Nippon Horrors / Horror Express 2020 #10: Kaidan Hebi-Onna /‘Snake Woman's Curse’ (Nobuo Nakagawa, 1968)

 A decade or so after he turned out a series of fairly wacky horror pictures like Ghost Cat Mansion and The Lady Vampire for Shintoho, Nobuo Nakagawa - who had largely retired from directing after directly contributing to the bankruptcy of the aforementioned studio with his 1960 epic ‘Jigoku’ [‘Hell’] - returned to the fray for this considerably more conventional kaidan effort, produced under the unlikely auspices of Toei.

I say ‘unlikely’, because, although they soon would soon go on to cut a bloody swathe across the early ‘70s with some of the most grotesquely violent and OTT genre movies ever made, supernatural horror was never really Toei’s ‘thing’, leaving Kaidan Hebi-Onna [‘Snake Woman’s Curse’] feeling like a bit of a curious one-off.

According to what little background info I can find on the film, the production seems to have originated with writer Fumio Kônami, who apparently told the producers that he would only allow the studio to film his script if Nakagawa (who had not worked in the industry for about five years at this point) was hired to direct. (1)Apparently keen to try to establish a viable kaidan/horror line at the time, Toei acquiesced to the writer’s request, and…. bob’s yr uncle, as we say over on this side of the globe. (2)

Plot-wise, ‘Kaidan Hebi-Onna’ is in most respects a pretty standard, run-of-the-mill kaidan picture - essentially a variation on the old bakeneko (ghost-cat) story, in which a wronged woman returns from the grave with the help of an animal spirit to take her vengeance on the hateful aristocrats who have destroyed her family, only with snakes used as the totem animal this time around instead of cats.

Set (and presumably filmed) somewhere in Japan’s remote far western region, the story opens with an elderly peasant farmer (the ubiquitous Ko Nishimura), practically throwing himself under the wheels of the local landlord’s coach, as he begs for leniency vis-à-vis the repayment of his debts. Needless to say, such mercy is not forthcoming from the venal plutocrat (Seizaburô Kawazu), but, on his death-bed, the farmer is still pleading deliriously for the chance to save his family’s small-holding, uttering the key phrase which will go on to become something of a catch-phrase for the film’s spectral avengers: “even if I have to eat dirt, I will pay you back”.

After the man’s death, the landlord decrees that his homestead will be demolished in order to clear space for the planting of mulberry trees (used in the production of silk), whilst his wife (Chiaki Tsukioka) and adult daughter (Asa, played by Yukiko Kuwahara) are cheerfully informed that they will be taken into service in the landlord’s household, there to ‘work off’ their late patriarch’s debts.

As you might imagine, this is far from an idyllic prospect for the two women. Set to work weaving silk in what basically amounts to a small scale Victorian sweatshop, Asa must work sixteen hour days under the supervision of the landlord’s thuggish, lecherous son (Toei yakuza/action regular and future Roman Porno director Shingo Yamashiro), whilst her mother meanwhile becomes a general domestic dogsbody, bullied and belittled at every turn by the landlord’s sadistic wife (Kurosawa regular and future ‘Female Prisoner: Scorpion’ / ‘Sex & Fury’ legend Akemi Negishi).

Although their fellow servants treat them with kindness, and although Asa still has steadfast fiancée Satematsu (Kunio Murai) waiting for her on the outside, the inhumane treatment doled out to the two women leads them, inevitably, to their sad and undignified deaths. Asa’s mother, significantly, has always made a habit of habit of helping unloved animals (she was nursing a pigeon back to health when the family lost their home), and she is struck down whilst attempting the prevent the killing of a snake which has intruded into the landlord’s house.

As anyone who knows the ‘rules’ of this genre will be well aware by this point, the Big Man and his horrid family had better watch the hell out, as Nakagawa and his crew prepare to get busy with the thunder crashes, gel lighting, stage blood, green-faced living corpses and double-exposed snake effects, for the riotous closing act of vengeance-from-beyond-the-grave.

To Western audiences, these films often play more like ritual re-enactments of familiar folk tales than exercises in contemporary story-telling, which perhaps to some extent accounts for their failure to gain much of an overseas following, as the lack of novelty within their narratives can soon become pretty dispiriting. Once you’ve seen a handful of ‘em, you’ll know exactly how things are going to play out, right from the outset. The only interest comes from seeing how efficiently the filmmakers will accomplish their task, in technical and dramatic terms.

For domestic audiences however, we must assume this would not have been so much of a problem. More accepting of the traditions behind the bakeneko form, and more able to appreciate the more subtle cultural resonances within it, one hopes they would have been able to view each addition to the cycle with fresh eyes. 

(By way of comparison, we can perhaps imagine how a viewer largely unfamiliar with American culture would feel after being sat down and told to watch 25 early ‘80s slasher films. We might love them all for their minor eccentricities and variation on the theme, but to the uninitiated, aren’t they all kind of the same, more or less?)

In some ways, ‘Snake Woman’s Curse’ feels like a case in point in this regard. As eye-rollingly over-familiar as the basic storyline may be, look deeper and some very specific points of departure from the norm begin to emerge. For a start, the film is set during the Meiji era (1868-1912), a time of dramatic change and modernisation for Japan, immediately differentiating it from the more historically static Edo or Tokugawa eras in which kaidan stories more traditionally take place.

Again, domestic audiences would likely have been keyed into this right from the start, as the landlord is seen roaring through his domain in a Western-style coach, whilst his son sports a bowler hat and other foreign accoutrements. The mechanised ‘sweat-shop’ in which Asa is put to work likewise represents a form of industry unknown in pre-Meiji Japan, but whilst the the adoption of these innovations by the film’s villainous aristocrats would seem to indicate an implicit support for the older, folk-based way of life favoured by the hard-done-by peasants, the approach taken by Kônami’s script is, as usual, a little more nuanced than that.

The ambiguous attitude to modernisation and/or Westernisation so frequently encountered in early ‘70s Japanese genre cinema is perfectly encapsulated here via a memorable one scene cameo from Tetsurô Tanba, playing a regional police chief dispatched to investigate the murderous goings on within the landlord’s domain.

Effectively acting as the very personification of modern, democratic state governance, Tanba reduces the landlord to a fit of spluttering disbelief as he calmly undercuts the local lord’s Shogunate-derived feudal authority, daring to suggest that the police may wish to investigate the death of one of his peasants, and that he might even dare to implicate members of the aristocrat’s own family in the process - an absolutely unthinkable prospect for a man born into the strict caste system of the Tokugawa era, and an amusing demonstration of that the way that, however keen the ruling classes may have been to enrich themselves using technological innovations offered by contact with Western capitalism, their understanding of the social and political implications of such development tended to lack somewhat behind.

