Empusa (2010)

When out and about with his best buddy, fisherman Victor (Antonio Mayans), former actor turned beach bum, tarot reader, writer on the occult and lover of all kinds of substances, Abel Olaya (Paul Naschy, sometimes dubbed by another actor, because he didn’t figure out the trick of speaking from beyond the grave, to everyone’s disappointment), finds a severed female underarm (including the hand) on the beach. Despite vigorous protests from Victor, Abel doesn’t call the police but takes the arm with him to research the mysterious tattoo on the arm, storing it in his fridge for the duration, right above his salami.

Turns out, empusas – in the film’s interpretation hot, very old, more durable female vampires – are slowly invading the quaint coastal town, turning the old men populating it into normal vampires through the powerful lure of hot goth girl sex, and plan to do something or other. Eventually. One supposes. They are also nibbling on Abel a little, but since he’s extra special – Naschy does after all script and direct – they have more interesting plans to acquire his “wisdom”. He, on the other hand, believes he’s destined to kill all empusas.

Though this isn’t the last film that came out starring Spanish horror king Paul Naschy, it is the last film he directed and wrote before his death in 2009. By this time, he had made something of a minor comeback, starring regularly in direct to video films that weren’t as fun as those he made during his heyday, but typically provided a couple of scenes of Naschy doing Naschy things like turning into a werewolf or a vampire and charming all the decades younger ladies with his increasing decrepitness, or wisdom, or whatever.

While nobody would ever call Empusa a good film, or even a consistently entertaining one, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it as anybody’s first Naschy film, there’s a good-natured, ambling quality to the cheap looking thing that at the very least makes it a rather likeable film for the Naschy enthusiast, which I certainly am. In part, Naschy simple goes through many of the greatest hits of his interests – apart from lycanthropy – by now having grown out of the bitterness that made some of his 80s films pretty hard to watch. Spending one’s final years making silly horror movies with some friends and a surprising number of pretty young women willing to pretend one is the hottest thing on legs, do silly dances, or just drop their clothes in front of the camera does seem like the proper way for Naschy to go out on.

This feels companionable rather than exploitative, in large part because Naschy makes many jokes about the absurdity of the whole affair in the tone of somebody who knows very well who he actually is, but has fun embodying a fantasy version of 70s manliness, continued into old age, and there’s very little meanness in any of the jokes and asides here that could spoil this impression.

Rather than an attempt at some kind of no budget late period masterpiece that would only break everyone’s hearts (just look at Jess Franco’s final years), Empusa is the product of a guy who is just having a bit of fun at the end of his life, and who could blame him?

Panic Beats (1983)

Original title: Latidos de pánico

Warning: there will be spoilers!

Paul de Marnac (Paul Naschy) is the descendant of noble family, but has grown up in what he calls poverty. That’s not what we call living in a mansion and having enough money to go to university around here. Anyway, he has managed to marry rich Geneviève (Julia Saly), and has apparently worked pretty hard in her family’s company.

When Geneviève is diagnosed with a dangerous heart condition, Paul convinces her to leave her beloved Paris with him and go live in his old family mansion. There, they are supposed to live a quiet life with Paul’s old housekeeper Mabile (Lola Gaos) and Mabile’s young, sexy niece Julie (Pat Ondiviela), who Mabile has taken in after some unpleasantness at reform school.

There’s a gothic pall hanging over the house, though. Mabile and Julie both dive into the tale of Paul’s ancestor Alaric de Marnac (also Paul Naschy, of course), who brutally murdered his wife when she was unfaithful to him. Alaric is said to return every century or so to kill any de Marnac wife he encounters. And wouldn’t you know it, his hundred years are nearly over.

Geneviève takes the tale rather seriously, and soon begins to see Alaric in his plate mail whether she’s awake or asleep. Snakes appear and disappear in her room as well whenever she is alone, and someone does just love to put something into Mabile’s tea that makes her very sleepy indeed, so she is of little help. Why, you might think someone’s trying to induce a fatal heart attack in Geneviève.

So yes, this entry into the body of work of house favourite Paul Naschy starts out as one of those thrillers in which the villains attempt to kill or drive crazy their rich wives to better get at their victim’s money. Making matters morally even worse, it’s not as if Geneviève were keeping Paul on a short leash – she’s clearly very much in love with him; he, is very much in love with that guy as well.

Which does of course make Paul a typical Naschy protagonist in his darker period beginning in the 80s. Where Naschy’s various versions of wolfman Waldemar Daninsky in earlier years always had a whiff of gothic tragedy around them, Paul is an utterly despicable bastard who is only pretending to have any kind of moral core when it fits into his plans, and instead of tragedy, Paul has put some irony in his way. Namely, that he encounters a partner in crime in Julie who is even worse than he is – as well as more patient.

So the film turns into a different kind of thriller in the middle, one where the villains first have to cover up their deeds by committing further murders – there’s a brilliantly sharp and brutal bit where Julie kills Paul’s other lover – and then eventually turn on each other.

That’s not enough for Naschy, however. Just showing terrible people being terrible to one another is all well and good, but letting the final survivor stumble into a horrible supernatural end by exactly the force they pretended to be earlier is a delight. Particularly since Naschy – also in the director’s chair this time around – decides to realize this bit in a pitch-perfect scene of EC comics imitation, with the grim, grinning delight in dramatically ironic carnage the best – and most of the other – EC horror stories had.

Before Panic Beats gets there, Naschy also delivers a mansion-load of gothic atmosphere, obvious but still highly effective twists, and some moments of the kind of bitter misanthropy that increasingly began to dominate his films without ever quite hiding the big, monster movie loving heart of our hero.

Lycantropus: The Moonlight Murders (1997)

Original title: Licántropo: El asesino de la luna llena

The small town of Visaria (which locates the movie right in Universal Horror land, just in the 90s) is beset by a string of terrible murders taking place on nights of the full moon. If not for certain circumstances suggesting human agency, the state of the corpses the killer leaves behind could only be read as animal attacks, as if the victims were mangled by something like a wolf. Well, most of the murders, that is.

I’m sure local bestseller writer Waldemar Daninsky (Paul Naschy), suffering from blackouts, daytime hallucinations concerning the tragic circumstances surrounding his birth, visions of his long murdered romani mother Czinka (Ester Ponce) and their clan’s doom-prophecies sprouting head Bigary (Javier Loyola) who talk much of his curse and how unpleasant their undead state is, and general malaise, has nothing whatsoever to do with anything.

This return of the great Paul Naschy to yet another version of his ever-doomed werewolf (that’s not a spoiler, surely) protagonist Waldemar Daninsky as directed by Francisco Rodríguez Gordillo was meant as a bit of a comeback for the actor, writer, director, producer and monster-lover, after he had to lighten his workload (which in his world meant making only about a movie a year, apparently) for half a decade thanks to massive heart problems and assorted health issues. Unfortunately for Naschy, the film wasn’t terribly well distributed and flopped rather badly.

I can’t help but suspect this had rather a lot to do with changes in fashion that probably simply didn’t make yet another werewolf film with Naschy a terribly great proposition for whatever audience this sort of project still had in Spain. Even Naschy’s more nihilistic 80s films always had an old-fashioned quality surrounding them that has never been the sort of thing to pull in audiences, unless your film takes place in Victorian England and is about some idiots of nobility and wealth, of course.

It can’t have helped the film’s position at the time that it simply isn’t terribly good. Lycantropus certainly does attempt to forgo Naschy’s old, sometimes shoddy, monster movie romp style in favour of something slower and more cerebral and psychological for a change, but the script (of course also by Naschy) isn’t terribly good at it, going through plot points, twists and developments even the less genre savvy audience members will see coming from miles away. We spend an inordinate amount of time with characters of little interest, and waste even more of it until Naschy actually gets to don his wolf garb, which happens so quickly and is over with  even quicker, the film might as well just not have bothered.

It’s not a total wash, at least: the cinematography by Manuel Mateos is often very beautiful, if rather staid and conservative, making things look rather pricier than they often did in Naschy’s prime. The performance of a physically clearly diminished Naschy is fine, too. Age lends him some of the gravitas he never quite could reach in earlier decades, and while his own script doesn’t actually give him enough opportunity to shine, he still makes the best out of it.

