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.

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(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: Lady Frankenstein (Mel Welles, 1971)

PLEASE NOTE: As a result of the fact that I am still unable to take screengrabs from blu-ray discs, readers should be aware that the images above are taken from an old DVD edition of this film, and *NOT* from the recent restoration carried out by Nucleus Films, which was viewed for the purposes of this review, and which I can confirm looks *absolutely magnificent*. Please buy that one with confidence.
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If you’re in the mood for a classic Euro-horror film, full of wild n’ woolly erotically-charged bloodshed, daring, stylised direction and mind-bending hallucinogenic weirdness, well, I’m afraid ‘Lady Frankenstein’ is not the film for you.

Indeed, the first time I watched it I found it pretty underwhelming, broadly concurring with critic Jonathan Rigby, who writes it off in his Euro Gothic compendium as “a rhythmless, atmosphere-free bore”. (1)

What a difference a few years – and a beautiful new transfer with fifteen reinstated minutes – can make. Returning to the film with expectations appropriately adjusted and (I hope) a bit more of an appreciation of the more, uh, ambient pleasures of the horror genre, I found ‘Lady Frankenstein’ quite delightful.

Before I try to sell you on this nigh-on Frankensteinian change of heart however, perhaps a bit of background might be in order. (IMDB was running hot as I checked up on all the salty characters who played a role in this film’s genesis, so I hope you appreciate my efforts.)

Though he is probably doomed to forever accept second place when the subject of rotund, deep-voiced Americans named Welles who were hanging around in the ‘60s European film industry arises, Mel Welles (1924-2005) can nonetheless claim a certain degree of cult movie immortality via his performance as the kvetching flower shop owner Gravis Mushnick in Roger Corman’s 1960 ‘Little Shop of Horrors’. (His turn as the rhyme-talking gravedigger in The Undead meanwhile… not so much.)

After relocating to Rome in the early 1960s, Welles carved out a niche for himself as a cornerstone of the dubbing industry, overseeing the Anglicisation of countless continental features whilst also using his contacts to occasionally scrape together funds for some small independent productions of his own. A self-professed devotee of gothic horror and fantasy cinema, Welles' first foray into the genre was 1967’s ‘Island of The Doomed’ (aka ‘Maneater of Hydra’), a sort of killer tree yarn starring Cameron Mitchell, on which he served triple duty as writer, director and producer.

By Welles's account, the project that became ‘Lady Frankenstein’ began when an aspiring producer (identified elsewhere as former Hollywood playboy and heir to the Vanderbilt fortune Harry C. Cushing IV) dropped out of the sky with a confirmed production budget and asked him to direct a script named ‘Lady Dracula’, intended as a vehicle for actress Rosalba Neri. (Allegedly, Cushing was trying to seduce Neri at the time, and figured that the offer of a leading role might help his chances; whatever the case, it certainly doesn’t seem to have hurt them, given that the pair were married (briefly) a few years later.)

Somehow however, this initial deal fell through, the rights to the script – written by none other than former Peplum muscleman and ‘Kommissar X’ star Brad Harris - were lost, and Cushing was (seemingly) out of the picture, leaving Welles with a crew and studio time already booked in, but nothing to shoot. (2)

At this point, globe-trotting exploitation producer Dick Randall pops up for cameo, telling Welles “hell, so you can’t make ‘Lady Dracula’, make ‘Lady Frankenstein instead”, and earning himself a generous “original story” credit in the process. Decamping to London, Welles next hooked up with credited writer Edward Di Lorenzo, and after a few weeks of woodshedding, ‘Lady Frankenstein’ was up and running. (3)

In view of the film that eventually resulted, it is instructive I think to consider that ‘Lady Frankenstein’ was written in England, by two Americans. For better or for worse, Welles and Di Lorenzo’s script takes the picture in a very different direction from most early ‘70s continental horrors, rejecting the usual melange of errant craziness and random exploitable elements, and instead telling a story that, though stodgy, conventional and loaded with cliché, is at least coherent and thematically unified, even throwing in a few literary and historical allusions alongside its more obvious borrowings from the Universal canon.

