The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism (1967)

aka The Blood Demon

Original title: Die Schlangengrube und das Pendel (“The serpent pit and the pendulum”)

As luck will have it, neither Dr. Sadism (the surgeon you can trust) nor a pit full of snakes make an appearance. Go figure.

The 18th Century or thereabouts. Lawyer Roger Mont Elise (Lex Barker) is just an orphan boy, whose last name was given to him on account of a misinterpreted medallion that was part of the baby package. He seems puzzled but okay with his unclear birth identity, as far as Barker’s never changing facial expression can be interpreted, but when a one-legged Moritatensänger (German for a medieval “singer of ballads”, though the guy doesn’t actually sing his material) appears and gives him an invitation to the castle of one Count Regula (Christopher Lee, in a couple of scenes) in which the Count promises to disclose the truth about Roger’s heritage, he’s off to the far away “Middlelands” (I have no idea) at once.

As is usually the case in these situations, once our hero has reached the town supposedly closest to Regula’s Castle Andomai, the local populace is less than helpful and rather fearful when asked about how to get there. Eventually, our hero manages to acquire the information from an elderly gentleman walking around carrying a large cross over his shoulders, and goes on a long, long, long, oh so very long coach ride to the castle, meeting up with what will soon turn out to be a fake priest (Vladimir Medar). During that excruciatingly long coach ride, Roger saves one Baroness Lilian von Brabant (Karin Dor, never one of my favourite German actresses of her generation, and here actively bad instead of just her typical combination of very pretty and so bland being pretty is no help) from a group of masked riders. Well, Lilian and her servant Babette (Christiane Rücker), but Roger cares so little about her, he doesn’t even help her up when he finds both women knocked to the ground by the riders. What a hero!

Obviously, love is in the air. As it turns out, Lilian has also been invited to the Castle, though in her case, it’s something about an inheritance.

After further spooky coach riding, everybody eventually arrives at the castle, which turns out to lie in ruins. But don’t fret, there’s a creepy undead servant (Karl Lange, ironically giving the liveliest performance in a film full of people emoting like the walking dead) around. The dead man is out to revive ole Chris Lee with the blood of thirteen virgins, so Regula can take revenge on the parents of our young couple by murdering their descendants, who were responsible for quartering him for the murder of twelve virgins. The fact that Regula’s servant did indeed murder the parents of our protagonists, and Regula therefore has actually been avenged already notwithstanding. Christopher Lee’s gotta murder somebody, right?

Schlangengrube’s director Harald Reinl was one of the better directors of the Edgar Wallace cycle, mostly distinguishing himself there by providing his films with some actual pulp energy. Energy is not something you’ll find in this German attempt to jump on the Corman Poe adaptation train, for everything here happens in the slowest and most tedious manner imaginable while also lacking any and all of the deliciously clever subtext Richard Matheson or Charles Beaumont were wont to bring into Corman’s films. Writer Manfred R. Köhler sure wasn’t Matheson, Beaumont, or even Del Tenney.

The film may deserve to be looked at as a record holder when it comes to the length of the coach ride that eventually will bring our protagonists to the castle, but I don’t think gothic horror is improved by drifting off into the realm of a very slow and boring version of Stagecoach. To be fair, said coach ride – which does take up about three hours of the film’s eighty-five minute runtime, I believe – does contain one of the handful of good gothic horror moments Schlangengrube delivers, when the superstitious driver is confronted with blue fog that reveals trees full of human limbs, in part growing out of them like branches. That’s obviously the sort of tone and content I wish Reinl would have emphasised, but director and script seem to go out of their way to underplay the truly fantastic elements of the film, and instead puts a lot of energy into scenes of various characters making circles through the castle cellars. Scenes that also happen to lack in in pace and energy, even though these elements of the filmmaking art should be right up the director’s alley.

The art department – lead by Gabriel Pellon and Werner Achmann - really seem to have been the only members of the production who actually got why the Corman productions this is trying to haplessly imitate were as good as they were, and do their best to create a bunch of interesting and expressionistically weird sets, only to have camera and direction put them into the worst possible, and most certainly least interesting, light. It’s a bit of a shame, really, but all too typical for German genre cinema after the silent era.

In short: Pirates of the Coast (1960)

Original title: I pirati della costa

On the Spanish Main, when the pirates of the Tortugas ruled the waves. Poor Spanish Commander Luis Monterrey (Lex Barker)! Commissioned by the crown to finally get a load of silver from Santa Cruz back to Spain – none of the other deliveries ever reached their goal – he finds himself outwitted and outgunned by the Tortuga-based pirates of evil Captain Olonese (Livio Lorenzon) who for some reason knows quite well the cotton the good commander has supposedly loaded is actually silver. Also add to our hero’s trouble his puzzling infatuation with Isabela (Estalla Blain), the unpleasant, classist and generally unkind niece of Santa Cruz’s governor who’d never get together with a peasant like him anyway.

During a hilarious process, Monterrey is sentenced for losing the gold as a traitor to a life of hard labour. While on the way to the penal colony, Monterrey and a few of his fellow prisoners manage to take control of their prison ship. What’s a man to do than to grab himself an eye patch, dub himself Captain Nobody, and sail off to Tortuga to become a pirate too?

