Past Misdeeds: La vendetta di Lady Morgan (1965)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Warning: spoilers haunt this write-up with adorable puffs of smoke!

Despite her rather uninviting name, 19th Century (or thereabouts, we’re in Gothic Horror time here) noble Susan Blackhouse (Barbara Nelli) leads a bit of a charmed life: not only will she very soon inherit one of the greatest fortunes in the country but she has also found love in the hunky shape of French architect Pierre Brissac (Michel Forain). Even better, when Susan declares her love and her determination to marry Pierre, neither her uncle Neville (Carlo Kechler) nor the man she was actually supposed to marry, Sir Harold Morgan (Paul Muller) put up even a bit of a fight.

So, once Pierre will return from a quick trip to Paris, a-marrying they will go. Alas, someone with the same haircut and general body shape as Harold’s manservant Roger (Gordon Mitchell) throws Pierre off the ferry to France, breaking Susan’s heart in the process.

Some time later, and for no explicable reason seeing as nobody was actually trying to push her into it, Susan decides to marry Harold. It’s going to be a bit of a curious marriage, though, for she, her uncle and her husband have made a pact to have her leave the country and stay with Neville right after the wedding ceremony until such a time as she will be actually willing and able to love Harold. We can only assume the patron saint of good plans was on holiday.

While this melodramatic brouhaha is going on, the audience learn that Pierre did actually survive his involuntary swimming lesson. Of course, and to nobody’s surprise given the rest of the plot, he’s suffering from amnesia that’ll only lift when it’s opportune for further developments, that is to say, the film needs a warm body to be threatened by vampire ghosts.

Again some time later, Susan decides she’s willing to move in with her husband who has been living in her ancestral home while she was shacking up with Uncle Neville. But how curious! Harold has let go all of her trusted servants but one, and so the house staff now consists of the not-at-all-murderous Roger, Susan’s least favourite maid, and one Lillian (Erika Blanc), a woman with quite the habit of grim staring. Or is it even…hypnotic staring? So now it’s time for the gaslighting part of the film. However, to give Lady Morgan its due, only few gaslight plots work with the help of a female hypnotist who whispers through a connection between her and her victim’s bed room, nor do many of them succeed in what amounts to the space of two or three nights.

By now, I’ve grown quite used to the fact that even the best Italian Gothic Horror films tend to have plots that only make sense when looked at as products of dream states or as walking and talking metaphors but even in this exalted realm Massimo Pupillo’s La vendetta di Lady Morgan is quite remarkable; it also isn’t a film to which the word “best” applies. However, Pupillo’s film is bad in all the right ways, and I don’t think it’s possible to be bored by it, or not come away from it liking this dubious piece of work that it is quite a bit.

It’s not just that the film’s narrative content is – quite keeping in the style of the original gothic novels, of course, though I doubt that’s on purpose – pretty darn stupid, dominated by coincidences and really bad plans that only work because everybody involved is an idiot, it’s also that Pupillo pretends the nonsense to be very very serious in the most hysterically melodramatic tones he can afford, with no line of dialogue that isn’t commented on by cloying and dominant music, and come to think of it, no line of dialogue that shouldn’t be ended with at least one or two exclamation points.

I can’t help but admire the film for it, though, for there really are few Gothics – quite independent of the country they were made in – whose tone is as consistently shrill; there are also only very few films where the main character has a major freak-out because she’s convinced her husband’s manservant has ONLY PRETENDED TO POUR WINE FOR HER (insert DRAMATIC MUSIC and ZOOMS ZOOMS ZOOMS here!), which honestly is the point where our dear Susan gets her first big breakdown. Who’d have thunk Erika Blanc staring at a girl really hard and whispering “You’re crazy! You’re crazy!”, and a guy not pouring wine could be this effective?

