace the last village doctor. Finding their new place of residence isn’t terribly easy, though, for every villager they ask about the way the doctor’s house answers with stony silence.

Once there, the couple encounters their predecessor, an old man so afraid of something he won’t stay another night. He does give some of the traditional vague, doom-laden hints, and mentions the villagers don’t want them there, but, as is traditional in these cases, he’s not the most helpful informant you could wish for.

Consequently, Joan and Henry will have to find out what’s going on with the villagers and what they might be up to on their own. For one, the locals hold nightly ceremonies at the beach in which they leave young women tied up against a rock for the undead Knights Templar - as known from the first three Blind Dead movies - so the Templars in turn can sacrifice the women to the golden idol of some sort of hideous water creature (shall we call the thing Dagon?). To the Steins, the villagers are mostly stone-faced, rude and vaguely threatening, but Joan’s tendency to take in strays in form of the mentally handicapped Tedd (José Antonio Calvo) – literal village punching bag – and slightly more sociable village girl Lucy (Sandra Mozarowsky) combined with Henry taking the whole “saving lives” part of being a doctor very seriously indeed rather quickly makes relations even more strained. In the end, the new doctor’s couple will spell catastrophe for the village, which really deserves one.

Now, given that the whole plot is about a supernaturally oppressed village that is so brutalized by its fate it becomes actively complicit in the actions of its oppressor and just loves to turn on anyone who is different, and that it was filmed at the tail end of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, I find it impossible not to read Night of the Seagulls as an acerbic comment of director Amando de Ossorio on the country around him, featuring Franco as a golden idol, the blind dead as his true believers and the villagers as the general Spanish population. It’s not a terribly subtle metaphor but then, “subtle” isn’t a word to describe military dictatorships either.

This very visible subtext doesn’t mean the fourth (and alas final) Blind Dead film isn’t a horror film first and foremost. It does however mean a change of pace for the series after the classically exploitational first two films and the total shit show of the third. This time around, de Ossorio puts heavy emphasis on an eerie mood of decay, attempting something different from most of his other horror films. There’s still a bit of blood, close-ups of cut-out hearts and such things, yet this version of the Blind Dead (whose myth changed a bit in every single one of the movies) isn’t as much into blood drinking and pointless slaughter as before but performs an unpleasant religious service to their strange sea god. Even the gratuitous nudity is nearly non-existent.

Instead, much of the film’s considerable power comes from lingering shots of the fantastically creepy village location, the crude yet effective portrayal of the casual brutality as well as quiet desperation of the villagers, the sounds of bells and seagulls, and the always creepy presence of our undead Templar villains. Building a film on elements like these does of course mean it won’t be full of exciting action sequences, so Night of the Seagulls is a bit of a slow mover that really takes its time to build up to its climactic scenes. Coming from me, this isn’t a complaint, of course, particularly not since there’s a point to the slowness in a film that seems much more interested in a slowly mounting dread than in its handful of shocks.

For once, a de Ossorio movie even features likeable leads, with Joan acting as often with kindness and compassion as she is near hysterics and Henry – despite a bit of rather mild 70s macho posturing – turning out to care about other people more than about himself too. Why,a viewer might even find themselves caring about what happens to these two.

Last but not least, it is pretty much impossible for me to dislike a film that uses Lovecraftian elements in such a fine, unobtrusive way as this one does, featuring as it does a decaying seaside village sacrificing to a fishy looking godhood, without ever needing to list mythos books or creatures. The film’s seagulls (eerily active at night) whose voices in shades of The Dunwich Horror are the souls of the murdered women and girls of many generations are rather on the Lovecraftian side too, but used in the best way, as building blocks for de Ossorio’s own mythology.

The Night of the Sorcerers (1973)