As you will no doubt have gathered from the preceding paragraphs, ‘Kaidan Hebi-Onna’ is about as politically conscious a kaidan pictures as you could possibly hope to find, taking the age old fantasy of the rural peasantry exacting revenge against their cruel feudal overlords baked into all bakeneko stories, and hammering it home for strongly than ever, applying it to a more nuanced, more realistic and more historically recent setting in the process.

Some might be apt to suggest that the film’s success as a horror movie suffers as a result of this heavy emphasis on socio-economic angst, and indeed Nakagawa’s pacing here is glacially slow, whilst the atmosphere he builds is painstakingly sombre. The inevitable horror ‘effects’ which dominate the final act meanwhile, whilst inventive and fun, are strictly conventional within the genre.

So, we’re definitely not looking at a Friday night horror banger here I’m afraid, but, if you can approach the film in an appropriately sober, arthouse-y frame of mind, Nakagawa’s execution at least is absolutely top notch. Performances are excellent across the board (in addition to the aforementioned esteemed actors, there are also turns from such Toei notables as Yukie Kagawa and Hideo Murota), whilst Yoshikazu Yamazawa’s photography, highlighting the fertile-yet-foreboding topography of Japan’s mountainous Western coast, is beautiful, radiating an overpowering brown n’ green aura which seems to link the earth where the snakes crawl directly to the hallowed afterlife from whence the spectres emerge.

Shunsuke Kikuchi’s score meanwhile is richly evocative, and the carefully wrought production design includes a wealth of great “folky stuff” (songs, costumes, local festival customs) for Japanophiles to enjoy. Most importantly perhaps, Nakagawa manages to imbue the script’s off-the-peg structure with a handful of genuinely haunting, transcendental images which will live long in the viewer’s memory after viewing.

Born in 1905, the director was sixty-three years old as the time of this film’s production, and it would be all too easy to interpret the slower, more meditative direction Nakagawa takes here as the work of a filmmaker trying to establish himself as a more ‘serious’ voice in cinema during the twilight years of his career, after half a lifetime spent churning out rushed 60 minute programmers and battling the studios for budgets.

Unfortunately for us reviewers’ desperate need to try to impose a narrative onto everything however, Nakagawa rather kicked this idea in the nuts by immediately going on to make a brief but prolific comeback as a commercial director in 1969, directing five action/yakuza pictures for Toei in quick succession before, curiously, adopting the pseudonym “Ise Tsugio” in order to make what I presume to be a series of obscure, independently distributed pinku (erotic) titles (ubiquitous S&M / rope torture guru Oniroku Dan is credited as writer on at least one of them). All of these hit cinemas before the year was out, with the director’s anonymity surely somewhat undermined by the fact that they were all proudly produced by his own ‘Nakagawa Pro’.

So, once again, we return to the idea of ‘Kaidan Hebi-Onna’ seeming like a real one-off - an odd, inexplicable diversion in the paths followed by its director, writer and studio. It is what it is, I suppose - but thankfully for those with an interest in this particular overlooked corner of Japanese culture, what it is is very worthwhile indeed.

---- 

(1) An absolutely pivotal figure in the golden age of Toei exploitation, Kônami (1933-2012) went on to contribute to a huge number of the studio’s best and/or most outrageous films from the early ‘70s, including the entire ‘Female Prisoner: Scorpion’ series, Sonny Chiba’s Yakuza Deka movies, the extraordinary Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope, the horrifying Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs and Kinji Fukasaku’s ‘Sympathy for the Underdog’ and ‘Graveyard of Honour’, to name but a few. 

(2) CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE DEPT: All background info on the production of this film is taken directly from Jonathan M. Hall’s well-researched commentary track on the 2007 Synapse DVD release.

Nippon Horrors: Snake Girl & Silver Haired Witch (Noriaki Yuasa,1968)

Whether by accident or design, 1968 seems to have been a bit of a banner year for Japanese horror films, with such weird delights as The Living Skeleton and Genocide appearing from Shochiku, ‘The Snake Woman’s Curse’ unleashed via Toei, and Kaneto Shindô’s arthouse kaidan classic ‘Kuroneko’ released by Toho. It was the struggling Daiei studios though who seemed to be leading the pack in this mini-boom, not only fighting The Great Yokai War, but also managing to squeeze a whole host of late period kaidan pictures into their ’68 release schedule, including Tokuzô Tanaka’s ‘The Snow Witch’ and Satsuo Yamamoto’s ‘Kaidan Botan Dourou’ (aka ‘Bride from Hades’), amongst others.

A somewhat more off-beat entry on Daiei’s ’68 scorecard however comes in the form of ‘Hebi Musume to Hakuhatsuma’ (literal translation: ‘Snake Girl and Silver-Haired Witch’), an interlinked adaptation of two stories by flamboyant horror manga pioneer Kazuo Umezu, brought to the screen by Noriaki Yuasa, a director best-known for his tireless work on the Gamera series.

Shooting in no frills, regularscope black & white (whether for budgetary or aesthetic reasons who knows, though either explanation is plausible), Yuasa here succeeds in pulling off that rarest of feats: a film that mixes full-on horror with childlike whimsy without betraying either side of that equation, meaning that Umezu’s child-orientated tale of what happens when your attic-dwelling big sister turns out to be a blood-thirsty snake monster emerges as a movie both spine-chilling and delightful in equal measure – a singular piece of fantastic cinema that could appeal equally to viewers of all ages, assuming they’re not too adverse to a good dose of horror-y business.

A pre-credits sequence depicting the murder of a maid in the basement home-lab of natural history specialist Dr. Nanjo sets the tone nicely, as the usual ultra-ominous Japanese horror music accompanies an opening shot of a hairy, clawed hand lifting a snake from its cage, swiftly followed by a graphic death-by-snake that proves extremely creepy, if none too convincing.

This leads us into a wonderfully pulpy credits sequence, the camera drifting across a panorama of dinosaur bones, oversized test tubes and other mad scientist ephemera as lightning flashes, rain hammers the windows and somebody on the soundtrack goes nuts on the theremin. Needless to say, the possibility of my not enjoying this film is already fading fast.

As the story proper gets underway, we are introduced to our heroine Sayuri (Yachie Matsui), daughter of the aforementioned Dr Nanjo, a plucky yet rather somber young girl who finds herself leaving the safety of the convent boarding school she has known for many years and returning to her family home, where, uh, things are not well, to say the least.

