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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October Horrors # 4: Sexo Sangriento (Manuel Esteba, 1981)

As the foundations of Franco’s fascist regime in Spain gradually disintegrated through the late 1970s following the dictator’s death, the restrictions governing on-screen content in the previously censorious nation correspondingly collapsed, flooding Spanish screens with an unprecedented backlog of smut, eventually culminating the early ‘80s hey-day of the hastily codified Classificada ‘S’ certification for “adult” (but not quite porn) features.

Soon to be celebrated in a new documentary from Severin Films, the possibilities for low budget filmmaking opened up by this era not only saw ex-pat directors like Jess Franco and José Larraz returning home to produce some of their most distinctive work, but also encouraged a brief outburst of one-off sex-horror films, including the likes of Mas Alla Del Terror, the more widely seen Satan’s Blood, and - delving further into the depths of obscurity - films like ‘Sexo Sangriento’ (I don’t need to translate that for you, do I?), which at the time of writing remains available only as VHS-sourced bootleg.

Interestingly, ‘Sexo Sangriento’ explicitly acknowledges this political context, at least to some extent. Set in 1975, it begins with its characters listening to (and pointedly ignoring) a radio announcement reporting the Generalissimo’s death, as they motor on toward the snow-capped mountains of (we assume) a sparsely populated rural area somewhere on the country’s Northern border.

Despite this curious touch of historical verisimilitude though, real world concerns are soon forgotten (at least for a while), and this is in fact one of the few early ‘80s Spanish horrors which immediately harkens back to the genre’s more escapist golden age a decade beforehand, presenting us with a trope unseen since the glory days of Paul Naschy - namely, that of a group of beautiful young ladies who share a passionate interest in parapsychology and medieval witchcraft, getting way out there on a field trip to a remote, mountainous locale!

Helpfully for the film’s exploitation quotient, two of the girls also share a passion for intense lesbian lovemaking, whilst the third prefers to spend her nights hanging out in abandoned castles with a tape recorder, capturing what she calls ‘psychophonies’.

By which point, long-term readers will appreciate, I was pretty much already sold on whatever happens next.

Before long of course, the girls’ car breaks down (“the distributor is useless,” exclaims the driver, in what I’m going to assume is a movie industry in-joke), and right on cue, a sinister older lady (Mirta Miller, essaying the ‘sadistic/domineering mature woman’ role less than a decade after she was doing her ‘glamorous female lead’ bit in Naschy vehicles like ‘Count Dracula’s Great Love’ and ‘Vengeance of the Zombies’) emerges from the woods and invites them to stay the night at her place.

After a hot night in the sheets, some nude posing for Mirta’s suitably creepy, blood-drenched paintings (she is a reclusive macabre artist, it transpires) and a few strolls around the local ruins, strangely nobody seems terribly concerned about getting the car fixed anymore.

A more threatening note is struck by the presence of Mirta’s lumbering, mute housekeeper, whom she cheerfully declares is “gradually turning into a beast”, but you know, I suppose you’ve got to take the rough with the smooth in this kind of scenario, right?

Truth be told, there’s not much of a story to this one, and things are pretty slow-moving, but with frequent elegiac softcore interludes, plus an equal amount of time spent exploring some of those truly incredible, evocative, derelict locations so unique to Spanish horror, who’s complaining?

During the final act however, things take a considerably darker turn, as the expected supernatural shenanigans are entirely bypassed in favour of gory crotch violence, revelations of historical child murder and some pointed commentary on the trauma suffered by Northern rural communities during the years of fascist oppression. Hmm, didn’t see that coming.

In its currently extant version, this film’s photography has an unappealing Shot On Video kind of look to it, but it’s easy to imagine that a more filmic texture (plus widescreen framing?) might be salvageable, if someone were able to get hold of the original elements. (I’m looking at you Severin - fingers crossed.)

A more intractable problem however is presented by the soundtrack which primarily consists of poorly chosen and poorly synchronised needle-drops on cheesy rip-offs of well known pieces (Goblin’s ‘Zombie’ theme, ‘Star Wars’, ‘Air on a G String’ etc); it’s all very distracting, and far too high in the mix.

Despite these drawbacks though, ‘Sexo Sangriento’ is as sexy and bloody as its title promises, and delivers a respectable dose of palpable gothic atmosphere into the bargain; dedicated Euro-horror devotees should find it well worth tracking down. 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Horror Express: Cinta Terlarang [‘Forbidden Love’] (Pitradjaya Burnama, 1995)

Though it dates from somewhat after the ‘70s-’80s glory days of Indonesian horror/fantasy cinema, the opening of Pitradjaya Burnama’s ‘Cinta Terlarang’ certainly makes good on his nation’s proud history of maniacal cinematic insanity, as two women wearing translucent white dress shirts over their sensible white pants descend the steps leading to a cobweb-shrouded, blue fog-drenched subterranean altar chamber.

