Horror Express: The Beast with 1,000,000 Eyes (David Kramarsky / Roger Corman, 1955)

Over the past few years, I’ve got into the habit of tuning in to ‘50s American sci-fi/monster movies for a dose of comforting, mid-week escapism. Perhaps it’s just me, but somehow, that distinctive combination of remote desert town settings, flat, TV-style staging, woozy theremin music, reassuring techno-babble, clean-cut squaresville vibes and that distant patina of eerie, cold war paranoia… all of this just goes down perfectly with a whisky & soda after a hard day in the office (and the short run-times help, too).

Imagine my consternation then when 1955 ‘The Beast with a Million Eyes’ brutally overturned my expectations. Despite boasting Roger Corman as an executive producer (and uncredited director), the opening half hour of this extremely low budget, Palm Springs-shot outing feels a world away from the cheery hi-jinks of Not of This Earth or It Conquered the World. Instead, it presents us with a vignette of bleak, psychologically harrowing b-movie existentialism which Corman’s later collaborator Richard Matheson would have been proud of.

Our setting is an isolated, family-run ranch which has been steadily losing money for three years, or so husband/father Allan (Paul Birch) tells us in voiceover. He feels like a failure, having lost his family’s affections as a result of this financial turmoil, but is unable to find a way to reverse their sorry fate.

Allan’s shrewish wife Carol (Lorna Thayer) is meanwhile introduced to us as a seething vortex of negativity. Trapped in a kitchen she clearly hates with every ounce of her being, she spends her days labouring away at the Sisyphean task of trying to bake cakes, repeatedly burning them, and flying into a rage as a result.

So bitter is Carol that she won’t even allow the couple’s teenage daughter Sandy (Dona Cole) to leave to go to college. “Why should she get the chances I never got?”, she demands to know. Sandy in turn bitterly resents her mother for condemning her to a life of drudgery on the isolated ranch, all culminating in an atmosphere which at times feels as suffocating and inescapable as the pit in which the characters toil in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s existentialist classic ‘Woman of the Dunes’ (1964).

As if all this wasn’t bad enough meanwhile, the family’s problems are silently observed by a lumbering, mute simpleton (Leonard Tarver) who - for reasons that are not really made sufficiently clear until the film’s conclusion - lives in a shack adjoining their house.

Charmingly, this fellow is known to the family simply as “Him” (“he can’t tell us his name, assuming he ever had one,” Sandy sneers), and he seems to spend much of his time shivering on an unkempt mattress next to wall covered in girly pictures - when he’s not spying on the family members or lurking about with a wood axe, that is. Allan insists that “He” is harmless, but the women aren’t so sure, treating him with a mixture of fear and outright contempt.

At the heart of this tsunami of bad vibes, Allan himself remains an inert, helpless figure. Staring out into the desert, he meditates on the threat posed by the dry, lifeless expanse which stretches beyond the limits of his unhappy homestead. “Maybe the hate started out THERE…,” he muses, gazing at gleaming animal bones in the sand.

Already living in vision of the American Dream transfigured into a hermetically-sealed, loveless hellscape, it’s safe to say the last thing any of these folks need is the arrival of a Beast with a Million Eyes. Thoughtfully though, when the film’s allotted visitor from another world does eventually make an appearance, it does so in a manner which initially feels more annoying than actively apocalyptic.

The Beast’s ship (or meteorite, or whatever it is - the nature of the vessel is never really made clear) overshoots the ranch house, breaking all the windows, and shattering Carol’s beloved glassware. Her sense of futile, outraged frustration in the face of this inexplicable domestic calamity feels horribly palpable; as she gazes forlornly at the shards of a water jug, it honestly feels for a moment or two that she might be about to slash her wrists.

Long before it deigns to make any kind of physical appearance however, it becomes clear that The Beast’s modus operandi involves taking psychic control whatever ‘inferior’ intelligences happen to be hanging about in its general vicinity of its landing zone, dispatching them on malign and destructive missions on its behalf. (Herein lies the rationale for the creature’s purported “million eyes”, or so I’m assuming, as it sees through the optics of all the local insects and animals, etc etc.).

So, first a flock of suicidal birds attacks Allan’s station wagon, before the film reaches what is surely it’s nadir (in both emotional and cinematic terms) during a sequence in which the family’s beloved sheepdog Duke allegedly ‘turns bad’ under the influence of the alien entity and attempts to attack Carol whilst she is alone in the house.

I should clarify that, up to this point, ‘The Beast with a Million Eyes’ has been reasonably well made on its own low budget terms, but the problem here is that the production obviously had no means of creating the illusion that poor old Duke had gone crazy / become rabid. True, they manage to rustle up a few close-up insert shots of him growling and bearing his teeth, but in the long shots which comprise the majority of the scene, he just looks like a normal, happy doggie, making Carol’s decision to run screaming in fear and subsequently blast him with a shotgun seem entirely inexplicable in visual terms - as well as making us hate her even more in the process - even as we grudgingly acknowledge the idea the script is trying to convey.

Strangely, the catharsis caused by Duke’s death (along with the impact of the other low level disasters the family have suffered) somehow succeeds in bringing them back together, allowing them to escape the depressive fug in which they were previously trapped and reminding them of the familial bond they all share -- and it is here that the essential point of Tom Filer’s screenplay finally becomes clear.

It is soon noted, y’see, that the alien’s hypnotic powers only have an effect on people when they are alone. When we’re together, when we have LOVE, we’re safe! (Like all malign invaders/super-computers/killer robots etc, the Beast is flummoxed by by the concept of love, although its clumsy voiceover here at least acknowledges a distant, historical memory of such a thing once existing on its long-dead home planet.)

Corny as it may seem in retrospect, this grand theme is actually quite effectively unpacked by Filer’s script, aided by a set of characterisations which are more multi-faceted and psychologically realistic than those generally encountered in ‘50s monster movies. Crucially, the core idea that, beneath all the dysfunctions and resentments inherent in family life, we still share an unbreakable bond with our relatives and life partners, is allowed to develop naturally here, rather than just being preached in our general direction, as was more standard in this genre/era.

Unfortunately however, nobody thought to include poor old “Him” in the group hugs, so… you can probably guess how that whole plotline plays out, although there is at least quite an interesting, socio-political twist thrown in vis-à-vis the revelation of who the hell “He” actually is, which I won’t spoil for you here.

Thematically speaking, I found this story’s emphasis on the virtues of togetherness - and its implied rejection of individual agency - quite interesting, in view of the anti-communist / pro-‘freedom’ ideology which (in allegorical terms at least) was pretty much obligatory in American SF films of this era.

But then, if you look at it another way, I suppose the alien entity’s attempt to create a kind of invasive hive mind provides just as good a stand-in for the Reds as anything else, so ok - fair enough. Nothing to see here folks, just a bit of unusually thoughtful ambiguity on the part of the scriptwriter - let’s move on.

Of course, the philosophical resonance and character drama in ‘Beast with a Million Eyes’ could have soared to Shakespearean heights of achievement, and it still wouldn’t have saved the film from living in reviled infamy in the minds of the millions of ‘50s monster kids who presumably sat bored out their minds in matinee screenings, demanding to know: where in the fucking hell is the Beast with a Million Eyes?!

Legend has it that this was also the reaction of producer James H. Nicholson, whose American Releasing Corporation financed and distributed the film shortly before morphing into the legendary American International Pictures. True to form, they already had the movie pre-booked with title and poster artwork ready to go, so…. WTF are you trying to do to us here, Roger?

Having committed the cardinal sin of turning in a monster movie without a monster, ‘executive producer’ Corman was thus allegedly dispatched to make right on his mistake with a mere $200 in hand, hooking up with master monster sculptor Paul Blaisdell to produce… well, for the most part, they seem to have resorted to just using a kettle with some flashing lights on the top, to be honest.

Seen in insert shots earlier in the film, this object seems very small (like some kind of sensor or radio receiver or something?), so when we see the surviving characters approach it during the film’s final minutes and discovering that it is actually supposed to be big - like, a spaceship, with a monster in it - the effect is disorientating.

When the door on the side of thing finally opens, we belatedly get a 30 second glimpse of some kind of scary, brain-headed monster thing (with TWO eyes, for the record), somewhat reminiscent of the creatures from the same year’s ‘This Island Earth’. In an attempt to boost the impact of this revelation, these shots are super-imposed with the image of a big, throbbing eyeball, lending them a rather wild, proto-psychedelic quality which could, at a stretch, perhaps be seen as a very early indicator of the direction Corman’s directorial work would take during the 1960s.

All this is actually quite cool, and psychotronic as heck, but it’s likely audiences at the time merely saw it as a load of cheapjack crap - a pathetic, last minute attempt to try to justify the movie’s title and poster artwork, delivering far too little, far too late -forever condemning ‘Beast..’ to the lowest rungs of the monster movies canon.

Viewed with nearly 70 years-worth(!) of hindsight however, ‘Beast with a Million Eyes’ feels like a more-than-respectable addition to the Corman/AIP catalogue. Sure, it suffers more than usual from budgetary constraints, and the lack of a tight directorial hand on the reins allows some extremely clumsy elements (eg, the dog scene and the monster’s ridiculous voiceover) to make it into the final cut, but at the same time, the film’s strong writing and well-rounded characters nonetheless keep us engaged throughout.