Sayuri’s mother, we are told, is very ill following a head injury received in a car accident, and as such, she seems a little distant and disconnected, descending the stairs in the manner of a gothic heroine and apparently regarding everything around her with a great deal of uncertainty. Dad meanwhile seems like a nice chap, irrespective of all the weird stuff he keeps in his basement, but unfortunately he announces shortly after Sayuri’s arrival that he must fly to Africa immediately to study a new species of poisonous snake that has been discovered there. Such is the life of a leading specialist in rare reptiles and creepy-crawlies I suppose.

This leaves the balance of power in the household largely resting with bossy housekeeper Shige, and it doesn’t take long for Sayuri to figure out something a little more tangibly strange is going on here. The mysterious stranger who stares at her through a hole in her bedroom ceiling provides the first clue, and when this unseen interloper progresses to dropping live snakes on her pillow, and her mother responds by ordering her to perform her devotions before a household shrine from which a ghostly, living face stares back…. well I think it’s safe to say we’ve reached the “get the hell out of there straight away!” stage in record time.

During its first half hour, ‘Snake Girl & Silver Haired Witch’ sets out quite a smorgasbord of familiar horror tropes, from the weird doctor father, to the reclusive wife who’s gone a bit mad, the clawed monster killer and the ubiquitous ‘watcher in the attic’ mythos (presumably a direct reference to the famed Edogawa Rampo story of that name). Later on, things open up a little to take in elements of the inevitable “mutant / sub-normal family member secretly locked in the attic” sub-genre, throwing in the ever-present silver-haired witch of kaidan tradition for good measure, and even trying out a few riffs on the old “woman with disfigured face becomes monster” routine. Quite a line-up of thrills and chills there for us to get to grips with, and thankfully the script allows all of these ingredients to percolate for a good long while before we’re eventually given something like the full story.

Style-wise, Yuasa matches this surfeit of narrative elements with a wealth of gleefully executed horror imagery. From the threatening shadows and staring, lizard-like eyes of the snake-sister in the attic to the flashes of lightning throwing shadows on wall-partitions in classic kaidan style, the rich chiaroscuro lighting and gothic, western-style furnishings of the Nanjo house and the gratuitous close-ups of snakes and scorpions in Dad’s basement, the atmosphere here is laid on thick enough to slice up and serve for supper.

Whilst the make up and visual effects here are sometimes crude, they are never less than imaginative, and Yuasa proves a capable ring-master for the film’s numerous monstrous goings-on, deploying what we can assume was a fairly limited effects budget for maximum audience impact. In particular, the first full reveal of the snake girl, briefly glimpsed as Sayuri sees her sneaking through the dark of her bedroom at night, is absolutely fucking terrifying. A bit too slow and sinister to really count as a ‘jump scare’ maybe, but I’d still defy any viewer to not be thoroughly shaken up by it – a classic horror movie moment, perfectly executed.

Such shock moments serve to highlight just how resilient our young heroine is in the face of mind-bending horror, as Sayuri seems to retain her composure through a succession of sights and sounds that would send most adults screaming in terror. I mean, when was the last time you saw a horror movie in which a protagonist calmly accepts the notion that she will henceforth share a bed with the were-creature she has previously seen stalking around in the dead of night sporting glowing eyes and reptilian fangs? Nothing seems to phase Sayuri, and her quiet reticence, capable manner and determination to rebuilding a loving family life against all the odds certainly makes her one of the more likeable child protagonists in horror movie history.

Opting to use a child as the central character is of course one of the main things that leads ‘Snake Girl..’ toward its unconventional mixture of kid’s movie whimsy and grown up horror, and, if we’ve mainly been discussing the latter here so far, the former element really comes into its own during a series of absolutely spectacular, kaleidoscopic dream sequences, during which the filmmakers really go all out to try to replicate the oneiric / psychedelic drift and scratchy visual overload of Umezu’s groundbreaking manga artwork.

Accompanied by a delicious soundtrack of ‘Carnival of Souls’-esque wurlitzer unease, these dream sequences really come out of nowhere, stretching the movie’s sense of reality to breaking point. Once they get going, they really throw the kitchen sink at us too, as poor Sayuri’s sleeping spirit is subjected to a cavalcade of spinning hypno-wheels, floating kabuki masks, slo-mo dream flights through tunnels of pulsing light, leering white-haired hags with detachable floating werewolf hands, a doll-like ‘Alice in Wonderland’ dream avatar, further snake-related hullaballoo and even a somewhat unconvincing rubber spider attack - all employed by the movie’s malign forces in an attempt to freak out unflappable heroine yet further, treating us to some of the most delightfully unhinged in-camera special effects ever seen in Japanese cinema in the process. Really way-out stuff, these sequences will prove obvious highlights for any dedicated weird world movie fans in the audience, and you won’t be surprised to learn that most of the screen-grabs I’ve posted at the top of this review are harvested from them.

Running parallel to all this though, ‘Snake Girl..’ also functions to some extent as a decidedly grown up dysfunctional family drama, following the secret sister / snake girl’s introduction to the story in the solid, ostensibly non-supernatural shape of Tamami (Mayumi Takahashi).

Confined to the attic and kept out of sight of both her father and the world at large on the dubious logic that she’s a bit grumpy and “can’t learn a thing in school” (hey, don’t look at me, that’s the only explanation the fan-subbed dialogue gives us), Tamami’s in her non-snake incarnation is revealed to be a petulant, bullying older sister with heavy self-esteem issues, and the rather uncomfortable intimations of child abuse relating to her confinement are quickly swept aside as the film begins to focus instead on Sayuri’s valiant attempts to befriend her troubled sister, and upon the hidden power that the aggressive Tamami seems to wield over the more fragile adult women of the household.

And where, you might ask, does the noble Dr. Nanjo fit into all this? Well, curiously enough, Sayuri’s father is treated throughout as a compassionate, nigh on saint-like figure, with the film inviting us to believe that he is completely ignorant of all these malicious goings-on in his household, even as viewers familiar with the perhaps more cynical logic of Western horror films will no doubt be left screaming at such an eminently questionable loose end in the plotting. (I mean, reclusive scientist father with a basement full of caged snakes and over-sized chemistry equipment + daughter who seems to transform into a snake monster at night = you do the math!)