It turns out that Ratih (Lela Anggraini) and Nita (Welda Hidayat) are here to exact black magickal vengeance upon the father of Ratih’s unborn child, who has refused to claim the child or even marry her (the swine!)

Conveniently, all the gear they need for this task is neatly stored in a box which they extract from inside a smoking, blue-light emitting coffin, including both an ancient grimoire and some rather fetching ceremonial leotards and matching cloaks, which they promptly change into, as the scene is inexplicably intercut with footage of dancers writhing in a neon-drenched night club.

Right on cue, the reverb-y voice of an apparent demonic entity chimes in, telling them, “your spite of love will be the foundation of our alliance”. A black rooster is duly slaughtered (in long shot, and I believe the effect is faked, thank god) and its blood dripped onto a photograph of the witches’ intended victim. (1)

Clearly, this kind of threat to the patriarchal order cannot be left unchecked, and so, outside the witches’ lair, a bunch of men armed with machetes and clubs have assembled, apparently taking orders from Ratih’s shady, white-haired boyfriend, and another fellow who seems to be acting as his occult advisor.

After gaining access to the altar chamber, shady boyfriend belatedly attempts to take the gentlemanly route, apologising to Ratih for his prior conduct and offering her his hand in marriage. Evidently though, it’s a bit late for that, and the girls are having none of it, responding to his overtures with suitably miffed “HMPH!”s, before - brilliantly - they strike martial arts poses and begin enthusiastically beating the living daylights out of loverboy and his henchmen, employing their new-found supernatural fighting prowess in the process.

In the course of the ensuing melee however, Ratih regrettably ends up getting decapitated by the falling lid of the blue-lit coffin. “You’re mean and cruel,” her still conscious severed head spits at the assembled males. “Await my revenge!”

“I will come back after 13 full moons,” Ratih’s now-disembodied voice continues as Nita grabs her bloody noggin and makes a flying, wire-assisted exit, “and I will bring the sacrificial blood of three male virgins! Remember that! Remember that!”

At which point, I sat back and offered praise to whatever unholy deities preside over the unruly world of Indo-horror, for once again allowing the genre’s efforts to hit that perfect sweet-spot of bloody, fantastical craziness I so crave in my cinema viewing.

Meanwhile, at Jakarta’s famed Cleopatra Executive Discotheque (the signage is fucking amazing) - which we have been randomly cutting to throughout the preceding sequence - another, rather confusing, storyline begins to unfold. 

This involves a chap named Andre (Sonny Dewantara, sporting a mighty ‘tache), who is arguing with his girlfriend over the paternity of their unborn child.

As Andre’s girlfriend storms off, never to return, Nita watches pensively from the bar, whilst a woman named Lola (top-billed Sally Marcellina, in a fetish-y combo of lace and leather) reacts to cut-away shots of a black cat, and contemplates a bloody tampon she lifts from a bin in the bathroom. (2)

At the end of the night, Andre (who later turns out to be the son of Ratih’s white-haired boyfriend) goes home with Lola (who may or may not be a prostitute - it’s a little unclear). Before they can get it on though, Lola falls asleep, and - apparently being a more chivalrous soul than his conduct thus far would tend to suggest - Andre gently tucks her into bed and calls it a night.

Back in the witches’ realm however, Nita is now poised over her scrying bowl, as Ratih’s spectral head looms from the shadows pleading for reincarnation. And so, a black cat is dispatched to Lola’s residence, and, we presume, a rather vague form of possession-based vengeance is about to be enacted!

The first fruits of this malediction are reaped the following night, during a truly uproarious scene in which Lola, at the behest of the sleazy, quasi-pimp type guy who seems to control her activities at the night club, goes home with a musclebound dude named Randy. 

At the height of their passion, after she has spent quite a long time sensually rubbing her face around Randy’s knees (which I suppose must be as far as local censorship at the time permitted these things to progress), Lola announces, “now it is time for me to suck your blood”! After transforming into a vision of Ratih, complete with her purple ceremonial garb, proceeds to send Randy reeling with a set of bloody gashes scratched across his face. 

Then, she goes one better by sucking his very life-force (represented by a kind of post-production laser beam) directly out of his brain, before plunging her fist into his chest and eviscerating him with her bare hands. Blimey! 

To western eyes and ears, ‘Cinta Terlarang’ will seem ‘80s to a fault, in spite of its mid-90s release date. Hazy, diffused lighting provided by blinding blue spotlights is filtered through smoke and translucent, billowing curtains, along with gleaming neon and the best chrome / glass / silk interiors the production could manage.

The bedroom sets within which much of the action takes place often look as if they’re under water, such is the quantity of blue light pulsing through their windows, and thumping electro-pop and wistful, Tangerine Dream-esque synth jams dominate the soundtrack.

Though there is no actual nudity (again, presumably due to diktats of local censorship), implied sexual content is fairly strong, and almost every frame of the movie features at least one woman wearing some form of impractical, kinky lingerie. (Seriously, the costume designer(s) must have had the time of their lives on this one, and the results are remarkable.)

