The Lady and the Monster (1944)

The Lady and the Monster is a 1944 Republic science fiction/horror movie based on Curt Siodmak's excellent 1942 novel Donovan’s Brain.

In this case rather than one mad scientist we get two but they’re obsessed and blinded by hopes of scientific glory rather than being overtly mad or evil. Professor Franz Mueller (Erich von Stroheim) and Dr Patrick Cory (Richard Arlen) are doing brain research. 

They believe they are close to being able to remove a brain and keep it alive outside the body.

Obviously they need a human subject but they’re not evil. They are not prepared to commit murder in order to obtain a brain. Their hope is that they can find someone so ravaged by disease or so horrifically injured as to have no chance of survival. In which case they have convinced themselves that removing the brain and keeping it alive externally would not really be morally wrong.

Of course they would have to do this in secret - the police might misunderstand. Luckily Mueller has a huge isolated old house (which everyone refers to as The Castle) with a well-equipped laboratory in the basement. And he not only has Cory to assist him but also his pretty young ward Janice Farrell (Vera Ralston), an aspiring scientist herself.

A plane crash gives them their chance. They are able to remove the brain just in time. And it survives!

That’s all very interesting but what they now want to do is to find a way to communicate with the brain.

There are things they don’t know about this brain, at least at first. It belongs to a very very rich man named Donovan. That’s unfortunate because it means that his death will attract publicity. There is however a much bigger problem with this brain. I’m not going to spoil the movie by hinting at the nature of this problem.

Professor Mueller is not really evil but he is increasingly blinded by ambition and increasingly obsessed. There is also a suggestion that he has a sexual or romantic interest in Janice. This does not please the housekeeper Mrs Fame (Mary Nash) who seems to be carrying a torch for the professor. And Cory and Janice are in love so there’s plenty of jealousy. Mueller’s judgment becomes more erratic.

There are also factors (which I can’t reveal due to the risk of spoilers) that cause Cory’s behaviour to be become very erratic.

And there are nefarious plots being hatched in the background, unbeknownst to Mueller and Cory.

It’s interesting to watch von Stroheim and Arlen both playing obsessed characters and taking totally different different but equally effective acting approaches. While von Stroheim is outrageous and flamboyant he is more than a mere ham.

Vera Ralston was being pushed towards stardom by Republic Pictures boss Herbert Yates. She’s a bit stilted but since she’s playing the beautiful female assistant to a mad scientist her subtly odd performance and slight accent make her seem suitably exotic.

The very moody atmospheric visuals are the work of the great cinematographer John Alton. And the sets are quite impressive as well and there’s some good miniatures work.

This was an A-picture for Republic and it’s polished and professional and vastly superior to most of the schlock Universal was churning out in the 40s.

The Lady and the Monster is cleverer and more subtle than you might anticipate. This is fine entertainment and it’s highly recommended. And a must for von Stroheim fans!

This is part of a four-movie Republic Horror Blu-Ray set. The transfer is excellent.

Night of the Comet (1984)

Night of the Comet is a 1984 post-apocalyptic science fiction film but it’s not handled in quite the way you might expect.

A comet is about to pass very close to Earth. Scientists reassure everybody that there is no danger. It just will be a spectacular light show.

Regina (Catherine Mary Stewart) misses the show. She’s in the projection booth of an old movie theatre having sex with her boyfriend. Well he’s not exactly her boyfriend. They’re not going steady.

The projection both just happens to have steel walls. That’s important.

The next morning everybody is dead. Everybody in LA. Maybe everybody in the world. Well, almost everybody. By a coincidence Regina’s sister Samantha (Kelli Maroney) spent the night behind steel walls.

And Hector (Robert Beltran) spent the night in the back of his truck with some chick he’d picked up. It seems like anybody who was safely behind steel barriers of some sort has survived. Which means that everybody is dead except for a tiny handful of people.

They run into Hector at the radio station. That’s important, because that’s how the scientists find out about them.

There are also the zombies. There aren’t many of them. But they’re mean and you don’t always recognise them as zombies at first.

And there are those scientists. They’re holed up in some top-secret laboratory out in the desert. Since they’re scientists and they’re part of a secret research facility we assume they’re evil. They might not be, but it’s highly likely. Maybe they will rescue the two girls. Maybe.

The romantic comedy Valley Girl had been a huge hit in 1983. Writer-director Thom Eberhardt sold the producers of Valley Girl on Night of the Comet by pitching it to them as Valley Girls at the End of the World. Post-apocalyptic sci-fi, but with valley girls.