The Hanging Woman (1973)

Original title: La orgía de los muertos

Sometime in what I assume to be the late 19th Century. Globe-trotting man of action Serge Chekov (Stelvio Rosi) comes to a small town in backlot Europe for the reading of the will of his recently deceased uncle. What he initially encounters in the village are a population with a hysterical fear of the night, and the corpse of a woman hanging from a tree in front of the graveyard.

The corpse turns out to be his cousin Mary (Aurora de Alba). As Serge soon learns at the reading of the will, Mary would have been his co-inheritor of dear uncle’s wealth, as well his new ward. It’s a bit of an awkward situation, but even the lovingly rude inspector called from the next town over (Pasquale Basile) can’t hang anything on the newcomer, particularly once it turns out that Mary hasn’t actually hanged herself but died of heart failure – out of fright – only to be tossed up the tree later.

This is only the beginning of Serge’s troubles, for his late uncle’s household is a peculiar one: there’s dear uncle’s wife Nadia (Maria Pia Conte), a self-declared black magician who has inherited nothing of use to her (land without serfs, she complains), and seduces Serge as quickly as possible for better prospects; a butler (Carlos Quiney) with anger issues that don’t hold up against our hero’s two-fistedness; Professor Leon Droila (Gérard Tichy), a scientist whose experiments concerning the electrical energies dissolving in death the uncle financed, and who now fears to lose his financing as well as his cellar lab in uncle’s mansion; and Droila’s lovely daughter Doris (Dyanik Zurakowska), obvious good girl love interest. With this cast of characters – also including the great Paul Naschy hanging around the borders of the plot as a necrophiliac grave digger - it’s no surprise that Serge soon has to fight off murderous attacks, does not fight off seductions, sits in on a seances, romances Doris and solves the mysteries surrounding his uncle’s death.

So it’s pretty useful for the film that Serge is a moustachioed Italian 70s macho who is as good at punching people – living and dead – than he is at baring his chest; it’s also a very nice change for a gothic horror movie to have a protagonist so lively, he’d feel right at home in a Eurospy movie instead of the usual stiff-necked pieces of wood who tend to be the least interesting bits of their respective movies. While I never managed to actually like the guy (machismo this large is not one of my favourite character traits, and I’m immune to bared male chests), he’s certainly highly entertaining to watch even when he’s just having a conversation, exuding nervous energy.

I just called José Luis Merino’s The Hanging Woman a gothic horror movie, but apart from that, it is also a macabre mystery whose mystery solving-process is driven much more by Serge’s two-fistedness than too much clever ratiocination. Which isn’t a complaint in a film with as much pulp energy as this one displays.

The pretty wild genre mix works very well for the film in particular because Merino displays a hand for all the genres and tropes he has packed in here. The early scenes of gothic horror as well as the obligatory séance are wonderfully creepy and claustrophobic (with a picturesque graveyard featuring as something as a bonus), the action scenes of Serge doing his Serge stuff are as punchy as they are supposed to be, and the sleaze elements are enhanced by some choice early 70s psychedelia. Who, after all, wouldn’t want the film’s main sex scene to consist of Nadia and Serge rotating on a bed intercut with Naschy’s Igor zooming in on one of his dead sex partners? Well, please don’t answer that one in the comments, come to think of it.

Speaking of sleaze, another high point of the film is the scene in which Nadia dresses up as a corpse to seduce Igor (the film never gets around to telling us what she actually wants from him there), only to be rejected as way too alive for the man’s tastes when she starts moaning a little. Naschy, as Naschy did, really seems to get into this sort of thing, too, providing this creepy dude with feverish intensity. But then, this is one of those sort of gothics where really everyone in the cast seems to enjoy going all out – even Zurakowska’s good girl is not as boring as those usually are, actress and script giving her at least some backbone.

All, this – and some sweet undead make-up – adds up to a film bound to entertain anyone even vaguely interested in 70s European cult cinema and its wild and woolly ways. The Hanging Woman is a keeper.

The People Who Own the Dark (1976)

Original title: Último deseo

A murder of upper class men – doctors, hunters, military scientists, diplomats and so on – meet up in an old castle for a very special kind of party. It’s a cultish sado-masochist sort of thing, the men (among them characters portrayed by Paul Naschy, Emiliano Redondo and Alberto de Mendoza) putting on rather creepy looking masks, and just starting on business of dubious sexiness with the hostesses (among them characters played by Nadiuska, Teresa Gimpera and Maria Perschy) in the castle’s cellar, when somewhere outside what we’ll soon enough learn is a nuclear bomb explodes. Apparently, it’s World War III.

The castle’s cellar is a fallout shelter, too, so right now, the inhabitants are as well off as possible. One of them also happens to be a physicist involved in the military-industrial complex, so there’s someone to provide helpful exposition and survival tips about how it’s best for them to first get provisions from the nearby village to then hole up in the castle for a couple of weeks or months.

That visit to the village doesn’t turn out terribly well, though. As it turns out, every villager was at a big village fete when the bomb fell, and so every single villager has been blinded by the bomb, now acting rather a lot like blind zombies you might remember from certain other Spanish horror movies. Though, to be fair, the blind are only becoming aggressive once they realize our protagonists – at least one of them – are rather quick to murder people getting in their way of grabbing provisions. Of course, the actual killer is then strangled by one of his peers, who afterwards starts to crawl around in the buff, grunting like a pig, so no harm, no foul, right?

Alas, the blind people must have seen the same horror films we’ve seen, too, getting up to what amounts to a classic zombie siege scenario while the seeing get up the the equally classic – though at the point in time when this film was shot not quite as clichéd – business of ripping each other apart even without help.

The People Who Own the Dark is a weird one. Obviously inspired by the early-ish non-voodoo zombie movies following Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, its director León Klimovsky is also sharing the American’s love of highly metaphorical zombies (okay, blind people). Klimovsky clearly wants to say something about class divisions, as well as the social and emotional pressures of the cold war in an era when it felt to be very close to becoming hot.

He just has a much goofier and weirder way going about that than Romero did, with little grip on even vaguely believable human psychology, but a lot of love for a bit of sleaze and soap operatic dialogue. He also never bothers to explain why everyone here is acting quite as extremely as they do, with everyone willing to murder whoever is available on the slightest provocation, only to turn into a human pig afterwards, or start dropping mutilated corpses through holes. As a portray of humanity under pressure, all of this doesn’t work at all, and if Klimovsky wants to suggest this is meant to be a result of the radiation, he certainly never mentions that despite not shying away from expository monologues anywhere else.

The portrayal of the blind masses is rather bizarre too, not just because the blind apparently turn into a weird mob only waiting for a reason to literally rip people apart at the first opportunity. The film also feels it opportune to have every single one of these blind grab some dark glasses from somewhere (I assume there’s a factory for the things somewhere in the village), as well as useful sticks. And yes, that does indeed lead to siege scenes that look as absurd as one imagines reading this, only turned more so by Klimovsky’s perfectly serious and melodramatic handling of all of it, clearly believing that a mob of regular blind people is one of the most terrifying things any audience could imagine.

When not concerned with SM cults (which will never come up again after the first act, of course) and the blind as zombies, the film is always also still trying its best to be a bleak after the bomb film, so even the characters who survive the blindpocalypse end badly in a couple of scenes that are at once improbable and ridiculous yet also curiously effective thanks to Klimovsky’s use of nearly archetypal shots of an open mass grave, gas, and a surprisingly clever use of the choral part of Beethoven’s Ninth.


Of course, as a whole, The People Who Own the Dark is much too silly a movie to feel truly bleak; its treatment of the anxieties and fears of its time to bizarre to be terribly effective; but as a document of a not untalented exploitation filmmaker like Klimovsky trying to make sense of its time as well as making a buck, it is a very worthwhile film, particular since its general sense of weirdness really never lets up, keeping a viewer at least guessing at what strange idea Klimovsky’s going to put on screen in the next scene.