As such, it to some extent helped establish a formula which Corman would re-visit again and again over the next few years, with increasing confidence and success each time around. In marking the start of this cycle, it deserves to be viewed sympathetically as a minor landmark in American genre cinema, as well as for its own not insignificant points of interest.

Weird Tales / October Horrors 2019 # 9: The Magician by W. Somerset Maugham (Penguin, 1971 / originally published 1908)

“Oliver Haddo ceased to play. Neither of them stirred. At last Margaret sought by an effort to regain her self-control.
‘I shall begin to think that you really are a magician,’ she said, lightly.
‘I could show you strange things if you cared to see them,’ he answered, again raising his eyes to hers.
‘I don’t think you will ever get me to believe in occult philosophy,’ she laughed.
‘Yet it reigned in Persia with the magi, it endowed India with wonderful traditions, to civilised Greece to the sound of Orpheus’s lyre.’
He stood before Margaret, towering over her in his huge bulk; and there was a singular fascination in his gaze. It seemed that he spoke only to conceal from her that he was putting forth now all the power that was in him.
His voice grew very low, and it was so seductive that Margaret’s brain reeled. The sound of it was overpowering like too sweet a fragrance.
‘I tell you that for this art nothing is impossible. It commands the elements, and knows the language of the stars, and directs the planets in their courses. The moon at its bidding falls blood red from the sky. The dead rise up and form into ominous words the night wind that moans through their skulls. Heaven and Hell are in its province; and all forms, lovely and hideous; and love and hate. With Circe’s wand it can change men into beasts of the field, and to them it can give a monstrous humanity. Life and death are in the right hand and in the left of him who knows its secrets. It confers wealth by the transmutation of metals and immortality by its quintessence.’
Margaret could not hear what he said. A gradual lethargy seized her under his baleful glance, and she had not even the strength to wish to free herself. She seemed bound to him already by hidden chains.
‘If you have powers, show them,’ she whispered, hardly conscious that she spoke.”
- pp. 90-91

W. Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965) is not usually a name that springs to mind when one thinks of the great horror writers early 20th century. Indeed, the best-selling author of ‘Of Human Bondage’ and ‘The Moon and Sixpence’ goes entirely unmentioned in H.P. Lovecraft’s wide-ranging survey Supernatural Horror in Literature (although, far further down the line, I gather Stephen King has expressed a fondness for his work).

Given Maugham’s reputation for florid Victoriana and good, old-fashioned story-telling, I approached his 1908 novel ‘The Magician’ - a tale inspired by the (broadly negative) impression Maugham formed of Aleister Crowley whilst both men were living in Paris in around 1902 - expecting something reasonably down to earth.

I picked the book up recently partly just out of sheer curiosity, and partly to soak up some fin de siècle Parisian atmosphere. I suppose I was anticipating some kind of slightly bohemian society melodrama with a few sinister overtones, framing a thinly veiled, industrial strength character assassination of a legendary blaggard – and whilst the book certainly delivers on this score, as it went on, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself reading a full-blooded supernatural horror story that wouldn’t have been out of place in Bram Stoker’s canon, further enlivened by some wildly excessive, hallucinogenic excursions into realms of depraved occult phantasmagoria. So, yeah - that’s certainly a recommendation that fans of this era’s literary fantastique can take to the bank.

Central to the story of course is Maugham’s Crowley analogue, Oliver Haddo - an exaggerated and titanic caricature of The Great Beast who bestrides ‘The Magician’ with a force of will that makes it feel as if the prose itself is cowering in his presence.

Clearly unconcerned about the prospect of upsetting his character’s real life model, Maugham’s descriptions of Haddo dwell obsessively upon his physical girth; we are constantly reminded that he grotesquely, unnaturally fat, as well as sweaty, pale and morbidly unhealthy in all manner of other respects. (Curiously, this characterisation feels slightly prophetic, given that, by my calculations, Crowley was a mere 27 years old and in fairly gaunt physical shape, having recently returned from one of his debilitating mountain-climbing exploits, when Maugham met him in Paris.)

Haddo’s conversation meanwhile echoes his physical appearance, in that is obscenely verbose and self-regarding. After making his entrance to the British ex-pats dining club where are heroine Margaret, her fiancé Arthur and their party are enjoying their supper, Haddo immediately sets about bullying and haranguing the assembled artists and dilettantes until, stung by his barbs or disquieted by the bad atmosphere he has introduced, they all make their excuses and call it a night, leaving Haddo to regale our protagonists with tales of his unparalleled bravery and skill in the field of big game hunting (a clear analogue for Crowley’s mountaineering), alongside darker hints of his sinister occult beliefs.

Although Haddo is a grotesque and cartoonish figure, Maugham does an excellent job here of capturing the aspect of Crowley’s character which has allowed him to remain such a fascinating figure within our culture – and, in the context of this novel, a frightening one too. Namely, the fact that whilst he may have been a liar, egomaniac, wastrel, blowhard, confidence trickster, sexual predator, drug addict, bully, spendthrift, really crappy poet and wanton abuser of men, women, children and animals alike, at the same time, he could never be entirely written off as a fake.

That’s not to say that Crowley possessed the kind of supernatural powers which are attributed here to Oliver Haddo, but for all his myriad failings as a human being, his work in the field of ceremonial magic, and the philosophy which accompanied it, have proved sufficiently revelatory to have entirely redefined the discourse surrounding his chosen subject area across the span of an entire century, whilst his dedication to his craft, and his associated feats of endurance, stamina, memory and persuasion, remain remarkable.

These latter qualities are carried over wholesale to the fictional Haddo, the legitimacy of whose powers is first indicated by his forceful gaze, which, in an identical manner to that which can be observed in the most famous photographs of Crowley, has the uncanny quality of seeming to look through, rather than at, the object of his gaze.

As we will gradually learn, Haddo’s learning and intellect also appear to be vast (he can quote entire tracts of books on a wide variety of subjects from memory), he plays the piano like a veritable demon, and, according to a letter helpfully provided by a former university colleague whom our hero contacts to learn more about this troublesome rascal, his achievements in the fields of hunting and sports are genuine and widely acknowledged.

During the book’s first real horror set-piece, we find Haddo – who has accompanied his new ‘friends’ to the fairground, largely against their wishes – intimidating an Egyptian snake-charmer with a tirade of terrible and forbidden incantations in his own language, before coaxing the deadly cobra into biting him on the arm, apparently suffering no ill effect from the fatal venom, and promptly snapping the creature’s neck.

Clearly Haddo – like the notoriously spiteful and litigious Crowley – is not a man you’d care to get on the wrong side of, in spite of his boorish public persona. But, of course, that is exactly what happens here, as the upstanding Arthur (it’s difficult not to picture him as being played by the aptly named David Manners from Browning’s ‘Dracula’ and Ulmer’s ‘The Black Cat’) subjects Haddo to “a sound thrashing” after the ill-mannered brute kicks his fiancée’s pet dog in a fit of pique.

Thereafter, the gargantuan magus instigates his elaborate scheme of vengeance, bending the impressionable Margaret to his indomitable will and eventually coaxing her into marriage, after which ‘The Magician’ falls into a similar formula to Stoker’s ‘Dracula’, as Arthur, Margaret’s best friend Susie and Dr Porhoët - a genial French surgeon with a special interest in Alchemy who acts as the novel’s Van Helsing character – become a close-knit unit, united by their determination to free their mutual friend from Haddo’s malign influence.

One area in which Maugham’s creation departs significantly from the real life Crowley is that of the precise nature of his magic(k)al work. The author seems to have been either unfamiliar with, or uninterested in, the ‘Western esoteric’ tradition of ceremonial magic from which Crowley’s practice originated, with the enactment of rituals and spiritual communion with supernatural intelligences mentioned only fleetingly in the text (and then only in the vague context of unspeakable, implicitly orgiastic, bacchanal rites and so forth).

Instead, Oliver Haddo is portrayed as a kind of modern day alchemist, working toward his abominable goals through chemical experiments which, for the modern reader, seem to veer closer to the realm of mad science than black magic, digging deep into that fascinating, pre-20th century hinterland of weirdness in which cutting edge chemistry seems to exist side-by-side with the blackest of ancient diabolism.

To his credit, Maugham seems to have conducted an absolute ton of research in this area, and ‘The Magician’ verily overflows with esoteric lore, as the works of figures such as Paracelsus, Éliphas Lévi and Hermes Trismegistus are discussed at length, whilst Dr Porhoët bangs off lists of (genuine) priceless Latin grimoires which could have given Lovecraft himself palpitations.

Combined with the novel’s parallel interest in exploring the more romantic and macabre aspects of both classical and comparatively recent visual art, which repeatedly had me pausing my reading to google up images of the works the characters are discussing (both Margaret and Susie are in Paris as aspiring painters, so there’s a lot of art chat), and the overall effect is pretty intoxicating.