What makes Night of the Comet oddly appealing is that you expect it to become silly and goofy and it is, but only up to a point. It’s a bit darker than you think it’s going to be. It seems like it’s going to become a black comedy, but it’s more an absurdist comedy. The tone is all over the place but its unpredictability works in its favour.

As a post-apocalyptic nightmare world it’s just desolate and empty rather than terrifying and horrific. But the desolation and emptiness are effective.

Regina does have one big thing going for her. Her dad is a Special Forces officer. Regina can handle a submachine-gun with the same skill as her favourite arcade game. And her dad has taught her that if you have to use a gun, shoot to kill. Regina is more than a match for the average zombie. And kid sister Samantha is a pretty cool customer as well.

Our trio of survivors has no idea what is going on. They know that somehow the comet killed everybody but they don’t know the truth about the zombies and even when they encounter the scientists they don’t know what that desert laboratory is all about. But they are 80s teenagers and they’re not inclined to be overly trusting. And they’ve seen horror movies. They know you don’t take chances with zombies. And they know that scientists and government people are not always the good guys.

The scenes of deserted LA are beautifully and atmospherically shot. The desolation is achieved with commendable subtlety. The slightly red skies are a nice touch. You don’t need a huge budget to make a post-apocalyptic. You just have to know what you’re doing.

The two lead actresses are wonderful. They play off each other beautifully and they’re sassy without being annoying. This is not a movie that offers non-stop mayhem. It’s more a bitter-sweet look at real people trying to deal with the end of the world. It doesn’t need gore because we really care about these people. We really really want them to make it.

This is a much better movie than it has any right to be. It manages to warmhearted and cynical at the same time. Highly recommended.

Robotrix (1991)

Robotrix is a 1991 Hong Kong science fiction movie which lifts its central idea from RoboCop but it cannot be regarded as a mere RoboCop rip-off. It’s a wildly different story.

While RoboCop is about corporations and governments out of control Robotrix is more of a traditional mad scientist movie (with the twist that the mad scientist is both a Dr Frankenstein and a Frankenstein’s monster in one). This might make it seem less interesting than RoboCop but Robotrix simply has other fish to fry.

Salina (played by Japanese actress Chikako Aoyama) is a tough Hong Kong police detective. An Arab oil prince has been kidnapped by a brilliant but deranged Japanese scientist, Ryuichi Sakamoto (Chung Lin). Sakamoto has transformed himself into a cyborg. His motivation seems to be revenge for the mockery his work had attracted.

In the course of the kidnapping Salina is killed but her story is far from over. Another genius scientist (and Sakamoto’s arch-rival) Dr Sara (Hui Hsiao-dan) uploads Salina’s personality into a robot.

Dr Sara has a beautiful female assistant, Ann (Amy Yip), who is in fact a robot. Ann is a pure robot while Salina is a cyborg, with a human personality.

While RoboCop is troubled by the fact that he is no longer either man or machine but a bit of both and looks like a monstrous robot Salina’s problem is that she looks entirely human but is no longer sure if she’s a machine or a woman. And I think it’s fair to assume that this would be an even bigger issue for a woman than it would be for a man. Salina has been dating Joe (David Wu), a member of her squad. She needs to know if she is still capable of love now that she is no longer exactly human.

Sakamoto, now an incredibly powerful cyborg, goes on a murderous rampage.

Prostitutes are being murdered, the police believe this to be linked to Sakamoto and the police have set a trap. It doesn’t work out the way they had hoped.

All their attempts to apprehend Sakamoto seem destined for failure, even with a formidable lady cyborg and an equally formidable lady robot on their side. Lots of incredibly violent mayhem ensues, with unpleasant consequences for both Salina and Dr Sara. It will of course lead to a violent showdown.

While Robotrix engages with some serious issues along the way it’s essentially an adrenalin-charged action romp and it doesn’t take itself too seriously. At times it is extremely funny, and deliberately so.

The whole concept of cheating death by uploading your personality into a computer or a robot is not as simple as it sounds. You’re dead. There is now a copy of your personality in the robot, but you yourself are dead. This is glossed over in most science fiction stories but there is a tantalising hint that the writers, Jamie Luk and Man Sing So, were aware of this problem. There is a moment when Joe fears that Salina has been killed again and Ann tells him, “Joe, Salina has been dead for a long time.” This aspect is not developed because that would have made this a totally different movie.

