October Horrors # 6: Jaani Dushman (Rajkumar Kohli, 1979)

Whilst watching this intermittently delightful Bollywood werewolf movie, I was under the impression that what I was witnessing here was a precursor to the definitive mode of masala horror film which the Ramsay Brothers would go on to perfect in their work through the ‘80s and early ‘90s.

I’ve only subsequently realised however that, in making that assumption, my chronology was actually a bit off. In fact, the Ramsays’ first successful horror film, ‘Darwaza’, came out in 1978, meaning that, in all likelihood, ‘Jaani Dushman’ [which translates as something like ‘Beloved Enemy’, if anyone’s bothered] took its inspiration from the surprise popularity of that film - which actually makes a lot of sense, in view of the way that this one awkwardly crow-bars horror/monster elements into the storyline of what would presumably otherwise have been a standard rural / romantic melodrama.*

Certainly, the horror material here has a very Ramsays-esque feel to it, as the werewolf (think Universal-style facial make up, ingeniously combined with a Fozzy Bear-style ‘furry jump suit’ body) terrorises a remote mountain village, snatching red-robed brides from within the curtained palanquins in which they are carried during their traditional bridal procession. Spiriting them away to a dry ice-strewn subterranean temple, he then gets busy menacing them with his claws, and generally charges around freaking out and so forth, surrounded by ornate stone columns and randomly scattered bones.

During the film’s opening sequence, a honeymooning couple travelling through the dark, dark woods in a broken down taxi end up sheltering in a derelict mansion. Therein, the ghost of a deceased nobleman appears, and helpfully fills them in on how he was possessed by the demon spirit which transformed him into the Wolfman, forcing him to murder his unfaithful wife in the aforementioned subterranean temple on their wedding day, or some such. None of which will obtain any relevance to the rest of the film’s narrative for a very, very long time, but nonetheless - it all feels like quintessential Ramsay Bros type business, that’s for damn sure.

Not that Rajkumar Kohli and his colleagues really manage to summon much of the overloaded atmosphere or bombast of the fully-fledged Ramsays productions, sad to say, but they more than make up for it with sheer gusto during ‘Jaani Dushman’s horror scenes, employing a range of lo-fi, in-camera special effects - most notably, primitive matte shots to create the illusion of the Wolfman’s head rotating 360 degrees, ‘Exorcist’-style, along with some absolutely adorable model work, used to depict people and horses jumping across chasms or plummeting off cliffs.

The movie’s finale, wherein our dashing hero (Sunil Dutt), the film’s now-reformed human bad guy (Shatrughan Sinha) and, uh, some other dude, team up to take on the werewolf in an extended tag-team throw down, is also exceptionally good fun - especially once our heroes get some swinging chains on the go, whilst the Wolfman begins trying to crush them by throwing gigantic stone pillars, accompanied by frequent cutaways to Sinha’s kidnapped bride shrieking in highly theatrical terror. Terrific stuff.

Unfortunately however, whereas the Ramsays were proud and unashamed monster-mongers, devoting probably around 60%-70% of the screen-time in their movies to horror, the producers of ‘Jaani Dushman’ seem to have been far more reticent about adopting the tropes of what, up to this point, had been a universally scorned and despised genre within the Indian film industry.

As such, everything I’ve described above comprises at most 40 minutes of the film’s 155 minute run time - the opening plus the conclusion, essentially. Between which, two further hours stretch out, utterly devoid of any reminder that we’re watching a horror movie.

Thankfully from my own POV, there are few things I enjoy more in life than kicking back with a ‘70s Bollywood movie on a rainy afternoon, so, even though this probably rates as second tier masala stuff at best, I still had a pretty good time with it, even though I swiftly found myself losing track of who was supposed to be marrying who, and who was whose brother, or sister, and so on.

So, within these sprawling, werewolf-free hours, we find many under-cranked scenes of people charging around beautiful mountain landscapes on white stallions, many massed brawls and several exciting tests of masculine strength for our hero and his cad-ish, spoiled-son-of-the-local-aristocrat love rival.

There is also an enjoyable sub-plot at one point about a female character whose painted-on moustache apparently convinces everyone she’s a young man, until she gets trapped in a pit with a deadly cobra, and must reveal her true feminine identity. 

And meanwhile, all of the more lady-like ladies look absolutely stunning in their brightly-hued formal / bridal finery and ceremonial jewellery, imbuing the film with an almost psychedelic overload of visual stimuli in places.

(A special shout-out is due here to Sarika Thakur, playing the lower caste orphan girl rescued from rape by Sinha’s aforementioned spoiled brat character, who has a great take-no-shit attitude, and really shines during the dance sequences.)

Speaking of which, Laxmikant-Pyarelal’s musical score for ‘Jaani Dushman’ is… fairly traditional, I would say, largely eschewing the raging synthesizers, disco beats, electric guitars and crazy echo effects which began to make Bollywood music so awesome around this period - as befits the film’s vaguely delineated historical setting, I suppose. The songs are all quite nice though, the staging of the dance routines is as splendid as you’d hope for, and with Lata [Mangeshkar], Asha [Bhosle] and Mohammad Rafi all present and correct on playback duty, who’s complaining?

Well - horror fans with less tolerance than myself for random Bollywood shtick, that’s who. In fact, they will be complaining like fuck by the time we reach the ninety-minute mark with no further werewolf action on the horizon, and they will find little to salve their woes for a good long while thereafter.

So, whilst I would never condone such a wholesale dismissal of one of the world’s most vital and unique pop cinema cultures, I will at least quietly advise more single-minded monster kids in the audience that, if your sole interest here lays in seeing a Bollywood werewolf in action, well - watch the first half hour of ‘Jaani Dushman’, then skip to the final half hour. Nothing that happens in-between was meant for you.

Consumer guide note: I watched ‘Jaani Dushman’ via a DVD put out by the Italian Filmotronik label, purchased in the UK from Strange Vice. It’s a very soft-looking SD transfer with occasional print damage, but thoroughly watchable, with nice colours, and a definite step up from bootleg quality. The film appears to be properly licenced, and the English subtitles are excellent (including translations of the song lyrics, which I always enjoy), so buy with confidence.

And meanwhile, check out this amazing range of artwork I managed to google up for the film:

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* Whilst saying this, I am of course aware that Rajkumar Kohli had already directed an earlier horror film, ‘Nagin’ (1976), which I’ve not yet had a chance to see. Reading around it however suggests that it is likely a rather different kettle of fish to the bloody, monster-centric movies ushered in by ‘Darwaza’ and ‘Jaani Dushman’, so for now I’ll stick by my contention that the former likely influenced the latter.

October Horrors # 5: The Sex Serum of Dr Blake [aka Voodoo Heartbeat] (Charles Nizet, 1973)

Las Vegas-based filmmaker Charles Nizet’s berserk drive-in oddity ‘Help Me.. I’m Possessed!’ was one of the unexpected highlights of my 2022 October horror marathon, so naturally I was curious to check out Nizet’s other foray into horror territory, previously considered a lost film, but now happily rescued from oblivion (albeit in an alternate softcore sexploitation cut, with burned in Dutch and French subtitles) by Vinegar Syndrome, as part of their Lost Picture Show box set.

The first thing to note here is that, compared to decidedly lo-fi production values showcased in ‘..Possessed’, this one actually seems a bit more ambitious in scope (relatively speaking). By which I mean, Nizet employs a fairly wide range of locations, with shots stolen around airports, military bases and highways, along with some actual, choreographed action scenes, camera set ups that occasionally extend beyond basic ‘point and shoot’ methodology, and so on.

Reassuringly though, the whole affair is also still lurid as a strip club basement and mad as a bag of snakes, with a wild, “absolutely anything could happen next” vibe which makes it feel like an entertainment for a strange and debased form of humanity, beamed in from another dimension.

All of this weirdness however is parsed out on this occasion with lengthy passages of almost transcendental boredom, as if the filmmakers were determined to make every goddamned frame they sent to the lab count.