In this regard however, it’s worth noting that the ill-fated Randy also strips down to his Y-fronts and does a sweaty erotic dance at one point, whilst a subsequent hunky victim of Lola/Ratih also gets stripped and tied to the bed, so - props are due to the filmmakers for making a rare attempt at equal opportunities titillation, I suppose.


In spite of all the mad supernatural horror stuff I’ve described above in fact, the prime intention here was presumably to ape the style of the then-ubiquitous erotic thrillers emerging from the USA in the wake of ‘Basic Instinct’ - a conclusion supported by the (very sparse) promotional materials for the film which can be found online,  featuring images of clinching couples and nothing to suggest this is actually a horror movie. 

And indeed, this is largely the direction the film takes during its middle half hour, possibly with a side dish of TV soap opera thrown in for good measure. A garish approximation of high gloss eroticism takes precedence, whilst a love triangle plot line develops involving Andre, Lola and… Nita, who, in civilian life, it transpires, is actually Lola’s possessive lesbian lover!

Amidst the lengthy stretches of melodramatic relationship talk which result from all this however, director Burnama at least has the good sense to keep the witches’ cauldron boiling, as Ratih and Nita instigate further occult outrages, claiming that aforementioned pimp guy as Lola/Ratih’s second victim, and also undertaking an unsuccessful spectral assault upon Andre’s Dad’s house.

(The latter, incidentally, fails largely as a result their insistence on utilising billowing silk and flying vases as their sole weapons, leading to Ratih’s spirit being buried beneath a glowing flower pot on the lawn, trapped by an ‘antidote talisman’ which the occult advisor guy has told him Andre’s Dad to bury there!)

Just to further confuse the film’s genre identity meanwhile, there are also a number of decently choreographed martial arts fight scenes, suggesting that perhaps Burnama secretly wished he was helming a full scale action movie. (Perhaps the influence of sexed up Hong Kong action movies like ‘Naked Killer’ (1992) and ‘Robotrix’ (1991) can also be detected here?)

Naturally, this is all to the good in terms of the film’s overall entertainment value, and the scenes in which the thoroughly bad-ass Nita lays waste to gangs of machete-wielding goons in her slo-mo, silk-flowing splendour prove especially awesome, even incorporating some fairly elaborate HK/wuxia style wire-work in places. (3)

In a sense, I can see a similar methodology at work here to that guiding H. Tjut Djalil’s classic of Indo-horror/action insanity, ‘Lady Terminator’ from 1989. 

With that film, Djalil didn’t seem able to simply make a straight rip-off of ‘The Terminator’, instead switching out the sci-fi elements in favour of an insane, quasi-feminist black magickal possession story. By the same token, Burnama seems to have been unable (or unwilling) to make a standard erotic thriller here without spicing it up with… an insane, quasi-feminist black magickal possession/revenge story (and indeed, some kung fu). For this excellent decision making, we can all offer him our gratitude.

Having said that though, in visual terms, ‘Cinta Terlarang’s ultra-garish ‘80s bad trip splatter-horror aesthetic is actually probably more closely aligned with Djalil’s later ‘Dangerous Seductress’ (1992)… but yes, that one also goes pretty big on the insane, quasi-feminist black magickal shit as I recall, so the point still stands.

Though ‘Cinta Terlarang’ is evidently working on a lower budget than Djalil’s films - and is, comparatively speaking, less ambitious in its craziness as a result - all of this helps illustrate why I believe that pre-2000 horror films from Indonesia are always worth checking out, even when, like this one, they don’t quite manage to entirely achieve their potential.

Speaking of which, the pedant in me demands that I state that ‘Cinta Terlarang’ is fairly incoherent in logical, thematic, emotional, and even spatial, terms, but honestly - does it matter, when there is so much pure, wild, diabolical fun here to enjoy?

On a more depressing note meanwhile, the existence and rediscovery of wonderful films like this one also causes me to reflect sadly on the way in which a nation whose popular cinema was once overflowing with unashamed lesbian love, implied oral sex, vampiric flying heads, kung fu battling witches and leather-clad Lady Terminators laying waste to neon-drenched nightclubs, has, in more recent years, regressed to a state in which media portrayals of homosexuality are effectively outlawed, sex outside of marriage has recently been criminalised, and women are increasingly facing harassment for venturing outside without full face-covering.

Oh well. For now, let’s all close our eyes tight and/or cue up ‘Cinta Terlarang’ and return for 80-something minutes to wild and carefree days of… 1995? I know - who’d have thought it, right?

-- 

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(1)Curiously, the demonic entity in ‘Cinta Terlarang’ is addressed by the witches as “Eyang”, which the internet informs me means “grandparent” in Indonesian, perhaps suggesting some kind of diabolical ancestor worship is going on here?

(2)It is only after watching the film several times, and writing this review, that I’ve finally realised that, rather than just being totally inexplicable, that bit with the bloody tampon is perhaps meant to imply that Andre’s girlfriend is not actually pregnant, thus excusing him of being an arsehole when he refuses to believe her? If so, this plot point is… not very clearly explained, to put it mildly.