This is a Category III movie (roughly the equivalent of a US NC-17 rating) and there’s some very graphic violence and some very graphic sex. There’s some very graphic sexual violence but while this is to some degree added as an exploitation element it does serve a purpose. There is a danger that we might feel come sympathy for Sakamoto, that we might see him as a tragically misguided genius scientist capable of redemption. His brutalisation of a prostitute and of one the central female characters ensures that we feel no sympathy for him whatsoever. It is necessary for the audience to see Sakamoto as a monster who must be destroyed.

There’s also a romantic sex scene between Salina and Joe. Salina has to know not only if she can still enjoy sex in a physical sense but more important whether she can still enjoy it emotionally. This is a movie that jumps from serious moments such as this to broad comedy. It’s all over the place and while this would be a flaw in most movies this is a Hong Kong movie and it works.

The action scenes are impressive.

The ending is magnificent. And then there’s an epilogue which is quite perfect as well.

The 88 Films Blu-Ray looks terrific and there’s an audio commentary.

Robotrix does have superficial resemblances to RoboCop but it’s also an interesting anticipation of Ghost in the Shell. The Ghost in the Shell movie did not come out until 1995 but the Ghost in the Shell manga was published in 1989.

Robotrix is total insanity but it’s inspired insanity and it’s bursting with energy and it’s very highly recommended (although it is perhaps not for the faint-hearted).

Darkman (1990)

Darkman, released in 1990, was one of a number of comic book or comic book-inspired action movies made in the early to mid 90s. Other notable examples being Dick Tracy, The Rocketeer, The Shadow and The Phantom. All were expected to launch franchises but for various reasons this didn’t happen (although there were a couple of direct-to-video Darkman movies). Darkman was in fact commercially very successful.

Sam Raimi directed and co-wrote the script.

Genius scientist Dr Peyton Westlake (Liam Neeson) is working on a new type of synthetic skin. His girlfriend Julie Hastings (Frances McDormand) is a lawyer but despite this she’s one of the good guys. She has tumbled upon a corruption scandal involving property developer Louis Strack (Colin Friels). She has an incriminating memo. A bunch of goons led by the sinister Robert Durant (Larry Drake) break into Peyton’s laboratory and then blow it up. Peyton is assumed to have perished but he survived, horribly disfigured. His new synthetic skin invention won’t help because it’s unstable. It disintegrates after a short period of time.

The skin however can be useful as a temporary measure and Peyton uses it it to get his revenge.

An enormous amount of mayhem ensues.

This movie was not based on an actual comic book. It was an original story by Sam Raimi. Comic books were a very obvious influence, along with 1930s pulp novels such as The Shadow, 1930/40s movie serials and the Universal gothic horror movies of the 30s. Darkman certainly achieves an extraordinary comic-book vibe. And since it’s an original story there were no pesky rights issues to worry about.

It was also clearly an attempt to ride on the coat-tails of Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman mega-hit. Darkman has some traces of the urban gothic feel of Batman but it has a flavour of its own. It has an aesthetic perfectly suited to a comic-book movie.

Liam Neeson is an actor I’ve never thought about one way or the other. He’s fine here and does the brooding tragic thing well.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with Frances McDormand’s performance but it’s too bland for a movie such as this which demands larger-than-life performances.

This movie is dominated by its villains. Colin Friels is deliciously oily and slimy. Larry Drake as Durant is properly menacing and sadistic.

What distinguishes Darkman from the other comic book style movies of the 90s is that Raimi was coming from a horror background so it has more overt horror moments, and the Darkman makeup effects are genuinely gruesome.

What makes it fun is that the horror is combined with so much goofiness and so many hyperactive action scenes.

You’re not meant to take his movie even a tiny bit seriously. There’s a lot of black comedy. It’s all very tongue-in-cheek.

Some of the action scenes are amazingly silly and totally unbelievable but it doesn’t matter. This is the world of comic books. The crazier the action scenes the better, as long as they’re done with energy. And this movie has immense amounts of energy. The suspended-from-a-helicopter scenes are ludicrously over-the-top and implausible but comic book heroes can do those sorts of things.

Raimi had a modest budget to work with. Some of the special effects are a bit iffy but Raimi figured that if they were done at sufficiently breakneck pace it wouldn’t matter, and he was right.

The production design, given the limited budget, is impressive. This is a cool dark fantasy world.