At a push, the combination of this saintly father figure and the equally estimable ‘big brother’ character (a happy-go-lucky young guy who works at the Convent school and turns up at irregular intervals to offer Sayuri nuggets of upbeat life advice) could seem to push ‘Snake Girl..’ (presumably accidentally) into that weirdly misogynistic realm of socially conservative melodrama that will sadly be all too familiar to viewers of vintage Asian and Indian films. (Y’know the kind of thing – where the men in a family remain lofty, noble figures, unaware of the conflicts and machinations of the weak and/or scheming women stirring up trouble beneath them, and so forth.)

After the movie takes this turn toward more domestic concerns in its second half, the responsibility for providing scariness increasingly shifts to the aforementioned silver-haired witch, whose appearance, cool though it is, eventually sets things up for a regrettably rushed and silly conclusion that very nearly destroys the not inconsiderable wealth of audience goodwill the film has built up by this point, with an inexplicable action showdown on a convenient building site scaffold (anyone else get sick of that particular trope?), and a fairly witless Scooby Doo-esque wrap up that seems to imply that all the preceding events were the work of purely human villainy, irrespective of the numerous instances of blatantly supernatural business we’ve already been shown. All a little suspicious if you ask me, especially with the good Doctor getting off scot-free on his convenient post-showdown return from Africa.

At the end of the day though, such flaws (presumably the fault of either rushed scripting or the difficulties of combining two separate manga stories into a single narrative) are eminently forgivable in the face of ‘Hebi Musume to Hakuhatsuma’s manifest strengths.

Whereas the same studio’s ‘The Great Yokai War’ seemed uneven and confused in its mixture of juvenile and adult impulses, Yuasa’s film skillfully blends them into a cohesive whole whilst also taking on board all of the visual ambition and imagination of the aforementioned film, resulting in a gloriously atmospheric dose of pulpy horror, delivered with a charm and conviction that – prior to its conclusion at least – easily wins it a space alongside such eerie, all-ages classics as Jaromil Jires’s ‘Valerie and her Week of Wonders’ and Richard Blackburn’s ‘Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural’. Splendid viewing in other words, and another great addition to Japan’s oft-neglected legacy of horror/fantasy cinema.

(The poster below advertises a triple feature, combining ‘Hebi Musume to Hakuhatsuma’ with ‘Gamera vs Gaos’ (1967) and ‘Warning From Space’ (1956). Respectfully borrowed from Tokyo Scum Brigade.)

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?

--

(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).

Venom(Piers Haggard, 1981)

It’s difficult to know where to start with a movie like ‘Venom’. Let’s just say that if you’ve had a quick look at the poster reproduced above and you’re still reading this, rather than running straight to your preferred movie provider to locate a copy, you might be reading the wrong weblog.

I’m unfamiliar with the novel, by Alan Scholefield, from which this film was adapted, but I can only imagine it to be the absolute epitome of hilariously contrived, late ‘70s, post-Jaws airport potboilers. Did it have a black cover with the title outlined in giant, shiny silver letters and an airbrushed illustration of a rampant snake-head? Was it about 400 pages longer than it really needed to be? I have no idea, but by god, I would like to think so.

I don’t want to get bogged down in plot summarising, so let’s keep it simple and just state that this is indeed a film in which a trio of crooks played by Klaus Kinski, Oliver Reed and Susan George find themselves under siege by the police in a luxurious West London townhouse, with aged big game hunter Sterling Hayden and his chronically asthmatic, heir-to-a-colossal-fortune grandson as their hostages. By complete coincidence, the grandson has just come into possession of a new pet which, due to an innocent pet shop mix-up, turns out to be not the docile house snake he was promised, but – oh no! – a full size Black Mamba, most deadly poisonous snake in the entire world!

So yes, it’s Kinski and Reed vs the snake, vs the cops, and vs each other, with kid and grandpa (plus a late entrant in the form of Sarah Miles’ mild-mannered snake expert) stuck in the middle. Anything could happen, but it’s a fair bet it’s not gonna be pretty.


Initially entering production with Tobe Hooper as director, ‘Venom’ suffered a set-back when Hooper was either a)thrown off the project for being unmanageable and incompetent, or b)walked voluntarily after having his creativity intolerably compromised by the big-head producers and disobedient stars, depending on who you choose to believe. Either way, ‘Blood on Satan’s Claw’ director Piers Haggard took the reins mid-stream and, whilst he clearly doesn’t display much of the personal vision he brought to that film, he nonetheless delivers exactly what was required of him under the circumstances, streamlining the frankly ludicrous source material into an efficient, fast-moving thriller, whilst also coping with the unenviable task of having to put Kinski and Reed in a small room together and then tell them what to do all day long.

The essential who/what/wheres thus established (never mind the ‘why’s or we’ll be here all night), I think perhaps the best way to convey the many unique qualities of ‘Venom’ is via a quick list of bullet pointed items.

There will be spoilers, in case you’re bothered about that sort of thing.


* Sterling Hayden IS Action-Grandpa! Hopping around in a moth-eaten cardigan and the most unflattering beard foisted upon a fading Hollywood star by the cruel British since Robert Mitchum in ‘The Secret Ceremony’, he’s far too “golly gee” to really convince as a retired colonial adventurer, coming across more like some twinkly-eyed old codger who’s accidentally wandered in from a live action Disney movie. But the set-piece scene where he’s forced to hunt the snake across a darkened living room armed only with table-lamp and a cushion is a lot of fun, the tension only slightly diminished by fact that continuity has clearly established that the snake has buggered off into the heating ducts by this point.


* Susan George is brilliantly duplicitous as the cockney maid who initiates the kidnapping plan, clearly planning to set her two lovers/accomplices at each other’s throats as soon as the opportunity presents itself. Unfortunately, one of the film’s major drawbacks comes from having her die far too soon, causing the vicious little Jim Thompson-esque love triangle that's been brewing to fizzle out before it’s ever really got going. I guess somebody needed to get whacked to demonstrate the gruesome effect of the snake’s venom, and she was just deemed the least essential character vis-a-vis the story’s plot dynamics. I wish they woulda killed that annoying kid instead, but then the crooks would have lost their hostage angle… or they coulda killed Grandpa, but then there’d be no sensible ‘good guy’ presence to lead the snake hunt. Stupid plot dynamics! Stupid good taste! What they should have done of course is written in some additional pointless flunky characters and killed them off. But they didn’t, so… no more Susan George. Curses!