So, a scene in which a man breaks into a locked briefcase and carefully examines its contents plays put pretty much in real time. A close up of a needle being injected into an arm holds for so long that I actually undertook a brief exchange of messages on my phone, looked back to the screen, and realised it still hadn’t cut. There are many, many phone calls and office meetings in which secondary characters calmly explain the plot to each other. A sixty second shot of a policeman descending a ladder, anyone? You get the idea.

In the context of a film like this though you understand, I am not necessarily criticising the inclusion of all this extraneous footage. On the contrary, it actually has a kind of hypnotic effect after a while, and, whether in a 1973 drive-in or a 2024 living room, it allows ample opportunity for toilet breaks, food and drink preparation and so on - which is helpful, especially within this kind of movie’s natural environment, sandwiched mid-way through a continuously rolling, multi-film marathon of some kind. Grotesque, inexplicable madness, presented in an admirably relaxed, ambient package.

Don’t dawdle too long though, or you’ll miss some of the many “highlights” (for which please interpret those quotation marks to denote a wry and sardonic tone of voice, leavened by a certain underlying leeriness).

These begin with a lengthy, exotica-tastic “African” tribal ritual, in which a gaggle of dancing girls strip out of their zebra-print bikinis, screw a guy and then cut his heart out (shades of Love Goddesses of Blood Island?), observed by a pith-helmeted explorer who sneaks in after the show to steal a vial of what (for some reason) he takes to be the fabled elixir of youth.

Then, at different points, we’re treated to a car chase AND a boat chase, both fairly elaborately staged.

Sleaze junkies meanwhile will want to note the presence of both a harrowing, roughie-esque vampire sex murder, and a later threesome with a few borderline hardcore shots, staged in a desert canyon, which culminates in the participants being shot to death from above and vampirised.

Perhaps best of all from my point of view though was the most awkward father/daughter dinner date in cinema history, which… well, you’ll just have to witness it first-hand, that’s all I’m saying.

Speaking of cinema history though, I would also like to take this opportunity nominate the titular Dr Blake (played by Ray Molina) as a contender for the single sleaziest and most misguided motherfucker ever to grace the screen.

As exhibit A, I present his hairstyle, combining sideburns which extend all the way to the corners of his mouth with a disgusting, tangled, oily kiss-curl which hangs down across his forehead, almost reaching his eyebrows. If I walked into a doctor’s office and he looked like this, I would leave immediately, no questions asked.

It is no surprise therefore to discover that Dr Blake has recently been in hot water for performing unlicensed abortions, and is now being prosecuted for manslaughter by the parents of one of his patients, who died following the procedure. (The doc insists it was nothing to do with him, but I don’t believe him for a second.)

During his drive home after another hard day of.. this sort of thing, Dr Blake happens upon a flaming, overturned wreck on the side of the highway. Rather than notifying the authorities or trying to help any survivors however, his first reaction is instead to steal a briefcase with a severed arm handcuffed to it(!) from inside the wreckage, after which he jumps back in his car and heads straight back to his ugly suburban tract home, where he casually sticks the arm in the icebox(!?), and gets to work on opening the case (see above).

Extracting a vial of unidentified, colourless fluid from the case, he immediately digs out a syringe and ties off, injecting the fluid straight into his veins… only to then remember that - oh no - he’s forgotten to pick his daughter up from the airport!

Gentlemen, I put it to you - in all facets of life, Do Not Do What Dr Blake Does, and your life will proceed in a more harmonious and worthwhile direction.

Charles Nizet, one of cinema’s great moralists - truly he hardly knew ye. 

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Bonus screengrab - the doctor takes a call in his office...

Cormania: Gas-s-s-s! Or, It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It (Roger Corman, 1970)

If we were to chart Roger Corman’s engagement with socio-political issues in his work upon some kind of hypothetical scale, then at the opposite end of it from the uncomfortably effective The Intruder, we would find ‘Gas-s-s-s!, or, It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It’ [henceforth ‘Gas’, just for the sake of our sanity], an inexplicable, rather hare-brained movie which, over fifty years later, is difficult not to see as one of its directors greatest failures. (I mean, say what you will about Creature From The Haunted Sea, but at least it had reasons for being crap.) (1)

This is extremely regrettable, given that the project represents an important milestone in Corman’s career on a number of levels. Not only does it mark the conclusion of his cycle of ‘counter-culture’ films (following on from ‘The Wild Angels’ in ’66 and ‘The Trip’ in ’67), but also his final collaboration with American international Pictures (following fifteen years of fruitful co-dependence), and in fact his final work as a director of independent commercial cinema in the United States. (2)

So, what’s ‘Gas’ all about then? Well… it’s difficult to say really, and that very uncertainty soon becomes a pretty big part of the problem.

A pastel crayon animated prologue introduces us to some high ranking military officials (including such personages as ‘General Strike’, and ‘Dr Murder’ - and if you find that magazine cartoon level of humour uproariously funny, there’s hope you might enjoy this movie yet), who, in the process of attending a ceremonial function at a chemical research base in Alaska, accidentally uncork a beaker containing a cloud of custom-made poison gas which now promises to spread across the earth, killing everyone aged over twenty-five.

Moving into live action post-credits, we meet a long-haired, wise-crackin’ campus troublemaker (Bob Corff) and his adorable, only marginally less wide-crackin’ girlfriend (Elaine Giftos), who depart Dallas in a salmon pink Cadillac and promptly get involved in a series of tiresome comical capers, eventually joining forces with a group of other sketchily-defined, more-or-less hippie-aligned young people (including amongst their number both a young Bud Cort, and one Tally Coppola, later to become Talia Shire). Together, this merry band traverse a marginally post-apocalyptic version of the American South-West, enduring a multitude of symbolic / quixotic encounters and threats as they vaguely pursue an Oz-like quest to consult an ‘oracle’, whose billboards (including a count-down in miles) they spot along the highway.

And… that’s about it, really. I mean, I wish I could tell you what the wearying procession of factions, marauders, aggressors, cultists, herd-like victims and all-purpsoe extraverted weirdos our protagonists run into along the way were actually meant to represent, but, as the film’s attempts at satirical humour alternate wildly between blunt, eye-rolling obviousness and head-scratching, lost-in-translation obscurity, it is honestly difficult to locate anything here which we squares might term a ‘point’.

Which might have been all well and good, if only Corman and his collaborators been able to wrangle some other value from these narratively unglued proceedings, but, sadly, the kind of pupil-dilating visual excess and subversive, taboo-breaking chaos which defined the era’s more successful underground/counter-cultural filmmaking is in very short supply in ‘Gas’.

Shot in a range of uninhabited / wreckage-strewn desert locations across Texas and New Mexico, the film’s footage soon becomes fairly monotonous, in spite of the natural beauty of the surroundings and some intermittently impressive photography from DP Ron Dexter. The tone of the action meanwhile remains cloyingly light-hearted, employing a gratingly twee take on hippie-era surrealism, whilst the characters remain vacant, distant and uninteresting.

Even the garish, mid-century Americana of the costumes and production design simply remain… standard issue, for the most part. Please bear in mind that I say all this as a viewer who usually maintains an extremely high tolerance for what Kim Newman has termed ‘Weird Hippie Shit’, but in a word, ‘Gas’ simply feels tired.

Just a few short years earlier, Corman could reasonably have claimed to have had his finger on the pulse of the intersection between popular culture and the underground (after all, ‘The Wild Angels’ not only launched a whole new era-defining genre, but provided direct aesthetic inspiration for generations of proto-punk rebels in the process).

The shadow-haunted autumn/winter of ’69 though found Corman and screenwriter George Armitage (future director of ‘Grosse Pointe Blank’ and the fantastic Miami Blues) beginning work on ‘Gas’ at precisely the moment in which the optimism of the 1960s evaporated, leaving something darker and more fragmented behind it, ready to curdle as the decade turned… and ensuring that the film’s happy-go-lucky, flower-child hipster-isms must have felt painfully irrelevant by the time their film finally opened in September 1970. (3)

In this context, scenes which may have passed as wild, Godardian po-mo provocations back in the mid-‘60s (such as the film’s lampoon of a western shoot-out, in which characters point their fingers at each other whilst shouting the names of famous cowboy actors) simply play out as eye-rolling tedium - self-satisfied acting class wheezes dragged out for far longer than is really necessary.