Don’t bother giving any thought to the plot. It’s a standard revenge plot and it’s full of holes but if you have plenty of beer and popcorn on hand you won’t care. There is an attempt to add a tragic aspect to the story and that works quite well.

Darkman is just pure hyperkinetic crazy fun. Just sit back and enjoy the ride. Highly recommended.

Darkman looks pretty good on Blu-Ray.

Genocyber (anime OVA, 1994)

Genocyber is a five-episode 1994 anime OVA directed by Kôichi Ôhata based on Tony Takezaki’s 1992 manga Genocyber: The Beauty Devil from Psychic World. The anime is a fine example of a good idea somewhat weakened by self-indulgent visual excess.

There’s a cyberpunk influence here, and a monster movie influence. Among other things it’s a mad scientist story.

This is a near-future world where attempts are being made, unsuccessful as usual, to eliminate war. As usual it seems that this peaceful utopia will be a global totalitarian state. National armies will be outlawed. There is a problem. Private corporations such as the Kuryu Corporation have more military power than most countries. And their ethical standards are much the same as those of governments - in other words they don’t have any ethical standards.

There are actually two mad scientists and they have been investigating the powers of the mind. There is within the human mind a mind shadow that can harness life energies and make them tangible, and potentially powerful in the physical world. The result is a kind of corporeal mind-creation, the Vajra.

Their research is centred on two sisters, Elaine and Diana. Whether they can be described as sisters or perhaps twins or whether they’re something else entirely is open to debate. They may be the daughters of one or other of the mad scientists.Diana has no functional body, only a cyberbody. Elaine has the mind of a child, or perhaps that of a wild animal.

Eventually two monstrous creations have come into being, the Vajranoid and Genocyber. This is the world of anime so it wouldn’t do to jump to conclusions about which is good and which evil.

As usual when people try to bring about world peace it leads to war. A US supercarrier is involved. By chance Elaine is aboard the carrier. She has been adopted by a kindly female doctor, Myra. There’s another mad scientist and he has harnessed the Vajra to create the Vajranoid, a superweapon which is both cybernetic and biological and maybe something else. A lot of mayhem ensues. Cities get destroyed.

There’s an enormous amount of blood and gore. There’s so much that it quickly ceases to have any impact. Seeing a head explode might shock the first time but seeing a head explode for the 143rd time becomes tiresome. This anime needed more creepiness and dread and less gore.

That’s the first three episodes. Then it changes gear completely for the final two episodes. We’re in future society, the last refuge of humanity. It’s a utopia and like all utopias it’s actually a totalitarian dystopia. There’s another pair of sisters. There’s a young man and a young blind woman making a living with a sideshow act. There’s a strange religious cult. The cult incorporates element of Christianity combined with loads of other millenarian stuff. The connection with the three earlier episodes is rather tenuous. These two episodes feature a lot less gore, they’re much more atmospheric, they’re much weirder and much more interesting.

There are some genuinely cool ideas here. The plot is never fully explained. In fact the plot is totally incoherent. This OVA is not a complete success but it does have lots of WTF moments which I enjoy. I do like all the weird disturbing never-quite-explained sister stuff. These are sisters with a psychic link but the link is more mystical and mysterious than that. There are also plenty of suggestions of weird things being destined to happen.

I don’t object to gore but it tends to bore me. Too often it’s used to cover up a lack of real imagination. That’s a pity here since there is some real imagination in Genocyber. There’s a stupendous quantity of action. There’s some nudity and a small amount of sex.

This is a product of an era in anime when boundaries were being pushed and in which a major selling point for violent anime was that it was seen as very much not kids’ stuff. That did lead to excess for the sake of excess and Genocyber is guilty of that at times. Genocyber is very very violent indeed.

Whatever its faults Genocyber is unpredictable and in its own way memorable, and entertaining in a bizarre way. Recommended.

If you enjoy the wild crazy sex and violence-fuelled excesses of late 80s/early 90s anime then Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend (1989) does it much better, as does the 1989-94 OVA Angel Cop.

Discotek’s Blu-Ray presentation is fine. The only worthwhile extra is a fairly informative essay.

Alien from the Abyss (1989)

Alien from the Abyss is a crazy 1989 monster movie directed by the great Antonio Margheriti.

We start with a couple of do-gooders, crusading journalist Jane (Marina Giulia Cavalli) and cameraman Lee (Robert Marius), trying to get to an island where nuclear waste is being dumped into an active volcano. They get machine-gunned from the air.

