Past Misdeeds: L'amante del vampiro (1960)

aka The Vampire and the Ballerina

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.

Someone in a coat walks around the Italian countryside, sucking the blood of young women, turning them into his slaves through what rather looks like quality orgasms before the continued blood loss kills them. The country folk are convinced they are being terrorized by a vampire, but what they have of local authorities (including a doctor who can't tell bite wounds from scratch marks, and does not think an epidemic of anaemia among young women is anything worth investigating further) isn't interested in all that superstition, or is, like the police, curiously non-existent in the world of the film.

As luck will have it, a group of what the film calls ballet dancers after a definition that probably declares every dance taking place in a night club also to be ballet have come to a villa in the countryside to train a new choreography and to provide Luca (Isarco Ravaioli), the nephew of the slightly creepy owner of the villa, an opportunity to romance his very-soon-to-be fiancée, the dancer Francesca (Tina Gloriani). This set-up suggests quite a feast for a hungry heterosexual male bloodsucker.

For a time, it's all undisturbed dancing, lover's talk and listening to uncle's vampire tales for the girls, though. That is, until  Francesca, her now fiancée Luca, and her best friend Luisa (Hélène Rémy) are surprised by a storm while out walking and have to seek shelter in a supposedly empty castle. There, they meet two curious people: countess Alda (María Luisa Rolando) and her servant Herman (Walter Brandi), both dressed in fashion a few hundred years out of style, and moving as stiffly as, well, living corpses.

While at the castle, somebody takes a good bite out of Luisa's neck in a walk-in wardrobe, turning her into a rather enthusiastic Renfield, and Luca finds himself all too happy to be invited to return to Alda later the same night. My, you'd think there's something wrong with these people and their home…

I, like many a cult film fan, know and love L'amante's director Renato Polselli mostly for his perfectly insane, and wonderfully bizarre weird-out Gothic Black Magic Rites/The Reincarnation of Isabel, one among the weirdest films in a genre rich in weirdness. Compared to that piece of glorious incoherence, the film at hand is a rather logical and clear piece of filmmaking, even though every character - vampire or human - here does act completely and rather inexplicably foolish in at least one scene, and even the emotions of people not touched by the supernatural are turned to eleven all the time.

However, L*amante's narrative makes some basic sense, and I'm even willing to call some of the character motivations the script gives comprehensible, at least for some of the running time. Of course, this being an early Italian Gothic horror movie, I don't really care all that much how much sense the script makes or rather doesn't make, and am rather more interested in the film's mood of irreality.

Polselli shows himself quite adept in the creation of this mood of thick irreality, with many a beautifully composed shot of shadowy castles and graveyards, shadows on the walls, and whatever other traditional way of showing the audience that it has stepped into a place where the membrane between this world and another is particularly thin one might ask for in this regard. We are again in the realm of a very dream-like idea of what filmmaking means here, where pacing is sometimes erratic (some may say slow), people don't act like people generally do in real life, and where logic exists but only seems skewed to push the characters into the arms of the supernatural.

Apart from this, L'amante surprised me with how heavily and openly sexualized vampirism in it already is for a movie of its time, and how much further even than Hammer's Horror of Dracula it goes this early in the vampire movie game, with so much writhing, breast-rubbing, and obvious orgasming from the female part of the cast that speaking of a "subtext" here would be utterly preposterous. In Polselli's film, vampirism is all about sexual dominance, a fact that is  even further emphasised (and pushed in the direction of the slightly perverse) by the ugliness of the (not exactly convincing) vampire make-up. It's not difficult to see this as a film about unhealthy sexual power structures, particularly once we find the main vampire staking his former victims so that they can't disturb his "mastership"(!), and learn he keeps his vampire lover locked up in their castle, only letting her feed indirectly by drinking his blood after he has gouged himself, which, in turn, is the cause of his ugliness. Consequently, it's hardly a surprise she attempts to use Luca to get rid of him and probably to find a more pliable partner, even though later developments in the film suggest the distribution of power between the two vampires might be a little more complicated, as it often goes in sexualized master/slave relationships.

Polselli's treatment of these elements is as on the nose as imaginable for a film made in 1960, and really makes the film's two supposedly titillating dance scenes look as if they were part of a different, much less interesting and daring movie made in a time when even the often sexually quite more progressive and open European cinema had to use attractive women in skimpy outfits dancing horribly as the best it could do for titillation. On the other hand, the return to the second half of the 50s (in Europe, not the Code-dominated USA, obviously) in between actively messed up sexuality does further increase the film's unreal mood.


Not that L'amante del vampiro really needed that, for it is already a wonderful example of Italian Gothic horror being weird without it.

Past Misdeeds: The Playgirls And The Vampire (1960)

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 without any re-writes or 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 bus carrying a group of five showgirls, their manager (Alfredo Rizzo) and their driver comes to a stop on a blocked road during a storm while traversing a nameless Central European country. The next town is far away, and the last town holds an angry hotel owner, so our heroes are only too happy when they stumble upon a castle. Having never seen a single horror film in their lives, everyone thinks it a grand idea to ask for shelter there.