(3)Given that Nita possesses such impressive fighting prowess whilst in her witch-y incarnation, I’m curious why another scene finds her (in her day time / ‘jilted lesbian lover’ guise) hiring a bunch of male goons to beat up Andre whilst taking no part in the assault herself, but… NEVER MIND!

Horror Express: Verotika (Glenn Danzig, 2019)

Say what you like about Glenn Danzig’s widely derided feature debut as writer/director/composer/co-cinematographer, which I finally persuaded myself to get around to watching last week - it’s a remarkable achievement in at least one respect.

Specifically, I’m referring to fact that, despite having been a successful musician and public figure for at least forty years at the time of this film’s production, Danzig still managed to create a movie exactly like the one a horny sixteen-year-old goth kid would probably have made, given access to the same resources.

Whatever your thoughts on the result of his efforts, his refusal to countenance any form of maturity whatsoever here is genuinely quite extraordinary, arguably making ‘Verotika’ the most purely (accidentally?) punk rock thing he has been associated with since Robo quit as The Misfits drummer in 1983.

Unfortunately however, simply being a contender for the most adolescent film ever directed by a sixty-four year old man does not necessarily mean ‘Verotika’ is worth watching. Indeed, for anyone lacking either a pre-existing interest in its creator’s oft-questionable oeuvre or a very indulgent attitude toward low budget 21st century horror, I’d recommend a hard pass.

As much as I’d love to defy critical consensus and declare this an unappreciated masterpiece, the sad truth is that, by any reasonable yardstick, ‘Verotika’ is an extremely bad film in pretty much every respect; indifferently directed, cheaply staged, sketchily scripted (to put it kindly), thoughtlessly misogynistic, entirely devoid of originality and filled with dead-eyed non-performances from a cast seemingly comprised of aspirant fetish models and porn stars. (1)

To paraphrase Chris Morris, we’re looking here at a crass, ugly and deeply stupid work, and yet.... what kind of horror/exploitation fan would I be if I couldn’t find something perversely captivating in the midst of this lumbering, irredeemable mess of nonsense?

Though it is not remotely as significant or enjoyable, ‘Verotika’ still, to some extent, captures the same mixture of gleeful nastiness and utter weirdness which helps make the early Misfits material so extraordinary. For all its faults, it bears the same gory signature of an artist whose brain-damaged concerns have (perhaps worryingly) remained remarkably consistent across five decades of creative output.

To run down a few elements of the ‘weirdness’ part of that equation, I’ve firstly got to commend Danzig’s refusal to adhere to the narrative conventions which usually govern the EC-via-Amicus anthology framework he has chosen to work within here.

The idea that segments within a horror anthology should consist of concisely rendered cautionary tales with a circular/twist ending goes completely out the window form the outset, but… in a way, I appreciated the open-endedness of this. 

 I mean, let’s just take the first story here - ‘The Albino Spider of Dajette’ - and admit that I have no idea why the aspirant fetish model with eyeballs where her nipples should be (played by Ashley Wisdom) gets victimised by an anthropomorphic spider monster which manifests itself whilst she is asleep, and proceeds to rape and murder women.

And if there is ultimately no connection at all between the eyeballs-for-nipples thing and the spider-monster thing, well… why not? That’s life, right? Here’s this poor girl, just tryin’ to get through life with her freakish eye-boobs, and today, she’s having an especially hard time of it, vis-a-vis the whole aforementioned spider-monster situation. There’s no moral pay-off, no clever resolution, no lessons learned - fuck you, O.Henry! It’s actually quite refreshing.

(Of course, I didn’t realise at this point in my viewing that I was actually watching by far the most well-developed of the film’s three segments, but… we’ll get back to that soon enough.)

More mystifying - as one or two commentators have noted - is Danzig’s inexplicable decision to have the cast of this first story deliver their lines in ersatz French accents.

If the intention here was to lend the film a sense of continental exoticism, I’m afraid it's rather undercut by the fact that ‘Verotika’ otherwise remains as all-American as a burger van parked outside a Sunset Boulevard strip joint. And, given that few of the performers appear to have much prior acting experience, and seem to have been informed about the whole accent thing about sixty seconds before shooting began.... well, you can imagine the range of out-rrrageous ac-CENTS we’re treated to here.

(My favourite must be the waiter who advises our heroine to hurry home before she falls victim to “zee neck brea-CURR”.)

Were it not for Danzig’s total devotion to the gospel of low-brow / trash culture, I’d be tempted to speculate that he intended this French accent thing as a kind of Brechtian disassociation technique - like Werner Herzog using hypnotised actors in ‘Heart of Glass’, but far more entertaining. But no. There is no way a man as steadfast in his aesthetic beliefs as Glenn Danzig would countenance such pretentious/abstract bullshit.

Indeed, the most incredible thing about all this is that he is entirely sincere, but… we’ll return to that train of thought later, because unfortunately we still need to address the film’s two remaining stories. 