In other words, it is exactly the kind of script Hammer might have filmed for their own Frankenstein series, had they taken a more traditionally gothic direction. This is no bad thing if you’re prepared to take it on its own terms, and indeed, Welles’ solid but unspectacular direction follows suit, as does the careful, moody lighting and the painstaking attention to detail intermittently evident in the production design.

One thing Hammer probably wouldn’t have done however is hire Morricone and Nicolai’s avant garde-leaning right hand man Alessandro Alessandroni to provide a soundtrack, and happily the composer makes his presence felt from the film’s very first second, opening proceedings with a bracing sting of his trademark fuzz guitar, as some thoroughly routine Burke & Hare type business is conducted in a particularly squalid looking graveyard. (4)

The lead grave robber is played by Austrian actor Herbert Fuchs (often credited as Herbert Fux), a possessor of a face-you-won’t-forget whom you’ll probably recall stealing the show in Adrian Hoven’s ‘Mark of the Devil’ (1970). Fuchs makes for a lovably sleazy ne’erdowell here too, aided by the unusual amount of detail the script provides regarding his lifestyle and dwellings, which momentarily reminded me of Jonh Gilling’s excellent The Flesh & The Fiends. (5)

After Fuchs and his boys drag their insalubrious cargo across the foreground of a splendidly ominous establishing shot of the Umbrian castle within which much of the film takes place, we are promptly introduced to Baron Frankenstein himself, embodied here by no less a personage than Joseph Cotten. (6)

In contemplating the circumstances that led to Cotton getting mixed up in a film like ‘Lady Frankenstein’, I’ve often entertained the possibility that perhaps he heard that some American blowhard named Welles was directing, and the ink was already dry on his contract by the time he realised his terrible mistake. Amusing as this thought may be however, the more prosaic truth seems to be that Cotten had enjoyed making ‘The Abominable Dr Phibes’ in England the preceding year, and, taking inspiration from his friend Vincent Price, thought he’d stay on in Europe and have a bash at becoming a “horror star”.

‘Lady Frankenstein’ represents the first fruit of Cotten’s brief flirtation with this new career path (Bava’s ‘Baron Blood’ would soon follow, after which he seems to have given up on it), and it was perhaps this fleeting sense of enthusiasm that accounts for the fact that he actually delivers something approaching a performance here, rather than just looking disgusted and cheesed off, as per every other film I’ve seen him in post-1960.

Playing opposite Cotton in many of the film’s early scenes meanwhile is the aforementioned Rosalba Neri in the film’s title role as Tania, the Baron’s daughter, who has just returned from university as a fully qualified surgeon (no mean feat for a woman in the 1820s) and is keen to get stuck in at the business end of her beloved father’s experiments.

In later interviews about the film, Mel Welles liked to declare himself as a feminist (“twenty years before my wife”, he endearingly insisted), and although applying such ideological intent to ‘Lady Frankenstein’ will seem a stretch for most modern viewers, the very idea of female character willing to step up to the plate as a fully-fledged mad scientist must in itself have been a novelty within the none-more-patriarchal environment of a ‘70s Italian gothic horror movie [a fact that was certainly not lost on whoever designed the comically salacious poster for the film’s US release via Corman’s New World Pictures – see below].

Though it is difficult to gain a full appreciation of Neri’s performance given that, like everybody else in the film besides Cotton, she is dubbed in both English and Italian versions, insofar as we can tell she seems to considerably upped her game here, perhaps appreciative of a part that took her beyond her usual sex kitten/shameless hussy roles.

Though demure to a fault through the opening half of the movie, Neri nonetheless manages to imbue all of her scenes with a sense of mature, self-confident kinkiness, and, when she eventually gets to let loose in the laboratory, she is very much in charge, reducing her father’s assistant Charles (the ubiquitous Paul Muller) to an even more subservient role than he took when working with the Baron.