The acting is on par with the writing too (is that artistic unity, or what?), with Nelli portraying Susan as a gibbering emotional wreck on the slightest provocation, Muller making all the evil faces a career of playing the bad guy had provided him with, Blanc looking really, really annoyed – unless when she’s rubbing a man’s face and shoulders, which is this film’s apex of eroticism and her face turns to looking slightly less annoyed – and Gordon Mitchell. Well, and we all know how Gordon Mitchell gets when a director tells him to really let loose with his acting, don’t we?

And this all happens before the film’s final twenty-five minutes or so hit, and the titular vengeance of Lady Morgan finally starts. You see, right at the moment when the evil conspirators have managed to drive Susan to death (spoiler, I guess), Pierre suddenly remembers everything, and promptly returns to Susan’s ancestral home where he and Susan’s ghost proceed to have face and shoulder-rubbing ghost sex, after which she tells him how she spooked her murderers into killing one another with her awesome powers of blowing out candles, turning whiskey into water, letting little smoke explosions off, blowing up a vase, stealing shoes, and whispering. Said conspirators of course treat all this as if it were the height of the scare; well, and reason to kill one another, of course. Oh, and afterwards our now dead bad guys have turned into some kind of ghost vampires keeping themselves undead with the blood of Uncle Neville, whom they had stashed in the cellar when they were still alive to give Gordon Mitchell somebody to whip. Nope, I got nothing.


What I do have is a healthy respect for the grand gestures Pupillo uses to treat the piddling and harmless supernatural phenomena he’s got in his budget, trying and failing merrily to turn that bloody exploding vase into a real event, pretending that all that screaming and shouting through a very limited number of generally overly lit sets were actually utterly horrifying. And really, if I have to watch some third row Italian Gothic made by people who were neither named Bava, Freda or Margheriti, or just plain crazy, I rather prefer a film like this that’s desperate to provide me with all the entertainment it can afford.

On ExB: La Vendetta di Lady Morgan (1965)

Many of the lesser entries into the Italian Gothic Horror cycle tend to be a bit – or often rather a lot – on the boring side, with little visible effort put into making the things actually entertaining.

Massimo Pupillo’s tale of the vengeance of Lady Morgan is a bit different there. Not that it’s a good film or anything exalted of that kind, but it certainly is a very entertaining one, and most certainly one that’s working hard for its audience. Let me tell you more about it over in my column on Exploder Button.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,other places,horror,gothic,massimo pupillo,barbara nelli,erika blanc,gordon mitchell,paul muller

The Devil's Nightmare (1971)

Original title: La plus longue nuit du diable

aka Vampire Playgirls

A group of seven travellers (a glutton, a seminarist, an unfaithful husband and his rich and greedy wife, an old grump, an oversexed young woman and another one who really likes to sleep a lot) on a bus tour lose their way and have to spend the night in the castle of Baron von Rhoneberg (Jean Servais). While the baron is welcoming the seven with open arms, they soon realize something's not right with the place. The creepy butler Hans loves telling the guests about the violent deaths that happened in each room, all connected with the von Rhoneberg family curse that turns the firstborn daughter of every Rhoneberg generation into a succubus. So it's probably for the better the film showed the present Baron murdering his infant daughter in the pre-credit sequence.

The castle has a curious influence on the guests: they all indulge in their various obsessions - all part of one particular Deadly Sin - a little more openly, and suddenly, than people usually do. Most everyone's behaviour turns from strange to downright crazy once Lisa Müller (Erika Blanc), another tourist in dire need of a room, appears. It's pretty obvious Lisa is a servant of the Devil (Daniel Emilfork) himself, so it will not come as much of a surprise when the tourists die one after the other by her hand while indulging in their favourite sin. But will Lisa be able to bag herself a seminarist, too?

Leave it to a cooperation between Belgium and Italy to make the most Catholic 70s European horror movie I've seen that isn't about possession but about a succubus really doing very traditional devil's work by enabling people to indulge in their sins and then killing them before they can be absolved of these sins. How serious director Jean Brismée and his writers take the theological content of their film is of course questionable, for Devil's Nightmare is an exploitation film through and through, which means it is a film very much in the business of tut-tut-ing at people indulging in behaviour it tells us is morally corrupt while spending all of its running time showing us this behaviour with great enthusiasm.