Three Films Make A Post: Don’t call it in.

Wounds (2019): This one’s one of the bigger disappointments of my movie year. On paper, Babak Anvari, the director of the brilliant Under the Shadow, adapting a story by one of contemporary weird fiction’s and horror’s finest writers, Nathan Ballingrud, sounds like a surefire win. However, somehow, the film suffers from weaknesses I didn’t expect to come up after the director’s last film. A major problem is how unconvincing the asshole protagonist’s shift into a different, darker reality is (or the shift of that reality into him), for the film is full of scenes that feel like horror set pieces instead of organic expressions of what is happening to Will’s reality, Anvari showing little imagination in his staging of events. The other big hit against the film is its protagonist itself, who doesn’t come over as the painfully flawed but interesting protagonist of Ballingrud’s piece but a simple manchild asshole bar any actual emotional complexity. I can’t help but think casting Armie Hammer instead of a proper actor wasn’t conducive there.

Vinyan (2008): This film by Fabrice du Welz about a grief-stricken couple (Emmanuelle Béart and Rufus Sewell) following a probably imaginary hint about their son who was lost and believed killed during a tsunami on an odyssey through Thailand and Burma on the other hand does contain a lot of emotional complexity. For much of its running time, it is really an attempt to bring the formula of “Heart of Darkness” into a contemporary context, the director visibly putting a lot of effort into avoiding the – for contemporary eyes, in Conrad’s own time, the guy was pretty progressive in his views about race and colonialism – aspects of that approach that could easily be read as “problematic”. Much of the film is carried by du Welz’s nearly hallucinatory staging and an intense performance by Béart, and plays out like an arthouse drama, only in the very end turning into a metaphorically loaded horror film about the horrors of love, loss, and motherhood.

Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll aka Los Ojos Azules de la Muñeca Rota aka House of Psychotic Women (1974): A drifter (Paul Naschy) with fantasies and/or flashbacks about strangling a woman comes into the household of three emotionally fucked up sisters (Diana Lorys, Eva León and Maria Perschy) as a handyman. While sexual tension rises, someone murders the surprising number of young, blue-eyed, blonde women in the area.


This Spanish giallo by Carlos Aured is one of the best Spanish examples of the style, nearly reaching the intense and often bizarre, dream-like aesthetization of the best Italian films, including a neat thematic package about how badly the relations between men and women were in Spain, 1974 (consciously or not, I can’t quite say), and featuring quite a performance by co-writer Naschy as well as the main female trio. As extra bonuses, there are the neat and plot-relevant use of “Frère Jacques” in the murder scenes and a “logical explanation” for what occurred that includes hypnotism and “simple telepathy”, as well as a very badly prepared corpse.

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.

Past Misdeeds: Horror Rises From The Tomb (1973)

Original title: El espanta surge de la tumba

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

France during the Middle Ages. Warlock Alaric de Marnac (Paul Naschy) and his partner in witchcraft Mabille de Lancré (Helga Liné) are killed for their enthusiasm for various evils, including the drinking of blood and cannibalism, of course. Because that's what you do when you're into the black arts, Alaric and Mabille curse the men responsible for their deaths (one of them Alaric's own brother) and their descendants, promising to one day return to plague them with various horrors.

The time for the charming couple's return finally comes in the 1970s. Alaric's descendant Armand (of course also Naschy), his buddy Maurice Roland (Victor Alcázar) - of course also a witch finder descendant - and their girlfriends poke around in their ancestral legends. One séance with possible supernatural phenomena, and a floating Naschy head later, the quartet decides that the only way to decide if they've been duped by a medium or they really have experienced supernatural shenanigans is for them to travel to the old chateau on the ancestral lands of the de Marnacs, far out in the backwoodsiest part of France, and dig up the head of Alaric (who was decapitated, with body and head buried at different places).

To everyone's surprise, this idea turns out to be a rather large mistake. Soon, Alaric's bodyless, redly lit head (excellent "Naschy in a box with his head sticking out effect there") puts mind control whammies on various members of the cast, murders are committed, hearts are eaten, heads and bodies reunited, Linés revived, and the future of all humanity threatened by two very cranky dead witches. Only the hammer symbol of Thor(!?) and a vague monster destroying manual might possibly save the day.

Carlos Aured's brilliantly, and rather truthfully, titled Horror Rises From The Tomb shows the great Paul Naschy at his most bizarre, with nary a thought given to plot logic or emotional believability but very many thoughts to showing off a series of increasingly weird supernatural occurrences. This time around, Naschy (as so often in his career also the man responsible for the script) and Aured get the required dream-logic particularly right, resulting in a film that uses elements of Naschy's beloved Gothic horror, 70s horror movie bleakness, and curious ideas as if it were out to reconstruct a particularly vivid fever dream.

Aured shows himself to be one of Naschy's more aesthetically conscious directing partners, making use of some excellently shot bleak landscapes, Bava-like coloured lighting, and a lot of cheap red blood to create an atmosphere somewhere between a carnival sideshow, a cheaper version of a Hammer horror movie, and that dream you had where Paul Naschy's head hypnotized you into catching various scantily clad women for him to eat. From time to time, the film's curiously naive, and certainly idiosyncratic, approach to horror even produces not just dream-like and strange, but actually nightmarish sequences, like the one in which some of the dead of the film rise again from the local marsh to do the surviving protagonists harm.

The sense of bleakness so typical for horror from the 70s that characterizes that sequence, as well as a surprising character death by shotgun and the mood of Horror Rises From The Tomb's ending, are part of a recurring negative view on humanity and life itself which would become ever stronger in Naschy's body of work during the second half of the decade and the first half of the 80s until  pessimism finally sometimes turned into downright nihilism. This philosophic approach always does mark a strange contrast between Naschy's films and those of the more innocent horror eras he most admired, and often rubs against the sheer loopiness that has always been part of the charm of his films. In this particular case, silly head movie fun and the inevitable doom of everyone involved for no fault of their own go hand in hand, as if they were contrasting impulses in the auteur's personality fighting it out live on screen; the winner is inconclusive.

Even some of Horror Rises From The Tomb's nominal weaknesses turn into surprising strengths. I found it, for example, exceedingly difficult to distinguish between the various female characters in the movie (which is the thing that happens when three of the film's four human female characters are very similar looking attractive brunettes without any character traits), turning the not exactly sharply drawn relationships between the characters diffuse, confusing and ever more dream-like.

Even the old Naschy-ism of pretending his own characters to be virtually irresistible to all women is put to good use here, giving the film an even more surreal feeling. In the case of evil Naschy it's the result of hypnotism anyhow; and really, in the context of everything else going on in the movie, it's not a surprise that Naschy suddenly appearing in a woman's bedroom is answered by instant excited writhing. Evil Naschy, by the way, is the sort of fiend who wears absolutely nothing under his cape, as does Helga Liné who for her part has the rather curious ability of killing men by raking her nails across their backs. On paper, it's all just a way to show off a bit of nudity, of course, but the film's execution turns even standard sleaze material like this into dream-like/nightmarish eroticism of a sort not generally found outside of European horror films of the 70s (more’s the pity).


Horror Rises From The Tomb really is Naschy at his most concentrated, showing off his virtues and faults particularly clearly. This also means that, if you can't stand European horror movies of the non-realistic persuasion, this is not a film for you. If, on the other hand, it's exactly the strange and the weird you're looking for from your horror, you just might find a new favourite movie of the hour.

Past Misdeeds: La Venganza De La Momia (1973)

aka The Mummy's Revenge

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Egypt during the 18th Dynasty. Pharaoh Amenhotep (Paul Naschy) - please don't ask which Amenhotep he's supposed to be - is too much of a tyrant even for ancient Egyptian expectations of leadership. The pharaoh and his favourite concubine Amarna (Rina Ottolina) just love to enliven a meal by torturing virgins to death, and making a drink out of said virgins' blood.