Indeed, for a Corman production, ‘Gas’ feels uncharacteristically bloated and excessive. Shot across multiple locations in several states (and dogged by inevitable weather-related delays along the way), he seems to have become fixated here on mounting vast public spectacles of one kind of another.

The finished film is stuffed full of marching bands and parades, crowds of extras fleeing through the streets of Western town sets pursued by gangs of stuntmen on brightly painted bikes and sidecars, convoys of golf carts, JCBs and tooled up dune buggies (triggering entirely accidental flashes of Mansonoid paranoia), cheerleaders, football teams and hundreds of people crammed onto a remote mountaintop for the film’s conclusion… all, ultimately, to very little effect.

Amidst all this sound and fury, it becomes difficult to avoid the conclusion that the man who once shot a film as beautifully crafted as ‘Little Shoppe of Horrors’ on a single set in two and a half days has lost his way very badly somewhere along the line.

Perhaps the sole quantifiable pleasure I took from ‘Gas’ in fact came from the music - and this is entirely due to the fact that I’m a big fan of the perennially underrated Country Joe & The Fish, and in particular of their gifted lead guitarist Barry ‘The Fish’ Melton, who was charged with composing ‘Gas’s songs and incidental cues (as heard in the rare moments when the brass marching bands, cheerleading chants and honking car horns shut up for a few minutes). (4)

It’s nice to hear the various bits and pieces Melton came up with (recordings never otherwise released, insofar as I’m aware), and we also get to enjoy some choice footage of the band in full flow at some kind of outdoor festival held at a drive-in theatre, backed up by a bitchin’ psychedelic light show, inter-cut with footage of two of the young hippie characters making out during an acid trip, and accompanied by subliminal flashes of underground movie-style abstract imagery.

Arguably the film’s strongest sequence, the overall effect here is only partially spoiled by the presence of Country Joe McDonald (who I’m fairly sure would not have made the twenty-five year old cut-off point required for this movie’s plot, incidentally) doing some kind of terminally unamusing skit about how he’s an omnipotent, god-like figure named ‘A.M. Radio’, or somesuch. (My god, this obnoxiously performative, satire-lite fucking hippie ‘humour’, I swear… it’s enough to make me want to shave my head and enlist in the nearest para-military organisation post-haste.)

Aside perhaps from hardcore C.J. Fish fans though, it’s difficult to imagine that anyone at the time of ‘Gas’s original release was actually digging what Corman was laying down here. Whilst ‘straight’ audiences must have simply been confused and alienated by all this mystifying hullaballoo, the campus radicals and garage band suburban punks the movie was presumably supposed to appeal to would surely by this point have felt patronised and turned off by its parade of quirky, central casting hippies mouthing half-baked flower power witticisms, long past their sell-by date in the hyper-accelerated climate of mid-century pop culture.

Even within the sphere of disastrous, released-too-late hippie movies, ‘Gas’ ranks low, lacking the lo-fi earnestness of the Firesign Theatre’s “electric western” ‘Zachariah’, the wild artistic vision of Dennis Hopper’s ‘The Last Movie’ or the magisterial visual gimmickry of Antonioni’s ‘Zabriskie Point’.

But the saddest thing of all is that, despite all this, ‘Gas’ seems to have been a project which mattered to Corman a great deal.

He spends over five pages of his 1990 memoir ‘How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime’ discussing the film, acknowledging the gruelling nature of the production, and regretting his decision to begin filming without a finished script. But, he also speaks enthusiastically of his success in creating “an apocalyptic, Strangelovian satire,” - one which, sadly, sounds a lot more exciting in Corman’s recollection than any of the footage which actually ended up on the screen;

“My films and my politics were getting more radical, more “liberated,” as the 1960s were coming to a close. I was truly beginning to believe I could do anything, which is why the picture ran a little out of control. Any idea that came to us, we would put in.” 

[…] 

“We ended up with some pretty wild and surreal images. We had a group of Hell’s Angels riding in their colors in golf carts instead of their choppers. The Texas A&M football team became a band of marauders on dune buggies, terrorizing the Southwest. We had Edgar Allan Poe speeding through the frame on a Hell’s Angels chopper with a raven on his shoulder, making comments from time to time. […] We re-created the Kennedy assassination while it was sleeting. Then we finally got to the Acoma mesa, which is virtually cut off from civilization, accessible only by a steep and winding dirt road.”

Although everything Corman describes can kind of be seen in the movie if you squint hard enough, I think the failure of any of it to actually make much of an impression on the viewer simply goes to prove that, much as I love him, Roger Corman was no Alejandro Jodorowsky. Logic, working within fixed limits and careful advance planning were the engines which powered his best cinema, and the mellow ideals of middle class So Cal suburbia remained his aesthetic base-camp, even as the wily tendrils of psychedelia and European decadence repeatedly threatened to drag him further afield. At the end of the day, maximalist cosmic wig-flipping was simply not his bag, man.

Nonetheless, Corman remained extremely unhappy about a number of cuts he claimed were made to ‘Gas’ in post-production, and which he blamed primarily on AIP’s James H. Nicholson, whom he felt had become increasingly conservative and intolerant of risk-taking in the films his company released, citing these arbitrary cuts as reasons for the film’s incoherence and commercial failure.

Strong words perhaps from a man who in later years would become famous for insisting his protégés’ films came in at under 88 minutes in order to save on film canisters, but above all, AIPs decision to cut the film’s intended final shot remained a source of great bitterness to Corman, ending one of the longest and most productive relationships in the history of independent cinema on an extremely sour note;

“The unkindest cut of all was the last scene. I ended the film with a spectacular shot from on top of the mesa, with a view sixty, seventy miles to the horizon. We had the entire tribe there and everyone else who had been in the film. It was a celebration. The leading man kisses the woman and I zoom back. It was a cliché I had never used to end a film. I did it precisely because it was a cliché. I had the entire marching band of the local high school. I had a whole group of Hell’s Angels. I had a bunch of guys on dune buggies. I had a football team. I had our whole cast in this wild celebration as the camera zoomed back and over the shot. God, who was a running character throughout the film, made his final comments on what went on. 

There must have been three hundred people on top of that mesa. It was one of the greatest shots I ever achieved *in my life*. And AIP cut the entire shot. They ended the picture on the couple’s clichéd kiss - because they didn’t like what God was saying. The Picture ended and made no sense.”

For a more revealing take on Corman’s state of mind during the production of ‘Gas’ though, I think the last word must go to production manager Paul Rapp, quoted in the same book;

“The ‘Gas-s-s-s!’ shoot was the toughest one I ever saw Roger go through. I had never seen Roger in a nasty, bad mood like that. He seemed very down, snarling and weary. The Dallas sequences were around Thanksgiving and they had all-time record cold and blizzard conditions. It was miserable. Roger was shivering the whole time, wearing the same parka he had for ‘Ski Troop Attack’. 

[…] 

The day we set up the last sequence at the mesa Roger seemed really adrift. The Indians were terrible to work with. He seemed isolated, almost directing like a robot. The last scene was a big action shot with the entire cast, dune buggies, motorcycles, and the whole Indian tribe coming together. The first take was a complete mess. Roger just sat there. I got everybody back in their positions for a second take and looked over at Roger. He just nodded. I called action for him, and surprisingly, this time it went perfectly. Roger got up from his chair slowly, thanked everybody, and said very quietly, “Let’s go home.” (5)

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(1)According to IMDB trivia, ‘Gas’s lengthy sub-title was inspired by an unnamed Major in the U.S. Army, who is alleged to have justified the total destruction of a Vietnamese town and its inhabitants on the basis that, “it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it” - a reference which would have stood as the darkest and most effective piece of satire in the entire picture, if only an effort had been made to draw the audience’s attention to it.

(2) The WWI aerial combat epic ‘Von Richtofen and Brown’, which Corman shot in Ireland for United Artists, saw release in 1971, and subsequent to that he did not return to the director’s chair until 1990’s ‘Frankenstein Unbound’ - a film which I would argue stands more as a one-off vanity project produced by his own studio (albeit, a very worthwhile and interesting one) than as a strictly commercial proposition.