At first, the place's owner, Count Gabor Kernassy (Walter Brandi) is quite displeased by the group's appearance, but as soon as he lays eyes on Vera (Lyla Rocco), one of the girls, his demeanour suddenly changes and he is willing to let them stay the night. But the Count has a few rules for his guests. Chiefly, he doesn't want to see them leave their rooms at night under any circumstances, and urges them to lock their doors from the inside. Nobody seems to think this the least bit suspicious, and so not everyone does what the Count asks.

Not surprisingly to anyone not a character in the movie, the next morning finds one of the girls dead, supposedly fallen to her death from the castle ramparts. And oh, look at that, the rain falls over night have made the way to the next town to hold the police - or for the guests to leave the castle - impassable.

Obviously, there is something strange going on in the castle. Might it have something to do with Vera's feeling of having been there before and the weird, quite changeable behaviour of the Count, whose at once cooing at Vera and urging her to get away as soon as she can? And where does the dead girl's corpse disappear to the next night? Only the movie's title and time will tell.

The Playgirls and the Vampire is not as good a film as one would hope for, but it's still an interesting part of the minor wave of Italian horror films of the early 60s trying to put the tropes - and some of the style - of the gothic vampire film into contemporary times (compare for example with the very similar - even to the use of Walter Brandi - The Vampire and the Ballerina). Unfortunately, it's also a film desperately trying to show as much supposedly titillating content as possible, without spending much of a thought on where and how to place the sexiness best. This random adding of what was probably called "risqué" when this was shot to where it doesn't work in the context of anything going on around it tends to strain one's patience with the film's permanently see-through nightie-clad protagonists. At least Vera - as the heroine - does put a leather jacket on once we all have seen enough of her breasts and her panties peaking through her gown. The most desperate and ill-fitting, and therefore most funny, moment of "sexiness" here must surely be shortly after the burial (yeah, they're fast with that, here) of the dead girl Katia. The logical reaction (if you're a character in an Italian exploitation film) of one of her friends to the shock of death and burial is - obviously - to do a (frightening looking) striptease. It's probably the way of her people instead of keening. Or a godawful moment in the history of screenwriting. In any event, this particular scene shows The Playgirls' lack of coherence, or rather, its puzzling absurdity. Who would think including a striptease in that way to be a good idea?

However, once you take a look at the name of The Playgirls' writer and director, and the body of work coming later in his career (mostly as a screenwriter), everything becomes clear. It's Piero Regnoli, writer of classics of Italian exploitation with extra sleaze like Burial Ground, Nightmare City or (the actually pretty swell) Malabimba. Of course, these films are quite a bit more effective and far-reaching in their sleaziness than The Playgirls is, but it's quite clear that Regnoli goes as far as the year of production allows (he even manages to smuggle a few seconds of naked vampire breasts in). Unfortunately, that's not far enough to let the film's attempts at titillation look anything more than desperate, and makes a good argument for the honesty of Regnoli's later work.

The Playgirls is a more interesting and effective film when it doesn't try to arouse its audience with showing either too little or too much. The movie's gothic melodrama aspect isn't exactly original (even in a film made in 1960), but works perfectly fine if you enjoy the style (as I do). From time to time, Regnoli even manages to build up a suitably spooky mood. The scenes with the vampirized Katia, always half dressed in stark shadows, are quite strong, as is Vera's encounter with the male vampire outside by night. With the help of some solid photography by Aldo Greci and in often very beautiful, noir-ish frame compositions, these scenes build up the film's vampires as a surprisingly creepy supernatural menace, only to be too soon interrupted by another reason for a girl to show off her nightgown. The gothic horror film and the would-be sexploitation one are permanently stepping on each other's toes, with Regnoli only once (in a scene between dead Katia and the manager) seeming to realize that the sex and the horror belong together in a scene and not in separate ones.


Fortunately, that's a lesson Regnoli would have learned well later on, as the full-grown psychosexual freak-out of Malabimba and Peter Bark's role in Burial Ground prove, to my delight, and the pain of many others.

On Exploder Button: L'amante del vampiro (1960)

Ah, Italian Gothic horror, what would I do without you? Probably not watch films about a group of "ballet dancers" encountering some surprisingly obviously sexual vampires, that's pretty sure. It would be a sad and empty life.

Fortunately, there are films like Renato Polselli's L'amante del vampiro (aka The Vampire and the Ballerina), as I explain in this week's column over at ExB.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,horror,gothic,renato polselli,hélène remy,walter brandi,tina gloriani,isarco ravaioli,maría luisa rolando,other places

On WTF: The Playgirls And The Vampire (1960)

What happens when young Piero Regnoli, later to be the writer of Malabimba and Burial Ground (among other lessons in extreme sleaze), is hired to make a contemporary gothic vampire movie? A cage-match between as much sleaze as 1960s' Italy allows and a gothic vampire movie, of course!

Read my detailed impressions of the fight on WTF-Film!

 

Technorati-Markierungen: horror,reviews,other places,piero regnoli,walter brandi,gothic