They survive and reach the island. There’s a mad scientist, Dr Geoffrey (Luciano Pigozzi), but the guy who’s really in charge of the E-Chem facility is much scarier. That’s Colonel Kovacks (Charles Napier). He’s head of security and knows nothing of nuclear physics but the E-Chem head office lets him make the scientific decisions because they’re like totally evil and he can be relied on to maximise profits. Lee has taken incriminating video footage. He gets captured and tortured.

Jane escapes. She is rescued by a nerdy snake-hunter, Bob (Daniel Bosch). They’re pursued through the jungle by the E-Chem security guards. The guards are armed with automatic weapons but Bob has his trusty snakes as allies. Every snake on the island is deadly and there are lots of them.

Narrow escapes and plenty of mayhem follow before he gets her to his jungle hideaway and introduces her to his snakes. She is not impressed.

She is also not impressed that he doesn’t want to join her crusade against E-Chem and rescue her cameraman buddy.

But he changes his mind because Jane is a pain in the ass but she’s kinda cute.

The whole facility seems like it’s become a huge nuclear bomb about to explode.

That’s when the alien spaceship lands! We later find out that the aliens have been attracted by all the radiation. Aliens just love radiation.

This is one mean nasty alien. It’s not just the huge jaw-like chopper things. He can also slime you to death.

Colonel Kovacks has to figure out how to kill the alien. Jane just wants to get that videotape back. Bob just wants to get into Jane’s pants but he’s not having much luck.

The plant is getting closer to meltdown, the volcano could blow at any moment and the alien has embarked on a killing rampage. He’s one of those unstoppable monsters. Shooting him just annoys him.

I believe Margheriti was disappointed by the monster but I think he’s rather cool.

There are lots of gunfights and countless explosions. Lots of guys get chomped or slimed by the monster. This is what cinema is all about!

The acting is mostly adequate for the kinds of movie this is. Luciano Pigozzi is fun as the cynical disillusioned mad scientist who isn’t as evil or mad as he appears to be.

And of course there’s Charles Napier being Charles Napier and he’s huge amounts of fun to watch.

It goes without saying that this was a low-budget movie (shot in the Phillipines) but Margheriti always knew how to make a low budget go a long way. And he keeps things powering along. If the action slows down for a minute or so, add more explosions.

This is a remarkably tame movie on the sex and nudity front. There is zero nudity and zero sex. Despite Bob’s best efforts. Jane is not going to come across because she has a Cause and that means more to her than a man.

There is naturally a great deal of silliness and goofiness but there’s adventure and excitement and an unstoppable slimy monster. And deadly snakes. And explosions.

Margheriti could handle most genres and he does a solid job here.

Alien from the Abyss (also released as Alien from the Deep) is not a movie you want to take the least bit seriously but it’s fine entertainment. Highly recommended.

Severin’s Blu-Ray release looks very nice indeed and there are some extras.

King Kong Escapes (1967)

King Kong Escapes was a Japanese US co-production between Rankin-Bass and Japan’s Toho studio. Made in 1967 it was directed by Ishirô Honda but was inspired as much by The King Kong Show animated TV series of the time (which I've never seen) as by Japanese monster movies or the original King Kong movie.

At the North Pole the mad scientist Dr Who (Eisei Amamoto) has built a giant robot ape. He needs the robot ape to dig deposits of Element X out of a cavern. Dr Who is in the employ of an unnamed country which it’s reasonable to assume is meant to be China (Red China hysteria was huge in 1967).

He is taking his orders from the beautiful but deadly superspy Madame X (Mie Hama).

Meanwhile a super-advanced United Nations submarine skippered by Commander Carl Nelson (Rhodes Reason) has to take refuge in an inlet in a tiny island. The island is of course the island on which the legendary King Kong was supposed to live and by one of those amazing coincidences which abound in this movie Commander Nelson (a character clearly heavily based on Admiral Nelson in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea) and his executive officer Lieutenant Commander Jiro Nomura (Akira Takarada) are totally obsessed by the subject of King Kong. They believe he really existed. They’re Kong experts.

Nelson and Nomura, accompanied by the ship’s nurse Lieutenant Susan Watson (Linda Miller), land on the island. They discover that Kong not only was real, he’s still around. The island is also swarming with dinosaurs.

Given that we know that Kong has an eye for a pretty girl we’re not surprised that he takes a shine to Susan. I can’t say that I blame him. She’s cute and blonde and adorable. But of course Kong has lousy luck with women. Whenever he thinks he’s found Miss Right something always goes wrong.