* It’s great watching Oliver Reed’s character making a b-line for the liqueur cabinet whenever things get tough – “I… I think I need a drink… yes, a DRINK.. a drink would help us all relax!” Whether this was part of the original story or just written in for Olly, who knows. This isn’t really the place for a cheap dig at Reed's alcoholism though, partly because that would be unnecessary and cruel, but also because he’s actually on pretty top form in 'Venom', delivering a characteristically barn-storming turn as a petty thug way out of his depth, desperately trying to keep his shit together. A stock character, but in Reed’s meaty hands his gradual collapse into panic and random violence is a pleasure to behold.


* Conversely, it’s safe to say Kinski probably didn’t invest a great deal of commitment in his work here, but at least he stays awake and delivers the lines, which is more than can be said for a lot of the exploitation pictures he made through the ‘70s. Basically he contents himself with just ‘doing the villain’, but as ever, he’s pretty great at it - seeing him curl his lip in disgust as he delivers his monotone ransom demands to the “poliiizeman” brings joy to my soul.


* The poliiizeman in question by the way is Nicol Williamson, toiling away just below the bigger names on the cast list as a character who seems like a genetically engineered prototype of every dour, no nonsense working class ‘70s British police detective ever. By turns he reminds me a bit of Robert Hardy in ‘Psychomania’, Alfred Marks in ‘Scream and Scream Again’, and the entire brood of stoney-faced functionaries who propped up Carter & Regan on ‘The Sweeney’. A perfect specimen, he’s armed with a full set of Scottish tough guy mannerisms, a dirty raincoat, a really ugly school tie, and he even enjoys the attentions of a weaselly aristocratic superior who pops up at inopportune moments to make disparaging remarks and ‘keep an eye’ on him.


* There’s a great bit where Kinski throws a cigarbox from the window of the house, announcing it to be “..a geeft from doctor Shtowe”. Nicolson opens the box, hands it over to the others with a look of disgust. The other cops open it – close up of a severed finger wrapped in tissue paper, followed by reaction shots of their horror and surprise – you know the drill. Long, shocked silence as they try to form a response. Young policeman ventures; “they’ve cut her bloody finger off!” Laugh? Why, I nearly…


* A cameo from Michael Gough, playing real life London Zoo snake-handler David Ball, anyone..? Well, why not.


* This one guy!




* Above all else though, ‘Venom’s sudden/violent finale is perhaps one of the most astounding sixty seconds of cinema I’ve seen in my entire life. I mean, for the love of god, we’re talking about Klaus Kinski, locked in deadly combat with a Black Mamba, plummeting to his death through a shattering balcony window, being riddled with police sniper bullets, as he succeeds in shooting the snake’s fucking head off a mere split-second before he hits the ground, narrowingly missing a set of cast iron railings.

Damn, if only they could have gone all the way and ended with the impalement, it would have perfect. Even so, watching this alone in my living room on a Sunday afternoon, I stood up and applauded. And to think, they gave Oscars to other films in 1981.

Smothered in Michael Kamen’s absurdly bombastic score, which makes the whole movie sound like Indiana Jones exploring a lost Babylonian tomb, ‘Venom’ is as spectacular a load of beserk, high-powered nonsense as could possibly be wished for. If you’ve read all the above and you’re still not rushing out to get a copy, well.. I fear there is no hope for you.

The Brides of Fu Manchu (Don Sharp, 1966)

After the grimness of “Castle Freak”, some easy-going hokum seemed in order, and hokum don’t come much more easy than this confused pulp adventure romp, the second of five (five!) Christopher Lee Fu Manchu flicks produced during the ‘60s under the auspices of future sleaze/exploitation kingpin Harry Alan Towers.

“Brides of Fu Manchu” stands out as a bit of an oddity on my video shelves as the proud bearer of a British “U” (“suitable for all”) certificate, an honour it shares only with a dubbed VHS copy of “Kiki’s Delivery Service” and my box set of Ealing Comedies. Given the BBFC’s fondness for slapping the dreaded PG – bane of every bloodthirsty six year old – on any film that dares flirt with such notions as ‘mild peril’ or raised voices, this does not necessarily bode well for a tale concerning the nefarious escapades of everybody’s favourite racist caricature of an Oriental crime baron.

But then, as all British film fans know, the ways of the BBFC are as inscrutable as those of Dr. Fu Manchu himself. Take those aforementioned Ealing Comedies for instance – full of shady goings-on and grown-up situations, no doubt, but they’re heritage you see – young children will benefit from their calming and humane influence, not like some godforsaken American thing about robots shooting rockets at each other - ugh, heavens no.

You may think I’m exaggerated, but only last month I heard a spokesperson for the BBFC interviewed on Radio 4, earnestly explaining how they’d arranged for a historical drama with a certain amount of profanity and sexual content to have it’s certificate lowered due to it’s educational interest and positive message, whereas a popular comedy with similar content was given a higher certificate because it was deemed to be a load of silliness. Maybe they had a point, but making calls like that shouldn’t be part of their job. Imagine that kind of patronising attitude on a wider scale, still making the final decisions vis-à-vis which freaky, lunatic b-movies can or cannot be legally screened in the British Isles! I know things have opened up a lot in recent years, and the BBFC haven’t actually stopped me watching anything I wanted to see recently, but even so.


Anyway, enough of such griping, let’s turn our attention to the kind of wholesome fare the BBFC assures us will delight viewers of all ages – “The Brides of Fu Manchu”!

This begins with a scene in which a scantily clad girl is suspended from the ceiling by her hair, before another, hypnotised, girl hacks away her bangs with an axe, letting her fall to her doom in a pit full of venomous cobras, while a British actor playing an offensive stereotype of a Chinaman and a Chinese actress portraying his daughter look on, cackling manically and apparently taking sadistic pleasure from the proceedings.

Good work, BBFC. I mean, don’t get me wrong, personally I’d probably call my children in specially and make them watch it, but let’s just add that to the extremely long list of reasons why I don’t have any children and move on.


A Fu Manchu movie must have been almost as much of an anachronism in the 1960s as it would be today, but if the number of sequels Towers and co churned out is any indication, they certainly found an audience. And if “Brides..” perhaps understandably doesn’t make great play of the character’s alarmist ‘Yellow Peril’ origins, neither does it attempt to apologise for or reinvent him the way a modern day effort would be expected to. Fu Manchu’s ethnicity is not allotted great importance here, and is purely incidental to his role as a secret base-lurking international super-criminal who currently seems to be residing in a complex of tastefully decorated Ancient Egyptian caverns - standard issue villain in a story that essentially plays out as a cranky, Edwardian-era variation on a mid-60s Eurospy movie.