Though stiff and mannered as the material demands, the performances by this central trio within the castle are actually all very good. The hawk-featured Muller – who surely needs no introduction to readers who have seen a handful of Spanish horrors or Jess Franco films - is solid as ever here, shouldering an epic quantity of screen time in a pretty thankless role, whilst, all things considered, Cotten gives us a surprisingly subtle and melancholic take on the aging Baron. There’s definitely a touch of Price in his dialogue delivery I think, but he wisely plays it straight, conveying both his resigned reaction to the apparent failure of his climatic experiment and his evident love for his daughter quite convincingly. It’s a shame that -- uh, SPOILER ALERT -- he gets unceremoniously clobbered by his own monster less than halfway through the picture.

That monster, by the way, is probably the reason for a lot of the bad press ‘Lady Frankenstein’ has received over the years. With the best will in the world, it’s hard to deny that he’s pretty damned goofy. The corduroy trousers and woollen smock he’s given to wear are rather charming, but his bulbous head / mutilated eye make-up job was never going to win any prizes, despite the prominence it took in the film’s marketing, and it’s difficult to find an explanation for the traditional, monster-stompin’ platform boots he is already wearing when he first slides off the operating table.

Blandly over-lit and rendered in artless, point n’ shoot fashion, the subsequent scenes in which the monster strolls around the countryside causing trouble have a crude, second unit feel to them that seems a world away from the more classy material with the principals in the castle. But, the bit where he throws a stark naked girl in a very shallow river is pretty funny, so… there’s that.

Most of the scenes dealing with the local townsfolk and the investigation of the monster’s crimes meanwhile feel similarly slapdash. Mickey “Crimson Executioner” Hargitay is given little to work with as the police chief (there’s certainly no hint here of the kind of dementia he exhibited in his better known horror roles), whilst many of the costumes and set dressing seem to have been recycled from the waning Spaghetti Western boom. Combined with some distinctly 1970s-style male grooming, this serves to rather make a mockery of the more carefully rendered period detail of the castle scenes.

Despite all this silliness however, Welles seems to have been in earnest in his love for old school gothic horror, and, like his cast, he plays it straight. A great deal of effort was clearly invested in the film’s laboratory sequences, which (aided no doubt by Carlo Rambaldi’s effects work) are an absolute treat for connoisseurs of mad scientist movies, incorporating some of the finest fizzing electrical arcs, byzantine glassware and bubbling beakers of blood seen on-screen since the glory days of the 1930s, with some first class ‘pulsing organs in jars’ thrown in to appease the gorier tastes of early ‘70s viewers.

Clearly somewhat of an enthusiast for such business, Welles allows time for both of his Frankensteins to describe their experimental processes in quite some detail, including a discussion of how the recent discoveries of Volta and Galvani have been incorporated into their work. I’m fairly certain too that this must be the only Frankenstein film in history that actually took the time to design and construct period appropriate surgical lamps and dry-cell batteries in the name of historical verisimilitude – a detail of which Welles seems to have been particularly proud, on the basis of his later interviews.

The scale of the De Paolis soundstage on which the lab set was constructed is also impressive, as is vast, stained glass skylight seen opening during resurrection of first monster. It’s little wonder that the whole shebang was repurposed in its entirety by Paul Morrissey’s ‘Flesh For Frankenstein’ a year later – a movie that, to a significant extent, basically plays like an exaggerated spoof of this one, I should note.