The couple lives the evil dream until the high priest of Amun-Ra decides that enough is enough with the virgin killing, and poisons them. Because a mere death by poison isn't enough to pay for Amenhotep's misdeeds, the priest curses the pharaoh's soul to be forever trapped in the body of his mummy, never to be able to even step in front of the gods for them to weigh his worthiness.

Centuries later, in the Victorian era to be exact, a couple of married American archaeologists, Nathan (Jack Taylor) and Abigail Stern (María Silva) open Amenhotep's hidden tomb, and carry the pharaoh's mummy, his sarcophagus and a few papyri to the British Museum for Natural History. The couple's expedition was financed by Sir Douglas Carter (Eduardo Calvo). Carter once was an adventurous archaeologist like them, but now he is elderly, wheelchair-bound and rather sickly. Taking care of him takes up most of the time of his daughter Helen (Rina Ottolina again - and we all know what that means in a mummy movie).

Some time later, Egyptian archaeologist Assad Bey (Naschy again) and his girlfriend/assistant Zanufer (Helga Liné) arrive in London and take an interest in Amenhotep's mummy. Carter is surprisingly willing to share his findings with them. The first thing he does is excitedly reading one of the papyri to the new colleagues. In it Amenhotep - warned of the danger to his life by prophetic dreams - lays down how his mummy can be revived. It only takes the sacrifice of three virgins…

And wouldn't you know it, Assad Bey and Zanufer are cultists out to revive Assad Bey's ancestor Amenhotep, so that he can punish those who steal and abuse Egyptian culture?

London's virgin population soon finds itself greatly threatened and Amenhotep's mummy (also Naschy, of course) is revived and "disappears" from the museum after unnecessarily crushing the skull of a poor watchman. Amenhotep turns out to be a talking member of the mummy species, so he explains the next step of his plans to Assad Bey and Zanufer himself. Before he will do anything else, the ex-pharaoh wants to revive his beloved Amarna - say what you will about him, but at least Amenhotep is devoted to the woman he loves. To that end, he needs another seven virgins. Poor virgins of London.

While the virgins are hunted down - I'd really love to know how our Egyptian friends manage to hone in on them so easily, they are not all brides just before the wedding night after all - London's police force is doing sod all. Fortunately, Professor Stone wants his mummy back, and even though he doesn't believe in walking mummies and curses, he does think Assad Bey and Zanufer are somehow involved in the disappearance of Amenhotep. Hopefully, he and Abigail can do something about it before all seven further virgins are bled dry. Obviously, Amenhotep has set eyes on Helen as the obvious choice for his new Amarna.

Everyone even slightly familiar with the body of work of Spanish horror icon Paul Naschy probably realizes that one of the ambitions of his life must have been to play the role of every classic (as in "featured in a classic Universal movie") movie monster at least once in his life. By 1973, there was only the mummy left, so a mummy Naschy became in a film directed by Carlos Aured, and of course written by himself.

For once, and very much to my surprise, Naschy doesn't write his character as a jerk the script insists is a tragic figure even though he clearly isn't. Amenhotep is an unrepentant bastard whose only positive character trait is his love for Amarna, but since Amarna is just as much of a monster as he is, this theoretically positive character trait is only cause for a lot of dead virgins and crushed heads. Of course, Naschy still can't help himself and includes a kissing scene between the mummy and Helen, but at least she's pretty much sleepwalking in that scene and it's important for the film's ending, so we don't necessarily have to read it as another one of Naschy's thousands of attempts to write all of his characters as sexually irresistible to all women they meet.

Naschy's other role as Assad Bey is a bit more complex. He's not a much more moral character than Amenhotep is, but his evil is of a more human dimension, infused with enough doubts to make him somewhat sympathetic without the film ever making the mistake of some of the Daninsky films of pretending he is the film's true hero. It's not too difficult to understand Bey's motivation - the slow bleeding out of his country's culture by western graverobbers with a more pleasant title - the problem lies with his methods. Insert my "what have these virgins ever done to you speech?" here.

There is a surprising amount of interesting and likeable detail in the film's script: there's the insinuation that Sir Carter's marriage with his Egyptian wife couldn't withstand the pressure that sort of thing would have had to survive in the Victorian era; the lovely way the American archaeologist couple does everything together, from archaeology to puzzling over mysteries Scotland Yard is too dumb to solve to breaking and entering, an idea of how couples are supposed to work together that is also darkly mirrored in Zanufer and Amenhotep and absolutely speaks to my romantic spirit; the way Zanufer changes her mind about her life's work once she realizes what a bad influence Amenhotep is on Assad Bey and learns to like Helen. It's all a bit deeper than you'd need things in what is at its core a simple monster romp to be, and makes the movie a much more interesting watch. The script is also more tightly constructed than many of Naschy's films are, with all appropriate transitional scenes there and accounted for, no important scene only talked about after the fact instead of shown, and character development that makes perfect sense in the world of pulp horror.

Carlos Aured's direction works well with this script. The film's detailed (how do I know the film is set in the Victorian era? Because there's a picture of Victoria hanging on the Inspector's wall) yet not exactly naturalistic sets and the handful of location shots seem deeply - and fittingly - influenced by early Universal horror, with a lot of fog and shadows whenever Amenhotep stalks his virginal prey but also with some minor, appreciable, gore effects like in the scene where Amenhotep decides that none of the seven virgins he, Assad Bey and Zanufer caught is pretty enough to host Amarna's soul to his satisfaction, and goes on to crush one virgin head after the other like a petulant child. One wouldn't call Aured's direction tight today, but there's a nice enough flow to the proceedings.


All in all, La Venganza De La Momia may be a relatively minor entry into Naschy's body of work, but it's also one of the man's films that is neither batshit insane nor slapdash mummery, and might make a good entry point for viewers looking to start with Naschy without wanting to go in at the deep end. It should be a fun time for anyone.

Past Misdeeds: Hunchback of the Morgue (1973)

Original title: El jorobado de la morgue

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


The picturesque Bavarian mountain town of Feldkirch has everything a movie town needs: a surprisingly big hospital, a system of catacombs that has been used by the Templars and the Inquisition, and a reform school for young women. It would probably be a fantastic place to live in, watching shower scenes and listening to Wagner all day, if not for the fact that basically everyone in town is a mean, mad bastard in one way or another.

Hard-working, not particularly clever, hunchbacked, ugly (at least that's what everyone says: Naschy isn't wearing any "ugly" make-up, looking just like he does in other movies where he's supposed to be a handsome lady killer) morgue assistant Gotho (Paul Naschy) is the favourite victim of everyone in town. His daily routine seems to consist of being insulted, slapped around, and made fun of, his only recourse being a mad expression when he cuts corpses into little pieces  - which is something you do in this particular hospital morgue. The only one treating Gotho like an actual human being is Ilse (María Elena Arpón), but the girl is on her death bed suffering from a lung disease (must be consumption), and all the flowers the really rather sweet Gotho can bring her won't keep her alive.

When Ilse dies, Gotho cracks. The mild-mannered man turns a bit murderous, first killing two other morgue assistants who are trying to rob his dead sweetheart with a conveniently placed hatchet, then dragging Ilse's corpse down into the catacombs hoping she'll awaken one day. Afterwards, it's off to another revenge murder.

And that's how things could continue for Gotho, if not for the resident mad scientist, a certain Dr. Orla (Alberto Dalbés). With the help of his assistant Dr. Tauchner (Victor Alcázar), and Tauchner's girlfriend the reform school headmistress (I think) Dr. Meyer (Maria Perschy) Orla is trying to create artificial life. Orla's total lack of scruples and his need for fresh body parts cost him the co-operation of the hospital, however.

So it's pretty much like Christmas and his birthday falling on the same day for Orla once he realizes where Gotho is hiding. The catacombs will make a fine laboratory for the secret continuation of his experiments, and Gotho is easily swayed to help with acquiring body parts once Orla has promised him to revive Ilse. Soon enough, Gotho's new duties will involve grave robbery, murder and the kidnapping of fresh girls from the reform school (for Orla's experiment turns from a mass of cells into a hungry monster); the only hobby they leave room for is kissing the feet of reform school co-head Elke (Rossanna Yanni) and getting romanced by her in return.