Aside from anything else, it’s certainly hard to believe Christopher Lee hung on for three more of these movies, given his obvious lack of enthusiasm for the role. To paraphrase Michael J. Weldon, they might as well have used a picture of Christopher Lee for all the acting he does here. I guess Lee was probably of the opinion that he’d earned his cheque simply by turning up and agreeing to be filmed whilst wearing the costume, and to be honest I can see his point – that moustache is simply beyond the pale.


Anyway, the net result of Sir Christopher’s acceptance of pay in return for public ridicule is that Fu Manchu, in the course of realising his fiendishly crack-brained scheme to kidnap and hypnotise the beautiful daughters of the world’s twelve most esteemed scientists in order to blackmail them into helping him hold the world to random with a radio controlled death ray (well, wouldn’t you if the opportunity arose..?), calls upon a palette of expression consisting primarily of barking orders like a bored public school PE teacher, some extremely half-hearted cackling, a great deal of standing still and, mercifully, absolutely NO attempt to act Chinese. He doesn’t even do any of that requisite sinister-Oriental-villain finger waggling type business.

In fact a far more convincing face of sadistic evil-doing in “Brides..” is provided by actual-Chinese-person Tsai Chin as Fu Manchu’s loyal daughter Lin Tang - a super-cool villainess who I wish had got more screen-time. (As the first ever Chinese member of RADA, Chin actually has a way strong CV as an actress, having appeared in everything from "You Only Live Twice" to "Memoirs of a Geisha" and that lame modern version of "Casino Royale" – thanks IMDB!)


Arrayed against this threat to civilisation as we know it, we have the forces of good, represented in the first instance by Sax Rohmer’s own Sherlock Holmes analogue, the redoubtable Sir Dennis Nayland Smith of the Yard. As portrayed here by Douglas Wilmer (from The Vampire Lovers and Jason & The Argonauts), Nayland Smith makes a wonderfully appropriate adversary for Fu Manchu – not an aristocrat or dashing hero, but a stuffy, sour-faced cardigan-wearing sort of a detective – avenging avatar of the kind of lower middle class England that still battles nefarious foreign infiltration every day in the pages of the Daily Mail.


For company, Smith has his own Watson, Howard Marion-Crawford as the jovial Dr. Petrie, chiefly notable for the purposes of this review because throughout the film I thought Smith was calling him “Peachy”, as some kind of affectionate nickname.

Like many early pulp police detectives, Nayland Smith seems to have developed a great scam wherein he spends the day sitting around in his royally appointed study overlooking Parliament Square, eschewing day to day police work and telling anyone who interrupts that he is busy contemplating the diabolical machinations of Fu Manchu – machinations so diabolical in this case that they could only really be comprehended by, say, reading a plot synopsis of “Dr. Goldfoot and The Bikini Machines” and sorta reversing it. As for what Dr. Petrie’s patients think of him spending seemingly all of his time hanging around with his detective pal asking leading questions and enjoying monologues of a heavily expositional nature, well, who can say. Maybe Rohmer’s books address these issues in more detail, but good luck reading them on the train in 2010.


I can’t tell you much about director Don Sharp – who he was, what made him tick, what the notable stylistic features running through his films are – but I can tell you that he is one of my favourite British horror/b-movie directors simply because everything he made was great fun, from “Kiss of the Vampire” to “The Devil Ship Pirates” through to all-time weirdo horror mindblower “Psychomania” in ’73, and “The Brides of Fu Manchu” is no exception. A work of sublime silliness, “Brides..” is the polar opposite of “Castle Freak”, which I watched the same weekend, in that I can’t remember a single element of it that was actually good as such, and yet I enjoyed it immensely.

Oh yeah – actually, one thing I can actually single out for praise is the various fight scenes, which were an absolute hoot! This being the pre-Bruce Lee era, Fu Manchu’s secret army of loyal kung fu guys (who insist on running around town in their pyjamas and bandanas when sent to London on undercover missions) are portrayed as being masters of that classic school boy martial art that consists of leaping into the centre of a room screaming “YAAAH”, throwing a wicker chair at somebody’s head and then getting duffed up by a middle-aged Englishman in a tweed suit. As such, the fight scenes in “Bride..”, particularly an extended number in a hospital, are blunderingly joyous affairs, full of enthusiastic barroom brawl-style fisticuffs, breathless corridor chases, wanton furniture destruction and all that good stuff. I tried to keep a tally of people getting punched in the face, but gave up when I got to about forty. It’s a sort of good natured, old fashioned violence, full of “oof!” and “blast it!” and puffing and panting – not a bit like all the violent violence you get in today’s films.




I also liked Fu Manchu’s wonderfully archaic scheme of shooting vast quantities of energy across the world using wireless sets, and his repeated declaration that he intends to blow up “the Windsor Castle”, leading to a great forehead-slapping misunderstanding on the part of our heroes, which I wont spoil for you here. I loved the brief shot in which some pyjamaed ne’erdowells make off down the Thames in a boat which they don’t even try to convince us dates from the 1920s, I loved French actress Marie Versini as our almost unbearably sweet young heroine/kidnap victim, and the shiv-wielding ‘brides’ revolting against their captors was great fun.




I loved Nayland Smith commandeering a cargo plane to hoof it over to Fu Manchu’s hideout in North Africa, and the subsequent sight of him doggedly leading a conga line of battle-hardened brides in tattered evening wear back toward civilization across the Atlas mountains, as Dr. Fu’s hideout blows up in the background and the credits prepare to roll. And no, I don’t quite get why some mountain caverns in North Africa are full ancient Egyptian stuff either, but the world is full of wonders, whatcha gonna do.


Utterly pointless, morally bankrupt and with a slightly sleazy atmosphere throughout, “Brides of Fu Manchu” is a perfect, undemanding Sunday afternoon movie. For ninety minutes, I put sensible work aside, drank a bottle of pale ale, chuckled my head off and felt great – maybe next weekend, you should do the same. In a personal modification to a recent addition to the lexicon of contemporary phraseology, I have subsequently felt an urge to describe my optimum state of being as: A FU MANCHU MOVIE IS PLAYING, AND THE BEER IS OPEN.

After “Brides..”, one Jeremy Summers helmed “The Vengeance of fu Manchu” in ‘67, before none other than Jess Franco took the reins for two further entries in the series, “Blood of..” in ’68, and “Castle of..” in ‘69. Quite what happened when Franco met Fu Manchu, I can scarcely imagine, but somehow I doubt the BBFC would be inclined to grant it a “U” certificate.