Indeed, whilst the approach Welles took in directing ‘Lady Frankenstein’ was innately conservative, the central ‘high concept’ that provided the impetus for the film’s script – namely, the idea that Tania plans to create the perfect lover for herself by transplanting Dr Charles’s “brilliant” brain into the body of Thomas, the castle’s beautiful but simple-minded handyman – is actually fairly startling. (7)

Although this notion is not given as much screen-time as more sensation hungry viewers might have wished, when the movie does finally get around to it, it certainly doesn’t flinch, especially as regards Tania’s decision to seduce both of her experimental subjects prior to the big operation - a development that certainly lends itself to some queasily Freudian interpretations, suggesting that she needs to copulate with these two ‘fathers’ in order to ‘conceive’ the new monster that will replace her own recently departed father in her affections. (Not, you will note, exactly the most feminist twist on the Frankenstein mythos that could be imagined.)

Anyway – after using her wiles to ensure the cooperation of the hopelessly devoted Charles, Tania next takes poor Thomas to bed, just in order to, I dunno, test out the merchandise, I suppose. This latter scene culminates in what is far and away ‘Lady Frankenstein’s most transgressive moment, when Charles, who has been discreetly observing Tania’s tryst with Thomas, emerges at the climactic moment to smother him to death with a pillow.

Though reminiscent of a number of ‘erotic asphyxiation’ scenes that had already made their way into Jess Franco’s filmography by this point, this is still genuinely shocking stuff, jolting us out of the ‘ersatz Hammer’ mindset and into the realms of full-on Italio-exploitation. The film’s straight-laced dramatic context renders it more disturbing than any of the tongue-in-cheek outrages Morrissey would soon perpetrate on the same sets, and the scene gains a particularly sinister sex-horror frisson from Rosalba’s reaction shots, which see her biting her wrist in orgasmic ecstasy as her lover expires beneath her.

Whilst there is a touch of ‘House of Frankenstein’s “whose brain goes where” farce to the proceedings that follow, the fact that Tania and Charles seem so casually disinterested in the travails of their first monster – who is still throttling peasants at a steady rate - speaks eloquently both of the growing madness that is consuming them and of the thoughtless cruelty that naturally accompanies their aristocratic background, as does the fact that poor old Thomas’s brain has presumably been tossed in the bin, declared ‘worthless’ in typical proto-fascist fashion, even as his devoted sister frantically searches for him, haranguing various members of the cast about her brother’s disappearance.

All of this is standard issue Frankenstein movie stuff of course, but it is nicely done here, quietly drawing our attention to the moral (and mental) degradation of the characters we are ostensibly following whilst avoiding the need for any ‘message’ speeches or hand-wringing moralising.

Despite its infusion of (moderate) sex and (mild) gore however, ‘Lady Frankenstein’ must nonetheless have seemed ponderous and old fashioned to many of its contemporary viewers. In terms of its pacing and atmosphere, it is very much of a piece with the somewhat patience-testing gothics that Italy largely phased out when Barbara Steele disappeared from screens in 1966, whilst its director’s inspirations were clearly still rooted three decades before that.

Although many gothic horror films were still being produced in the early ‘70s – more than ever before, probably – by the time ‘Lady Frankenstein’ hit screens, just about all of its competitors were in some way reinventing themselves, adding either softcore erotica, psychedelic freak-outs, self-conscious genre deconstruction or goofy comedy to the mix, and even Hammer had almost entirely moved away from their more traditional period pieces by this point.

Though there were a few stragglers in the following years, ‘Lady Frankenstein’ thus stands as one of the very last gothic horror films made anywhere in the world that plays things totally straight. Respectfully abiding by the established conventions of the genre, it never offers the audience a wink or nudge, withholds the easy wins of sex n’ violence from all but its most crucial moments, and tries instead to ensnare its viewers through the simple pleasures of a hoary old yarn, adequately told.

The extent to which Welles and his collaborators succeeded even in this modest goal might be debatable, but it is difficult not to admire the earnestness of their intent on some level, and, for those of us so jaded we can take pleasure in seeing the bones of these old gothic tropes dug out of the closet and paraded around one last time, there remains much here to enjoy.
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Also, this movie had a lot of great posters.