Of course, things can't stay this paradisiac forever, and Gotho will have a violent discussion with Orla's monster (which just happens to look like the Oily Maniac) soon enough.

Even for something taking place on Planet Naschy (the great man of Spanish horror cinema is of course co-responsible for the film's script as well as playing the male lead), where the bizarre is actually the quotidian, El Jorobado is a pretty wild concoction. Where else, after all, would a story about a mistreated hunchback with certain necrophiliac tendencies taking vengeance on his tormentors be just too normal not to need an infusion of a gorier variation of the classic mad scientist story at about the half-way mark? I am, of course, not complaining about this broadening of the narrative (such as it is) for it's exactly things like this that give most of Naschy's films their charm and their weird energy.

That energy comes especially to the fore here, in a film that eschews the usually languid pacing of many of Naschy's scripts for something much snappier. Which isn't to say the script doesn't have many of the usual flaws in a Naschy film, namely, that most characters act like complete idiots (would you believe it's a bad idea to tell the mad scientist your plan to out him to the police?), and that some of the connective tissue one is used to from a professionally written movie is missing, so it's always a possibility the film's not going to show an important development at all but prefer to just talk through it later on; possibly for budgetary reasons, possibly because Naschy hated proper transitions. If one wants to enjoy El Jorobado - or most of Naschy's other movies - one has to accept that things don't work in quite the same ways on Planet Naschy as they do in our world or in the movies of our world.

On the other hand, it's difficult to imagine a more "normally" structured film having the time for all the small digressions and suggestions of various kinks El Jorobado has - some torture, a random whipping, the quite clearly suggested necrophilia, the fem dom whiff of Gotho's feet kissing or just the suspicion that Elke falls in love with Gotho because she's into men with physical disabilities for the disabilities' sake and not the men's, or else really has a thing for guys who kiss her feet for little reason; it'd probably make for an awesome porno.

It being a horror movie instead of pornography, though, the film is much more interested in crude yet entertaining gore effects, most of which ooze a classic carnival charm I found myself unable to resist. The only problematic scene in this regard is when Naschy fights some rats who are nibbling on Ilse's corpse. At first, they "jump" (that is, are thrown at him with great force) our hero - the sort of thing that's always good for a laugh, but then, we're attacked by pictures of actual rats being burned alive with a torch. Like all real animal violence in the movies, that's just completely out of ethical bounds for me, and makes it difficult to still call the film's fake violence "good-natured" and "silly" as I else would have had.

Nearly a thousand words in, I still haven't mentioned El Jorobado's director Javier Aguirre. That's because there really isn't much to his direction. Despite the moody assistance of an awesome mountain village, a spooky ruin, and some fine catacombs, Aguirre's direction just doesn't do anything memorable at all, certainly nothing even vaguely comparable to the weirdness of the script. On the other hand, Aguirre is also not doing anything that's actively bad, so it's difficult to criticize him for anything but being not as crazy as the script he's working with and shooting it like a straight little horror movie.


If you're willing to ignore the fate of those poor rats, El Jorobado De La Morgue is a perfectly entertaining piece of Naschy craziness, containing everything I love and hate about the man's work, plus (at least in the Spanish language version) a small nod towards the Necronomicon that will make all co-Lovecraftians happy, too.

Assignment Naschy (sort of): La herencia Valdemar & La herencia Valdemar: La sombra prohibida (2010)

A man assessing the antiques in an old mansion somewhere in rural Spain disappears; then the woman called in to do his job disappears as well. The company both worked for doesn’t like the police but calls in a private detective who will spend a very long train journey listening to a melodramatic flashback about the sordid history of the house with cameos by Aleister Crowley, Lizzie Borden, Bram Stoker and poor H.P. Lovecraft, as if his actual life hadn’t been crappy enough. People run through the woods. A guy talks to manikins. Cthulhu is embarrassed by a really bad cult. Three hours of my life just disappeared.

On paper, I should be all over this. Cthulhu Mythos stuff, the late 19th Century occult boom and Gothic horror, all the things this film in two long and tedious parts is built on are pretty much catnip to me. Add to it the – I think – final appearance of the great Paul Naschy as loveable butler, and I should be in some sort of movie heaven singing the praises of some deity, at the very least.

Unfortunately, what La herencia Valdemar truly is, is tepid, overlong and boring, a film so lacking in control it feels the need to bloat up a ninety minute story into two ninety minute films full of pointless overlong scenes of nothing of import happening, and a lot of side-business that should have ended on the editing room floor. You’d think the filmmakers would have noticed they had a problem when they could summarize film one at the beginning of film two in about a minute without leaving out anything important, but then you’d probably think people with enough of a budget for the films’ very pretty photography and set design would have enough of a clue not to let their work pointlessly sprawl into various flashbacks, add lots of characters with no use to the story at hand at all, and would actually not let every scene run on and on and on and on for what feels like hours.

Tonally, the films are just as much of a mess, wildly meandering from way-to-overcooked melodrama to “ironic” winking at the audience, pointless attempts at the grotesque, and sheer stupidity, resulting in a double-film nobody involved – certainly not director José Luis Alemán – seems to have any control over, nor even just a simple idea of what kind of film this is actually supposed to be.

I do assume the idea wasn’t to make a draggy, boring and tedious one, at least, though that’s exactly what I just waded through.

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,in short,horror,josé luis alemán,paul naschy

On Exploder Button: Assignment Naschy: Horror Rises From The Tomb (1973)

Heads. We all know their fiendish ways, their horrible roundness, their hypnotic powers. Now just imagine a head belonging to Paul Naschy himself, rising from his tomb to do typical evil head stuff, like hypnotizing people into carrying him around and bringing him fresh human hearts.

Hold that thought and click on over to this week's column on Exploder Button!

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,reviews,horror,gothic,carlos aured,paul naschy,emma cohen,victor alcázar,helga liné,other places

On ExploderButton: Assignment Naschy - La Venganca De La Momia (1973)

aka The Mummy's Revenge

Fellow M.O.S.S. agent Kevin's WTF-Film has transformed into a shiny new beast made of pop culture and is now the less movie-centric, even more awesome ExploderButton. I'm still doing my weekly column there, so the Internet can rejoice/sigh with disappointment.

As anyone reading my blatherings for some time will know, I've developed a rather large enthusiasm for the body of work of Spain's sexiest (he did after all usually write his own scripts) horror actor/director/writer/enthusiast, the immortal Paul Naschy.

So it'll come as no surprise that my inaugural column on ExploderButton enthuses about Naschy's turn as that most well-dressed of monsters, the mummy. Please click on through to hear about the film's wonders.

Technorati-Markierungen: reviews,spanish movies,horror,other places,paul naschy,jack taylor,maría silva,helga liné,rina ottolina

In short: El asesino está entre los treces (1973)

aka The Killer Is One Of Thirteen

Two years after the death of her husband in the crash of his private plane, rich widow Lisa Mandel (Patty Shepard) calls thirteen of his friends and associates - among them a bored looking Jack Taylor, Simón Andreu and other familiar faces - for a big reunion. On the group's first dinner, Lisa reveals that she has proof her husband didn't die accidentally, but was murdered, and that she's convinced one of the attendants is his killer. After all, everyone had motive and opportunity to do the deed, which she then proceeds to reveal. Let's just say that the rich in this movie really are involved in a lot of things, reaching from the rather more typical mass adultery, to art forgery, to deeply Freudian mother-son relationships, to drug smuggling.

Unfortunately, the motives and opportunities are so ample, Lisa has her difficulties deciding who actually is the killer, so she's obviously decided to just bring everyone together and wait until the killer reveals his or herself. It's a sound plan, as it turns out, for once everyone's secrets are revealed or hinted at, the guests spend the next few days with attempts at digging each other's holes deeper. And after a time, the killer cuts the phone lines, wrecks some cars in the knowledge nobody here knows how to walk, and begins to thin the herd of people who might know something about him.

In theory, Javier Aguirre's The Killer should be a rather pleasant mystery of the "rich bastards die in an isolated place" type, but in practice, it's mostly a bore.