For my money, the most remarkable part of ‘The Magician’ is the chapter setting out Haddo’s seduction / establishment of mental control over Margaret. Written from her point of view, the sequence of events begins when Haddo gains admission to her lodgings under the pretext of being struck by some kind of medical emergency. Once ensconced, he begins to slowly lure her (and by extension, we the readers) into his trap, initial acting with great humbleness and civility, before he turns his eye to the prints of paintings pinned upon his victim’s wall and begins holding forth about them with great eloquence, before ranging freely through the canon of sensuous and decadent art, as if trying to batter his listener into submission through sheer over-powering rhetoric.

He then makes his way to the piano, were he unleashes torrents of spell-binding, demoniac music, the like of which poor old Margaret has never heard in her life. And finally, once she is thoroughly cowed by his over-bearing presence, he makes his way to the kitchen and, producing a vail of strange, blue powder, treats her to a demonstration of its startling power;

“Immediately a bright flame sprang up, and Margaret gave a cry of alarm. Oliver looked at her quickly and motioned her to remain still. She saw that the water was on fire. It was burning as brilliantly, as hotly, as if it were common gas; and it burned with the same dry, hoarse roar. Suddenly it was extinguished. She looked forward and saw that the bowl was empty.
The water had been consumed, as though it were straw, and not a drop remained. She passed her hand absently across her forehead.
‘But water cannot burn,’ she muttered to herself.
It seemed that Haddo knew what she thought, for he smiled strangely.
‘Do you know that nothing more destructive can be invented than this blue powder, and I have enough to burn up all the water in Paris? Who dreamt that water might burn like chaff?’
[…]
‘He took a long breath, and his eyes glittered with a devilish ardour. His voice was hoarse with overwhelming emotion.
‘Sometimes I am haunted by the wild desire to have witnessed the great and final scene when the irrevocable flames poured down the river, hurrying along the streams of the earth, searching out the moisture in all growing things, tearing it even from the eternal rocks; when the flames poured down like the rushing of the wind, and all that lived fled before them until the came to the sea; and the sea itself was consumed with vehement fire.’”

Haddo then urges Margaret, who by this point is thoroughly under his control, to breathe deeply of the fumes produced by the blue powder…. and after that, we’re off to the races, basically;

Another point of differentiation between Haddo and Crowley is that Maugham’s character is the vastly wealthy skein of an ancient, aristocratic family (rather than merely pretending to be), and, following Margaret’s elopement with the blighter, we are treated to some delightfully coy ‘intimations’ of their misbegotten life together, as they mix with the highest of high-rollers in Monaco.

It’s amusing here to contemplate an era when a lady’s chronic moral degradation is shudderingly revealed in the fact that she tells a dirty joke during dinner and dares to tip her hat to “a woman known to be of low virtue”, but on the other hand, the implications of after-hours debauchery in the pleasure palaces of the Riviera in this section of the book also carry a pungent whiff of brimstone, suggestive of a debased, morally bankrupt European aristocracy drifting rudderless into the jaws of the First World War.

The final act of ‘The Magician’ however is where things get really wild, cementing the novel’s horror credentials. As our heroes converge upon Haddo’s blighted family seat in Staffordshire (in the tradition of Poe and, later, Lovecraft, vegetation fails to grow upon the blasted landscape surrounding his night-haunted abode), we’re treated in quick succession to a series of set pieces that could have come straight from a 1930s issue of ‘Weird Tales’, leaving us in no doubt as to the novel’s supernatural worldview.

A necromantic séance on a moonless night, a life-or-death battle with Haddo’s spectrally projected avatar, and, finally, the terrible, sanity-shaking sights which await our protagonists when they eventually batter their way into the furnace-like interior of the locked attic laboratory atop the magus’s decrepit stately home – dark secrets which, needless to say, will remain unrevealed here.

Considered with over a century’s hindsight, ‘The Magician’ feels like one of those fascinating works which seems to gather and reflect influence in all kind of unexpected directions. As well of potentially drawing from Stoker alongside the legends surrounding the real life Crowley, Maugham also seems to have drawn here from the success of George du Maurier’s 1894 novel ‘Trilby’ (which introduced the world to the character of Svengali), whilst the book’s take on contemporary alchemy may also have found an echo in the unheimlich imaginings of Hanns Heinz Ewers’ influential but deeply questionable ‘Alarune’, published a few years later in 1911.

Thereafter, the influence of Maugham’s book can arguably be felt to some extent in all of the mesmeric Satanic demagogues who would soon be romping all over the shadier reaches of popular culture, perhaps even playing into the creation of some of the greatest works of early American horror cinema, with both Karloff’s Hjalmar Poelzig in the aforementioned ‘The Black Cat’ (1934) and the twisted homunculi sealed in bell jars by Ernest Thesiger’s Dr Pretorius in Whale’s ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ (1935) embodying elements which could potentially have been pulled from the lurking shadow of Oliver Haddo. (1)

Meanwhile, ‘The Magician’ also seems noteworthy as one of the only fictional works I can recall in which an author has had the cast-iron balls necessary to present a thinly veiled portrait of a still-living individual, portraying them as a diabolical, murderous villain.

In view of Aleister Crowley’s tendency to let rip against his ‘enemies’ with curses, magickal battles and wildly extravagant lawsuits, I think he must have either had a soft spot for Maugham, or else secretly enjoyed the attention which ‘The Magician’ brought his way, because his public response to the book’s publication seems to have been relatively benign.

Writing under the name “Oliver Haddo”, Crowley produced a satirical review of ‘The Magician’, which was published by ‘Vanity Fair’. With typical point-missing insouciance, Crowley seems to have focused here upon accusing Maugham of plagiarism, alleging that he ‘stole’ parts of his novel from such works as Franz Hartmann’s ‘The Life of Paracelsus’ and ‘Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie’ by Eliphas Levi - a pretty fatuous suggestion, given that it is plainly obvious Maugham did indeed consult the books Crowley cites, using them as historical sources for his broadly original fictional story. (2)

Wisely, Maugham refused to respond to Crowley’s accusations, later claiming that he had not even bothered to read the ‘Vanity Fair’ review, adding that, “I daresay it was a pretty piece of vituperation, but probably, like his poems, intolerably verbose”.

In the same ‘fragment of autobiography’, which has prefaced most latter-day editions of ‘The Magician’, Maughan also claims that, many years later, in the flush of his literary success, he received an unsolicited telegram which read as follows;

“Please send twenty-five pounds at once. Mother of God and I starving. Aleister Crowley.”

Once again, he declined to respond.

---

Having generally been marketed as a “general fiction” title in paperback, covers for ‘The Magician’ have tended to be pretty dull, but I love the none-more-decadent detailing on the first edition hardback pictured above. That aside, the designs below are proabably the best of the bunch.

--

(1)Funnily enough, Thesinger actually knew Maugham socially, as a result of their work in London theatre; he appeared in the cast of Maugham’s play ‘The Circle’ in 1921.

(2) Crowley also accused Maugham of ripping off H.G. Wells’ ‘The Island of Dr Moreau’, but I really can’t see much similarity between the two novels at all, to be honest.

Franco Files: Vampyros Lesbos (1970)

VIEWING NOTE: Although the review below was written after a viewing of the (excellent) 2015 Severin blu-ray of ‘Vampyros Lesbos’, the screenshots above are by necessity taken from the (perfectly serviceable) 2000 Second Sight DVD.

AKAs:

In addition to variations on its most common title (extended in the film’s original West German release to ‘Vampyros Lesbos: Die Erbin des Dracula’), IMDB also currently lists the following, mostly without further details: ‘El Signo del Vampire’, ‘The Heiress of Dracula’, ’The Heritage of Dracula’, ‘The Sign of the Vampire’, ‘The Strange Adventure of Jonathan Harker’, ‘The Vampire Women’, ‘City of Vampires’. The substantially different (and substantially less good) Spanish version went by the name ‘Las Vampiras’, and German language working titles are listed as ‘Das Mal des Vampirs’, ‘Im Zeichen der Vampire’ and ‘Schlechte Zeiten für Vampire’.

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First of all, some background. I know I have claimed elsewhere that ‘Kiss Me Monster’ was the first Jess Franco film I watched, but actually, I’m pretty sure ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ beat it to the punch. In fact, I saw ‘Vampyros..’ well over ten years ago, long before the director’s name meant anything to me. For a variety of reasons (in particular, the heavy cult rep garnered by the film’s soundtrack in the late ‘90s and the mainstream-friendly packaging of Second Sight’s DVD release), ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ was by far the most high profile Franco title available to UK viewers in the early ‘00s, reaching an audience that expanded beyond the learned euro-horror cognoscenti to eventually include even clueless young rubes such as myself, who happened to see its magnificent title (surely one of the best in exploitation movie history) on the shelves of a high street chain store, noted the heavily discounted price, and thought, “well, *that* looks like a good evening’s entertainment”.

