Lover of the Monster

The lesser of the two Turkish Sergio Garone movies but it has some great stuff in it and Kinski kicks ass as always. Kudos to Full Moon for digging this one up. It's been hard to find and it looks great on the Full Moon channel. If you're a Kinski fan you'll want to catch this but make sure you see the Full Moon version because it looks like ass in all the bootlegs out there.

One of the better films from director Sergio Garrone, Le Amanti del Mostro benefits from star Klaus Kinski, who delivers a surprisingly subtle and nuanced performance as Alex Nijinksi, a doctor who stumbles upon a secret experimental laboratory when he returns to his wife's ancestral homestead. Work in the lab turns the curious Kinski into a Jekyll and Hyde split personality, with the evil alter ago going on a killing rampage blamed on a pair of tramps--one of whom bears the name Polanski. Whether this is a tribute to the great director or a commentary on 19th century anti-Semitism isn't made clear, but the film DOES feature an amusing cinema in joke in the early going, when co-star Katia Christine (the Nicole Kidman lookout playing Kinski's wife) visits her father's grave, which bears the name Ivan Rassimov! A surprisingly bloodless late period example of Italian Gothic cinema, Le Amanti del Mostro is available on a grey area Shoarma DVD which also features a generous stills gallery of Kinski performances, and the crown jewel: a 1985 German television interview featuring a reticent Kinski and some amusing outtakes from his then current production, Commando Leopard.

What we have here is a concoction obviously based on the classic Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde story and taking a bit of influence from Frankenstein. It actually reminded me a lot of the modern horror classic Re-Animator; although anyone expecting anything as gory/entertaining as that film will likely be very disappointed after seeing this one! Lover of the Monster is the second 1974 film directed by Sergio Garrone and starring Klaus Kinski- the first being The Hand That Feeds the Dead, and the two are apparently often confused. The plot here focuses on a doctor and his wife who go to stay at the wife's childhood home despite having some marital problems. The doctor begins snooping around the house and comes across some work investigating life and death. Naturally the doctor wants to investigate this himself, but things go wrong and he ends up with a murderous alter-ego and goes round the countryside murdering people, only for a poor innocent tramp to get the blame for the killings.

Sergio Garrone was responsible for one of the most notorious (and one of the very worst) Video Nasties with SS Experiment Camp in 1976; so it's surprising just how tame Lover of the Monster is. The film is very slow indeed and features practically no bloodshed whatsoever; which is fairly surprising considering that there are more than a handful of murders on display. All the murders are committed through the eyes of the killer; and it's really rather dull and pointless since we always know exactly who the murderer is and thus it may as well be shown. The film takes on a period setting; which doesn't do it any favours either, aside from the fact that Klaus Kinski looks right at home. The film runs for less than ninety minutes but somehow it still manages to outstay its welcome and my interest in the film waned further as the film went on, and unfortunately there was nothing at the end to reignite it. Lover of the Monster is a rather rare film; and I'm sure it will stay that way as there's no good reason to dig it up!

LOVER OF THE MONSTER is the English translation of the title. This movie is somehow linked to another movie starring Klaus Kinski, called THE HAND THAT FEEDS THE DEAD. Supposedly both films use some of the same footage although I don't remember seeing it. In both films, Kinski plays the heavy. No surprise there. I had read about both LOVER OF... and HAND THAT FEEDS...for years and was excited when I discovered they were both going to be available on Bluray. The label wisely released THE HAND THAT FEEDS THE DEAD first. Watched it. Enjoyed it. Very happy to own it. Satisfying 70s Italian horror. No Oscar winner but it definitely gave me what I expected from it. Then, I saw that LOVER OF THE MONSTER was being released by the same label. Now, I was warned by reviewers that LOVER OF THE MONSTER was painfully short of not only monsters, but blood, gore, and pretty much anything to set it above a made for TV movie. I figured those poor reviewers had seen some abridged version on DVD or VHS and that surely there was blood, gore and horror, if not a monster and would certainly be gloriously restored for this Bluray release, right? Afterall, THE HAND THAT FEEDS THE DEAD, allegedly made by the same people, had blood, gore and surgery scenes enough so that there was no doubt as to why Carlo Rambaldi was credited on that film. Rambaldi's handiwork is highly visible in HAND THAT FEEDS THE DEAD. He is also credited on LOVER OF THE MONSTER. What he did on LOVER OF THE MONSTER is anyone's guess. Little, if any, blood. No gore. Definitely no monsters...at least none created using latex rubber suits or makeup appliances. You have Kinski supposedly turning into a monster running around making weird faces but he still looks about the same as when he is not a monster. Makes me wonder exactly what Rambaldi did on this film. I've searched the internet and can find no behind the scenes stories about LOVER OF THE MONSTER. I don't know if makeup effects were created but edited out for some unknown reason or if prosthetic makeup was created to be worn by Kinski and he refused to wear it. Maybe some stuff was created and the schedule was too tight and they had no time to film it. I guess I'll never know, although a Making of LOVER OF THE MONSTER could only be more interesting than the actual movie. All I can say is; unless you are a fan of seeing Klaus Kinski make faces while running through the woods, there's really not much here to hold your attention. There's definitely more lover than monster here but really not much of either. No real excitement either. Unless your curiosity demands you watch this (as happened to me) or unless you are a Kinski completist, I suggest you skip this one and watch THE HAND THAT FEEDS THE DEAD instead. You'll get Kinski who is still an evil scientist and some hot women and a decent amount of cool, if not completely convincing, blood, gore and makeup effects by Carlo Rambaldi before he started working with Spielberg.

This was made at the same time as Garrone's Hand That Feeds the Dead, starts mainly the same people, with scenes occurring in the same place. It's also just as boring as that film, and I had to force myself to watch it to the end. Hand That Feeds the Dead had a kind of mad scientist thing going on, whereas this one goes for the Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde deal, which is a bit of problem as Klaus Kinski kind of looks like Mr Hyde in real life. So how can we tell when Klaus has turned into a sex-crazed killer? His shirt is a bit dishevelled and he looks a bit tired.

Klaus and his wife are drifting apart, it would seem, and have moved into a new house (giant castle) in order to repair their relationship. His wife hits it off with the local doctor so in his despair Klaus somehow manages to turns himself into an insane killing machine, courtesy of something he finds in a hidden laboratory inside the castle. Was it a book? It was hard to maintain interest in this one.

Don't get all excited about that sex-crazed killer part either, because sex and gore are at the bare minimum for this one. Kinski rampages through the landscape, attacking people and gurning for the camera (i.e just acting like Klaus Kinski), while we are dragged kicking and screaming through a sub-plot about a homeless man accused of carrying out the killings, and a whole load of scenes between Kinski's wife and the doctor that make the entire one-hour, twenty-three minute film seem like an eight hour miniseries. This is nineteen seventy four, Garrone, which you seem to remember ten second from the end, judging by the downbeat ending.

Sergio Garrone, who started off with the pretty good Django the Bastard, would sink much lower by giving us the Nazisploitation film SS Experiment Love Camp. This one nearly de-railed the 'watch all the Euro-films' project.