I suspect the higher number of the guests here is an attempt to outdo And Then There Were None, but it really leads to a film with so many characters there's no room to properly develop any of them or to find time to amuse the audience with their decadent hobbies for more than five seconds. The only bits of decadence the film finds time showing are various deeds of adultery, but those are filmed as the sort of face rubbing that wouldn't be steamy in a 70s soap opera, with little of interest to the friend of sleazy entertainment nor the viewer in hope of anything visually or emotionally interesting. It's just a very bland film that even manages to waste an excellent set-up for Freudian shenanigans.

This blandness is further increased by the film's snail-like pacing, Aguirre's decision to tell his story as a series of overlong and perfectly boring dialogue scenes, and the fact that it takes an hour until the killer decides to finally off a member of the horde of suspects (of course in a bland and uninvolving manner). It's difficult to understand how the same Javier Aguirre was able to direct the insane Hunchback of the Morgue in the same year as this snoozer, but there you have it. As it stands, the only connection the two films have is the presence of beloved Spanish horror icon Paul Naschy, but where Hunchback is his film, this one sees him only doing a short guest star part in which he looks as bored as Taylor does.

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,in short,mystery,javier aguirre,patty shepard,paul naschy,jack taylor

Satan's School For Ghouls: El Mariscal Del Infierno (1974)

aka Devil's Possessed

aka Marshall of Hell

This October, the agents of M.O.S.S. are digging deep into the heart of Halloween, taking a look at films about demons, the devil, and every kind of fiend (except US presidents and presidential candidates). You can find our collected annals of evil here.

Speaking of the devil, what would our old friend Satan be without worshippers? And how awesome would these worshippers be if they were played by Spanish super-wolfman Paul Naschy? Actually, not very, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

It's the middle ages. War hero baron Gilles de Lancré (Naschy) feels his influence on the king dwindling, and decides to concentrate even more than before on his true interest: finishing the Great Work of alchemy, so that he can afterwards replace the king (man why doesn't the guy trust him!?) and rule the world. So let's hope for him that Great Work isn't meant quite a metaphorically as some scholars believe.

Gilles's mad plan is driven on by the occultist (and con-woman) Georgelle (Norma Sebre). The two are lovers with quite a Macbeth-ish relationship, for when Gilles's pet alchemist (and Georgelle's co-con-person) tells him he needs virgin blood - and lots of it - to finish the Work, she's the one talking him out of his mild attacks of conscience ("Even more murders!?"). And she's right, too - surely, there can't be nothing wrong with sacrificing young women to Satan? Though it has to be said the film awakens doubts about Gilles's understanding of the word "virgin", seeing as how the way to the sacrificial altar seems to begin in his bed; at least if he's not inconvenienced in the act by an epileptic fit.

So Gilles begins a reign of terror among his serfs, kidnapping and killing young women and bleeding everyone else financially dry to finance the alchemical experiments. He's so enthusiastic he earns himself the nickname "the Marshall of Hell". But even medieval serfs can only take so much, so Gilles soon has a small peasant revolt going on. The serfs' leader, however, is quite easily captured and gotten rid of. Things change when Gilles's old war buddy Gaston de Malebranche (Guillermo Bredeston) comes home from time spent as prisoner of war. Even though the two men were fast friends, Gilles's and Georgette's love for tactically catastrophic violence soon turns Gaston into the baron's most dangerous enemy.

After a failed attempt on his life, Gaston decides to seek out the remnants of the resistance against his former friend, and soon enough turns what had been the demotivated shells of Gilles's enemies into a sub-chapter of Robin Hood's Merry Men. I'm sure Satan would help Gilles out if he actually existed inside of the fictional world of the film, but as it stands, all hope seems lost for the cause of evil, even though Gilles still has a few tricks up his sleeve.

When I started with my films for this October's M.O.S.S. project, I didn't suspect how difficult it would be to set eyes on films that actually contain the devil, demons, or at least supernatural fiends outside of their marketing material. Il Mariscal is not the film I was looking for, for what tries to look for all the world like a horror film variation of the career of Gilles de Rais, is at its heart a rather lame and tame swashbuckler whose bad guy just happens to sacrifice "virgins" to Satan.

Apart from this core disappointment, the film suffers from all the typical Naschy weaknesses: important, possibly exciting plot developments are talked about rather than shown (the build-up of the rebel army - happens off-screen; that first rebel leader - captured off-screen; and so on); a dubious sense of the way time works; a lack of production values that leaves most sets nearly empty; Naschy's obsession with trying to make his bad guy characters look sympathetic by having them whine a lot about what poor dears they are, which is a bit difficult to buy when talking about a character who mass rapes and murders women. Not that we'd actually get to see much of the depravity, because, unlike most of Naschy's films, this one is rather lacking in nudity and gore to help keep the audience awake.

For most of its running time, the film also lacks the secret weapon that keeps many of other Naschy's other films that share Mariscal's flaws at least watchable, often even brilliantly entertaining: an endearing love for the wrong-headed, the bizarre, and the improbable. Naschy's love for these things seems absolutely stunted in this outing, with little happening on or off screen that I wouldn't call quotidian.

I'd be less down on the film if it were any good as a swashbuckler (after all, "Robin Hood versus Satanists" sounds rather great, doesn't it?), but the swashbuckling is so rote and charmless it's impossible to get excited about it. It doesn't help the film's case how little visual imagination Naschy's regular collaborator León Klimovsky brings to the table here. Everything is very brown and slow and realized without passion, as if no one was even trying to let the film look like anything other than a handful of people in school play medieval garb waddling through brown, depopulated locations and sets without a designer. Just look at the so-called tourney with two horses and twenty guys standing in a row in the middle of nowhere and despair!

Among Mariscal's few positives is an expectedly melodramatic and physical performance by Naschy (his antagonist Bredeston is unfortunately not Errol Flynn, or even Richard Harrison). Naschy-the-actor really gets into his character's increasing mental deterioration; unfortunately, Naschy-the-writer doesn't provide him with much of interest to do. The final fight between (a stuntman clearly standing in for) Naschy and Bredeston is also relatively remarkable, with much better choreography and execution than anything that happens before it. In fact, if the rest of the film's action were of this standard, this could have been a rather more decent swashbuckler than it actually is.

That final fight is also the only point where the film does something actually surprising and interesting. Despite all genre conventions and being the designated noble hero of the piece, Bredeston loses the fight against his enemy, and it's the job of the peasant rebels to shoot the enemy of virginhood with arrows. This scene is staged as the only moment of true Naschy weirdness in the movie, with Naschy ranting about the awesome power the devil has provided him with, and the rebels just shrugging and turning him into a porcupine; the working classes finally asserting themselves.

Technorati-Markierungen: satan's school for ghouls,reviews,spanish movies,argentinian movies,paul naschy,leon klimovsky,norma sebre,guillermo bredeston,adventure,horror

Hairy Beasts meets Assignment Naschy: La Bestia Y La Espada Mágica (1983)

aka The Beast and the Magic Sword

aka The Werewolf and the Magic Sword

This May the agents of M.O.S.S. throw their collective gaze (warning: may turn anyone into a lesbian vampire) toward everything hairy and beastly: Cerberus, the shirtless Bollywood actor of your choice and more. To stay up to date on our exploits regarding the matter, you can just follow this handy link.

Otto the Great (Gérard Tichy), ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, has beaten the Magyars decisively, but neither he nor his men dare execute their enemies' imprisoned leader for fear of being stricken by a horrible curse. The only curse-free solution would be a duel to the death, but nobody seems to be able to beat the Magyar in a fair fight. Only the Polish nobleman Irineus Daninsky (of course Paul Naschy, wearing such a frightening wig and false beard that this alone would qualify the movie for the Hairy Beasts month) dares risk his life in this way anymore. The Poles price for his heroic attempt at duelling is the hand of Otto's disturbingly young looking daughter, but hey, it's the early middle ages.