I have seen sleazier movies made in Europe in the 70s, but The Devil's Nightmare still has more than enough room for close-ups of a guy over-eating, mock-lesbian shenanigans, Erika Blanc's attempts at seducing a seminarist, infidelity, Erika Blanc in simple yet effective demoness make-up, breasts (though it has to be said that the film's sex scenes, at least in the cut I watched, are rather on the harmless side and only interested in showing off a little naked actress rather than in the simulated sex they have), and a wee bit of violence.

Devil's Nightmare isn't quite as stylish, or crazy, or sleazy as some of its (especially Italian) counterparts in the European horror game of the era. I wouldn't call its aesthetics exactly conservative, but from time to time, I wished it would indulge its own flights of fancy a little more. Some of its sleaziness just feels a bit awkward, especially in the lesbian sex scene and the final seduction attempt of our seminarist hero Blanc indulges in, rather than like it should feel - an attempt to be sleazier, or cruder, or more tasteless than all films that came before, and certainly sleazier than the audience expects.

As it stands, the film is at its best whenever it comes closest to the feeling of a dream (which is especially appropriate for this particular film for plot reasons), or involves some actual fairy tale tropes. There's a scene of a deal with the devil right out of a (Catholic) fairy-tale that I found particular effective in that regard.

Taken as a whole, Brismée's film is taking up the middle ground of this particular type of European horror movie. The Devil's Nightmare is not quite outrageous or colourful enough to win my heart completely, but contains enough of the good stuff to be worthy of my time.

Technorati-Markierungen: belgian movies,italian movies,reviews,horror,jean brismée,erika blanc

Assignment Naschy: A Dragonfly For Each Corpse (1974)

Original title: Una libélula para cada muerto

A black-garbed and red-trousered killer strolls around Milan, killing addicts, prostitutes and lovers of kinky sex, leaving an artificial dragonfly with each corpse. To prove himself after a never explained case that went spectacularly bad, sadistic, mean-spirited cigar-chomping Inspector Paolo Scaporella (Paul Naschy) is put on the case. Scaporella - whom the film first shows threatening a flasher with death the next time he sees him - seems not too excited about the prospect, for he thinks the victims are getting exactly what they deserve. But it's a job, right?

Scaporella's actual investigation plays out with him not doing much for a while, except getting his wife Silvana (Erika Blanc), who is clearly the brains of the marriage, interested in the case and using a dinner party to a) learn that the dragonfly is a Chaldean symbol to mark "degenerates" and b) put a friendly gay fashion designer to finding out who made the special button he found with one of the victims. The latter will - quite unlike anything Scaporella is going to do - be important later on, but until the film reaches that point, it's scenes and scenes of our "hero" walking around chomping on his cigar, getting pascha-ed by his wife and beaten up by nazi bikers while following up clues that won't actually be important later on. Once the audience really has enough of that, the killings finally reach the inspector's friends from that all important dinner party. There's just enough time for Silvana getting close to the truth and herself in danger before Scaporella understands what's going on.

Directed by Paul Naschy's frequent collaborator León Klimovsky, Dragonfly is the duo's attempt at fusing the Italian giallo and the Italian cop movie by combining both genre's worst traits into a single, meandering piece of reactionary boredom.

So we get the silly mystery full of holes and the loosely structured plot typical of the giallo without much of the genre's visual panache; we get the cop film's hatred of everything and everyone who is different without much of its hatred for large-scale corruption, its often conflicted view of its cop heroes or its exciting action scenes.

Naschy's Scaporella is clearly set-up to be the shining hero of the piece. Yes, the audience is supposed to admire a guy who lets a wounded gangster he's going to arrest crawl to his car on his wounded leg, and who only sees "degenerates" deserving of death in addicts, prostitutes and people who like utterly innocent things like threesomes and necrophiliac role-play. If you see a clear opportunity for the film to explore some rather interesting points about how close its supposed hero and its villain are, then you're a lot cleverer than Naschy's script - like he does with everything potentially interesting in it, Naschy decides not to explore that aspect to put in another scene of himself being shirtless, as if you couldn't combine these things perfectly in some sexposition if you wanted to.