(3) Ironically in view of how badly the film falls victim to it, it’s interesting to note that Armitage’s script for ‘Gas’ is both aware of the hyper-accelerated fashion cycle of the ‘60s, and indeed pokes fun at it via the character played by Cindy Williams, a devotee of ‘old timey’ pop music who hangs around the jukebox listening to “golden oldies” by the likes of Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead; a familiar motif found in near-future fiction written at the time by slightly bamboozled older geezers, and in Thomas Pynchon novels all the way up to 2009.

(4) It seems that Corman had originally planned to make ‘Gas’ with The Grateful Dead appearing on-screen and providing the soundtrack, only to end up - in characteristic Corman fashion - telling them to get lost when they turned up demanding more money than had been agreed upon, and immediately getting Country Joe on the line instead.

(5) All quotes in this review are taken from ‘How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime’, by Roger Corman with Jim Jerome (De Capo press edition, 1998), pp. 162-167.

Exploito All’Italiana: Black Magic Rites (Renato Polselli, 1973)

 So, having managed to maintain this blog for the better part of fifteen years, it feels remiss of me not have dedicated at least a few paragraphs to discussing the indescribable cinematic singularity which is Renato Polselli’s ‘Riti, Magie Nere e Segrete Orge nel Trecento’ [‘Rites, Black Magic and Secret Orgies of the Fourteenth Century’], aka ‘The Reincarnation of Isobel’, allegedly aka ‘The Ghastly Orgies of Count Dracula’… but known to most of us (for the sake of brevity, if nothing else) simply as ‘Black Magic Rites’.

So, what with it being October, and having just spent some time luxuriating in the glow of Indicator’s never-thought-I’d-see-the-day 4k restoration… now would seem to be the time to take a deep breath and get on with it.

It must be admitted from the outset that this is a very difficult movie to try to review in any conventional sense, as those who have seen it will surely appreciate.

It is not only the film’s almost total lack of narrative which causes difficulties for the potential critic, but the seeming lack of any unifying pattern or purpose whatsoever. Faced with the onslaught of audio-visual anarchy found herein, the idea of understanding what Polselli’s intentions were in creating this thing, or of positing any framework against which his success may be assessed, seems nigh on impossible.

‘Black Magic Rites’ is, essentially, about as close as a piece of ostensibly commercial cinema has ever come to a state of utter, formless chaos, a celluloid equivalent of the mad piping of the servitors of Lovecraft’s blind idiot god crouching vacantly at the centre of the uncaring universe.

If you go in with enough determination, and pay close enough attention, you can identify discrete scenes and sections within the film, albeit generally interrupting and overlapping with each other to no clearly defined purpose. (This time around for instance, I was particularly taken by the whole funeral / premature burial sequence).

But, basically, this is a 100-minute hypnotic drone of a movie - no form, no progression. Most of the characters here are doing exactly the same thing at the end that they were doing at the start. The intermittent fragments of narrative which do creep in from time to time feel a bit like a heavy psychedelic rock band half-heartedly trying to add lyrics and song structure to their music, only for it to be totally drowned out by the roar of their amplifiers.

And what exactly, the uninitiated may ask, might that metaphorical roar consist of?

Well, you know - fire, screaming, gurning faces, crimson gore, kaleidoscopic psychedelic hoo-hah, awkwardly framed tableaux of female and male bodies squeezed into all kinds of outré costumes (both 14th and 20th century vintage), frantic time-and-space shredding jump cuts and cross-edits, lurid red and green disco lighting, erotic torture, breath-taking scenery and groovy castles, anonymous, drooling creeps lurking in shadows, more fire, more screaming faces, hypnotism, witch burnings, widescreen vistas of ritual depravity, pitchfork wielding mobs, chintzy birthday parties, frantic, awkward softcore sex, outbursts of alarming, screechy comic relief, and Count Dracula (apparently). 

The usual, basically - just a whole lot more of it. An all-you-can-eat buffet of all purpose, fumetti-style gothic horror/sleaze.

Within the pantheon of Italian genre directors who have become admired and/or infamous amongst the fans who have painstakingly unearthed their work over the decades, Polselli stands out as the kind of figure who, if he didn’t exist, someone would have had to invent him.

I mean, he had to be out there somewhere on the margins, didn’t he? The guy whose films were more extreme, more hysterical, more chaotic and senseless than anyone else’s, and who was stricken by censorship, public indifference and critical bafflement to such an extent that many of his films were barely even released at all, languishing in unfathomable obscurity for decades, and in some cases remaining almost impossible to see to this day.

And yet, despite these catastrophic set-backs, he kept dusting himself off and coming back to make more of the damned things, driven on by who knows what unfathomable personal demons. Certainly, the few public comments he made during his lifetime shed little light on why he persisted in ploughing his long-suffering financiers’ money into such grotesque, bizarre and (crucially) unprofitable productions. Indeed, reading the sparse interviews conducted with Polselli whilst he was still with us, his attempts to explain himself seem alternately gnomic, cynical and entirely irrelevant to the work at hand.

Suffice to say that, if you were putting together some ‘Berberian Sound Studio’-styled fiction based around the world of Italian cult cinema, you could scarcely hope to create such a fascinating, baffling and hilarious character - and yet, here he is, large as life, with ‘Black Magic Rites’ standing as his defining artistic statement.

Enthusiasts such as myself often tend to praise Euro-horror films for achieving passages of surrealistic delirium. In ‘Black Magic Rites’ though, Polselli begins in a state of surrealistic delirium and keeps his foot down hard on the accelerator right through to the closing ‘FINE’.

As a result, it stands as an example of a piece of pulpy, cynical exploitation assembled with such fevered intensity that it goes full circle on the artistic spectrum, swallowing its own tail and emerging as an experimental art piece; an overwhelming sensory experience that would probably sit better on a double bill next to ‘Flaming Creatures’ or ‘Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome’ than with a Paul Naschy or Sergio Martino movie.

To return to my earlier music metaphor, watching ‘Black Magic Rites’ for the first time as a fan of Euro-horror feels a bit like growing up listening to canonical ‘60s rock, loving the occasional moments of dissonance and feedback... then suddenly discovering Les Rallizes Denudes or Mainliner. Whoa. Too much, man.

Before we get too carried away though, it’s worth splashing our faces with cold water and remembering that, of the individual elements which make up the totality of ‘Black Magic Rites’, none are entirely unique within the Italio-cult context.

The voluminous output of that nation’s cinema during the early ‘70s did, after all, include low budget horror films which, whether by accident or design, were almost entirely incoherent (Angelo Pannacciò’s ‘Sex of the Witch’), or formally and tonally inexplicable (Francesco Mazzei’s The Weapon, The Hour, The Motive). 

There were films which simply pushed WAY TOO FAR to ever see widespread, uncut distribution at the time of their production (Fernando Di Leo’s ‘Slaughter Hotel’ aka ‘Cold Blooded Beast’), and other entries in the “sexy gothic” sub-genre which knowingly plunged over the precipice into full-blown parody and deliberately disjointed, rambling nonsense (Luigi Batzella’s ‘Nude For Satan’) - all trends redolent of a pre-porno film culture which routinely allowed questionably committed filmmakers to essentially go out and shoot whatever the hell they felt like, so long the requisite nudity and softcore groping was delivered on time.

‘Black Magic Rites’ though is the only film I’m aware of which managed to simultaneously cash in on ALL of these crazy possibilities, creating a maximalist overload of ‘70s witch-smut insanity which has never been equalled.

Trying to account for all this on a rational basis, I’m tempted to consider the suggestion floated by Stephen Thrower in his supplement to the Indicator release, that, perhaps, Polselli had intended to make a somewhat more structured, narrative film but (as per the Pannacciò film cited above) simply lost control of the production, discovering after the money had run out and the actors fled the set that he was missing whatever footage he needed to pull the whole thing together.

Hitting the editing room therefore, perhaps with only a few days to spare before delivering a rough cut, he simply panicked, resorting to the only tool available to a director of crazy horror movies in such circumstances - Art! Or, more specifically - jump cuts, and dreams-within-flashbacks-within-dreams, special / temporal disorientation, overlapping images and audio tracks and hypnotic repetition of footage - all cut to the beat of Franco Reverberi’s freaky, ritualistic score. Yeah!