So, sadly, the weird charm of the eyes-for-nipples/spider-monster business is entirely jettisoned in the second ‘tale’ presented here. A paper-thin item about a stripper with a mildly burned face (Rachel Alig) murdering and stealing the faces of other strippers, this one largely just serves as an excuse for what feels like hours of dispiriting bump n’ grind strip club footage, accompanied by a succession of mediocre stoner rock tracks.

Disappointingly, it also drops the French accents, but is notable for those of us charting ‘Verotika’s divergence from horror anthology tradition in that it doesn’t even attempt to have an ending. It basically just sets up its premise, and… stops? C’mon Glenn, give us something!

The third story, ‘Drujika: Countess of Blood’, certainly gives us… something… in that it’s a period-set Countess Bathory type affair. The attempt at a medieval setting is fairly ambitious under the circumstances, including use of actual horses, some limited location shooting and - get this! - a real wolf (albeit a not terribly threatening one).

But, on the other hand, you know we’re in trouble as soon as you note that the green-screened panoramic photo backdrop depicting the Contessa’s castle includes clouds of unmoving, still photographed smoke. Mario Bava, this ain’t.

With her spiked crown, latex fetish gloves and habit of staring contemplatively at bunches of grapes, the Contessa (played by Alice Tate) takes us straight into full-on Nigel Wingrove territory, somewhat reminiscent of those dreadful Redemption video promos we all had to sit through back in the bad old days every time we wanted to watch a Jean Rollin film.

Probably the film’s most overtly erotic segment, this one also finds Danzig indulging in some pretty shameless ‘chained virgin’ type fantasies. Perhaps he was going for a vague Borowcyzk / ‘Immoral Tales’ kind of vibe, though the faint Eastern European accents adopted by the cast aren’t as funny as the French ones, and again, the intended effect is rather spoiled by the arid, atmos-free L.A. porno feel, which hangs around the footage like disinfectant in a hospital ward.

Unfortunately, this also proves to be the film’s most boring segment - because, above all I think, what kills ‘Verotika’s chances in the midnight movie / so-bad-its-good stakes is actually its pacing.

Like so many amateur / first time filmmakers, Danzig just cannot cut his stuff for shit, stretching out most shots at least a few beats too long, and the concluding story finds him expanding this lethargic approach to a frankly quite trying degree, as he subjects us to several extended, silent medium-close ups of the Contessa bathing in blood or gazing at herself in the mirror which just seem to go on forever, seriously challenging the wakefulness of any late-night viewers who have proved hardy enough to stick with the movie thus far.

As expected by this point, there’s also pretty much no narrative here at all - just the blood-bathing Contessa going about her virgin-slaying day-to-day in more or less the manner you’d expect.

There is a certain audacity to the bit where she manages to begin fondling and eating a girl’s extracted heart whilst it remains beating and attached to the victim’s blood vessels, but the impact is deflated by the absurdly realised special effects, including the use of a heart prop whose size seems closer to that of an organ belonging to a large mammal than that of a human being. 

But, it matters not. Only an utter goon would demand realism in a context like this, and besides, to return to the point I touched on above, ‘Verotika’s sole saving grace - the unique component that allows this otherwise terrible film to cycle back round and grasp at something approaching warped greatness - is that Danzig is utterly sincere in his intent to make a sexy, gory erotic horror movie.

Unbelievable as it may sound in view of what I’ve outlined above, there is not an ounce of self-mockery or camp intent discernible here. Given how rare this total absence of self-awareness is in any creative industry these days, maybe we should take a moment or two just to think about that - to let it sink in.

Like the aforementioned goth kid sitting in the corner of the classroom, scribbling drawings of women who look like Death from ‘Sandman’ fucking bat-winged demons, Danzig believes his half-baked cartoon atrocities are transgressive and shocking, and that if you don't like it, you just can't handle his dark vision.

Given how few of us can make it to adulthood whilst retaining such knuckleheaded naivety - let alone preserve it through the rigors of adult life - isn’t that, in itself, a beautiful thing?

Or, to put it another way, I’d rather sit through ‘Verotika’ a million times than read a page of Morrissey’s stupid novel.

Saner voices may contend that neither option is compulsory, but saner voices have no place in this discourse. For as the man of the hour himself once sang, “possession of a mind is a terrible thing..”.

 --

(1)As it seems ungallant to let a statement like that stand without unpacking it a bit, here are the results of my IMDB-based research into ‘Verotika’s cast. So, we do indeed have several porn stars (primarily Ashley Wisom), along with a large number of people who have very few IMDB credits aside from this one (so who knows what they normally do all day), and a few legit actors.

Surprisingly, probably the most noteworthy person in the cast is actually the one with the silliest name, Kansas Bowling, who it turns out has won considerable acclaim as a director of music videos (working with Iggy Pop amongst others) and played a small role as one of the Mansonites in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. As one of the Contessa’s victims in ‘Verotika’, she is assigned the thankless task of remaining dead and topless through several very long scenes.