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(1) ‘Euro Gothic: Classics of Continental Horror Cinema’ (Signum Books, 2016), p. 295

(2) For anyone keeping track here, Harris’s ‘Lady Dracula’ script was eventually filmed as a comedy in Germany in 1977. It looks terrible.

(3) Perhaps stung by being shut out of the production of ‘Lady Frankenstein’, Randall went on to pretty much corner the market in shoddy Italian Frankenstein movies in the year that followed, covertly masterminding ‘Frankenstein ‘80’ and directing ‘Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks’, both in 1972. Of the latter, Rigby accurately notes that “..the childishly nonsensical result makes ‘Lady Frankenstein’ look like an unsung masterpiece”. (ibid.)

(4) For what it’s worth, I get the feeling that ‘Lady Frankenstein’s soundtrack was probably a bit of a mix n’ match affair, much in the manner of contemporary Jess Franco or Paul Naschy films. Although Alessandroni gets sole credit, and was presumably responsible for all the weird, atonal laboratory music and the occasional fuzz-drenched transition cue, the far more conventional orchestral music that accompanies the monster’s rampages and other ‘action’-based moments definitely sounds canned, perhaps pulled off some ancient library disc or something?

(5) Just for laughs, I feel like noting that Fuchs/Fux’s other credits for 1970 include ‘Secrets of a Vice Cop's Wife’, ‘Eugenie… The Story of Her Journey Into Perversion’, ‘The Naked Wytche’, ‘Gentlemen in White Vests’, ‘The Amorous Adventures of a Young Postman’ and ‘Strogoff’, an Italian swashbuckler in which he makes an uncredited appearance as The Pope. What a year!

(6) Identified on IMDB as the Castello Piccolomini in the Province of L'Aquila in Southern Italy, the castle used in ‘Lady Frankenstein’ also apparently played host to ‘Bloody Pit of Horror’, ‘The Devil’s Wedding Night’, Radley Metzger’s ‘The Lickerish Quartet’ and Polselli’s ‘Black Magic Rites’ / ‘The Reincarnation of Isobel’. What a line up! I feel a plan for a new holiday forming… (Also: did Mickey Hargitay live down the road or something? Three of the four Italian horror movies he appeared in were filmed in this place!)

(7) Thomas, incidentally, is played – uncredited - by Marino Masé, an actor who enjoyed a rich and varied career far too extensive for me to spend time running down here. (Would you believe that the same man appeared in ‘Lady Frankenstein’, Visconti’s ‘The Leopard’ AND an episode of ‘East Enders’? IT HAPPENED.)

Bloody Pit of Horror (Massimo Pupillo, 1965)

Yes folks, it’s ‘Bloody Pit of Horror’! You’ve hit ‘play’, and there’s no turning back now! A jewel in the crown of pan-European exploito-horror mulch, this lively ‘shocker’ was allegedly lensed in 1965, but features a cartoonish matinee spirit and winningly naive approach to sleazy thrills that just screams NINETEEN SIXTY ONE to me. Nonetheless, ’65 it is, a year in which director Pupillo seems to have cut a bloody swathe through the world of cheap Italian horror movies, directing Barbara Steele in ‘5 Tombe Per Medium’ (aka ‘Terror Creatures From The Grave’), then knocking out this one and a third gothic horror called ‘La Vendetta di Lady Morgan’ in quick succession, despite having done little of interest either before or since.

To spare.. oh, I dunno, subterranean exploration enthusiasts, maybe?.. from disappointment, it should be noted that ‘Bloody Pit of Horror’ features no pits, bloody or otherwise. It does have a castle, and within that castle is a dungeon, which you’d think would have done nicely for an exciting title-noun that was at least vaguely accurate. But no, they had to go with ‘pit’. Whether or not the film inspires ‘horror’, and the extent to which it may be deemed ‘bloody’ are matters for further debate, which we shall perhaps return to.