Irineus kills the Magyar in a hard-won fight, gets the hand and love (repeat after me: all women want Paul Naschy, even when he has hair on his head and in his face that makes him look like bigfoot) of the emperor's daughter, and everyone could live happily ever after, if not for the Magyar's witch wife, who some months later appears and pokes Daninsky's pregnant wife in the belly with a wolf's skull, cursing all future generations of the family with lycanthropy.

Half a millennium later, at the end of the 16th Century, the curse is still up and running, and Irineus's descendant Waldemar (also Paul Naschy, though with not quite as terrifying hair) appears with his "companion" (yeah, I don't know either) Kinga (Beatriz Escudero) at the home of enlightened Jewish alchemist, physician and wise man Salom Jehuda (Conrado San Martín), hoping the sage will be able to find a cure for the curse that's haunting him.

Alas, before Jehuda is able to help Waldemar (something he isn't even sure is possible), antisemitism and witchcraft fear strike, and some masked asshats murder the old man, only to be summarily dispatched afterwards by Waldemar's superior fighting skills. Jehuda has just long enough to live to ask Wally to take in his blind daughter Esther (Violeta Cela) - already in love with Waldemar like every woman in the world ever - and to send Wally and his harem on their way to the next enlightened man of science who just might be able to help: a man named Kian (Shigeru Amachi), living and working in Kyoto.

Next thing we know is that Kyoto is stricken by a series of bestial killings which always occur during the time of the full moon, for Waldemar isn't able to find Kian as easily as he hoped and now spends his time not doing anything to restrain his wolfman alter ego and moping about it afterwards like all Waldemar Daninskys do, the pricks.

Ironically, Kian is one of the people tasked with hunting down whatever and whoever is killing its way through town and country. It takes some time for the universally educated - he knows his Japanese culture but also Greek mythology, European werewolf myths and even talks about brain surgery later on - man to believe in something as ridiculous as a werewolf, but once he stares down Wolfman-shape Wally after a bordello massacre, there's no disbelieving for him. After the encounter, Kian doesn't need much time to find the Pole.

For inexplicable reasons, Kian then decides to find a cure for Waldemar instead of killing him outright, but, as it went for Jehuda, his attempts at finding a cure lead him nowhere. But hey, at least Kian's younger sister Akane (Yoko Fuji) becomes another woman who falls for fattening Paul Naschy's scriptwriting-induced charms, because Japan means "harem manga", right?

Things become even more difficult for Kian thanks to a would-be Jubei Yagyu (just look at the guy and his ninjas and don't tell me that's not what he's supposed to be even if he wears a different name) and his lust for vengeance for nothing in particular, and an evil sorceress (Junko Asahina) who - as women not falling under the Wally's spell always do - wants the wolfman as her new pet monster. The only question is which of the three girls lusting after Naschy's paunch will survive the film to kill him in the end.

Say what you will about Paul Naschy, but the man was as driven a filmmaker as anyone you could name, the kind of guy I wouldn't at all be surprised to find using something like Kickstarter for a financial infusion if he were still alive. As it stands, fanfunding was not in the cards during the early 80s, but even so, Naschy was not the kind guy who'd let himself be discouraged by lack of funding for his (perhaps unwise and dubious, yet also awesome) visions. If making a movie meant going outside of his native Spain and cooperating with Japanese producers, then Naschy would do that.

Naschy, never lacking in ambition and imagination, clearly wasn't content with just taking the Japanese money and running. His vision was obviously grander, and if he was working in Japan, then why not make a film taking place in Japan that was not just another of his Daninsky wolfman films but also at least in part a chambara?

Now, before any of my readers start dreaming about the awesome possibilities of a Naschy horror movie at its most dream-like crossed with the insane possibilities of Japanese exploitation, be advised that neither Naschy nor the Japanese genre film industry was at the height of power at this stage of their respective existences, so the ideas of La Bestia's incredible awesomeness you might possible have will have to be adjusted to a much more modest level.

For alas, this is one of those Naschy movies that - especially in its first half - does feature many more scenes of people telling each other the plot than scenes of said plot actually happening. While the European parts of the film may sound a lot like a medieval legend, their execution is rather bland and non-committal, with the more exciting moments sandwiched between many scenes of two guys in bad medieval costumes sitting stiffly in front of a nailed-down camera. It's clearly a budgetary problem this time around, for whenever things actually do happen, they are rather exciting.

Once we have arrived in Japan, there are still more "tell, don't show" moments to come, but the scenes of excitement and interest are getting quite a bit more numerous. Some of the action scenes are particularly good, with Naschy (surprisingly, when you keep in mind we are talking about a guy who writes himself as irresistible to all women in his scripts, though the Japanese producers may have had a hand in this for all I know) often stepping down and leaving room for Shigeru Amachi to kick ninja ass in not exactly inspired yet well-done scenes that have a lot more in common with action in Japanese films than those in Spanish ones, leaving me with the question which Japanese director was responsible for these scenes.

Even later in the film, once Waldemar visits the witch, even the irrational, dream-like mood one hopes for in a Naschy movie makes a late appearance and doesn't leave the film afterwards, as if it, once conjured up, were impossible to dispel again. The film's highpoint in this regard is clearly Shigeru Amachi's fight against a group of oni that's all moodily artificial light and strangeness.

La Bestia features other elements I found remarkable, like the fact that some of its true heroes are an elderly Jew and his daughter - both realized without much racial stereotyping - and a scientifically minded samurai, with the film using an exploitation film version of their respective cultures, yet clearly treating them and these cultures with a respect you don't generally find in exploitation films; as if the enlightened humanism these characters believe in would take over Naschy's often not quite as enlightened world view by their mere presence. A nice addition to that is a scene in which the sorceress (of all people) scolds Waldemar for being an egotist, not giving a damn for the people he kills during his wolfman escapades, and quite in love with his own tragic whining. Plus, there's a pretty dangerous looking scene of Naschy wrestling a tiger.

As it is often the case with Naschy's films, all the great moments and clever details don't really come together to make the great whole the director/writer/producer/star had already proven he could create if given the opportunity, but they're more than enough to make La Bestia Y La Espada Mágica a film worth watching. The trick, as always, is to treat every moment that works and every idea that succeeds as a moment where Naschy (the tragic and slightly unsympathetic hero even behind the camera) triumphs over the circumstances within and without that hold him back, and just live with the film's failures.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,japanese movies,reviews,hairy beasts,paul naschy,shigeru amachi,junko asahina,yoko fuji,violeta cela,horror,chambara

On WTF: Assignment Naschy: El Jorobado De La Morgue (1973)

aka Hunchback of the Morgue

Continuing my frightening adventures with the works of Spain's auteur of the insane Paul Naschy, I explore a film that finally reveals the truth about what goes on in those Bavarian mountain towns.

Necrophilia! Bestiality! Foot Fetishes! All that and a mad scientist await you in my column on WTF-Film. Paul Naschy loved us.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,reviews,horror,paul naschy,alberto dalbes,maria perschy,rossana yanni,javier aguirre,other places

Assignment Naschy: Seven Murders for Scotland Yard (1971)

Original title: Jack el destripador de Londres

A murderer roams the backrooms of 1970s London, murdering (mostly) prostitutes as a self-styled new Jack the Ripper. The police in form of the frighteningly coiffed Inspector Cuthbert Campbell (Renzo Marignano) soon have a main suspect. It's the second victim's boyfriend, former trapeze artist Pedro (Paul Naschy), his solid alibis for more than one of the murders notwithstanding.

Implicated to the audience by quite a few sledgehammer-subtle red herrings, Pedro is soon fleeing the police and trying to avenge his lover by catching the killer himself. That's not quite as easy as it sounds, for there's not only the police trying to catch him, but the local gangsters have seen Fritz Lang's M one too many times, and want to see supposed serial killer Pedro dead.

Pedro's investigation eventually points him towards Inspector Campbell himself as the possible perpetrator. This, however, may be just another red herring, for Campbell's buddy, teacher, guy with sexual problems, frequent lounger in house coats and inappropriate admirer of his students Winston Darby Christian (Andrés Resino) is just as good a suspect.