Fateful words indeed. Predictably perhaps, my initial reaction to ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ was pretty negative. Basically I think, I just wasn’t ready for it. Largely unschooled in the ways of continental horror, I was probably expecting either a more traditional gothic horror movie or some sort of kitschy softcore sex flick, and needless to say, I got neither. With a field of reference that mainly consisted of British and American horror films, the idea of making vampire film full of bright sunshine, swimming pools and seaside hotel rooms just seemed absurd to me. Rather than recognising this as a conscious choice and an established part of Franco’s aesthetic, I assumed that the film’s crew must have been busy sunning themselves down in the Med, and simply couldn’t be bothered to inject any proper gothic atmosphere into their movie.

This impression was only exacerbated by the film’s technical shortcomings (yes, the zooms), its repetitious use of seemingly random footage, and the almost total lack of a conventional storyline. An utterly disconnected plot strand in which Franco himself seems to be torturing women in a hotel basement like some kind of sordid gnome didn’t exactly do much to win me over (I had ‘standards’ back in those days, y’see), and by the time a confused looking Dennis Price turned up, muttering bewildering litanies of vampire lore whilst staring into the middle distance in some cheap looking guesthouse, the film just seemed pathetic to me – a shameless cash grab from some cynical hack, whose apparent determination to avoid censorship issues by teasing on explicit sexuality and graphic violence without actually delivering a satisfactory quantity of either proved the final nail in the coffin of my attention span. *Fuck this Franco guy*, I thought, not for the last time in my early days of horror movie fandom.

How things change. Watching the film today, it’s difficult to comprehend why my reaction was so negative, as ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ now strikes me as a hugely enjoyable work, packed with stuff that, even in my youthful ignorance, I should surely have appreciated. The stark, stylized mise en scene and dissociative, almost psychedelic editing rhythms? The raging sitars of Hübler and Schwab? The neo-gothic elegance of Countess Carody’s costume and décor and the deep, dark eyes of Soledad Miranda? Man, I should’ve loved this shit! Why couldn’t I see it? What was I thinking?

Whereas on first viewing I remember dismissing ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ as a whole film cobbled together around Soledad’s iconic opening striptease act (that being the only bit that much impressed me), nowadays I think I actually find that scene to be one of the *least* interesting parts of the film – which is saying something, given that the sight of Ms Miranda prostrating herself beneath a mannequin in her full fetishistic finery whilst ‘Vampire Sound Incorporated’ go mental on the soundtrack must surely rank amongst the finer experiences life has to offer.

In fact, after revisiting the film, I think I’m apt to echo the general consensus that ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ is one of Franco’s all-time best, and certainly an essential cornerstone of the unique cinematic world he would go on to built for himself over the next fifteen years. Necronomicon and Venus In Furs may have seen him branching out beyond straight genre cinema toward the churning waters of psycho-sexual delirium, and the previous year’s self-financed and barely released ‘Nightmares Come At Night’ may have seen him jumping in at the deep end for the very first time, but ‘Vampyros..’ is where it all comes together into a wholly successful, tonally consistent, 100% proof example of everything we now mean when we say “a Jess Franco film”.

(If nothing else, the opening strip-tease certainly provides the definitive example of such a scene – the benchmark against which the innumerable similar scenes Franco filmed over the years must be measured against and inevitably found wanting.) (1)

Fans often talk about Franco films “casting a spell” over them, but rarely is this feeling as palpable – or as literally applicable – as it is in ‘Vampyros Lesbos’. Working (as usual) from almost nothing vis-à-vis budget or production design, Franco drags us down with him into an unfamiliar milieu that soon becomes completely intoxicating, ditching almost entirely the concessions to cinematic convention that kept ‘Venus..’ and ‘Necronomicon’ to some extent anchored in late ‘60s picture-house reality, and surrendering fully to the drifting currents of his own strange, sensualist vision.

As in several later films (including 1981’s partial remake Macumba Sexual), Franco here almost seems to be practicing a form of primitive, improvised magic through his camera lens. All it takes is a few disconnected ‘trigger’ images, presumably shot on the fly as they wandered into the director’s vision (a red kite flying through the Istanbul sky, a scorpion prowling the bottom of a swimming pool, a thin trickle of blood dripping down a glass windowpane, a fishing boat heading out to sea at sunset) and Ewa Strömberg’s Linda (our nominal protagonist / Jonathan Harker stand-in) is forcibly thrust beyond the threshold of her already somewhat hazy reality as the film’s magic circle closes around her, and, by extension, around us.

The repetition of these images as signifiers of supernatural / psychic influence is reiterated to such an extent during the first half of ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ that it starts to recall the ‘visual spells’ of Kenneth Anger’s magic(k)ally charged cinema. Whilst the notional ‘symbolic’ meaning of each image is a little blunt in view of the film’s storyline, Franco’s emphatic, montage-like repetition suggests that these images are intended to function less as ponderous thematic commentary, and more like subliminal flash-cards, marking a gateway from one realm of consciousness to another.

(In keeping with the film’s obvious debt to ‘Dracula’, it also occurs to me that these trigger images seem perhaps like some weird variation on the ritualistic pattern that signifies the journey toward the supernatural in so many more conventional vampire movies – the benighted inn, the coach-ride, the castle door etc.)

The idea of a powerful character’s will roaming far and wide beyond her (or his?) body is a notion that obviously runs rampant through most of Franco’s filmography - indeed, the slightly goofy idea of the seducer repeatedly whispering her victim’s name across some psychic breeze (“Linnnnn-da..”) would surely be one of the first things a parodist would pick up on if making some hypothetical ‘Carry On Franco’ project. This rather nebulous concept is rarely expressed quite as convincingly as it is in ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ though, as Jess allows the oneiric, melancholic headspace of Miranda’s Countess to gradually consume the film’s landscape completely, impacting the behaviour even of secondary characters (Andrea Montchal as Linda’s hapless boyfriend, or Franco’s psycho-sadist hotel porter) to such an extent that the fact we too are under her spell must be obvious to even the most dim-witted of viewers by the halfway point, without the need of any explanatory babble about ‘psychic powers’ or somesuch.

“I bewitched them; They lost their identity; I became them”, the Countess says of her victims during her confessional monologue in the film’s second half, which explains things succinctly enough, even as the fate she describes could easily be extended to the film itself, and its viewers.

Once you’ve grasped it, I think that this idea of seeing the world through the lens of a ‘supernatural’ character’s perspective is one that proves helpful in understanding whole swatches of Franco’s best cinema. From ‘Necronomicon’ onwards, when we watch one of the director’s more personal sex-horror films (as opposed to his straight genre efforts), what we are often seeing is a vision of events as filtered through the subjective viewpoint of an altered or entirely non-human consciousness – a consciousness that, as Stephen Thrower notes in the essay that opens his new book, often mirrors the heightened sensation and temporal drag of sexual arousal. Such is certainly the case in ‘Vampyros Lesbos’, as the dreamlike pace of the Countess’s languorous, vampiric half-life gradually intoxicates every aspect of the film’s style.

This sense of seeing the world through the distorting mirror of a sluggish yet sensually heightened being – whether a vampire, a witch, an avenging spirit, or whatever – is something that went on to inform most of Franco’s excursions into ‘other’ consciousness, reaching its apex perhaps in the disturbing sci-fi abstractions of 1977’s alienating ‘Shining Sex’

The feeling that ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ is drawing us into some kind of esoteric ritual – or at the very least, the deliberate conjuring of a very particular, pungent atmosphere – is only enhanced by the Countess’s curious use of untranslatable vampiric incantations (“kovec nie trekatsch”, anyone?) as she attempts to ‘turn’ her victims, and the rambling occult blather given voice by poor old Dennis Price as the ubiquitous Dr. Seward (a function he also fulfilled a few years in Franco’s two oddball Frankenstein films, of course)

Tying ‘Vampyros..’ in to some extent with these occasional comic book ‘monster bash’ flicks (Dracula: Prisoner of Frankenstein and ‘The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein’ foremost amongst them), I’m not sure whether Jess just banged all this stuff out off the top of his head during shooting, or whether it improvised later by the dubbing crew, but either way, the lack of context and sheer strangeness of all this vampiric claptrap, together with Price’s zonked out, affectless delivery, inadvertently works wonders vis-à-vis creating the suggestion of hidden depths of psychic / magical intrigue. (2)

To the uninitiated, Price’s scenes will no doubt seem extraordinarily shoddy, but for those of who have already crossed the Franco threshold, their mystifying oddity proves quite charming – a familiar part of the director’s world, and a wonderful example of bizarre logic and warped humour that runs through his work.

Curiously, ‘Dr Seward’ – the only character in ‘Vampyros..’ whose name is carried across from Bram Stoker - went on to become a bit of a recurring player in Franco’s own personal mythology; having already cast Paul Muller in the role in his adaptation of ‘Count Dracula’ a year earlier, Franco seems to have developed a bit of a fascination for the character.

Whilst the good doctor’s appearance in the form of Alberto Dalbes in the marginally Stoker-derived ‘Dracula: P of F’ and its sort-of sequel ‘Erotic Rites..’ seems understandable enough, he continued to lurk in the corners of the Francoverse long after vampiric subject matter had departed, his appearances usually coinciding with the director’s weird fixation with dubious mental institutions in which tormented, writhing women display a psychic connection to whatever unpleasantness is transpiring in the respective film’s main plot – an idea that we might suppose to be loosely inspired by the behavior of Seward’s patient Renfield in some iterations of Stoker’s ‘Dracula’. (3)

Quite what these scenes brought to the films, or why Franco so obsessively reiterated them, remains a mystery, but for what it’s worth, the Dr Seward of ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ seems to provide the model for all the dubious seekers into the mystery that followed, just as the film as a whole provides a handy index of so many of the other themes and techniques that Franco would continually revisit through the ‘70s and ‘80s.