Original Italian title is the slightly more dashing ‘Il Bioa Scarletto’, and the movie will also answer to ‘A Tale of Torture’, ‘Virgins for the Hangman’ or ‘The Crimson Executioner’, depending on where and when you happen to reside. ‘Bloody Pit of Horror’ seems to be the one that stuck though, and why not - that title’s gleeful, boneheaded absurdity suits the film in question perfectly.



Supposedly inspired by the writings of the Marquis de Sade (presumably in much the same way that ‘Hot Tub Time Machine’ takes inspiration from the work of H.G. Wells), goofball levels are off the scale right from the outset here, as we see an unhinged looking gentleman in a bright red KKK hood with attached cape being man-handled into a shockingly cheap looking iron maiden by some guys in sorta Roman Solider-via-Conquistador get up. An echoing PA system voiceover drones on about how this chap’s nefarious deeds will live in infamy.

“Fools, all of you! I am the Crimson Executioner!”, says The Crimson Executioner, shortly before the oversized butter knives glued onto a plywood door descend to end his life. “Ah-hahahahahahahahahahahahaha!”, he adds. “This day shall be written in blood! No man can judge me! I am the supreme law! I shall have my REVENGE!”

But more on The Crimson Executioner later. For now, we cut to the present day, where we join a group of employees from the art department of an Italian publishing house. Split evenly between dashing young photog/design guys and vapid glamour models, they are busy touring the countryside in a fleet of sports cars, in search of the perfect gothic castle in which to shoot some sexy covers for their new range of horror novels.


Whilst that concept sinks in, let us pause a moment while I make a brief appeal to any readers who may have connections in the Italian publishing industry;

I know that I don’t have much experience in photography or design per se, and I realise that my command of Italian is – how to best put it? – entirely non-existent, but all I’m saying is – if you have a vacancy, keep me in mind. After nearly a decade of gainful employment in various sectors, I really feel that your industry is one in which I could truly realise my full potential. If you were to give me a chance, you would not regret it. I understand that there might not be enough space at first for me to tag along on the expenses-paid gothic castle location scouting tours and such, but I’m willing to work my way up. Thank you.

Anyway, as you might expect, this jolly crew do manage to find a castle to fit their (apparently quite specific) needs. When no answer is received to their bangings ‘pon the front door, they assume the place to be uninhabited, and persuade a guy who seems to be the lone male model to utilise his impressive ‘jungle jim’ style skills, scaling a tower and gaining them access.



As you might also expect, the castle turns out to be far from uninhabited. It is actually the home of a reclusive individual named Travis Alexander, played by legendary muscleman and Jayne Mansfield husband Mickey Hargitay, and his… uh… (ok, deep breath) … and his squad of strapping, moustachioed man-servants, all of whom wear identical stripy sailor jerseys and tight white jeans and apparently march around barking orders and stamping their feet like soldiers on parade 24 hours a day, unquestioningly obeying their master’s every command. Many ways to finish this paragraph spring to mind, but I ain’t saying a word.

Upon discovering the intruders in his castle, Mr. Alexander indulges in some Torgo-esque toing and froing, but eventually opts to let them to stay the night, on condition that they leave him alone to enjoy his hermetic isolation, and that they do not enter the dungeon. So, naturally, the next scene sees our gang setting up their photo shoot in the medieval torture dungeon, happily swinging around on some blood-curdling looking implement, girls in bikinis and one guy wearing a skeleton suit! These publishing types, honestly.

I’ll admit that up until this point I had my suspicions that the rationale behind the whole ‘pretty girls cross-country castle tour’ concept might be less than entirely work-related, especially when it became clear that the boss of the publishing house and one of the writers were along for the ride. But in all fairness to these guys, as soon as they’re in situ it’s straight down to business, setting up the gear, ordering the models around, calculating how many rolls of film they can shoot before sunrise, etc. Rarely has the act of shooting pictures of a girl in a sexy pirate outfit being strangled by a skeleton been handled with such consummate professionalism.