In other circumstances, such an endeavour could have emerged as simply unwatchable (and many would no doubt claim ‘Black Magic Rites’ is just that), but, even for the less fanatical viewer, the film’s aesthetic pleasures and unexpected outbursts of beauty certainly help to sweeten the pill.

‘Black Magic Rites’ was shot in Italian weirdo horror’s home-from-home, the 15th century Castello Piccolomini in Balsorano, previously home to everyone from The Crimson Executioner to Lady Frankenstein, and it must be said, Polselli uses the castello’s potential quite brilliantly in places, especially when he breaks away from the suffocating, colour-saturated gloom of the interiors to stage scenes on the castle battlements, showcasing the astonishing vistas of snow-capped mountains which form the backdrop to the valley in which the castle stands. (1)

A necessary refresher amid all the madness going on down in the ballrooms and dungeons, you can almost smell the fresh air during these sequences, and a similar chill wind of melancholic atmos can also be felt during the funeral / burial sequence I mentioned above, which is really beautifully put together, acting both as a reference to the best scene in Polselli’s earlier The Vampire and the Ballerina, and indeed to its original inspiration, Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr.  

Though I prefer to avoid going into ‘consumer guide’ mode in these reviews, it must be said that the new transfer of the film really helps to highlight the beauty of some of the individual images Polselli and his collaborators conjured up here amidst all the carnage and peek-a-boo nudity and cheap special effects, perhaps helping to lend the whole thing a bit more of a sense of artistry than was really evident in earlier editions. God knows the travails Director of Photography Ugo Brunelli probably had to go through whilst shooting all this stuff, but he certainly delivered the goods in technical terms.

His work, together with Reverberi’s appropriately wigged out yet infernally catchy score (heavy on hand percussion, primitive electronics and reversed/echoed vocal weirdness), work to ensure the film remains an aesthetically intoxicating experience, as well as a simply overpowering one - with this intention often succeeding in spite of Polselli’s feverish, ADHD-afflicted editing and obsession with rubbing our noses in the most unpleasant imagery he can conjure up at any given point.

By far the funniest thing about the new transfer though is that it retains the grandly ornate interval cards from the movie’s original Italian cinema screenings, which I don't recall seeing before. What a hoot! I mean, can you imagine the poor, unsuspecting audience, staggering out into the sunlight for a smoke after 45 minutes of this shit? (“Say pal, whatcha think's gonna happen next?”) 

Simply amazing - as indeed is every aspect of this astounding, unrepeatable film’s genesis, existence and continued survival.

Check it out, please, before the thousand-faced messengers of Azathoth think better of letting it out in the wild, and pull remaining copies through some black trans-dimensional vortex, leaving no trace but a lingering, half-forgotten memory, ready to be shaken off with tomorrow morning’s much needed coffee.

---

(1) As I believe I noted in my ‘Lady Frankenstein’ review a few years ago, I’m intrigued by the fact that, of the four noteworthy Italian horror film Mickey Hargitay appeared in, three were shot in the Castello Piccolomini! I mean, was this just a coincidence, or did he live nearby, or know the owners of the castle or something..? Sadly the man himself is no longer with us to provide an answer, but - any insight welcomed.

Gothic Originals: La Llamada del Vampiro[‘Cry of the Vampires’] (José María Elorrieta, 1972)

In view of the cult which has built up around Euro-horror cinema, I’m surprised that this prime-era Spanish vampire flick has remained so determinedly obscure over the years. Rarely acknowledged or discussed even amongst genre die-hards, José María Elorrieta’s film is still only accessible (insofar as I’m aware) as a murky, fan-subbed TV rip with a very intrusive station logo burned into the top right corner (channel 18, folks).

Telling the tale of a sexy doctor (Diana Sorel) and her even sexier assistant (Beatriz Elorrieta - any relation?) who travel to a remote town afflicted by an outbreak of vampirism and soon agree to move into the local castle to care for the bed-ridden Baron and hang out with his feckless, would-be Byronic son (Nicholas Ney in his only screen credit), it’s probably fair to say that ‘La Llamada del Vampiro’ often feels quite a lot like an early Paul Naschy movie, minus the unique sense of imagination and enthusiasm which the great man brought to his productions.

In fact, I’d go one further and humbly suggest that quite a lot of what goes on in ‘La Llamada..’ comprises a direct imitation of the preceding year’s smash hit ‘La Noche de Walpurgis’ [aka ‘Werewolf Shadow’, aka ‘The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman’].

Qualified professionals who clearly don’t let their intellectual acumen prevent them from expressing their femininity and indulging their fondness for wearing baby doll nighties and/or hot pants, Sorel and Elorrieta’s characters are clearly modelled on the glamorous archaeological researchers at the centre of Naschy and León Klimovsky’s film, even to the extent that, in both cases, one half of the learned duo gets romantically involved with a moody, black-clad fellow who wonders the woods bemoaning his cursed lineage, whilst the other instead becomes enslaved by a predatory lady vampire.

Meanwhile, in the course of presenting Ney’s scraggle-haired, “moping teenager” type character as an extremely unconvincing stand-in for Naschy’s Waldemar Daninsky, the film even manages to bungle things by getting its vampire and werewolf mythos all mixed up, presenting Ney (and, by extension, the other vampires) as folks who are pretty normal most of the time, but freak out, grow fangs and set off against their will to seek the blood of the living whenever the moon is full.

As if all this didn’t constitute enough of a ‘homage’ to ‘La Noche de Walpurgis’, ‘Llamada..’s debt becomes blindly obvious later on, when we’re treated to slo-mo shots of the vampire women dancing around in flowing night gowns, showing off their fangs - an effect shamelessly cribbed from one of the more memorable images in the earlier film.

Furthermore I might add, ‘Llamada’ even has the gall to shoot in many of the same locations as ‘..Walpurgis’, with both the Castillo de la Coracera and the familiar Monasterio de Santa María de Valdeiglesias once again pressed into service.

(Very much hallowed ground for Spanish horror, the extraordinary ruins and imposing castillos in the province of San Martín de Valdeiglesias near Madrid have provided a home for everyone from The Blind Dead to The Blancheville Monster, making it difficult to imagine any fans being unfamiliar with them by the time they get around to a lower tier picture like this one.)

Even leaving aside the issue of plagiarism in early ‘70s Euro-gothic though, suffice to say that we’re looking here at a pretty run-of-the-mill example of the genre - but, the thing is, I like the genre, so still managed to have a lot of fun with it regardless.

Indifferently directed, blandly photographed and entirely lacking in originality though ‘La Llamada del Vampiro’ may be, the simple pleasures of looking at the pretty ladies in their groovy costumes, taking another tour of the spectacular locations, and hearing some way-out bits of canned music from the CAM archives provided my refined sensibilities with all the stimuli required to keep me happily enthralled through the film’s double bill friendly 84 minute run time.

Speaking of the pretty ladies meanwhile, it’s also worth noting that the version of the film screened by good ol’ Channel 18 appears to have been the international export cut, complete with a variety of easily snippable naughty bits clearly intended to entice us saucy foreigners into the (presumably very few) cinemas which played this thing in territories beyond the reach of the still highly censorious Franco regime.

For the first half hour or so in fact, I thought this was going to be a pretty chaste, old fashioned exercise in gothic horror, notwithstanding a few of our heroines’ fashion-forward costume choices. But then, without warning, we start to get a few surprising flashes of full frontal female nudity, before, during the final half hour, we’re suddenly hit with a pretty full-on softcore lesbian scene, followed by some extended kinky business with chains and feathers in the castle dungeons, as the ever-growing legion of vampire ladies titillate their victims in the lead up to the film’s agreeably action-packed and chaotic finale.

All of which serves, I suppose, to belatedly edge the film into the ‘erotic horror’ category, although viewers approaching it primarily for this reason will be in for a good long wait before getting their jollies, that’s for sure.