Kong has more urgent things to worry about. Dr Who’s robot ape has broken down so he decides to kidnap Kong. A real giant ape should even more useful than a robot one. Kong will be easy to control. He’ll be hypnotised. What could go wrong?

So far the action has taken place on Kong’s island and at the North Pole so the good people of Tokyo are probably breathing a sigh of relief that at least their city is not going to get stomped this time. But they’re wrong!

Doctor Who is perhaps not the brightest of mad scientists. His schemes always seem to contain some fatal flaws. He loses control of Kong. He thinks he can threaten Commander Nelson into helping him regain control of the recalcitrant ape. The key of course is Susan. Cute blondes can persuade giant apes to do anything.

Meanwhile Madame X seems to be cooking up schemes of her own.

There’s no point in complaining that this movie is very silly. It’s fairly obvious that it’s supposed to be silly. We’re not supposed to take it the least bit seriously.

The special effects are not very convincing but they’re fun and fun matters more than realism. The submarine miniature is cool. And there’s a flying sub. It’s not as cool as the one in the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea TV series and it’s more of a miniature hovercraft sub but it’s kinda cool as well.

We get a reasonable amount of mayhem with both Kong and the robot ape slugging it out, not just for dominance but for possession of the luscious Susan.

Mie Hama has huge amounts of fun as the sexy but evil lady spy Madame X. Linda Miller is just bursting with cuteness as Susan, Kong’s love interest. The two male heroes are perfectly adequate.

Eisei Amamoto as Dr Who manages to seem evil, crazy and incompetent all at the same time and his performance is most enjoyable.

King Kong Escapes is lightweight good-natured goofy fun and if you’re content with that then it’s definitely recommended.

King Kong Escapes looks lovely on Blu-Ray. The disc is barebones.

The Horrible Dr Hichcock (1962)

Riccardo Freda is generally regarded as one of the lesser Italian genre directors of the 60s and 70s. One reason for this might be that for years his gothic horror masterwork The Horrible Dr Hichcock (AKA The Terror of Dr Hichcock AKA L'orribile segreto del Dr Hichcock) could only be seen in very poor quality grey market releases. It’s now available on Blu-Ray and it’s worthy of re-evaluation.

It deals with classic gothic themes in a rather daring way for 1962.

Professor Bernard Hichcock (Robert Flemyng) is one of the most eminent surgeons in London in the 1880s. He is pushing the boundaries of surgery and of anaesthesia. He has a laboratory attached to his house. His work is somewhat experimental and there are risks. Sadly an experiment goes wrong and his beloved wife Margaretha dies. The professor can no longer stand living in the house and disappears. He is presumably now living in retirement somewhere.

Twelve years later he is back in London, with a pretty new wife. He met Cynthia (Barbara Steele) when he was treating her for a nervous disorder. Cynthia is very much in love with her husband.

Bernard Hichcock is clearly a man haunted by the past. The house is filled with pictures of his first wife Margaretha. This upsets Cynthia - Margaretha may be dead but she still seems to be a rival for her husband’s love.

There is a locked room in the house which Cynthia is forbidden to enter. Being a woman she naturally enters it. It’s all a bit disturbing. Other things make her uneasy - she is convinced she sees the figure of a woman in the house and in the grounds of the estate but her husband assures her that that is impossible.

There’s also a creepy housekeeper, Martha, who seems to resent Cynthia’s presence.

Professor Hichcock’s behaviour becomes more unstable. His colleagues, especially his chief assistant Dr Kurt Lowe (Silvano Tranquilli), worry about him. Cynthia is becoming quite frightened. She fears that there is something threatening in this household and of course she’s right. She really is in danger, but what kind of danger?

Freda obviously never met a gothic visual clichè he didn’t love. He lays on the gothic trappings very think indeed. Which is fine. The gothic is a genre in which nothing succeeds like excess. The Horrible Dr Hichcock is overcooked and overdone and overblown but that just makes it more alluring to fans of Italian gothic horror.

I can’t help wondering if this movie was influenced by the style and mood of Roger Corman’s The Fall of the House of Usher. It has a similar vibe.

I suspect a very definite Poe influence as well. While Hammer gothic horror was very concerned with good vs evil Poe was more interested in decadence, madness and doom and Corman’s Poe adaptations reflect that. The Horrible Dr Hichcock reflects some of that as well.