As has often been remarked, Soledad Miranda’s performance in ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ is magnificent. Exuding a kind of primal charisma and commitment to her role that more than matches her legendary beauty, she is utterly convincing as the predatory Countess Carody, her mesmerizing, inky black gaze conveying depth of experience that could well hold centuries of undead torment. Comparable to Barbara Steele’s equally iconic turn in ‘Black Sunday’, her very presence on screen is enough to leave horror fans speechless.

What particularly got under my skin upon revisiting the film is the Countess’s confessional monologue to her servant (named Morpho of course, and played here by José Martínez Blanco). Staring upward from a kind of futon in a red-hued, curtained room as the camera roams around her, she describes her initial encounter with Count Dracula (“Was it a hundred years ago, or maybe two hundred? I was young and all alone..”) amid an outbreak of violent looting that saw her family home sacked by soldiers in some unspecified war, and her brutal initiation into the ways of vampirism, as the Count ‘saved’ her from gang rape before taking the place of her attackers himself.

Franco films are rarely celebrated for their dialogue, but this soliloquy is both evocative and tragic, allowing Miranda’s character to attain a depth that is rarely given voice in Franco’s narratives. In fact, it manages to cut right to the heart of the kind of vampiric angst that writers like Anne Rice would make a career out of without sinking to the level of whinging self-pity, and in giving real form to the tragedy underlying all of Franco’s supernatural female predators, it in particular casts a whole new light on Miranda’s fellow Countess in 'Vampyros Lesbos’s semi-sequel ‘La Comtesse Noire’ / ‘Female Vampire’ (1973). (4)

As the Countess describes her domination by Dracula and the way he ‘turned’ her following her ordeal, the implications of childhood abuse and the cycle of dysfunction it can inspire in adulthood are hard to miss, even buried under layers of pulp gothic cushioning. Even whilst the waters are muddied somewhat by a rather unnecessary “..and that’s why I hate all men” comic book lesbian twist, this is neither the first nor last time the shadow of such issues can be found lurking in Franco’s better films, ensuring that, beyond all the sexadelic tomfoolery, there is a crushing sense of sadness and emptiness at the film’s core.

In fact, a big part of the film’s atmosphere – injected subtly, and easy to miss at first – is its overwhelming feeling of melancholy. Whilst part and parcel of any vampire story that invites sympathy toward its monster, this is an element that would grow increasingly prominent in Franco’s sexual domination narratives as the years went on, reaching a crescendo of gut-wrenching despair in films like Lorna the Exorcist and Doriana Gray. At this stage though, that darkness simply shimmers on the horizon - a delicious, bitter undercurrent beneath the film’s luscious, multi-hued surface.

Given what an excellent vehicle Dracula-derived storylines provided for Franco’s exploration of sexual domination and mind control, it’s surprising how few vampire films he actually made. Not counting his ‘90s/’00s shot-on-video projects, I count only five films centering on vampirism in his core filmography, and of those, two (the aforementioned ‘Dracula: Prisoner of Frankenstein’ and 1970’s ‘Count Dracula’) feature more traditional villainous male Counts and largely eschew the story’s sexual angle, leaving only a central trilogy of erotically charged vampire movies, within which ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ stands preeminent alongside ‘Female Vampire’ and the somewhat lesser known ‘Daughter of Dracula’ (1972). (5)

As per the inexplicable proliferation of Dr. Sewards, this relative neglect of vampiric subject matter in the Franco canon remains a mystery, as all three of the above mentioned films reveal Jess to be a perfect chronicler of such tales, whose unknowable, ennui-ridden sexual predators not only provided him with endless opportunities to ruminate upon his preferred themes and scenarios, but also a solid base of box office appeal.

Maybe, as with so many other things, he just got bored. Whilst his far more numerous DeSadean stories and crime/mystery focused sex dramas usually found ways to try to put a new spin on the material, perhaps he realised, with particular reference to his oft-expressed distaste for the crusty old gothic horrors many of his contemporaries were still knocking out, that there was only so much he could do with a menu of fangs, blood and candelabras, and quit whilst he was ahead.

When taking about this kind of euro-horror movie, myself and other writers are constantly abusing the term ‘dream-like’, whether in reference to filmmakers who deliberately seek such an effect, or those who merely stumble upon it, but it is rare that either Franco or any of his contemporaries achieved a mood that was so literally dream-like as that of ‘Vampyros Lesbos’.

It is the kind of film from which, if you lower your guard and let it wash over you, you will emerge ninety minutes later as if waking from a coma. Its cracked logic and intriguing non-sequiturs, its blurred contours, hypnotic repetitions, random drifts of intangible emotion and the strange hints of unseen significance lurking beneath its tides of  light and shadow… ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ is an exploitation movie as dream machine that richly deserves its reputation as one of Franco’s finest works, and as one of the cornerstones of ‘70s euro-horror in general. It is recommended without reservation, and if you don’t like it, well, I dunno… try coming back in ten years.

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Kink: 4/5
Creepitude: 4/5
Pulp Thrills: 3/5
Altered States: 5/5
Sight Seeing: 4/5

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(1)I sort of like the idea that the reclusive Countess Carody emerges from her sun-blessed island lair to perform exotic strip routines in seedy bars. Her pastime is never mentioned by the characters outside of these sequences, perhaps implying that Linda – watching with vacant, glazed eyes is simply hallucinating the whole thing – a vivid premonition of the sexual obsession she will soon be initiated into by the Countess - whilst her boyfriend, adopting a leering smirk, is enjoying an altogether more conventional sleazy floor-show (until later in the film of course, when it is his turn to be similarly be-witched).

(2)I’ll try to refrain from saying anything unkind with regard to Dennis Price’s widely documented alcoholism, but let’s just say that if you were to tell me he’d been submerged in a barrel of brandy for several hours prior to each of his appearances in Franco films, I’d certainly believe you. He’s still a trooper though, delivering his absurd dialogue with admirable decorum, and, given that he appeared in a number of films for Franco over several years, spanning both the reasonably budgeted Harry Alan Towers productions and some ultra-cheap quickies that presumably only offered the very slimmest of pay cheques, we can at least hope he was a good sport and enjoyed the experience, rather than considering such work a stain upon his rapidly diminishing dignity, or somesuch.

(3)For examples of this, see for instance ‘Lorna the Exorcist’, where the doctor’s questionable establishment features gaudy wallpaper and plush interiors extremely similar to Price’s rather squalid HQ in ‘Vampyros..’, and the utterly surreal ‘Shining Sex’, wherein Franco’s wheelchair-bound doctor seems to be running his experimental psychiatric research unit from the upper floors of an Alicante resort hotel!

(4)Watching the two films in close succession, it’s difficult not to get the impression that Miranda’s Countess Nadine and Lina Romay’s Countess Irina are in some way sisters, cousins, or in some way different manifestations of the same character, both wrestling with the same back story, the same compulsions and inner loneliness. It’s a shame they never got together for the ultimate Jess Franco slash fiction team-up, but maybe it’s for the best… poor Jess might have suffered a heart attack right there behind the viewfinder.

(5)I know, I know – only when referring to Jess Franco could you claim that a director had limited interest in a subject on the basis that he only made five films about it! But nonetheless, it’s interesting to reflect that, despite often being pigeonholed for years as “one of those lesbian vampire guys”, Franco actually probably made more movies about people getting lost in the jungle than he did about vampires.

Franco Files: Cartes sur Table / ‘Attack of the Robots’ (1966)

By the dawn of the 1960s, hatchet-faced American actor Eddie Constantine had become an pretty iconic figure in European popular cinema, playing Peter Cheyney’s hard-as-nails private eye Lemmy Caution in a series of French thrillers that included seven films between 1953 and 1963.

Two years after his final ‘straight’ Caution film, things took a rather strange turn when Constantine found himself reprising his best known character in the lead role of Jean-Luc Godard’s inscrutable arthouse sci-fi mash-up ‘Alphaville’, and with his screen persona thoroughly beyond-the-looking-glass by that point, it’s a fair bet that things scarcely got any more normal for Eddie when 1966 found him working for Jess Franco, playing the lead in two films completed that year.

One was the self-explanatory ‘Residencia para Espias’, and the other the little number we’re looking at today. Released around Europe with the inexplicably bland title ‘Cartes sur Table’ (‘Cards on the Table’), the film reached American shores under the somewhat more punchy ‘Attack of the Robots’, and, whilst neither title really bears *that much* relevance to the events portrayed therein, no prize is offered for guessing which of the two names I prefer.

So, with an English title that suggests a sci-fi movie and a star chiefly associated with two-fisted detective roles, it comes as something of a surprise to settle into ‘Attack of the Robots’ and discover that what we're watching here is actually nothing less than a fully-fledged euro-spy film, marching out in all its Bond-ripping finery.