Commentators of a more cynical disposition may be apt to question exactly what else anyone might want to approach it for, but personally I’d advise shunning such cynicism and embracing the half-hearted vision of le fantastique sloppily conjured up here by Elorrieta and his time-pressed collaborators. As outlined above, I still found plenty to give me a warm glow within this almost reassuringly routine and unexceptional addition to the Euro-horror canon.

Though certainly not any kind of overlooked classic, ‘La Llamada del Vampiro’ is definitely worth seeking out and saving up for that moment when you find yourself jonesing for another dose of that very particular ‘70s Spanish horror vibe, but have already seen all the good ones too many times. 

Horror Express 2023:All Aboard!

“It would be logical to suppose that troubled art is born out of troubled times. But it would be wrong to be that systematic about it, for what period of history has sailed in, pre-ordained and self-acknowledged a golden age?

Edgar Allan Poe existed in a momentary by-way of relative peace and security in a new country still full of hope, yet his work is limned by the same dark phantoms that haunt E.T.A. Hoffman’s, a writer who lived when Europe was an open field trampled by the Napoleonic Wars. The landscape of the mind does not always correspond to external circumstance. Rather, there seems to be inside us a constant, ever-present yearning for the fantastic, for the darkly mysterious, for the choked terror of the dark.”

[…]

“The superficial moralists who deplore the tendencies of certain movies to alarm them and in the same breath pretend that film is art would do better to realise that always alongside the art that pleases, ‘the Art of seduction’, springs the art of terror. Often we find pleasure in non-pleasurable forms. Next to smiling terracotta couples reclining on top of their Etruscan tombs, to whispering angels with gold-leaf wings, to ‘The Rape of the Lock’ and ‘The Marriage of Figaro’, there have always arisen hair-blanching depictions of the damned, of Saturn devouring his children, the temptations of St Anthony, ‘Wozzeck’, and Man the Wastrel lost to gorgons, dragons, destiny, and death.

Moreover, art works that stir the dregs of human experience have a steady unvarying coherence in their emblems and embodiments, while the style of patterns of perfect, healthy, happy beauty fluctuate as rapidly as fashion itself and contradict one another’s ideal forms according to period and culture. Satan is immutable, it would seem, whether ancestral dark angel or devil in the flesh. Those who imagine him today are not the doctors of demonology but the psychiatrist, the anthropologist, the sociologist. To them, horror movies might be seen as a historical imperative, if not an aesthetic necessity.”

[…]

“Still, we are expected to be terrified by the horror film, and fear, no matter how diluted or sublimated, is a very intense reaction to an experience, aesthetic of otherwise, and, failing Art, one not to be enjoyed with an easy conscience. Rather than sheer perversity, horror films require of the audience a certain sophistication, a recognition of their mystical core, a fascination of the psyche. […] What seemed to put the reviewers off horror films, what prevents them (even now) from surrendering their critical resistance, is their frequent - usually necessary - depiction of the fantastic.

This would be as superficial and absurd as dismissing Fra Angelico or Max Ernst because we don’t, or simply won’t, believe in angels and sphinxes. And yet the movies were progressing from the Manichaean simplicity of the Western - a genre that was more readily acceptable - to the Promethean ambiguity of the horror story, from start back-and-white to the nuances of the dark, from the wide open spaces to the psychic hinterland.”

- Carlos Clarens, from his foreword to ‘Horror Movies: An Illustrated Survey’ (Panther, 1971)

Any questions? No? Good.

I’m aware that updates to this blog have, once again, been rather piecemeal so far this year, but rest assured - I’ve been looking forward to my October horror marathon like a storm-tossed sailor longing for shore leave, and, come hell or high water, I’m going to be offering some choice words on assorted examples of the horror genre in this space across the next 31 days.

It’s unlikely any of it will prove quite as lyrical or well turned out as Mr Clarens’ mellifluous prose above (vocab: “limned”, best phrase: “..the choked terror of the dark”), but I’ll do the best that a couple of tired sessions across the Witching Hour will allow. As always, expect insensible first draft blather, typos and weird grammar all over the joint, but I hope they won’t spoil the fun too much.

Comments and feedback, as ever, warmly received.

Penguin Time/Psyched Out Sci-fi: The Traps of Time edited by Michael Moorcock (1970)

 

Remarkably, I don’t think I’ve ever actually featured any of the extraordinary covers produced by Franco Grignani for Penguin’s science fiction line in 1969-70 on this weblog before.

So, having picked up a few of them recently, now seems as good a time as any to rectify that.

According to the invaluable The Art of Penguin Science Fiction website, Grignani, “..was a leading figure in the field of experimental photography, with a career stretching back some forty years to his early work with photograms. From this he progressed to a range of techniques based on standard photography which he then projected and distorted using lenses, shards of glass, pieces of broken mirror, or liquids such as oil and water.”

All of which, needless to say, made him very much the man of the hour when it came to finding a way to combine the precise / modernist Penguin design aesthetic with the mind-bending chaos of the op-art / psychedelic light show era.

Spilling over, as was often the case, onto the back cover (though not, disappointingly, across the spine), ‘The Traps of Time’ showcases one of Grignani’s more menacing and abstract efforts - equally as far out as the era’s most attention-grabbing Penguin Crime covers.

I particularly like the hands on the back cover - suggestive of some technologically enhanced séance which has gone horribly wrong. (Shades of The Devil Commands / ‘The Edge of Running Water’, perhaps?)

As to the book itself meanwhile… well unfortunately, I’ll have to forego the opportunity to bask in the light of Michael Moorcock’s no doubt exemplary anthologising skills for the time being, as the binding on my copy is knackered to point of imminent collapse.

Nonetheless though, you’ve got to appreciate the none-more-new-wave audacity of shoving Aldiss and Zelazny in right next to Borges and Alfred Jarry, of all people.

In fact, the inclusion here of Jarry’s idiosyncratic 1899 text ‘How to Construct a Time Machine’ helps lends ‘The Traps of Time’ a certain level of underground historical significance, as again pointed out by the compilers of The Art of Penguin Science Fiction [see link above].

In view of Moorcock’s connections to the band, it was in all likelihood between these pages that Hawkwind’s resident poet/ideas man/maniac Robert Calvert first encountered Jarry’s essay, which - upon realising that the ‘time machine’ described by Jarry is in fact merely a bicycle - inspired him to compose the lyrics for what became Silver Machine, a work recognised by most right-thinking people as one of the towering achievements of human civilisation. Nice!

Exploito All’Italiana: The Weapon, The Hour, The Motive (Francesco Mazzei, 1972)

Although you wouldn’t necessarily know it from reading this weblog, I spend a lot of my time watching Italian gialli. Why I’ve so rarely written about them over the years, I’m not quite sure, as there is undoubtedly still a lot to be said about this feverishly creative and endlessly rewarding genre, even beyond the efforts made by the multitude of English language critics and commentators who’ve taken a crack at it over the years.

It feels fittingly perverse therefore that I should break the fast of giallo content in these pages, not by looking at any of the more celebrated or representative examples of the genre, but by instead turning my attention to what is, by anyone’s standards, an extremely marginal entry in the canon. Indeed, it’s probably fair to say that one-shot director Francesco Mazzei’s 1972 magnum opus ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’ languished in near total obscurity until Arrow saw fit to reissue it as part of a blu-ray box set last year. (1)

Suffice to say, even now that it’s easily obtainable, ‘L’arma..’ is unlikely to make it onto many giallo fanatics’ top ten lists. To be honest, I’m not even sure it would even make my top fifty at this point. But, it is at least incredibly strange, which counts for a lot around these parts - especially when it comes to inspiring me to hit the keyboard and begin trying to figure out what the bloody hell I just watched.

Of course, we all know there are a lot of very strange gialli out there, and seasoned fans of Italian genre cinema will have long since learned delight in these films’ refusal to abide by the dreary rules of narrative logic which American (and indeed British) culture have hammered into most of us from birth. But… ‘L’arma..’ is not really one of those films, if you know what I mean.

In fact, for much of its run time, it’s a perfectly linear murder mystery / police procedural kind of joint, doggedly moving from A to B…. except when it suddenly decides it would rather spend some time hanging around in Q or X instead, which is where the fascination begins. Returning to the jigsaw metaphor I was utilising just last month, it’s a film full of bulbous, misshapen pieces which stubbornly fail to coalesce into any kind of coherent whole, no matter how long you spend trying to force them into place.