This movie takes things a lot further in the direction of madness and very unhealthy sexual obsessions. Italian film-makers at this time were still limited by censorship in terms of showing nudity and sex but they were able to push sexual themes much further. This movie pushes them a long way indeed.

Having a screenplay by the great Ernesto Gastaldi certainly helps. This is perhaps more of a Gastaldi film than a Freda film.

While it’s obvious that the professor has a bit of a thing for dead girls the movie perhaps doesn’t make it sufficiently clear that this is what led to the unfortunate demise of his first wife. There are rumours that the film fell behind schedule which resulted in several important scenes not being filmed.

This movie also very obviously owes a debt to Hitchcock’s gothic masterpiece Rebecca.

Barbara Steele is excellent as always and as always looks extraordinary. Robert Flemyng is suitably creepy, tortured and on the verge of complete madness. Necrophilia is not exactly conducive to retaining one’s sanity.

Freda does have to be assigned to the second rank of Italian genre directors but The Horrible Dr Hichcock succeeds by virtue of its sheer excessiveness. It has plenty of flaws, it’s not a great movie in any conventional sense, but it is outrageous and enjoyably deranged. Highly recommended.

The Olive Films Blu-Ray is barebones but looks lovely. The English soundtrack is the only audio option but that’s no real problem given that even the Italian language versions of Italian genre films of this era were post-dubbed.

Yor: The Hunter from the Future (1983)

I always get excited when I see the words “directed by Antonio Margheriti” in a movie’s credits. It invariably means I’m in for a good time. I have no problems with profound movies and arty movies but sometimes you just want the cinematic equivalent of a burger and fries. Antonio Margheriti understood this and he would do you a great burger and fries and throw in a thick shake as well. I respect that.

Yor: The Hunter from the Future came out in 1983. I love the fact that we don’t get an introduction explaining what’s going on. Margheriti is confident he can entertain us enough to keep us watching and that it will be more fun to find these things out slowly.

At the beginning we don’t know if we’re on Earth or some other planet and we don’t know if we’re in the distant past or the distant future. We do know that things are pretty primitive.

We’re introduced to a tribe who are more or less at a Stone Age level of culture. They are however reasonably peaceful and friendly. They’re certainly friendly towards a mysterious stranger named Yor (Reb Brown). He’s just saved the life of Kalaa (Corinne Cléry). She’s a total babe and when he returns to her village with her and sees her dancing and sees the way she moves her hips he’s comprehensively smitten. She thinks he’s pretty nice as well. She knows a hero when she sees one and Yor is definitely a hero.

Yor has a medallion that he wears around his neck. He has no idea what it is but he’s certain that it’s important.

Disaster is however about to strike. There’s another tribe, a tribe of beast-men, and they’re not the least bit peaceful or friendly. They raid the village of Kalaa’s tribe, slaughter the men and carry off the women.

There are lots of dangers to worry about. The dinosaurs for starters. But there are worse things than dinosaurs.

There’s another tribe living out in the desert. Their queen is reputed to have magical powers. They worship her as a goddess. She’s blonde and beautiful. Yor falls for her in a big way.

Yor might be a hero but he doesn’t know too much about women. He doesn’t know enough to realise that these two chicks are going to be trying to scratch each other’s eyes out. Kalaa is a very jealous woman and as far as she’s concerned Yor is her man.

Yor has always had a feeling that there is something important he must do. There is a secret that he must unravel. He has a Destiny.

There’s yet another tribe living by the sea, and sure enough there’s another babe anxious to throw herself at Yor. And there’s a Mysterious Island, which might provide the answers for which Yor has been searching.

I’m being very vague about the plot because it’s ingenious and rather cool and it’s more fun to see it unfold gradually (although the posters give some of it away).

Suffice to say that this is not quite the prehistoric adventure movie it seemed to be at the beginning.

There are people on the island and they’re very different from the other inhabitants of this world. They’re definitely not Stone Age people. There are robots and rayguns. There’s also an insane and very twisted villain. He is Overlord. He has minions, and very nasty they are too.

This movie started life as a four-part Italian television series. It was edited down to less than half its original length for feature film release. The plot is still perfectly coherent (rather crazy but it does make sense).

This film may not have had anything like a Hollywood budget but it’s visually very impressive. Imagination and flair (which this movie has in abundance) always count for more than money. Best of all this was 1983 so there’s no CGI. The special effects are old school but they work just fine.