Another of the film's problems is that its ideas of what's "degenerate", and its way of showing them off is painfully behind what the Italians did and unpleasantly reactionary. Where even the most suspect giallos are so gleeful in their depiction of sex and depravity (or "depravity") that it's usually impossible to tell if they are in awe of or looking down on it (I usually suspect them to do both at once), Dragonfly really is so little into that sort of thing that it shows nearly none of it in an interesting way, leaving me neither shocked by the depths of human depravity as I'm clearly supposed to be, nor titillated as I'd have liked to be.

But even if you ignore these problems and flaws, Dragonfly just plain doesn't work as a mystery or a crime film. I could live with the ridiculousness of the set-up, but Naschy the writer is not someone able to produce the tightness of script that would be the only thing able to save the film. It's all wandering around and Naschy showing off how awesome he is without ever actually being awesome. Our supposed hero really comes off as a particularly dense bully who should listen to his wife more (even when she calls that thinking he never does "women's intuition"), stumbling through a case that's just not all that interesting.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,giallo,mystery,reviews,paul naschy,leon klimovsky,erika blanc

In short: Spies Kill Silently (1966)

aka Spy Strikes Silently

Famous scientists of a humanitarian bend - which in this film means scientists doing things like looking for a cure for cancer, not building death rays, surprisingly enough - die in mysterious ways. It looks like natural causes, but the international secret services soon figure out that the scientists were all murdered. By whom and why is unknown (and the latter will stay unknown even after the movie is through).

The British send the best spy of the Americans (no, I don't understand how that's supposed to work either), Michael Drum (Lang Jeffries) to Beirut to protect a Professor working on the cure for cancer there. Whoever is responsible for the other murders isn't too keen on Drum's presence, so the assassination attempts on him start before he has even had the opportunity to meet the man he is supposed to guard, but if there's one thing Drum is good at, it's killing back people who want to kill him. It's just too bad that he never leaves any survivors he could question about the identity of their boss or bosses.

Despite his awesome powers of face-punching, Drum isn't able to protect his charge. A few minutes of distraction by two cops who inexplicably attack the agent are enough to leave the poor cancer destroyer dead.

At least these two dead cops put Drum on the right track. They were obviously drugged and mind-controlled by some fiendish mastermind. But who, oh who might it be, and what does said fiendish mastermind want? Only lots of travel between London and Beirut will solve this riddle.

Maria Caiano's Spies Kill Silently will probably not go down as one of the unknown masterpieces of Eurospy cinema, but in its modest yet confident way, it is a fun enough little film.

Caiano's direction isn't too sexy or stylish, but it lacks the sloppiness that drags some parts of the Eurospy genre down. Some viewers seem to have their problems with the film's pacing, I however would call it tight enough to work.

The movie stands on the line between the more batshit Eurospy films and a more realistic sensibility. While the big bad's plan and his methods to realize it are beautifully silly nonsense, and the scientist hunt only seems to happen to point his enemies in his direction, the rest of the film is on the more gray and unfriendly side of the genre. Jeffries' Drum is a very competent fighter, yet he lacks the suaveness and the (often annoying) propensity to torture his enemies and innocent women with bad wisecracks many other Eurospy heroes show in abundance. He isn't exactly a believable spy in Le Carré sense, but he's not one of the silly buggers that dominate European spy films either.

The film's action scenes tend to the more realistic side too, feeling a bit more brutal than usual.

"Realistic" is of course a very relative phrase. We are still talking about a film whose evil mastermind uses a mind control drug and a death ray and likes to rant long and pointlessly about his own awesomeness.