So, let’s get down to cases. Basically our setting here seems to be a convent, located somewhere in rural southern Italy. Our characters are the strange gaggle of people who either live at the convent, work there, or just inexplicably hang around, enjoying the suspiciously boozy and indulgent meals which seem to be frequently served in the institution’s bucolic gardens.

Central to this social milieu is Don Giorgio (Maurizio Bonuglia), an attractive, blonde-haired young priest, who is soon revealed to be having affairs with not one, but two, married women. In fact, he is currently in the process of ditching teacher and wife-of-rich-businessman Orchidea (Bedy Moratti) in order to devote more of his time to tarot card reader and alleged ‘witch’ Giulia (Eva Czemerys). In addition, he has also attracted the steadfast devotion of almond-eyed nun Sister Tarquinia (played by the magnificently named Claudia Gravy), who insists with barely-concealed lust that Don Giorgio is “..a saint”. (1)

In a certain sense, perhaps Don Giorgio’s enthusiastic embrace of the ways of the flesh could be seen to reflect a devotion to the same kind of transcendent, non-denominational spirituality practiced by Oliver Reed’s character in Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’, carrying with it the same implied critique of papal dogma and clerical celibacy… but, as with so many things, Mazzei’s film never really gets its ducks in line sufficiently well to express this idea very clearly.

Meanwhile, much screen time is also devoted to the travails of a small boy named Ferruccio (Arturo Trina), who appears to live at the convent. Late in the film, a throwaway line of dialogue belatedly informs us that he is an orphan whom the nuns have unofficially adopted, but I don’t think we’re ever offered an explanation as to why they keep him confined to his bedroom, or why the aforementioned Orchidea visits him each day to administer some kind of injection.

Anyway, before long, Don Giorgio is found dead - stabbed in the back whilst seated at the organ in the convent’s chapel - and down-at-heel, motorcycle-riding Commissario Bioto (veteran comedy actor Renzo Montagnani) is soon on the scene, determined to crack the case in his best bumbling Maigret / Columbo type manner.

Soon though, the Commissario also finds himself smitten by Orchidea, instigating a romantic relationship which takes him way beyond the realm of professionalism, given that she is both a prime suspect in the murder case, and, lest we forget, already married.

So far then, a pretty standard issue whodunit, seasoned with a heady mix of religion, rural Southern superstition, sexual intrigue and implied child abuse which will inevitably remind genre fans of Lucio Fulci’s classic ‘Don’t Torture a Duckling’, even as Mazzei immediately steers things in an entirely different direction.

Because, really, it is the extraordinary series of non-sequiturs which accumulate on the fringes of this central plotline which make ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’ stand out.

We’ve already mentioned the strangeness of poor Ferruccio’s situation, which in most films would surely be treated as an immediate red flag that something nefarious is going on at the convent. But here, everybody - the police included - just seems to take it for granted that the nuns keep a drugged orphan locked in his bedroom.

Meanwhile, we’re also treated to what I can only describe as several one-off outbursts of gratuitous nunsploitation (an addition which is certainly in keeping with director Mazzei’s history as the producer of several mondo and sexploitation titles during the ‘60s).

At one point, the nuns strip off and begin indulging in an extended bout of topless self-flagellation, working themselves up into a state of orgasmic frenzy as a gliding camera tracks them against a black background; a scene which, again, invites comparison to ‘The Devils’, but, beyond its value as pure exploitation, it has no wider significance to anything else which happens in the film in thematic/narrative terms.

Even stranger is a subsequent scene, in which the nuns all take a shower together (still wearing their bloomers and gym slips), and appear entirely unconcerned when the heretofore unmentioned leering, snaggle-toothed ex-con gardener character suddenly wanders in to invade their privacy. The “joke”, I suppose, is that they then all lose their shit in predictably comedic fashion when the Commissario’s bungling sidekick Moriconi (Salvatore Puntilo) inadvertently intrudes on them, but… so many unanswered questions here. Rather than the sexy comic interlude which was presumably intended, it basically all just seems - at the risk of repeating myself - really strange.

The incongruous antics of the nuns pale into insignificance though once we get deeper into the film and find ourselves assaulted with several full strength descents into - albeit potentially unintentional - surrealism.

One of these occurs when young Ferruccio, fleeing from Orchidea as she pursues him wielding a syringe, descends to the cellars beneath the convent, where, incredibly, he enters a chamber full of cobweb-covered skeletons, arranged in some kind of morbid diorama, clad in moth-eaten regal vestments and bearing bejewelled medieval goblets!

Up to this point, I should clarify, the film has featured no hint of overt gothic horror imagery whatsoever, and yet here we are suddenly in the midst of an extraordinary feat of production design, straight out of Mario Bava or Riccardo Freda’s darkest nightmares.

Of course, neither Ferruccio nor Orchidea seem at all perturbed by this. It’s never mentioned in dialogue, never explained, and the set is never returned to. The characters simply run straight through it all as if it weren’t there.

So, what in the absolute hell is going on here?! Has something crucial been lost in translation, perhaps? Do convents in southern Italy routinely keep ancient skeletons posed in elaborate tableaus in their basements? Would domestic audiences have recognised this as an accepted phenomenon and taken it in their stride? I have no idea. (A more likely explanation perhaps is that the film’s crew just stumbled upon the set for a gothic horror movie shooting on a adjacent sound stage and decided, “eh, why not”?)

Either way though, this merely amplifies the confusion for those of us earnestly trying to figure out where in the hell ‘L’Arma..’ is coming from. I mean - murdered horny priests, sexually frenzied nuns with very strange showering arrangements, imprisoned orphans, skeleton dioramas in the basement… not to mention the fact there’s a ‘witch’ hanging around the place, and boozy dinners for sleazy local benefactors regularly going on in the gardens. In any - ahem - ‘normal’ film, a picture would surely be being painted here of a corrupt/decadent institution in which something very, very bad indeed is going on - but, nope.

Somehow, ‘L’arma..’s narrative never draws any connection between these isolated events. Outside of those directly suspected of Don Giorgio’s murder, no one at the convent is ever accused of conspiracy or foul play by the screenplay. Seemingly, day-to-day life in this whacko nunnery is going just fine so far as Mazzei and his co-writers are concerned, give or take perhaps some broad criticism of Catholic dogma and its attendant hypocrisies.

Weirder still though is the segment of the film which I will simply refer to as, “all that business with the restaurant”.

Long story short: in the throes of their new love, Orchidea and Commissario Bioto at one point go motoring off into the countryside, and stop on a whim at a restaurant located within an idyllic country villa. Therein, things take on an almost fantastical / fairy tale quality, as they are seated at a grand table in the centre of an otherwise empty palatial living room, and presented with a ridiculously extravagant bill of fare (bowls piled high with fruit, entire cakes, decanters of wine, etc.).

Suddenly though, it’s ‘David Lynch directs’, as Orchidea disappears, and the restaurant’s proprietors (an older lady and - we presume - her daughter) lurk around in the corners of the room, staring menacingly at their remaining guest.

“I have a son in Haiti,” the older lady announces. 

“Tahiti..?” ventures Bioto, confused. 

“No, Haiti.” 

The conversation ends there.

Bioto then rises, and POV camerawork takes us on a tour through the labyrinthine corridors of the building, until he eventually finds Orchidea reclining in a bedroom, ready to receive him in her arms for a bout of off-screen passion.

Again, I feel there may be a certain element of cross-cultural confusion playing out here. Would this whole set-up have been something contemporary Italian viewers would have recognised? Was this restaurant, say, the kind of place where rich folk in rural areas might have routinely gone to enjoy illicit liaisons of one kind or another? Was there some some element of the food or decor which may have explained the elderly lady’s strange conversation?

Anyway. Back at the convent, Commissario Bioto receives an anonymous note, advising him to investigate the restaurant he just visited in connection with Don Giorgio’s death. Returning, he finds a workman taking down the restaurant’s shingle. This man casually informs him that the joint has closed down because, “the proprietors have been murdered(!)”