Original title: La noche de los brujos

Post-colonial Africa, probably Kenya. A very small expedition is making its way through the countryside to do something ecologically important discerning the reasons for the dying out of the local animal population. The group consists of Professor Grant (the inevitable Jack Taylor), his younger colleague Rod Carter (Simón Andres) who will later turn out to be the kind of guy you really don't want to have on guard duty, Liz (Maria Kosty), the bitchy and whiny daughter of the rich man financing the whole business, Carol (Loreta Tovar), who is frequently nude, and Tunika (Kali Hansa), even more frequently nude and Rod's girlfriend. There's some jealousy plot or between everyone and their mothers, but it's never going anywhere.
When our heroes (cough) camp at their first point of interest, a trader in furs (living in exile?) named Tomunga (José Thelman) attempts to warn them off, for the area is supposed to be cursed by the ghosts of a dozen sorcerers once (as seen in the movie's first scene) killed by the colonial powers during a sacrificial ceremony meant to create a were-leopard. Supposedly, the sorcerers rise from their graves every night to do Very Bad Things™ to whoever they come in contact with - preferably white women they like to turn into wereleopards too.
The merry gang waves Tomunga's warning off, and - what do you know? - soon are one after the other killed or wereleopardized. Will anyone survive? Do I look like I care?
I harbour a deep and abiding love for Spanish director Amando de Ossorio's first and fourth Blind Dead film, and am therefore always willing to give his other movies a chance. Unfortunately Night of the Sorcerers is much closer to the much-hated third of said Blind Dead films, mixing a bit of the old ultra violence, stupid plotting, and huge amounts of sleaze into a concoction that's often pretty boring. I'd say surprisingly boring, but then I have been bored by a lot of things that sound exciting in movies.
As frequent readers of this blog will probably understand by now, I have hardly any moral qualms about violence and sleazy nudity in my films, so it's not that its mind is in the gutter that bothers me about Night of the Sorcerers. In fact, de Ossorio's desperate attempts to shoehorn nudity into the least fitting situations (personal favourite: a completely pointless "character moment" taking place with one of the female characters discussing her emotional life while sponging herself off) is one of the film's more sympathetic features. It's just too bad that all that sleaze stops the rest of the film dead in its tracks and really does a good job at hindering any attempt at mood building that could turn this into an atmospheric horror movie too.
It's not as if the film did not have other problems: there's the sluggish pacing, characters who only ever act like idiots, a male hero who is responsible for people's death by skipping his guard duty for a long sex scene with his girlfriend not once but twice, and the little innocent fact that an actual plot only makes an appearance in the film's last thirty minutes or so. Before that, it's all women undressing, a bit of murder, and people doing and saying nothing of consequence.
Ossorio also attempts to use some of the stylistic tricks that worked so well for him in the first Blind Dead movie made the year before, but never manages to get the all-important details right that would let the film work on that rewarding non-naturalistic level. In fact, I don't think de Ossorio actually realized why the respective tricks did work in his earlier movie. Just take the use of slow-motion: where the blind dead in their decrepit state are made more threatening and unreal by being filmed in slow motion so often, the skimpy fur bikini leopard women are only ever made more ridiculous (and the acting surely doesn't help) and less threatening.
Where the earlier film oozes a strange and dream-like quality all of its own, Night only ever works as more than a mild piece of softcore sleaze in a handful of scenes during its final thirty minutes: there, Ossorio seems to find his lost horror filmmaker again. Suddenly, the director shows the return of a murdered character as a zombie in a red-lit scene (again very reminiscent of another scene from the first Blind Dead film) that is actually as dream-like and frightening as its content deserves, treats the abduction of another (sleeping-pill addled) character by a leopard woman as a moment right out of a fairy tale or dream, and - in an imaginary moment that for once positively reminds of the strange rules the Blind Dead have to follow - explains why the leopard woman all wear little green collars round there throats.
These few scenes aren't exactly enough to turn Night of the Sorcerers around - there's still a very dumb climax standing in the way, and too much boredom before - they do however make the film worthwhile beyond the ogling of pretty women and Jack Taylor (if he floats your boat), and demonstrate how strong a director of the fairy tale-like and strange type of horror de Ossorio could be when he applied his talents to it.

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In short: Las Garras De Lorelei (1974)

aka When the Screaming Stops

aka The Lorelei's Grasp

A sleepy German town by the Rhine is disturbed by a series of brutal murders. A rude amphibian is roaming the night, killing people (predominantly women) and absconding with their hearts. The local Hungarian blind hippie "gypsy" fiddler knows what's going on: the Loreley has risen from her grotto, turned into a horrible creature by the light of the moon to hunt for the hearts that will sustain her for the coming centuries. Surprisingly, nobody seems to believe that theory.

Elke Ackerman (Silvia Tortosa), a Professor in the close-by school for (pretty adult) girls is understandably disturbed by the murders, so she and the school decide to hire the professional hunter Sigurd (Tony Kendall) to protect the girls from what they believe to be a dangerous animals. Sigurd's impossible manliness brings its own problems with it, though. Not only are all the girls only too willing to make sweet, 70s eye and breast contact with him, even the virtuous Professor can hardly resist Sigurd's charms and falls into the classic movie behaviour of love-bickering with him whenever she sees him prancing around in the horrifying, yet formfitting fashion he decides to wear on any given day.

With his testosterone level now probably driven to a nearly lethal heights, it's no wonder Sigurd soon meets and falls in love with the human form of the Loreley (Helga Liné), who likes to pose by the Rhine in a tiny bikini. Loreley loves him back, too, but the love between manly men on a mission and were-Deep Ones can only lead to trouble, especially when said were-Deep One just can't let go of her diet of human hearts.

Spanish director Amando de Ossorio may be best known for his Blind Dead movies (with the first and the fourth one of that series clearly being his best films), but he did of course make other films.

One of these is this curious interpretation of the Loreley myth that turns the siren into the guardian of the treasure of the Nibelungs with the honest to Wotan Alberic (Luis Barboo) as her assistant who's there to give people a good whipping. I am of course a sucker for weird sideways interpretations of any sort of Western myth, and can't help but admire a film that turns the Loreley into a were-Deep One (or, as the mandatory Professor explains, some sort of were-throwback to an earlier human form that just happens to look like a bad rubber amphibian monster) and still has scenes that attempt to give it a serious dream-like mood, even though plot, dialogue and acting here can only ever achieve a cheese-like mood, quite like the moon.

The more mythical scenes are standing in stark contrast to much of the rest of the film which consists of Tony Kendall and various very attractive actresses strutting their stuff in horrifying pieces of 70s fashion or varying states of undress, and some very unconvincing gore.

De Ossorio films this fine mixture of sleaze and nonsense - the film also features a radioactive dagger, people acting like proper idiots, super dynamite, and Loreley's female servants (the Rhine maidens?) cat-fighting over Kendall  - in an exceedingly pretty style with sometimes pleasantly eye-popping colours and location shots of picture postcard quality.

Las Garras De Lorelei is not a film I can find in my heart to take seriously in the least, but it is one that does delight me as a fine - and oh so typical of the 70s - melange of cheese, sleaze and imagination.

 

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