Horror Express / Gothic Originals: Love Brides of the Blood Mummy (Ken Ruder, 1972)

Yes, folks - ‘Love Brides of the Blood Mummy’. If you thought I was going to turn down the opportunity to add this one to my shelves when Mondo Macabro put it up for pre-order earlier this year… well, you clearly don’t know me too well.

Irresistible as that title may be however, it’s worth noting that this obscure and rather mysterious Franco-Spanish co-production actually found itself travelling under a wide variety of other identities as it traversed the darker corners of the cinematic underworld in the early 1970s.

English-speaking territories primarily knew it as ‘Lips of Blood’ (thus causing confusion with the Jean Rollin film of the same name), whilst Spain got a shorter, sex-free cut featuring alternate ‘clothed’ takes, under the more chaste title of ‘El Secreto de la Momia Egipcia’.

As if to highlight the differences between film markets and censorship regimes in the two co-producing nations, the French distributors meanwhile went to the opposite extreme in their marketing, inviting the public to sample ‘Perversions Sexuelles’. (Well, yes, I suppose being molested by a four-thousand-year-old Egyptian mummy is pretty perverse, but beyond that it’s hard to believe the audience who turned out for that particular release got their money’s worth; blood-drinking aside, this Mummy’s tastes are pretty vanilla for the most past.)

But, it will always be ‘Love Brides of the Blood Mummy’ to me - a title the film first acquired upon its Canadian release under the auspices of David Cronenberg’s early sponsors Cinepix, and which, perhaps surprisingly, captures the spirit of thing more accurately than any of the alternative options listed above.

To get down to brass tacks then, what we essentially have here is a hoary and austere gothic horror framing narrative in which Spanish genre mainstay Frank Braña rides ‘cross the moors to meet his destiny at the sinister Dartmoor Castle. Therein, he meets Baron Dartmoor (George Rigaud), an amateur Egyptologist (and, it transpires, colonial grave robber), who proceeds to narrate in flashback a tale so absurd and offensive it could have been pulled straight from one of those crazy Italian porno-fumetti we all [know and love / grudgingly acknowledge the existence of / are about to google and probably lose our jobs as a result of – please delete as applicable].

So, one fateful day it seems, The Baron found himself unboxing the latest unearthed sarcophagus delivered straight to his gaff from the Valley of the Kings, only to discover that it contained not the usual papyrus-wrapped bag of bones, but the body of a perfectly preserved, eerily life-like young man (one ‘Michael Flynn’, in his only screen appearance).

Having established that his new acquisition is the body of “the depraved son of a priest, put to death for his crimes” (I wonder what the hieroglyphic character for ‘depraved’ looks like, incidentally), The Baron does what any self-respecting reclusive Victorian gentleman-scientist would do, dusting off his best Frankensteinian electrical clobber and setting out to bring the bugger back to life.

Once this small feat has been achieved with a minimum of bother though, we soon start to get an idea of why the Ancient Egyptians felt the need to get shot of this particular bastard ASAP.

Batting aside The Baron’s curious offer of a gravy-boat filled with milk, the Mummy instead hones in on a cut on the arm of Dartmoor’s man-servant John (Martin Trévières), making it clear that what he really needs to maintain his unholy existence is BLOOD, and plenty of it.

Again taking a leaf straight from the mad scientist playbook, The Baron pauses to consider the conflict between his humanitarian and scientific principles - spoiler, science wins! - and promptly sends John out to apprehend the first nubile virgin he can find wandering the blasted heathland which surrounds the castle. (The potential use of animal blood, or non-lethal transfusions from willing donors, is never considered here I note. Only the best for the Blood Mummy!)

As is the case with most of this film’s female cast, the actress who portrays the Mummy’s first victim is effectively uncredited (a list of anglicised pseudonyms on the opening credits is all we have to go on), but anyway - after guzzling down the proffered vessel of her fresh lady-blood, the Blood Mummy makes it clear that his appetites do not end there.

Rising from his slab and casually bashing John into unconsciousness, the Egyptian heads straight for the prone female captive, tears off her clothes, and, well… rapes her, to not put too fine a point on it, concluding his extended ravishment by bloodily chewing her throat out.

Using his hypnotic powers to take over John’s mind, the Mummy soon has The Baron locked behind bars in his own dungeon, forced to look on helplessly as his long-suffering man-servant is sent out again and again to find new girls, bludgeoning them into submission and carrying them back to the castle across his hunched shoulders, there to satisfy the relentless lusts of the Blood Mummy (who, monster fans will note, by this stage embodies traits usually associated with the mummy, the vampire and Frankenstein’s monster).

Bluntly staged by the filmmakers for the purposes of pure, gratuitous exploitation, these dungeon-based assaults - which comprise the bulk of the film’s middle half hour - soon prove as repetitive, joyless and robotic as the Mummy himself.