As a director ever shackled to the whims of contemporary box office trends, Franco made a number of films during the ‘60s that fall vaguely within the ‘eurospy’ bracket, but, crucially, he seems to have had little interest in making anything like a straight treatment of the genre. The live action comic book of ‘Lucky The Inscrutable’ (1967) is too weird and uneven to really hit its appointed generic prerequisites, whilst 1968’s two ‘Red Lips’ films are simply too goofy to count, and I’ve not yet had a chance to see the aforementioned ‘Residencia..’, meaning that, for now, ‘Attack of the Robots’ is by default the closest thing we have to a genuine Jess Franco eurospy film.

Of course, being a Franco film, ‘Attack..’ is still full of off-piste diversions and eccentricities, pushing heavily toward the sillier end of the genre’s stylistic spectrum and often toppling over into full-blown spoof territory. But nonetheless - aficionados of the marginally more well-known second string spy extravaganzas filling cinemas through the mid ‘60s will feel thoroughly at home here, in spite of the director’s relentless piss-taking.

Anyway! Plot summary! So, it seems mysterious assassins in black-face make up, black turtlenecks and Michael Caine glasses are popping up all over the place, annihilating important people as they head into big buildings to do important things! What the hell are the forces of international law and order going to do about it..?

(The loveably unconvincing globe-trotting during this opening assassination montage eases us into the low budget eurospy vibe perfectly, as on-screen captions inform us we’re visiting Buenos Aires, Amsterdam etc, despite seeing nothing more than vague shots of cathedral steps and airport runways.)

About ten minutes of exposition-laden chat at Interpol HQ follows, eventually leading us to introduction of Eddie Constantine, here not playing Lemmy C, but our old pal “Al Peterson” (in the English dub), a troublesome former agent picked out of a rolodex by an administrator with a surprisingly thorough knowledge of his operatives’ blood types. (Having copped that the assassins all have the same rare blood type y’see, they need an agent who matches it, vis-à-vis the general idea that the villains will latch on to him and pick him up for, well, whatever processes they use to create these ‘robot’ assassins… and Lemmy – I mean Al – is the only man for the job.)

Within the eurospy context, the comment that Peterson can be found “somewhere on this planet with a gorgeous blonde & a bottle of scotch” tells us all he need to know about our hero’s persona, even if the sexy dame we see him sweet-talking when the action cuts to a riverside casino in some questionably exotic ‘oriental’ locale is actually a brunette.

Much business with living statue geisha girls, soul-witheringly cheesy xylophone music and subterranean opium dens follows, as Eddie finds himself kidnapped by a cackling, shrieky-voiced Chinese agent named Lee Wee (Vincente Roca),(1) prompting an overload of sub-Fu Manchu orientalism that combines with a kind of bizarre back-and-forth slapstick comedy routine and some surprisingly elaborate set dressing to create the impression of a sequence that could have been taken from a film thirty years older than this one.

After he gets through with all that, our man finds his old buddies from Interpol waiting in his hotel room, and is duly given the lowdown. And if shooting in Bangkok or Buenos Aires may be off the menu for yr average Jess Franco production, his budget could at least stretch to a week or two in sunny Alicante, whence Peterson is soon dispatched with a new cover identity, a bag full of improbably dangerous gadgetry and the winningly Bond-like mission of simply hanging around drinking and womanizing until the bad guys obediently turn up to pounce on him. (“How many James Bond films have you seen recently?”, Eddie asks his handlers. “More than you’d think” comes the rather gnomic reply.)

Upon his ‘arrival’ in Spain, Constantine drops the obligatory tuxedo and returns to his more familiar uniform of a shabby looking suit & tie with crumpled, ill-fitting hat, reasserting the visual identity he had constructed for himself in the Lemmy Caution films, even as ‘Attack of the Robots’ ostensibly finds him playing a different character in a very different scenario.(2)

Within minutes, Eddie - sorry, Al - has scoped out a beautiful but suspicious dame (Sophie Hardy, in her only role for Franco), checked into a fancy hotel, indulged in a fist-fight with an overly effusive Mexican, and been spied upon by a furtive agent in a safari suit (‘60s Franco regular Marcelo Arroita-Jáuregui). And for the next thirty minutes or so things proceed in much the way you’d imagine really, which is just dandy.

Presumably filmed in close proximity to the preceding year’s The Diabolical Dr. Z (much of the same supporting cast reappear here, as do some of the props, most likely), ‘Attack of the Robots’ was also co-authored by that film’s scriptwriter, future Luis Bunuel collaborator Jean-Claude Carriere, whom we might conceivably credit with some this film’s more darkly witty moments.

The hackneyed Lee Wee stuff might not be terribly successful as comedy, but once we get past that, much of the rest of the film is actually pretty funny, with the combination of Franco’s cartoon-ish enthusiasm and a few well-placed zingers that I assume Carriere smuggled into the script leading to some genuinely amusing moments - not least the obligatory “gadget demonstration scene”, which is one of the best spoofs of such I recall seeing, as Eddie’s handlers palm off a series of increasingly absurd devices upon him with perfect deadpan unconcern, including a pair of electrified driving gloves that supposedly carry enough charge to kill “twenty adults, or about thirty children”, and, brilliantly, an explosive, poison gas equipped cigar whose contagion can only be avoided through use of a secret vial of antidote that can only be accessed by playing a particular jig on a flute disguised as a fountain pen (you might want to read that back a few times).

Further spoofy shenanigans follow in the shape of a random kid sending messages back to the villains using a ‘radio’ hidden inside a toy car,(3) and an agent who spends much of the film glued to a payphone delivering a series of uber-conspicuous code messages (“the roses and the gladioli have been set in the vase at last. You can play the delicate melody… but only in the minor key”). You get the general idea, I’m sure.

Unlike a crime or horror picture, a ‘60s spy movie really needs the oversaturated blast of cheap Eastman colour to get its groove on, and as such, ‘Attack..’ suffers somewhat from being shot in black & white, however admirable Franco’s moody, noirish photography might be. With this in mind, perhaps the decision to go as broad as possible with the humour may have been seen as the fimmakers’ best hope of overcoming such obvious budgetary limitations in the terminally overcrowded 1966 spy movie marketplace…? But who knows.

Either way, it was probably a good move. Rarely has there been a genre or an era in which the distinction been ‘serious’ examples of a form and spoofs thereof was as wafer-thin as in the post-‘Thunderball’ hey-day of these kinda movies, and, regardless of his producers’ intentions, Franco seems to have been very much on board with this on ‘Attack..’, amping up the same kind of breezy, good-natured bonhomie that predominated in La Muerte Silba un Blues to create a film that is similar in spirit to the uproariously entertaining Tony Kendall / Brad Harris ‘Kommissar X’ movies.(4)

From a directorial point of view, the filmmaking here is competent, briskly paced and engaging in a workmanlike sorta way, with only occasional lapses into sluggishness, even if Franco’s camerawork is nowhere near as inspired as it was in ‘..Dr. Z’ or Necronomicon. Fans worried that ‘Attack..’ might be little more than a goof-off should relax however, as, happily, the envelope-pushing kinkiness and general pop art dementia that crept into ‘..Dr. Z’ is back here in spades.

Just dig the movie’s villainess (Françoise Brion as “Lady Cecilia Addington Courtney”) wearing a shiny PVC dress as she takes a riding crop to similarly attired female ‘robots’ for instance, or a kidnapped girl being dragged around in chains prior to her dry ice and electric shock-based conversion into a ‘robot’. Franco was still riffing on exactly the same pulpy “women in chains” kinda stuff right through to the late 1970s of course, via Dietrich-era bangers like ‘Blue Rita’ and ‘Swedish Nympho Slaves’, and, though obvious limited by the more modest conventions of mid-‘60s action-adventure fare, he nonetheless has plenty of space to indulge his whims here.

Speaking of which, there are also two absolutely great nightclub scenes to enjoy here. Nothing quite as far-out as the “Miss Muerte” routine from ‘..Dr.Z’ perhaps, but classic Franco all the same. Clad in skin-coloured bodysuit & feather boa, Hardy vamps upon a velvet-curtained stage alongside a string quartet and a bunch of vaudeville bongo guys as feather fall from the sky, and later, apparently in the same room, she lounges in lingerie on a round central stage, looking more than a little like Maria Rohm in ‘Venus In Furs’ as she removes her stockings. It’s all a tad saltier than the “good clean fun” approach to sex appeal found in most eurospy flicks, but then would we really expect anything less from Uncle Jess?

Another thing you can always rely on Franco to come through with (in this era at least) is a damn good villain lair, and he certainly doesn’t let us down on that score here, building (perhaps literally) on ‘..Dr Z’s memorably zany lab scenes to create a direct precursor to what became the ultimate expression of his own particular brand of psyched out villain-lair cool in 1968’s staggering ‘The Girl From Rio’.