Me n' Coffin Joe, Part # 3:This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse (1967)

Three years after the success of “At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul”, Ze Do Caixao returned to Brazil’s screens in a film that bears all the defining marks of a sequel, essentially revisiting the themes and structure of it’s predecessor, but with more violence, more sleaze, a longer running time and even more ranting, but losing the self-contained charm of the earlier film in the process, replacing it with the first full manifestation of the kind of wildly excessive, oneiric sadism that Jose Marins would make his trademark in the coming years.

Rather than being dispatched for good by the combined forces of supernatural justice at the end of “At Midnight..”, it seems that Coffin Joe was merely… uh, badly burned or something, and “This Night..” begins with him returning to his home town fully recovered after a spell in hospital, and absolved of his crimes by a rather shoddy looking court on the basis of a lack of evidence. And unfortunately for the human race, it seems Joe hasn’t learned a damn thing from his ordeals, as he’s immediately up to his old tricks, harping on endlessly about the sanctity of his bloodline and the foolishness of religious belief and so on. Some bloody use that turned out to be, sigh the wandering ghosts somewhere in the background.

Stretching the shaky continuity further, business at the undertakers must have been booming in Joe’s absence, as his funeral parlor now finds itself equipped with a standard issue hunchback assistant named Bruno (his school play level make-up job somehow makes the poor guy look more repulsive than professional effects ever would have done), and also with a new complex of underground torture dungeons. Convenient!

Marins’ production values seem to have taken a corresponding leap forward too, at least if we can judge by such yardsticks as more sets, more expansive framing, more actors, more special effects, etc. I was disappointed to note though that the claustrophobic, gothic atmospherics that so livened up “At Midnight..” have been misplaced along the way, ironically falling victim to the arrival of more professional lighting, and the decision to shoot most of the external scenes on location. Gone are the restrictive corridors of forest and swathes of shadow that Marins conjured up on his chicken shack soundstage, and instead we get, well… realistic daytime footage of the same fairly boring looking place in Brazil, much of the time.

Sadly, many of the interior sets follow suit. That said, Joe’s dungeon/laboratory/whatever set up is lovably goofy - real mad scientist 101, straight of an Al Adamson or Ted V. Mikels flick, with weird, seemingly gas-powered machinery, the good ol’ strap-down gurney and parrots (?!) flying around for some reason. Quite what the machinery is for is anyone’s guess, although Joe does proclaim “not sadism – science!” at one point in the film, so maybe he’s got something on the backburner a bit more methodical than just throwing snakes at ladies and hoping for the best. Anyway, with this notable exception, most of the other interiors just have a lot of brick and white walls standing in for the delightfully cluttered compositions of the earlier film, unfortunately. Ho hum.

“At Midnight..” also features a whole ton of padding and subplots which were absent from the one-track-mind narrative of the first film – in fact the damn thing’s jam-packed with wild and wooly antics involving local politics, a kind-hearted wrestler, fixed poker games, tavern brawls and all manner of scheming and duplicity which I won’t try and run down for you in this review or we’ll be here all day.

One of the film’s most surprising scenes comes early on, when Joe saves a young boy from being run down by a careless soldier on a motorbike. Given his batshit philosophies and general disdain for humanity, one would assume that Joe only seeks a child of his own for purely utilitarian ends, to act as a miniature continuation of himself. But here, as he plays with the kid at the side of the road and curses the cyclist for his lack of attention, we start to realise that Joe just really digs kids, and hates the way that social and religious forces compel them to grow up into adults that he deems weak and ignorant. This one brief scene, in which Joe is framed as the protective force standing between the children and the hapless, accident-prone grown ups, is (to my knowledge) the only moment in Jose Marins’ entire filmography in which the director’s alter-ego is made to seem even remotely sympathetic. That it is never elaborated upon or followed up as the film proceeds full steam ahead in the direction of seedy, misanthropic carnage, simply makes it all the more curious.

Anyway, fathering a son is still Coffin Joe’s foremost objective in life, only now he seems to be framing this desire in even more deranged and fascistic terms, declaring that his first born will be the leader of a new race of supermen, free from human weakness. Ever the man of action, Joe decides that the first step is to find a mother befitting of his high standards, and as such he immediately sets about kidnapping the town’s six most desirable women. This quickly accomplished, he deposits them in a purpose-built ladies’ dormitory that he seems to have stashed away in his tardis-like lair, and prepares to instigate the first of film’s two extended sequences of horrifying shenanigans, as he subjects his potential brides to a series of ‘ordeals’ to determine which of them is most worthy of his seed.

Admittedly, women weren’t given a great deal to do in the first Coffin Joe film prior to becoming victims, but it soon becomes clear in “This Night..” that the level of Jose Marins’ misogyny, or, at best, his lack of empathy toward the opposite sex, was absolutely staggering when he was making these films. Kidnapped by a freak, these six able-bodied women just sit there impassively in their nightgowns, failing to display any emotion or resistance whatsoever, as their captor rants away, explaining in his characteristically roundabout fashion that he basically intends to kill five of them, and to rape the lucky survivor.

Upping the ante on the spider-based murder of his wife from the first film, Joe waits until the girls are soundly asleep (cos hey, what else are they gonna do after the man’s left the room?), and unleashes a box full of tarantulas upon them in a queasy sequence that goes on far, far longer than is strictly necessary (“necessary” being a pretty redundant term with Marins at the controls), cutting between close-ups of giant spiders crawling across the bodies of writhing, terrified girls and Joe’s staring eyes and belly-laughing chops, his pet creatures clearly presented as a direct extension of his body, and of the camera’s gaze. Somewhere, there’s a psychoanalyst hitting the big red button under his/her desk, and we haven’t even got to the snakes yet.



Ah yes, the snakes. When Joe deems one of the girls worthy of survival because she wasn’t too bothered by the spiders, she gets to watch as her companions are locked in a narrow underground chamber and left to the mercy of a bunch of venomous vipers and boa constrictors. Shots of the snake attack are intercut with equally icky footage of Coffin Joe trying to force himself upon the surviving lady. When she breaks down and admits that she is less than enthused by this whole turn of events, Joe decides she is not free from ‘weakness’ after all and thus can never be the mother of his child. Oh well, ya win some, ya lose some.



What I found most bizarre in this sequence though is what happens when Joe shrugs off his disappointment and tells her she is free to go. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll report all this to the authorities?”, she asks. No, Joe tells her, for I can tell that you have fallen hopelessly in love with me and will henceforth do my bidding. And she does.

What the EEEnfernoo is going on here? I thought I was at least getting used to the fuzzy logic with which Jose Marins conducts his movies, but once again his cracked-in-the-head approach to human behaviour has left me speechless.