Even after the film’s first fatality – which sees the guy in skeleton suit impaled with more butter knives when the rope holding aforementioned torture device in place ‘mysteriously’ snaps – the boss is determined that his team should overcome this tragedy and keep working. After all, he’s got a schedule to keep! Deadlines! I mean, can you imagine a pulp horror novel coming out a bit late, with an imperfect cover photo? It simply wouldn’t do.

So this movie’s been good woozy fun so far, but the next thing I remember is a scene that really raised the stakes big time. A scene that left me speechless, unable to even evoke the holy syllables of Whaa – Thaa – Fugg? A scene, in short, that reminds me why I got into the business of watching movies like this in the first place.

Get this: one of our male characters (who seems to be emerging as the hero of the piece) hears a cry for help from a neighbouring chamber. Rushing in, he finds one of the girls tied by her wrists and ankles in the middle of a huge artificial spider’s web! Don’t come any closer, she warns him, explaining that the killer has rigged up loads of arrows around the chamber’s walls, which are primed to fire as soon as anyone touches the web! And indeed, the walls are lined, not with crossbows and some other kind of practical arrow-firing devices, but actual longbows, mysteriously balanced against the walls somehow! Furthermore, the unfortunate lady continues, there is a poisonous spider slowly making its way towards her, and once bitten, she will die immediately! The spider in questions looks kinda like some furry, mechanical beastie straight out of puppet show, wobbling along on a plainly visible string.



After slapping myself about the face a few times to ensure that I was still awake, and that, yes, this insane spectacle was actually unfolding before me, I saw our hero lie face down on the ground, and proceed to slowly wriggle along the floor like a worm, propelling himself with odd, spasmodic movements, in a tension-building attempt to reach the doomed girl without setting off the arrows! At this point I simply raised my hands in supplication and tearfully offered praises to the gods of WTF b-cinema for showing me this thing.

And really, you could spend a lifetime pondering the whys and wherefores of how the scriptwriters came up with this deranged scenario in the first place, how it ended up actually being realised for the film in such utterly ludicrous fashion, and how the actors felt at being asked to perform in it … I mean, it’s not even clear whether we’re supposed to read the spider and web as being ‘real’, or whether they’re supposed to be mechanisms built by the killer, although frankly either scenario is equally fucking crazy. If you value your sanity, probably best put such questions aside and just let it all wash over you.


What troubled me above all about this incredible sequence though is the fact that the girl apparently seems pretty enthusiastic about the idea of dying in the middle of this spider web contraption, explaining the whole set-up to her would be rescuers in detail, and begging them to abandon her to her singularly weird fate - “Don’t you see? It’s a diabolical trap! It’s impossible for anyone to reach me! Nobody can stop the mechanism!”, etc. The killer must have been a pretty good talker, I suppose – which we can maybe take as foreshadowing of a sort.

I also loved the way that when our worm-crawling hero reaches the centre of the web-maze seconds too late to save to save the girl from the venomous bite, he expresses his frustration by picking up the ‘deadly’ spider and drop-kicking it into the middle of the web, causing a few arrows to half-heartedly flop to the ground posing no danger to anyone! Outstanding.


By this point, my goofball-measuring equipment (it’s sort of a prototype, loosely based on the Rock-o-meter from ‘Rock N’ Roll High School’) had long since overheated and ceased to function, which is just as well, as there is no way its limited capacity could have survived the white hot hurricane of goofery that is Mickey Hargitay as The Crimson Executioner – for naturally it is he who has been perpetuating all this mischief, convinced that he is the reincarnation of the aforementioned medieval torture-monger.

Taking on the guise of The Crimson Executioner, Hargitay sports a get up that makes him look rather like a pro-wrestler who decided to attend a costume party dressed as The Phantom, got drunk, lost his shirt and then decided to go for Flavor Flav instead by adding a huge, clock-like gold medallion to the ensemble. You might have thought it would be difficult for a scene featuring only one man to strictly be termed ‘homoerotic’, but then you presumably haven’t seen Hargitay gazing lovingly into the mirror, oiling his muscular torso as he rants to himself at length about the virtues of his perfect body – claims that are somewhat undermined by the fact that he adopts a slightly hunchbacked ‘gorilla posture’ and hobbles around grunting like a pirate, his features contorted into a kind of snarling mask of perpetual discomfort.