Allegedly located on a secluded island accessible only by motorboat (allowing Franco to indulge in a few woozy ‘out on the boat’ hand-held shots that prefigure the distinctive opening to ‘72’s ‘Countess Perverse’), the above-ground section of this particular lair consists of a beautiful hacienda-style summerhouse that longtime Franco viewers will probably feel they know their way around pretty well, given that both the exteriors and interiors have appeared intermittently in the director’s films across at least three decades. (Off the top of my head, it’s definitely one of the main locations for both ‘Plaiser a Trois’ (1972) and ‘Bloody Moon’ (1981), and no doubt many others besides.)

Filmed with high angles and heavy shadow, the shots in which Eddie make his through this building and its surroundings have a nice gothic horror feel to them, but naturally it’s when we get below ground that things really kick off. Here we find loads of great ‘computer’ machinery – giant dials, rows of flashing lights, rehabilitated typewriter keyboards, big “don’t pull this one” electricity levers, you name it – spread across an operations room that comes complete with a flashing light-enhanced world map (sadly not a transparent perspex one, but you can’t have everything), and rows of zombified fembot secretaries typing away at their ‘space-age’ workstations.

It is here that we also meet Lady Courtney’s male counterpart, “Lord Percy” (yes, the villains here are supposed to English toffs, presumably), who turns out to be none other than the esteemed Spanish thespian Fernando Rey - a man who was certainly no stranger to knocking out generous handfuls of b-movie appearances in between his more prestigious assignments.(5)

The finale, in which Rey’s character is toasted alive in his own electronic robot-making machine – a dry ice-filled perspex tube surrounded by stylized asymmetrical electrical cables into which the victim is lowered via a sort of medieval torture chamber chain & pulley system - proves a prime bit of sub-‘Bride of Frankenstein’ craziness, and the elaborate bedchamber scene between Constantine and Brion, with the ‘robots’ lined up around the bed, has a delightful air of sado-sexual weirdness to it too, all combining with some requisite eurospy goon-pummeling and self-destruct button pushing to ensure that, regardless of the merits of what transpired beforehand, the last few reels of ‘Attack of the Robots’ are an absolute hoot.

Whilst it’s not really anything special in the grand scheme of things, and is unlikely to inspire much in the way of widespread enthusiasm from 21st century viewers unaccustomed to the subtle joys of this-sort-of thing, ‘Attack of the Robots’ nonetheless sits high on the list of comparatively rare ‘60s Franco flicks that should prove essential viewing for both fans of the director’s work, and enthusiasts of breezy, low budget ‘60s pulp fare in general – a wonderfully off-beat eurospy contender that’s thoroughly entertaining on its own generic merits, even as its more erotic and surreal aspects directly prefigure some of the director’s later work, much to the delight of those of us out there taking note of such things.

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Kink: 3/5
Creepitude: 1/5
Pulp Thrills: 5/5
Altered States: 2/5
Sight Seeing: 3/5

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(1) An actor with an impressive CV of credits in European genre movies, Roca also appeared for Franco in ‘..Dr Z’, ‘Lucky The Inscrutable’, ‘The Bloody Judge’, ‘Sadisterotica’ and ‘Night of the Assassins’, and stepped beyond the Francoverse for bit-parts in ‘A Bullet For The General’, ‘Companeros!’ and ‘Horror Express’, amongst others. Whether or not he played an excruciating ching-chong Chinaman in any of them, I’m unsure at the time of writing.

(2) It’s likely that Constantine’s costume change may have been more of a marketing gimmick than anything else. The continued popularity of his “Lemmy Caution” screen persona across Europe can perhaps be gauged from the fact that in several countries, distributors went as far as to attach the name ‘Eddie’ to this movie’s title. E.g., ‘Kortene på Bordet, Eddie’ (“Cards on the Table, Eddie”, Denmark), ‘O Eddie Enantion tis Speiras ton Dolofonon’ (“Eddie Against the Gang of Murderers”, Greece).

(3) For more on those, begin here.

(4) Basically the child just holds the car to his mouth and talks into it, without the filmmakers even bothering to insert an appropriate sound effect – talk about a cheapskate effect. I half suspect Franco just found some kid playing with a toy car on the street and roped him into doing a few shots for the movie with the promise of some candy.

(5) Perhaps Franco hooked up with Rey when they were both working on Welles’ ‘Chimes At Midnight’ a year or two earlier? Just a thought. Either way, this was Rey’s only appearance in a Franco film to my knowledge.

Franco Files: The Blood of Fu Manchu (1968)

AKA:

‘Fu Manchú y el Beso de la Muerte’ [Spain], ‘Der Todeskuss des Dr. Fu Manchu’ [“Dr. Fu Manchu’s Kiss of Death”, Germany], ‘Kiss & Kill’ [U.S.A.], ‘Against All Odds’, ‘Kiss of Death’ [U.S. video titles, according to IMDB?].

Context:

Having recently looked at one of the highlights of Jess Franco’s tenure with Harry Alan Towers, it seems only fitting that we should turn our attention to one of the flat-out stinkers… or at least, that’s how Franco’s two Fu Manchu movies usually seem to be viewed. Personally I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for this one, as we shall see below.

The Fu Manchu series was of course the flagship of Towers’ modest production empire through the mid/late 60s. He wrote the scripts for all of them under his ‘Peter Welbeck’ pseudonym, and whilst they’re certainly no classics, I think the earlier entries certainly stand up well as entertaining rainy afternoon type fare.(1) As the decade progressed though, the audience for these kind of old fashioned adventure movies was beginning to drift away, and I can only imagine that interest in the series (which was already pretty outmoded when it began, let’s face it) was fading fast.

So, enter Jess Franco! Put to work on the next Fu Manchu picture by his new paymaster, and lumbered with a characteristically daft ‘Welbeck’ script, Franco fans will recognise that such circumstances usually spell kryptonite for the director’s creativity, but hey, at least he got to shoot in Brazil and hang out with Christopher Lee, and… well, I think he probably made the best of a bad job, all things considered.

Content:

Rich with the kind of dazzling invention and realism that if the hallmark of Mr. Welbeck, the plot here concerns – what else? - Dr. Fu Manchu’s latest devious plan for world domination, which this time consists of hypnotising kidnapped slave girls and dispatching them to the homes of world leaders and sundry other important men, whereupon – get this – they will kiss them with their Cobra venom covered lips, resulting in blindness, coma and (eventually) death! Quite what advantages this plan has over, say, sending them letter bombs or something, I’m unsure, but y’know, it was the ‘60s - gotta make an effort.(2)

One of the first victims of this characteristically half-baked diabolical scheme is Fu Manchu’s dogged arch-nemesis, Nayland-Smith of Scotland Yard, who as a result is blinded and thus spends much of the film off-screen, wrestling with cobra-induced fever. Presumably this turn of events was written into the script after actor Douglas Wilmer, who played Nayland-Smith in the three earlier films, bailed on the series shortly before shooting began, leaving insufficient time for his replacement (Richard Greene) to step into the breach.

Nayland-Smith’s absence from proceedings is unfortunate, not least because it temporarily shifts the burden of heroism across to his ersatz-Watson sidekick Dr. Petrie (Howard Marion-Crawford), who sadly is portrayed here as an utter buffoon, with practically every line of his dialogue reduced a weak joke about how much he misses rainy old blighty and wants to have a nice cup of tea – a fixation that seems to obsess him to such an extent that he should probably seek whatever equivalent of addiction counselling is available to one-dimensional movie characters (he’s even moaning about not being able to reach his Thermos whilst he’s chained up in Fu Manchu’s dungeons!). (3)

As Petrie blunders into the Amazon rainforest following rumours of Fu Manchu’s last known whereabouts, the hero vacuum is somewhat eased by the introduction of rugged jungle adventurer type Götz George (German production money ahoy!) and wandering medic Maria Rohm (producer’s girlfriend ahoy!), who have also stumbled onto the trail of the villainous mastermind for… well, I forget the reasons to be honest, but they are around, anyway.

Much faffing about and several long digressions follow, and during its middle half hour, the film takes everyone by surprise by suddenly turning into a kind of South American jungle-western! Here, veteran Spanish actor Ricardo Palacios spits out scenery and cackles with gusto as a quasi-revolutionary bandit chief named Sancho Lopez. Together with his gang of sombrero-wearing cut-throats (must have been a long ride down from old Mexico?), Lopez takes command of the remote village where Rohm’s character is based, staging bloody massacres and raucous, whore-filled parties with equal enthusiasm.

Just a hunch here, but do you get the feeling maybe Franco or Towers or somebody came back all fired up from an early screening of ‘The Wild Bunch’ just before they started making this one..? It’s all pretty good fun anyway, so if you like the idea of Jess Franco knocking out about thirty minutes of a pulpy south-of-the-border western, dig in.

For the final half hour we’re back in more familiar Fu Manchu territory, but to be honest nobody really seems to have their heart in it anymore, as Franco’s camera starts wondering off to look at foliage and the film’s shaky adventure movie syntax frays to breaking point, with only a nice waterfall, a few sloppily choreographed fight scenes and Christopher Lee’s patented “stand up straight / say the lines / collect the cheque” methodology saving things from collapse.