Sometimes, my project of getting my hands and eyes on every Paul Naschy movie possible turns into a bit of a chore. As someone who is completely unable to learn from my own mistakes, I decided to follow the pretty dire Spanish giallo A Dragonfly For Each Corpse with another one of Naschy's giallos, in form of Seven Murders, directed by José Luis Madrid (possibly known as the director of the also not very good Horrible Sexy Vampire, a film about a vampire who is neither). And wouldn't you know it, this one's only slightly better.

At least, Seven Murders isn't quite as unpleasantly reactionary as the later movie, a film whose protagonist and scriptwriters would probably applaud the killing spree of this one's villain. In fact, Seven Murders (at least in the version I saw; the different character names on the film's IMDB page suggest that other versions of the movie may be quite a bit different from the one I saw - on the other hand, the IMDB may just be full of crap) never suggests for a second that the victims deserve to be killed for being prostitutes, adulterers or just young and trying to experiment a bit. There's an uncommon unwillingness to identify with the murderer even in those scenes that are shot from his point of view that is on one hand pretty sympathetic, but that on the other hand only increases the film's distanced and disjointed feel.

As is so often the case with the films Naschy starred in, Seven Murders suffers from a script that doesn't seem to be able to make up its mind about much. Should it use too much exposition (like in one third of it)? None at all even when it would be useful (as in its other two thirds)? Should it really play this fast and loose with the guilt and innocence of its protagonists and include red herrings of a kind that can't be explained away and will therefore have to be ignored after the film is through? And who exactly is the protagonist: Pedro? Cuthbert Campbell? Winston "the Dandy" Darby Christian? How to tell a story in a way that doesn't drag and jerk from scene to scene as if the film were assembled from bits and pieces of two or three movies (it actually flows less well than some of Godfrey Ho's frankenfilms I've seen by now)? Scriptwriters Tito Carpi, Sandro Continenzo, Madrid and Naschy either don't know or are of different minds. Not surprisingly, this results in a film that's not just lacking focus, but can't even imagine having such a thing.

Now, a certain lack of logic and narrative focus isn't uncommon for a giallo; in fact it is something rather to be expected. However, the better films of the genre manage either to use these theoretical problems to enforce their thematic argument(s) (in which the absence of logic is often one of the points), to bury them under a pleasing, confusing or mesmerizing aesthetic surface, or to just throw so much weirdness and sleaze at their audience as to produce a state of bliss that makes caring about incoherence impossible. Seven Murders just doesn't manage any of these three feats. If the film has a theme, than it's something extremely generic like "in every man dwells a murderer", and Madrid (or the other writers) really can't be bothered to do much of interest with it.

Seven Murders' aesthetics are as confused as the writing. For every moment of beauty, every moodily framed scene, every bit of visual cleverness, there are two scenes of talking heads in anonymous rooms draining away all visual (and intellectual) excitement. Finally, weirdness and sleaze don't make any appearance at all.

One of Seven Murders' few high points is Naschy's performance. While it's really a Naschy standard role (the dark, brooding romantic with a dark past who is loved by all women, unpleasantly adept at physical violence, but has a good, yet tragic, heart), the actor puts a lot of energy into it, acting as the only physical and personal presence in a movie that is lacking personality in most other respects.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,reviews,paul naschy,jose luis madrid,giallo

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

Assignment Naschy: El Retorno Del Hombre Lobo (1980)

aka Night of the Werewolf

aka The Craving

aka Return of the Wolfman

As you know, Hungarian countess Elizabeth Bathory (Julia Saly) got in a bit of trouble with the Church for black magic, cannibalism, Satanism and that little thing with bathing in the blood of virgins, leading to the execution of her and her co-satanists and servants. Among those servants was the wolfman Waldemar Daninsky (of course Paul Naschy). Wally wasn't in it for Satan but for reasons of mind control, but clearly, that's not a thing that saves one from death by silver cross through the heart by the loving hands of the Church.

Centuries later, a trio of anthropologists and parapsychologists - Erika (Silvia Aguilar), Karin (Azucena Hernández) and Barbara (Pilar Alcón) - have spent years trying to find the place where Bathory and her servants are buried, and have now finally found it. Little do Karin and Barbara realize that Erika isn't on the side of science(!) anymore but has been converted to the ways of black magic through telepathic contact with the dead and buried Bathory. Consequently, Erika isn't planning on just examining the countess's grave but wants to revive its inhabitant with the help of a magical amulet and the blood of her two friends.

Some undefined space of time before that, while Erika is still killing to get the amulet and the other women are waiting around in Rome, graverobbers have found the crypt of Waldemar. Clearly, a silver cross is too much of a temptation not to steal it for them, even if it is sticking in a corpse's chest, and so the wolfman lives and (oh so tragically, if "tragic" means "without ever doing anything to avoid it") kills again. Together with supposed witch Mircalla (Beatriz Elorrieta) he off-screen-rescues from angry villagers, Wally moves into an abandoned castle close by the ruins and the system of crypts and underground tunnels where Elizabeth is buried, seemingly planning to wait around until a woman comes around who will love him enough to sacrifice herself to kill him.

When the trio of scientists arrives in the area, it fastly becomes clear that Karin is exactly the woman Waldemar has been looking for, but before they can commit double suicide, there are a few other problems for the couple to solve, for Erika manages to bring Bathory back to unlife as a vampire with a taste for creating other female vampires and ambitions for world and wolfman domination. Obviously, there's a wolfman versus vampire women throw-down standing between our heroes and their preferred end.

Even though I still have my problems with various elements of Paul Naschy's creative persona, my fastly growing experience with his body of work has shown the man to be the sort of artist capable and willing to learn from his mistakes, try new things even in the context of a long-running series like the Daninsky films, and improve his weak spots with every film he makes. To my eyes, this sort of passion for improving on previous efforts instead of coasting on their successes deserves much respect.

In El Retorno's case, Naschy is taking the improving pretty far, for the film is a re-working of the man's earlier Noche De Walpurgis, with many of the old film's problems removed and additions made that make the film much more dramatically involved and less random in its feel and structure. Even those of Naschy's weaknesses as a scriptwriter that reappear like bad pennies - namely a tendency to tell in stiffly expository dialogue scenes what he really should be showing - are comparatively reigned in and even make a certain amount of sense this time around. In El Retorno, Naschy isn't showing certain things because they may be important for the plot but are just not very interesting to watch, or are, like the process of Waldemar and Karin falling in love with each other, supposedly so natural - we are talking about the perfect male specimen here, after all - that there's just no need to dwell on them.

Transitions are left out completely, unless they involve skimpily clad vampire women returning into their graves (priorities, you know), which surprisingly does wonders to tighten the film's pacing as well as helps produce the dream-like mood continental European horror in the early 80s had often already lost.

For El Retorno, Naschy has also entered the director's chair, and instead of ending in a megalomaniac clusterfuck, this actually results in a Daninsky film that for once feels like a whole, losing the messiness I now suspect to be a result of directors and scriptwriter/lead actor of the other films in the series not seeing eye to eye about what they were trying to achieve. The price for this new-won unity of purpose is the loss of the batshit craziness I've learned to associate with Naschy, but Naschy the director replaces craziness with oodles of gothic mood and some very supernatural and weird (capital w version) feeling vampire women who very convincingly move from the seductive to the animalistic and back again, like they move from otherworldly gliding to predatory leaps. Julia Saly (who did work quite a bit with Naschy), Silvia Aguilar and Beatriz Elorrieta are properly great as the vampires, too, adding a distance and a sense for melodrama and some pretty fantastic screeching noises to their roles and making the perfect foil for Naschy's by now excellent wolfman and Azucena Hernández' sometimes feisty, sometimes whimpering (always doomed) heroine.

In Retorno, Naschy manages to unite his two main interests of his work - the comic book/pulp stylings and the more atmospheric parts inspired by Universal and Hammer horror - until they become something all his own. Turns out I don't miss the craziness of many of his other films at all in this case.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,horror,reviews,paul naschy,julia saly,silvia aguilar,azucena hernández,beatriz elorrieta