Spies Kill Silently is a satisfying little film that hits enough of the required genre beats to be fun.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,spies,eurospy,mario caiano,lang jeffries,erika blanc,in short

Shoot, Gringo, Shoot! (1968)

Somewhere in Mexico. The American gunman Stark (Brian Kelly of Flipper fame), having been betrayed by his partners in a robbery, is incarcerated in a Mexican jail. Thanks to a nice and effective performance as a leper he manages to escape. His new-found freedom only leads him into a confrontation with one of his ex-partners. A dead ex-partner and a minor shoot-out with the forces of the local potentate (Folco Lulli) later, Stark is captured again and bound to hang very soon.

Fortunately for him, Gutierrez, as the potentate is called, has a sudden change of mind about his destiny. If Stark would help him with a little problem, he'd just forget all about the small legal matter, and pay the gunman even $5000 for his work.

Gutierrez' son Fidel (Fabrizio Moroni) has run away from home to live the exciting life of a bandit with the gang of a Civil War veteran usually just called "The Major" (Keenan Wynn), but his father, and even more so his mother (Linda Sini), would very much like to have Stark bring their son back again. Of course, this is an offer Stark won't refuse, especially since it turns out that he himself is a friend of the Major and does not have much trouble getting into contact with the gang.

Stark is not straight with the Major or Fidel. Instead, he makes up a nice possibility of robbing a gold transport and takes Fidel with him on reconnaissance to kidnap the young man. As it goes, everything is becoming rather more complicated between the two men, and before Stark will be able to deliver his victim/friend, there will be the usual game of one or the other getting the upper hand, but everyone's plans getting thwarted again and again by unpleasant circumstances. Somewhere in between, there will also be time for the shortest romance subplot with Erika Blanc ever.

Sergio Corbucci's brother Bruno did a lot of work as a writer (often enough for his or with his brother), but he also has quite a number of directing credits. Shoot, Gringo, Shoot! is one of them, and while it never manages to achieve the heights of Sergio's best work, it still is a very fun movie to watch. This Corbucci is not a brilliant director, but a sure-handed one, perfectly capable to play around his two rather weak lead actors to provide some Spaghetti Western goodness. He also has a real knack for using nature and outside locations to set the mood of a given scene, keeping his film far away from the slap-dash look some of the cheaper Italian Western can get through over-use of rather boring looking sets.

His script isn't as successful. What starts out cleverly getting rid of the potential revenge plot, setting a light and humorous tone, with some moments of comic relief courtesy of the Major's gang and their leaders disturbing love for a duck I'd rather not have witnessed, seems to slowly turn dark when Stark and Fidel are starting their travels together, but never dares to go all out emotionally. Instead the film's focus shifts on an episodic series of adventures and mishaps that don't share enough thematically to be wholly satisfying, or are given too little room to be believable (like the romance plot). Then it all ends in a cleverly thought out, but random feeling darkened final stretch which then again turns into some sort of happy end.

Now, I am the first to admit that life itself is rather random, but I'm not too sure art should mirror this part of life and I'm absolutely not sure that Shoot, Gringo, Shoot! is out to talk about the randomness of life, as satisfying a thought as that may be.

What seems to be a better explanation for the movie's state is that Corbucci and his writing partner Mario Amendola had some great locations, all these actors on contract - some of them like Blanc and Wynn probably only for a few days - but only had little time to churn out a script before shooting began, so they put all the clichés that make up a typical Spaghetti Western into it, some of them with neat little twists. They just never had enough time to make a final re-write and polish it all up. That's my theory at least.

Fortunately (for me), I am well able to overlook silly little problems with a film like a lack of coherence of its parts, an overabundance of clichés or the lack of a thematic throughline if and when the non-cohering parts are in itself interesting and fun. Shoot, Gringo, Shoot!'s parts are, and while they don't cohere into the psychologically deep, depressing and plain exciting masterpiece the film's set-up promises, they make for a fine genre picture, no more, yet most certainly no less.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,spaghetti western,bruno corbucci,erika blanc,reviews