Kink:

Watching these Fu Manchu movies, I always find myself wondering who the hell they were aimed at, and who actually bought tickets to see them back when they were in cinemas. I mean, on the surface they’re pretty much just old-fashioned, kiddie-friendly adventure movies, very much in the spirit of the b-movie swashbucklers that Hammer used to knock out for the half-term holidays, but as the series progressed, they seemed to start throwing in all these vaguely kinky, Sadean sorta elements that seem squarely aimed at a more adult, horror/sexploitation audience – a stylistic disjuncture that leads to a pretty schizophrenic feel at times.(4)

I probably don’t need to tell you what effect hiring Jess Franco had vis-à-vis this trend, and right from the opening shots, things are amped up considerably here. The movie opens with scantily-clad slave girls being marched through the jungle in chains by whip-wielding henchmen, and before we know it, they’re being man-handled by a leather-masked torturer and suggestively mocked by Fu Manchu’s daughter Lin Tang (Tsai Chin). This kind of BDSM slave fantasy stuff was already bubbling under the surface in earlier instalments, but it’s pretty full-on here, becoming almost as sleazy as one of Franco’s Women In Prison films.

The implicitly erotic figure of Lin Tang plays a bigger role than usual here too, basically taking on the bulk of day-to-day evil-doing business from her father, as he largely scales back his involvement to just the all-important “standing around talking about the plans” element. In numerous scenes, she can be seen bossing around the female captives and behaving to all intent and purposes like one of the sapphic wardresses in Franco’s later WIP epics, whilst towards the end of the film, she’s even seen cackling to herself on her father’s throne, suggesting the possibility of a fun ‘Lin Tang takes over’ plot-line that I don’t think was ever fully realised in these films(?). Anyway, I like her a lot in this one - she’s pretty cool, and Chin seems to actually be having fun in the role for once too.

Elsewhere, this film’s stand-in for the obligatory Franco night-club scene arrives via a sequence in which one of Fu Manchu’s hypnotised slave-girls walks out of the darkness to perform a libidinous dance for Sancho Lopez during his gang’s victory celebration. Going on for far longer than it reasonably should in this sort of movie, this sequence proves to be surprisingly strong stuff, with only the thinnest of diaphanous gowns hiding her boobs from the full glare of whatever kind of mixed up crowd did actually go and see this movie as she rubs and writhes with abandon… before Lopez prematurely ends her performance by bloodily shooting her, which must have further delighted parents and moral guardians, I’m sure. (And yeah, they were definitely goofing on ‘The Wild Bunch’ here, weren’t they?)

For those still keeping score after that point, there are fully bared breasts to be seen on several other occasions, along with assorted whipping and dungeon bondage bits, as any remaining illusions about these movies being made for a juvenile audience go completely out of the window.

3/5

Creepitude:

Mildly gruesome tortures and a few bits Kensington gore keep things on a Hammer-esque “good ol’ blood-thirsty stuff for the kids” sort of level, whilst smoke and dungeons and skulls and cobras and so forth during the Fu Manchu hideout scenes all perpetuate that particular kind of pulpy horror-not-horror atmosphere that defines these kinda films, whilst mixed up bits of DNA from jungle adventure movies, euro-spy flicks and westerns further dilute the brew elsewhere.

2/5

Pulp Thrills:

“The moon is full… the moon of life. Let her taste the kiss… of DEATH!”

So, just to recap, we’re talking here about a motion picture in which Dr. Fu Manchu, as played by Christopher Lee, hangs around in a hidden citadel in the heart of the Amazon, hypnotising kidnapped girls and using ancient Inca rituals to impregnate them with deadly cobra venom, for the eventual purpose of wiping out world leaders and thus conquering the planet. Those trekking through the treacherous, unmapped jungle to oppose him include a dysfunctional Holmes and Watson-esque duo, a proto-Indiana Jones two-fisted archaeologist and an obese Mexican bandit chief who appears to be getting paid by the guffaw. If that ain’t pulp enough for you, I’d suggest a trip to the saw-mill.

5/5

Altered States:

This is far from the most far-out film Jess Franco made, but if you were approach it from the opposite direction, as an example of a low budget matinee adventure film gradually going off the rails, I think it would emerge as being at least moderately weird.

In between the aforementioned hi-jinks, there is much ‘down-time’, much wondering-camera foliage footage and many focus-blurring scene transitions. Much like a more regular Franco film, things soon settle down into a familiar pattern, mixing exciting / kinky set-pieces with segments of plodding, procedural drag that could soon have the casual viewer (and with a movie like this, is there gonna be any other kind?) snoring in vain.

A brief montage demonstrating the progress of Fu Manchu’s schemes around the world does briefly highlight a few bits of absolutely eye-popping, pop art production design – very much in the style of the same year’s astonishing ‘The Girl From Rio’ and, more than likely, probably spliced straight in from unused footage shot for that film.

Music by Franco’s favoured composer Daniel White meanwhile is sadly not much to shout about, dominated as it is by assorted variations on an insipid tune that sounds like a slight variation on ‘Que Sera Sera’, which seems to play incessantly through the film’s middle half hour.

2/5

Sight-seeing:

Most of the jungle footage here appears to have actually filmed in some corner of the Amazon rainforest, insofar as I can tell, and indeed, the locations used are very interesting and impressive, including some genuine stalactite filled caves, and a monolithic waterfall that adds greatly to the scope of the film’s otherwise rather uneventful conclusion.

Usually with these things, one tends to assume that all the locations used were probably just a quick bus ride from Rio, where Franco and Towers were based for the simultaneously shot ‘The Girl From Rio’, but, given that the Southern-most part of the Amazon basin is right over on the other side of Brazil, maybe they actually relcoated completely? Or, maybe there IS sufficiently Amazon-like terrain to be found within spitting distance of Rio? I dunno. If anyone can identify the surely-that-must-be-quite-famous dam/waterfall that appears in the film, maybe we can pinpoint it on our sadly non-existent Jess Franco Locations Map? (Obviously it would be a transparent map on a Perspex wall with flashing lights, like the one Fu Manchu always has knocking about in his hideouts..)

Meanwhile, all the scenes in the town besieged by the bandits and the colonial governor’s mansion where Götz George is kept prisoner look to have been filmed back in Spain, with distinctly familiar-looking grand interiors, and a few exterior shots that I *think* might match up with the complex of buildings memorably used a few years later in ‘A Virgin Among The Living Dead’ and numerous of Franco’s other early ‘70s productions.

I’d have to run some of the films again to be sure, and I can’t be bothered to do that right now, but… someone should do a book about this stuff, y’know? Big coffee table hardback thing – “In The Footsteps of Franco” – combining the middle class travelogue market with the cult movie freaks, it should be a good seller. I’m game, if any publishers out there want to pay for the plane tickets.

Oh, and the Fu Manchu hideout stuff is largely done on sets that I’m guessing are redressed versions of the ones seen in ‘Brides..’, and god knows what else besides. (Hey, you need a dungeon? Give Harry a call.)

4/5

Conclusion:

‘The Blood of Fu Manchu’ is not film that really gets much love, but I must say, I quite enjoyed it. Sure, it’s sloppy, tedious, cynical and practically the dictionary definition of “a load of old rubbish”, but the sheer amount of stuff going on gives it a strangely epic flavour that few other Franco productions can really match, and, whilst fans of the director will have to accept that it explores his favoured themes and obsessions only in passing, taken as an example of a rainy Sunday pulp adventure movie that’s completely lost the plot and wondered off into unknown realms, I think it has a lot to recommend it. I’d definitely place it toward the top end of Franco’s catalogue of work-for-hire genre exercises.

‘The Castle of Fu Manchu’ followed later the same year from Franco & Towers, and even commentators who hated ‘Blood..’ admit that it looks like Citizen Kane compared to that one, so…. that’s something to look forward to I suppose?

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(1)‘The Face of Fu Manchu’ (’65) and ‘Brides of Fu Manchu’ (’66), both directed by Don Sharp, are quite a bit of fun (I reviewed ‘Brides..’ here). I’ve not seen the third instalment, ‘The Vengeance of Fu Manchu’ directed by Jeremy Summers, but I think I’m gonna walk not run on that one given that Summers also made the unspeakably bad ‘House of 1,000 Dolls’ for Towers.

(2) Which is more than Christopher Lee and the film’s make-up team are doing here incidentally – aside from the floppy moustache, Lee isn’t even trying to appear Asian by this point in the franchise… which, though a let-down for fans of casual movie racism, is probably for the best, all things considered.

(3) My favourite thing about Marion-Crawford’s performances in these movies is his habit of yelling “FU MANCHU!?” in moustache-ruffling, outraged surprise at least once per film.

(4)If you think about it, I guess Hammer were actually doing much the same thing too, as ‘The Swords of Sherwood Forest’ gave way to ‘Prehistoric Women’ and ‘The Viking Queen’, although these Towers films, being considerably closer to the margins, tended to get more sleazy more quickly. As I mentioned in my earlier review, ‘Brides of Fu Manchu’ has to be the most erotically charged movie ever to be granted a ‘U’ certificate by the BBFC, and I’ve subsequently seen evidence that they even shot some alternate nude sequences for it (“for the Japanese market”, no doubt).