Entering the building, Bioto engages in a brief chase and scuffle with an initially unseen intruder, who is soon revealed to be his own colleague Moriconi, who also saw the note and got there before him. After a bit of mutual backslapping and exasperation, the pair leave, and the whole business with the restaurant is never mentioned again.

So, let me get this straight. Our protagonist here is a homicide detective. When visiting a restaurant to follow up a lead on the case he’s investigating, he’s told that the people he wishes to question have been murdered, and, after mooching around for a few minutes, his reaction is basically, “eh, never mind then, none of my business”..?

And from a commercial filmmaking POV meanwhile…. wouldn’t a scene in which a pair of women are stalked and killed within a beautiful old villa have been just this ticket to boost this film’s (otherwise rather scant) giallo / horror credentials..? We know from events elsewhere in the film that Mazzei wasn’t averse to a bit of totally gratuitous exploitation, so why just report this potentially shocking and exciting occurrence second-hand via a throwaway line of dialogue?

I can’t claim any insight into what might have been going on behind the scenes on ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’, but - to repeat myself once again - some of the decisions taken here seem very strange.

Speaking of giallo / horror credentials meanwhile, based on what I’ve written so far, readers might be forgiven for questioning the extent to which ‘L’arma..’ even qualifies as a giallo at all, at least in the Argento/Bava-derived sense usually employed in the English-speaking world.

Indeed, I was wondering the same thing myself up until the exact halfway point of the film, when somebody seems to have suddenly woken up and remembered the conventions of the then-extremely popular genre the film’s financing and eventual marketing was clearly geared toward [see the poster at the top of this review]. So, without further ado, a female character is murdered by a scissor-wielding POV camera, in a startling and technically well-executed scene as shocking, fetishistic and borderline misogynistic as anything you’d find in a contemporary Sergio Martino or Umberto Lenzi picture.

This scene is brief, only loosely motivated by the plot, and - you will probably not be surprised to hear by this point - nothing remotely similar happens at any other point in the film. But, it earns it its “Hi! I’m a giallo” badge, which was presumably the point of the exercise.

Now, dedicated genre fans will be aware of course that there is a distinct sub-set of lower tier Italian movies (often by first-time / one-time directors) which are disjointed to the point of being almost entirely incoherent. (Angelo Pannacciò’s lamentable ‘Sex of the Witch’ (1973) immediately springs to mind as an example.)

The difference though is that those films tend to be cheap, obviously amateurish affairs, whereas ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’ is actually quite a lavish production by comparison. The staging and camerawork is generally very good, executed with a certain amount of stylistic flair. The locations and production design are excellent, and most of the performances are entirely credible. Somebody clearly spent some money on this thing, and put some thought into it.

And, as I outlined towards the start of this review, neither is this one of those Italian horror movies which seek to evoke a flat-out crazy or disorientating atmosphere, revelling in delirium and oneiric weirdness for its own sake. Outside of the assorted oddities I’ve outlined above, the setting of ‘L’arma..’ is broadly realistic, and the tone is measured, assured and, if not exactly ‘serious’, at least fairly sincere in its intent - a fact which makes all the head-scratching diversions feel even stranger.

In trying to make sense of the succession of non-sequiturs which comprises so much of ‘L’arma..’s run time therefore, I found myself turning to some of the ideas explored by the critic Mikel J. Koven in his 2006 book La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film.

Therein, amongst other things, Koven seeks to draw attention to the context in which these movies were consumed and experienced by domestic audiences at the time of their release, and how this may in turn have fed into the development of subsequent films within the genre - an aspect of their existence which is all too easy to overlook in an era when we are far more likely to view them in an isolated, epicurean manner in our own homes.

In a review of Koven’s book published by Senses of Cinema, Alexia Kannas concisely summarises his arguments on this point as follows:

“..Koven draws on Wagstaff’s analysis of prima, seconda and terza visione (first, second and third run) cinemas. Both writers liken the giallo’s terza visione audience to that of a televisual (rather than cinematic) audience who talk, drink, smoke and are mobile during the screening. This is certainly useful for both indicating to and reminding the reader that, with gialli, we are not necessarily looking at classical narratives of cohesion or linear construction, but to something else of cinematic value.”

It is probably worth noting at this point that, unlike many higher profile Italian exploitation films, ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’ was clearly not made with foreign distribution in mind. Aside from the cultural specificities discussed above, no English dub ever seems to have been created for the film, suggesting that Mazzei and his collaborators were not under pressure to consider the expectations of an overseas (for which read: American) audience when assembling their final cut.

Reframed through this lens, and via the context of the terza visione screening experience which Koven helpfully reminds us of, a film like ‘L’arma..’ suddenly, miraculous, starts to make sense.

What might our hypothetical terza visione patron - say, a working joe in some provincial town - have taken away from a movie like this, assuming he took it in which one eye on the screen, in between heading out to the lobby for a few smokes, buying a lollypop, chatting to a local shop owner about business, and yelling at so-and-so’s son for trying to feel up such-and-such’s daughter in the back row..?

Well, I reckon our man probably have broadly followed the drift of Commissario Bioto’s murder investigation and been satisfied with its mildly ingenious conclusion, much in the same way we might get the gist of an episode of a TV detective show whilst absent-mindedly flipping between channels.

He might have enjoyed Renzo Montagnani’s eminently likeable performance as the Commissario, and might even have been touched by his ill-fated romance with the leading lady, or his burgeoning paternal relationship with the young orphan.

Beyond that though, he would totally have remembered a few of the way-out images which might have forcibly drawn his attention back to the screen every now and then. Freaky nuns! Skeletons! A chick in a mini-skirt getting slashed across her tits!

For better or for worse, these are the kind of things that tend to make an impression on an inattentive audience, then as now. And, whether our man was exhilarated or appalled by such spectacles, maybe, just perhaps, they might have inspired him to start telling his co-workers about the film the next day, prompting them to get down to the cinema in turn to check this shit out for themselves.

As to why all these things happen in the film, how they all fit together, the jarring shifts in tone they create, and all the other things which are liable to torment us 21st century cinephiles as we sit down in our darkened screening rooms paying close attention to ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’ from beginning to end…. well, that’s just so much water under the bridge, so long as it kind of feels like a proper movie from a distance, and so long as our man’s pals turned out the next night and coughed up a few lira for their tickets.

Francesco Mazzei’s brief filmography as a producer suggests he’d had a hard scrabble through the lower depths of the Italian film industry in the decade or so before he finally stepped up to make ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’. Contrary to what we self-styled giallo connoisseurs might think as we try to puzzle our way through his oblique intentions today, I’m sure he knew his business well enough to understand exactly what he doing back in 1972 - and there’s a fair chance it paid off for him too. 

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(1) Also including Giuseppe Bennati’s excellent gothic giallo ‘The Killer Reserved Nine Seats’ and Silvio Amadio’s enjoyably frivolous, Rosalba Neri-starring trifle ‘Smile Before Death’, safe to say Giallo Essentials: Black gets a big thumbs up from these quarters, even though I’d question the deeply misleading “essentials” tag assigned to these sets.

(2) To save clogging up the main text with an extended round of who-was-in-what, let’s get it all out of the way here instead. Maurizio Bonuglia has prime giallo cred, having appeared as Mimsy Farmer’s arsehole boyfriend in ‘The Perfume of The Lady in Black’, and Franco Nero’s pal in ‘The Fifth Cord’. Eva Czemerys is probably best remembered for meeting with a memorably sadistic end as one half of the ill-fated lesbian couple in the aforementioned ‘The Killer Reserved Nine Seats’. Claudio Gravy became something of a minor sexploitation star during the ‘70s, with appearances in the likes of ‘Byleth: The Demon of Incest’, ‘The Nun and the Devil’ and ‘La Llamada de Sexo’, as well the expected avalanche of largely forgotten sex comedies; she continued to work prolifically in film and TV right through the ‘90s and ‘00s. Despite being effectively second billed, Bedy Moratti is probably the least recognisable face in the central cast here; though she played small roles in a handful of noteworthy films between 1968 and 1975, her career never seems to have really taken off.