When setting out to assess Mickey Hargitay’s performance here, stock phraseology about how he ‘chews up the scenery’ or somesuch seems woefully inadequate in trying to convey the sheer ham-fisted delight he brings to the role as he capers around his torture dungeon in a state of delirious, childlike glee, accompanied at all times by the incessantly repeated ‘Crimson Executioner’ theme, which sounds a bit like the proud inventor of the world’s first underwater theremin giving a bathtub demonstration (word to composer Gino Peguri for a varied and enjoyable soundtrack all round actually).

Hagitay’s Shatner-esque cadences must be heard to be believed as he sets about tormenting the remaining characters in a manner that might have seemed fairly sadistic in a film that was less… well… y’know - a film that was less like ‘Bloody Pit of Horror’.

“The Crimson Executioner… invented the torture of icy water… for creatures like you!”, he taunts, shaking his fist at a girl who is having icy water dribbled across her back.

“I will punish you for your lechery!”, he promises, spitting in the face of the head of the publishing house, whom he has confined in a comically oversized neck manacle.

“The Crimson Executioner will torture you! Yes… will torture you… until DEATH!”, he announces to nobody in particular, spreading his arms and gazing skyward in joy.

Man, this guy is something else.

Watch entranced, as he straps two of the models onto some kind of rotating wooden contraption and pushes knives through slats in an adjacent screen at boob level, causing the fabric of their brassieres to be veeeery slowly stripped away, and their tender flesh to be cut, just a little bit! I mean, let’s not get carried away here, right? Standards of decency must be upheld. What’s that you say, Crimson Executioner..?

“My vengeance needs blood! The Crimson Executioner... CRIES OUT for blood!”



Such an instantly iconic, endlessly quotable character – I’m surprised that The Crimson Executioner hasn’t cast a wider shadow across subsequent horror history. Surely more than one ‘trash auteur’ must have watched this over the years and thought “this is great, all I need to do is get some theatrical goof-off to run around in a hood, and the rest of the movie writes itself”? One thing’s for sure – nobody who’s ever stumbled across this movie is liable to forget him, and the temptation to spend weeks after viewing wondering around the house in exaggerated wrestler stance, muttering “The Crimson executioner does this, The Crimson executioner does that”, is probably not an uncommon affliction.

Brilliantly, The Crimson Executioner’s reign of terror isn’t ended when he is outwitted or bettered in combat by our hero, as is traditional. I dunno whether I missed an important plot point here, but I’ve watched the film several times now (god help me), and it still appears that he just gets so overwrought about all the evening’s excitement that, after delivering one last fevered monologue about how his beautiful body has been “defiled” by earthly corruption, he simply keels over and dies!

A long tracking shot lingers over the multitude of carcasses that are now strewn around the dungeon floor, and the surviving couple stand in shock, wracking their brains to for some kind of profound closing message they can pull from this thoroughly meaningless outbreak of anachronistic barbarism.

“Well I won’t write any more horror stories, that’s for sure… the man who said truth is stranger than fiction made no mistake!”

You said it buddy! I mean, people in the real world made this movie – beat that, fiction.

‘Bloody Pit of Horror’ has long lurked in the Public Domain, and a splendidly murky, degraded, pixellated print of the film can be streamed/DLed from just about anywhere on the internet, including archive.org here or Youtube here. If you’ve got a reliable net connection, why, you could watch it everyday! What a world we live in! In fact, pesky family or relationship responsibilities notwithstanding, I’d go as far as to say you SHOULD watch it everyday! Go on, you know you want to.

Man, Psychovision looks pretty crappy.