This film is fast-moving and action-packed. It has a big dumb but likeable hero. It has feisty sexy females. It looks terrific. It boasts some great location shooting (in Turkey). It has monsters and villains. It has crazy twists and turns as Yor figures out what’s going on. It’s lots of fun. A total blast from start to finish. Very highly recommended.

Reb Brown isn’t much of an actor but he’s energetic and has a certain naïve charm and you can’t help liking him. John Steiner oozes slimy evil menace as Overlord. Corinne Cléry is a fine heroine. She is best-known for The Story of O (1975), one of the best erotic movies ever made. She’s also in Lucio Fulci’s The Devil’s Honey (1986) which is an absolute must-see movie.

I’ve reviewed a number of Antonio Margheriti’s films including his giallo Naked You Die (1968) and his amazing science fiction films The Wild, Wild Planet (1966) and The Snow Devils (1967).

Scream of the Demon Lover (1970)

Scream of the Demon Lover (Il castello dalle porte di fuoco) was also released under various other titles including Killers of the Castle of Blood. It’s a 1970 Spanish-Italian co-production directed by José Luis Merino.

It’s a gothic horror movie set presumably in the late 19th century but with so many anachronistic elements that it would probably have been better to have given it a contemporary setting.

Of course all movies with period settings are riddled with anachronisms, it’s just a bit more noticeable in this film.

The heroine Ivanna Rakowsky (Erna Schurer) is a 1970s independent ambitious career woman totally out of place in the period setting. She’s a biochemist and she’s applied for a job working for the mysterious baron Janos Dalmar (Carlos Quiney).

A number of young women from the village have been brutally murdered and the villagers are quite keen on the idea of burning the castle to the ground with the wicked baron in it. They have no evidence that the baron really is wicked, but burning the castle to the ground would certainly make them feel better.

Baron Janos is clearly a bit strange. He’s irritable, unstable and obsessive. Ivanna is not at all sure she approves of him. On the other hand he’s a young, handsome rich nobleman and she obviously thinks he’s a bit of a dish.

Janos is a mad scientist but in Ivanna’s romantic imagination he’s a dedicated scientific visionary whose genius has been misunderstood. As you might expect this makes him even more desirable in her eyes.

There are two other women living in the castle - the baron’s former mistress Olga (Cristiana Galloni) and a cute sexy maid named Cristiana (Agostina Belli). They’re both madly in love with the baron.

So we have a crazy wildly unstable baron living in a castle with three women who are crazed with lust for him, and insanely jealous of each other. That should produce interesting results.

There’s a whole wing of the castle that is closed off, allegedly because it’s falling apart and is therefore dangerous. Of course we know that there dark secrets hidden in the forbidden part of the castle, and we know that the heroine is going to explore that part of the castle even though she’s been warned not to.

There certainly are secrets here. The baron tells Ivanna a story about the nature of his scientific research and the reason for his interest in the possibilities of regenerating dead tissue but that story is not strictly true, although it’s not entirely a lie either.

There are some obvious borrowings from Jane Eyre but to say more on that subject would be to risk spoilers. There are also some interesting red herrings - Ivanna thinks she’s found out the secret that Janos is hiding but she’s on the wrong track.

There is a strong gothic horror plot here but (like Jane Eyre) this is also a gothic romance. Ivanna and Janos are falling in love but there are huge obstacles to be overcome. Their love may or may not be doomed, depending largely on how determined they are to confront the very real horrors concealed in the castle. The love story is at least as important as the horror story.

This was a very low-budget film but director Merino wasn’t going to allow that to cramp his style. He throws in every gothic visual trapping he can think of.

And it works, and it has to be said that he does it with a certain style and the movie does have some very nice gothic imagery. The baron’s initial entrance, accompanied by his two gigantic savage hounds, is very cool. We get lots of shots of pretty young women wandering through gloomy corridors in their nighties, carrying candelabras. Not terribly original but I don’t think any gothic horror fan is going to complain about the inclusion of such scenes. They always work.

There really isn’t anything at all wildly original in this movie, either visually or in the script, but it’s all put together with energy and flair. There’s some nudity and there are very real hints of strange sexual kinks. And there are some effectively creepy moments.

The acting performances are all perfectly competent.

This is a well executed gothic horror/gothic romance movie and it’s highly recommended.

Scream of the Demon Lover is included in Severin’s Danza Macabra boxed set. The transfer is very good given that the original 16mm negative was in poor shape. The highlight of the extras is a typically informative and perceptive visual essay by Stephen Thrower.