This creates an odd tonal disjuncture with the sombre and painstakingly atmospheric exterior sequences, during which reflections of twisted tree branches glimmer in icy lakes as horse gallop hither and yon, and as John (who rather resembles Paul Naschy in one his grotesque/simpleton roles) trudges out yet again across the freezing countryside, dragging captured women back to meet their doom across barren, coastal landscapes which resemble something Caspar David Friedrich might have come up with on a particularly bad day.

Once established, this grim pattern is broken only slightly when the Baron’s daughter unexpectedly arrives home from university accompanied by a friend (the latter played by Spanish horror regular Christine Gimpera). Dismounting and heading indoors, the pair are giggling like schoolgirls until - in a moment of pure, Bunuel-esque surrealism - they walk straight into a meet-cute with the Blood Mummy, leading to a surprisingly exciting horseback chase in which the malevolent Egyptian saddles up in pursuit of his prey.

After demonstrating such pluck, you might have expected the daughter (played by a very striking actress, who, again, sadly remains unidentified) to emerge as the heroine of a more, uh, ‘normal’ movie, but… nope. In fact, if there’s one thing I love about ‘Love Brides of the Blood Mummy’, it’s its sheer, bald-faced ruthlessness.

Just as a potential hero / hapless boyfriend character was earlier thoughtlessly dispatched when he took a step backwards and fell down a well (the Mummy did not give a fuck), the daughter is soon spread-eagled down in the dungeon, receiving the full Blood Mummy treatment whilst her horrified father looks on. The only girl to get out alive (simply because the Mummy is too busy to deal with her), Gimpera’s character meanwhile flees the scene in a state of mute insanity. Nice.

When it comes to trying to fathom the mystery of precisely how and why ‘Love Brides of the Blood Mummy’ came into existence, attempting to nail the film down geographically proves a good start.

Alongside exteriors shot primarily around the coast of Brittany, it also features interior/studio work carried out on subterranean sets which I’m pretty sure are the same ones used by another Franco-Spanish co-production, Jordi Gigó’s ‘Devil’s Kiss’ (1976). Meanwhile, the chateau featured in the film is the same one seen in Pierre Chevalier’s ‘Orloff Against The Invisible Man’ (‘La Vie Amoureuse de L'Homme Invisible’, 1970) - a film which often feels like the closest comparison to this one in terms of tone, visuals and weird/unhinged exploitation elements, and with which it was double-billed on at least one occasion [see the poster reproduced at the top of this post]. And, well… there’s a reason for that, which we’ll get on to shortly.

Though credited to a Frenchman (veteran Eurocine DP Raymond Heil), the film’s murky, autumnal photography strikes me as belonging very much in the Spanish horror tradition, heavy on the browns and greens, lending everything an antiquated, rusty/mouldy look similar to that often seen in the work of directors like Amando de Ossorio or León Klimovsky. This adds a melancholy, faintly despairing air to proceedings which is only intensified by the glacial, almost bloody-mindedly languid pacing.

The film’s music - which is fantastic - meanwhile feels very French, running the gamut from propulsive funk and weird loungey stuff to swelling, romantic strings and some creepy, avant garde electronic cues which lend an eerie, Blind Dead-esque quality to some of the Mummy’s antics.

Given the sheer variety of sounds and instrumentation featured, I had assumed whilst viewing that this soundtrack must be comprised of ‘needle-drops’ from pre-existing sources, but no - as part of his exhaustive research into the origins of this film, Mondo Macabro’s Pete Tombs has confirmed that ‘Love Brides..’ music credit - to composer/arranger and former pop singer Max Gazzola - is in fact genuine, and that the music featured here is (so far as we know) entirely original; which is pretty remarkable. (If any obscure reissue label moguls out there - I’m looking at you, Finders Keepers - feel like dredging up the tapes for a soundtrack LP, that would be just lovely, thanks.)

So - we’re definitely dealing here with that very particular liminal zone between Spanish and French ‘70s horror cinema, that’s for sure, with a few potential Eurocine connections swirling around in the mix… but beyond that, the question on every Euro-horror fan’s lips after first viewing this one will no doubt be: who exactly is the hilariously named ‘Ken Ruder’, the mysterious individual, referred to as an “underground American filmmaker” in some of the film’s original marketing materials, who ostensibly oversaw this baleful madness…?

When searching for an answer, it is probably instructive to consider the fact that - as noted above - ‘Love Brides..’ is a film which seems to be simultaneously pulling in two very different directions.

At times - primarily during the exterior scenes - someone definitely seems to have been attempting to make an artistically engaged, atmospheric horror film here, exhibiting an uncanny, almost ‘folk horror’-ish fixation with the natural world, including a lot of quality time spent with disorienting watery reflections, peat bogs, tree boughs, swathes of fog and a lengthy excursion through a field of glistening wheat sheaves.