Later in the film, Coffin Joe meets another girl, the daughter of a wealthy local dignitary, and things become even more confoundingly ridiculous when she immediately attaches herself to Joe and begins parroting his patriarchal, survival-of-the-strong philosophies back to him without even being prompted and doesn’t seem to mind when he slaps her around, causing our man to take a drag on his pipe and look on contentedly, as if to say “well, I knew the gal for me would come along eventually”.

Rarely in any sphere of creative endeavor – even the most bone-headed of superhero comics or fan fiction – have I encountered such a complete inability on the part of a male writer to conceive of women as independent, decision-making beings.

Not that I’d wish to really launch a defense of Mojica Marins, whose filmmaking ethics are clearly about as questionable as the Shell answer-man, but what I think we have to realise when dealing with Marins’ movies is that once they’ve got their initial plot set-ups and exposition out of the way and allowed him to get his horror on, all semblance of human characterisation and real world cause & effect are totally outta the window. In some quarters, Marins is often compared to Bunuel and Jean Cocteau, and, whilst that’s a comparison we should be wary of taking too far, “This Night..”s relentless concentration on personal dream logic and unforgettably intense imagery certainly speaks of such.

To put it bluntly, when Coffin Joe is ‘in the zone’, all other characters in the film are reduced to little more than bodies that do what they’re told. All through the film, things either happen comically slowly or appear sped up with no apparent logic, people say things that make almost no sense whatsoever, and a discordant mixture of music cues and random noises blare away with little relation to the action onscreen. Basically, the whole thing is freaked out on a level that only the very strangest of global filmmakers are able to compete with, and if things end up being almost unbelievably offensive too, well hey, that’s all just grist to the big WTF mill as far as Mr Marins is concerned. For every viewer left un-appalled by one of his films, Ze Do Caixao must shed a tear of failure.

What he is essentially going for here is Hitchcockian “shock cinema” on a cruelly primitive level. He doesn’t give a damn whether or not the audience expect these girls (or any of the characters other than Coffin Joe for that matter) to be recognisable, sympathetic humans – hell, he’d probably have used mannequins instead, except they don’t scream or wriggle so well. The reaction he’s going for is simply to make us squirm in our seats and go ICK ICK ICK, GIANT HAIRY SPIDERS! and AAARGH, SNAKES! and OH MY GOD THAT’S HORRIBLE, and JESUS CHRIST, I’VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THAT IN MY LIFE BEFORE! And it is his overwhelming success in obtaining these reactions where so many other horror directors have failed that continues to make his work so unique, regardless of the fact that on a personal level he seems to dwell somewhere on the slippery slope between “socially maladjusted” and “out of his freakin’ mind”.

This can all be clearly seen in the sequence that viewers will remember most vividly from this film – Coffin Joe’s descent into Technicolor hell! Although in some ways a mere warm up for the utter mind-flaying Marins would inflect on the world a few years later in “Awakening Of The Beast” (which recycles the B&W to colour gimmick), “This Night..”s vision of hell is in some ways even more brutally extraordinary.

Put it this way: think about every film you’ve seen over the years that has portrayed a visit to hell. It’s usually pretty metaphorical, right? In the name of sanity and good taste, filmmakers will usually find some smart or abstracted means by which to portray the infernal regions, be it the bureaucratic hell of ‘The Screwtape Letters’, the hallucinatory hell-on-earth of ‘Jacob’s Ladder’, the dopey S&M fantasies of ‘Hellraiser’ or the desert wasteland of Fulci’s ‘The Beyond’. Even the towering ode to literalism that is ‘Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey’ has the decency to present hell as a kind of stylized labyrinth in which we’re pursued by childhood fears.

But as we have surely gathered by now, sanity and good taste are not virtues held in high esteem by Jose Mojica Marins. If he’s going to take us to hell, he’s going to round up all the colour film stock, polystyrene, greasepaint and out of work actors his remaining budget can muster and take us to motherfucking HELL. And so, when Coffin Joe discovers that one of the women he murdered was pregnant, this sets him off on a predictably severe existential crisis which, combined with another one of those pesky peasant curses, sees him literally dragged through the ground, emerging in a garishly lit underground realm in which the legions of the semi-naked damned writhe in agony, being stabbed with pitchforks by red-skinned, loin-cloth clad demons!

Satan, also played by Marins (hey, why not?), sits upon his bloody throne, laughing uproariously as he zaps unfortunate sinners with lightning bolts, causing severed limbs to fly across the screen in a vision straight from the mind of a rabid eight year old boy. Rivers of stage-blood run through channels crudely hacked into the sets; naked women are bloodily crucified as boa constrictors crawl around their necks; floors and walls that looks like regurgitated pizza throb and moan with the torments of the damned; disconnected heads and body parts wave frantically through gaps in the ceiling. And meanwhile, cult film fans the world over proceed to foam at the mouth, fall off their chairs or manifest other suitably extreme reactions in sheer disbelief that their was some deranged guy with no money in the middle of Brazil actually MAKING THIS CRAP HAPPEN, AND FILMING IT.


It is a strange kind of joy to try to explain, that exquisite “I can’t believe I am actually seeing this” feeling. It’s not big, and it’s not clever, but it’s a form of joy all the same, and probably the reason I keep firing up movies like this when I could be doing something sensible.

Overall, I’m starting to get the impression that the cinema of Jose Marins is rather like being trapped inside the seething, sweaty mind of some leather overcoat-clad, catholic guilt-wracked teenager – you know, the kind you probably knew some variation of in school/college who quotes bowdlerised Nietzsche and seems to have a very high opinion of himself, but is cripplingly terrified/fascinated by the perpetually distant opposite sex.

It is not a place I can really recommend spending time, but on the other hand it does lead us into a hallucinogenic cavalcade of truly horrific horrors, realised with the kind of lingering intensity that makes you suspect Marins never got over his teenage disappointment that when you go to see a movie called, say, ‘Pit of Bloody Horror’, you rarely get to see eighty minutes-worth of pits full of bloody horror, and decided it was his personal destiny to make amends for this failure, in the name of prurient, emotionally-stunted horror fans everywhere. And so, for those of us with a hardy constitution and at least a certain fondness for the prurient, emotionally-stunted horror fan that lurks within us all (ok, some of us more than others), films like “This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse” are irresistible, providing further proof, as if it were needed, that being out of one’s freakin’ mind can often convey just as many advantages upon an intrepid filmmaker as it can problems.