Domenico Paolella’s Pirates of the Coast isn’t one of the treasures of Italian pirate films, for it is a bit lacking in charisma to be truly riveting. Lex Barker is a bit too wooden to make for a proper swashbuckling hero, and Luis’s character lacks any of the larger than life elements a good swashbuckling hero needs. Well, he’s certainly honourable enough but that’s it as far as his character traits go. The rest of the characters suffer from the same problem too, with nary anything distinctive between them. I’m not necessarily talking about character depth, mind you – what the film really needs is more character colour. Only Olonese is appropriately slimy and evil, Lorenzon consequently having a hard time to liven things up a bit when the rest of the cast isn’t playing.

On the plus side, this one seems to have had a bit more of a budget than usual in Italian swashbucklers, so we get some mildly exciting sea battles, mass battles that have more then three participants and some okay fencing duels (though I’ve seen much better, and not just in US movies). At least, the film’s certainly not shirking its duty of providing the audience with most of the mandatory types of action one can expect from a pirate movie.

Which, all in all, makes Pirates of the Coast a perfectly serviceable quick fix for your pirate movie needs, if, unfortunately, nothing more.

In short: Mister Dynamit – Morgen küßt euch der Tod (1967)

aka Die Slowly, You’ll Enjoy It More

A dastardly villain has somehow stolen a US nuclear bomb. For vague plot reasons, the CIA, despite having a spy among said villain’s men (excellently positioned as his chef), can’t take care of the situation themselves, so they do the most embarrassing thing and ask the German BND for help. The BND sends out its top agent, one Bob Urban (Lex Barker), also known – perhaps in the same way you call a big guy “Little” - as Mister Dynamite.

Bob’s investigation consists of the usual things Eurospy heroes get up to: sleep with every woman who can’t flee fast enough, walk into traps, get out of traps with his awesome powers of punching and ventriloquism (seriously), and shoot some people. Somewhere on the way, the CIA does send in one of their own, one Cliff (Brad Harris), also known as Cliff. Things don’t get terribly exciting.

Officially a German/Austrian/Italian/Spanish collaboration, this movie based on the popular series of German Men’s Adventure novels, is pretty German dominated behind the camera, which, despite its director Franz Josef Gottlieb usually being kind of okay when doing pulp action, does lead to exactly the result you’d fear, namely a curiously boring and anaemic film that lacks the feeling of crazy joy you can usually get out of Eurospy films. While there’s nothing about the film that exactly runs against the pleasurable parts of the genre’s formula, it all feels very bland and lifeless, with a few too many scenes of people in uniform sitting around in a grey room talking, and little excitement to be found around those scenes.

There are one or two pleasantly crazy moments, though: the film’s main villain is so much of a model railway nut his – tiny, unspectacular – lair is dominated by a model railway that if needed provides the usual monitors for henchpeople communications, as well as a lot of mysterious buttons. Oh, and for some reason, the guy likes to get drunk and roll himself up in a rug. Which is exactly the sort of nonsensical craziness I love in my Eurospy films, but is basically the only truly crazy thing about a film that seems to go out of its way not to provoke a heart attack – or even mild excitement – in anyone watching.

Most of the time, the film’s a series of scenes with Lex Barker being bland, Brad Harris being inexplicably bland and painfully underused, and bland blandness all around, with a veritable horde of German actors you’ll know from Rialto’s Edgar Wallace krimis popping up in tiny roles – with Joachim Fuchsberger as a random MP, and Eddi Arent as the BND Q, among others.

In short: Il boai di Venezia (1963)

aka The Executioner of Venice

aka The Blood of the Executioner

Luigi Capuano's gondolabuckler is a particularly fine example of the form, shot (rather lavishly) on location in Venice, full of probably not historically correct yet convincing and colourful costumes, and sets that fit the style of the real life locations well. There's a real sense of place to admire that results in a feeling of reality (not realism, mind you) not even the film's story can destroy.

Said story is of course the usual melodramatic silliness with an old and ill doge undermined by a capital E evil Grand Inquisitor (Guy Madison) who uses the doge's son (Lex Barker) to strike at him in particularly nasty ways. There is of course also a disrupted marriage (to Alessandra Panaro), whose disruption drives the poor girl involved in the direction of a convent and a sadistic evil master plan that suffers a bit from the needlessly sadistic and dangerous attempt of using a pirate captain to kill his own lost son. Evildoers, that stuff never works, particularly in Swashbucklandia, where people all too happily brand their little kids with tattoos of the Virgin Mary. Though, really, the custom seems rather useful when seen in a context like this.

Capuano presents all this with so much verve he even distracts from the fact that Lex Barker isn't particularly charismatic (sorry, guy whose performance as Old Shatterhand in the German Karl May adaptations was an important part of my childhood). The action sequences - ranging from duelling to brawls to a little bit of acrobatics - are generally imaginative and colourful, while the melodrama is as over the top as it should be. This is the sort of film where locking oneself up in a convent when one's lover has been killed looks like a completely appropriate reaction because everyone acts dramatically all the time, which probably comes with the lavish dress, now that I think about it.

Capuano adds to these simple yet inspiring delights (seriously, watching this, I hardly could keep myself from either jumping from balconies brandishing my imaginary epee, or from joining a convent, or from tattooing random babies) with an ability to squeeze even the last bit of local atmosphere out of his Venice shots, and a willingness to add telling, colourful details to the film whenever possible, very much in the style of the best literary swashbucklers. A typical example of the last is the leader of hero Sandrigo's friends in low places, Bartolo (Giulio Marchetti), whose blindness adds little to the plot but makes the character that much more memorable than if he were the usual grumpy old man or (always worse) the comic relief commoner.

Taken alone, little things like this don't sound like much, but they add up during the course of a movie and give Il boia di Venezia a nice warm place in the part of my heart I keep reserved for swashbucklers.

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