Although the ‘look’ of the film’s photography remains consistent throughout, this all contrasts pretty sharply with what goes on once we get inside the castle, wherein we’re faced with the aforementioned succession of gruelling, dispiritingly quotidian mummy rape scenes - footage which, though not especially explicit, often veers toward the kind of fetishistic / quasi-pornographic realm in which the presentation of naked woman being tormented and molested becomes the central point of the exercise.

This all results in a confounding and unsettling viewing experience which often feels like a Eurocine sleaze movie directed by someone suffering from clinical depression; a prospect which very few modern viewers will be likely to even tolerate, let alone enjoy or try to understand.

Amid this entropic torpor though, ‘Love Brides..’ also incorporates frequent outbursts of pure, surrealistic strangeness, tailor-made to fascinate and perplex those of us who are likely to be more sympathetic to this kind of cinematic oddity.

When we first meet Baron Dartmoor for instance, he is thrashing a disembodied arm chained to his living room wall with a riding crop - a bizarre, rather Freudian image which remains unexplained until the film’s final act. Shortly thereafter, The Baron demonstrates his (otherwise unmentioned) magical prowess by presenting Frank Braña with a walking cane which he transforms into a writhing snake on the fireside rug - an effect realised through a totally unexpected application of genuine stop-motion animation.

This latter incident is a total non-sequitur, and is never referred to again during the film’s run time. (Given that the Baron is a collector of Egyptian antiquities, it occurred to me that perhaps he might have recovered Moses’ fabled magic staff, but if that was supposed to be the idea, it was completely overlooked in both the French and English dubbing.)

Elsewhere, more stop motion effects (presumably an expensive and time-consuming addition to a marginal production like this) are used to animate the Mummy’s disembodied hand during the film’s conclusion - which is pretty cool - whilst the incessant use of a primitive, in-camera ‘irising’ effect lends a peculiar silent movie feel to much of the footage in the film’s second half.

Combined with the mysteries surrounding the film’s creation, these inexplicable elements of weirdness seem to hint at a strange, hidden intelligence lurking behind the morbid and frequently rather dull events unfolding on-screen; an intelligence whose aims certainly seem to stretch beyond the brutish commercial concerns signalled by the film’s sexploitation content.

Indeed, if we fall back on the old saw that the best horror stories are those which emerge from genuinely disordered minds, then ‘..Blood Mummy’ ceases to be merely an ill-regarded Euro-trash obscurity and instead becomes something of an inscrutable, rather haunting quasi-classic - like a broadcast from some other cinematic universe entirely.

The punchline here though of course is that, thanks to ther aforementioned Mr Tombs’ tireless researches, we do actually now have a pretty good idea of who directed ‘Love Brides of the Blood Mummy’. In a sense, it would be nice to perpetuate the mystery by keeping everyone in the dark, but, given that the special edition version of the blu-ray containing Tombs’ comprehensive liner notes is now permanently sold out, it would seem churlish of me not to spread the good word.

So, long story short - surviving documentation from the film’s production suggests two potential suspects hiding behind the Ken Ruder pseudonym. The first is Alejandro Marti, a Barcelona-based producer and occasional director who got into political hot water in 1968 as a result of daring to make a film (the musical comedy ‘Elisabet’) in the Catalan language, and was thus presumably seeking alternative avenues for his talents at this point in time.

The second meanwhile is - wait for it - our old friend Pierre Chevalier, director of ‘Orloff Against The Invisible Man’, along with masses of largely forgotten softcore sex films, largely financed and distributed by (yep) Eurocine.

Whilst we have no way of ascertaining the nature or timeline of the collaboration (or lack thereof) between these two gentlemen, now that we have their names on paper, it’s naturally just a hop, skip and a jump toward speculating that Marti must have been responsible for the atmospheric / gothic exterior footage in ‘Love Brides..’, whilst Chevalier - an old hand at sexploitation, often with a fairly rape-y focus - must have been brought in to handle the more overtly sexual / gory stuff taking place down in the dungeons.

The continuity of photography, costumes and actors across the film suggests that these two directors may have worked in parallel (rather than it being a case of the sexy stuff being inserted later or some such), which is interesting, and also raises questions regarding the provenance of the alternate ‘clothed’ scenes included in the film’s Spanish cut… but anyway, not to worry! Basically, we now have a workable solution to the question of who was responsible for ‘Love Brides of the Blood Mummy’. When it comes to the why though, well… that’s a whole other kettle of fish.

Though for most viewers, Ken Ruder’s magnum opus will likely prove an unpalatable cocktail of leaden pacing, gothic misery and poorly-staged rape, for certain epicurean connoisseurs of strange cinema (hi guys, you’re probably both reading), it holds the potential to soothe, hypnotise and fascinate long after the final strains of Max Gazzola’s romantic closing theme have faded away.

As I write this, I know it is destined to be one of those films which will live on, like an itch I can’t quite scratch in the back of my mind, until the next time I’m drawn to pull the disc down from the shelf like some 21st century equivalent of a dusty, thrice-translated grimoire, in search once again of lost esoteric wisdom otherwise left buried in the remains of some condemned film lab in the French-Catalan border.

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