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...

Random Paperbacks: Trailer Camp Woman by Doug Duperrault (Bedside Books, 1960)

Another example of a ‘60s US sleaze paperback recently discovered on these shores - I scored this one at a car boot sale in Peckham, no less.

Though pretty boilerplate stuff in terms of concept and content, the cover art here is way above average (albeit poorly reproduced). Unfortunately, it resides permanently in the “artist unknown” category on the Greenleaf Classics web archive (which is about as comprehensive a reference on this stuff as exists anywhere).

Bedside Books were an early exemplar of the multiple imprints which flourished as part of the wider Greenleaf Classics empire, effectively flooding the market with ‘adult reading’ throughout the ‘60s. According to the aforementioned archive, at least 110 books were published under the Bedside banner between 1959 and 1963.

‘Trailer Camp Woman’ is actually a re-print - it was first published, with different artwork, by Beacon Books in 1959, if anyone cares. An online review on goodreads.com states that it reads like the work of the ubiquitous Orrie Hitt, and I’m content to take their word for it.

Probably more interesting in this case however is what I discovered when I first skimmed through the book’s pages;

Oh boy.

Immediately, my mind conjures up an image of the lair of some debauched early ‘60s pervert, his stash so glutted with (then rare and illicit) pornographic photos that he’s taken to tearing them up and using them for bookmarks.

Or, perhaps a more likely possibility, could the book’s former owner have been a transient person or serviceman, carefully stashing their, uh, ‘favourite’ dirty picture somewhere where it wouldn’t be found?

Either way, I’ll keep it where I found it - preserving the sordid mystery for whoever ends up taking ownership of ‘Trailer Camp Woman’ once I’m obliged to part with it.

Random Paperbacks: Stranger in Town by Raoul D’Orque (Unique Books, 1967)

A rare example of a ‘60s U.S. sleaze paperback snagged in the wild here in the UK, I recently picked this up at Oxfam of all places, for a bargain price presumably reflective of the fact that the binding and spine are absolutely shot.

I mean, as if they actually expected anyone to read it! The cover art by Bill Alexander is the big draw here, and I’ll freely admit to staring at its warped, weirdo beauty for far longer than is healthy.

Though the artist’s intention was probably for our attention to be focused on the figure of the innocent (white-haired?) nymphet being assaulted by a jumpsuit-clad dominatrix immediately after stepping off the bus in the Big City, my focus instead keeps getting drawn back to the male figure on the left, with his Clint Eastwood scowl, jaunty neckerchief and fragile, elongated hands, clutching at the victim’s pasteboard suitcase.

Is he working in cahoots with the dominatrix, or has he just scuttled round the corner, drawn magnet-like by the opportunity to snatch some luggage? (“Yoink!”)

Either way, the demented cartoon world created by Alexander in this one mad vignette is sublime; the implicit idea that moral standards in America’s cities have collapsed to such an extent that a buxom, mid-western lass can’t even make it out of the bus station without getting clobbered by perverts and ripped off by rat-men… and the unspoken promise that, if you’re enough of a freak to be checking out a volume like this, you should probably find this prospect exciting, and hit the mean and sticky streets in search of flesh forthwith. Yowza!

I’ve always felt you could draw a direct line between this kind of sleaze paperback artwork, the more highly regarded/subversive fetish illustration which was its contemporary cousin, and the similarly ugly/beautiful atmosphere conjured up (albeit in more self-aware fashion) by ‘90s comic artists like Dan Clowes and Charles Burns - and indeed, clicking through to the above-linked ‘This is Horror’ story on Bill Alexander reveals that his long and varied career touched on all these areas, and plenty more besides.

A rare example of an African-American commercial artist, Alexander began his career in the ‘40s, illustrating the labels of 78rpm records by cats like Roy Milton (see some examples here), before helping to create “arguably the first black superhero strip”, ‘The Bronze Bomber’, which appeared in the Los Angeles Tribune from 1941-43. (Sadly, all artwork from this strip appears lost - for more detail, see the Wikipedia entry for Alexander’s contemporary Gene Bilbrew.)

After seeing service in WWII, Alexander seems to have moved on to paperback covers and S&M / fetish illustration through the ‘50s and ‘60s, including work for the legendary Irving Klaw, before achieving renown of a different order through his covers for the Eerie Publications line of horror comics in the 1970s - for more on which, I’ll refer you back to the This is Horror article, which is a great read.

As to the book itself, this appears to be the sole volume credited to the supremely named Raoul D’Orque -- and if I was ever looking for an alias to use for anonymously checking into hotels or making pornography, I think I just found it.

Rather than trying to provide a plot synopsis or similar, I’ll just hit you with this scan of the novel’s opening pages:

I realise coherence wasn’t a big concern for authors of single draft roughie sleaze books or their publishers, but still - there’s something fairly awe-inspiring about the idea that a manuscript which descends into gobbledegook within its third sentence can still go to print unaltered.

Just imagine the Burroughs-esque cut-up mayhem and made up words (‘matine’?) which might unfold across the following 150 pages, and shudder with misplaced ecstasy.

Oh, and - you see that ‘UB’ logo stuck in the middle of the above cover, like a sticker on an apple or something? That’s not actually a sticker on the book, it’s printed on. Someone must have artlessly slapped it onto Alexander’s original artwork whilst setting it out for printing.

This practice seems to have been standard operating procedure not only at Unique Books, but across all the associated imprints operated out of Buffalo, NY during the ‘60s by frequently indicted Times Square porno/sleaze entrepreneur Eddie Mishkin. (Also see: ‘After Hours’, ‘First Niter’, ‘Nitey Night’ etc, all of which used near-identical typography, and frequently featured the work of fetish-affiliated artists like Eric Stanton and the aforementioned Gene Bilbrew.)

I wonder, incidentally, whether Eddie Mishkin was any relation to Andy Milligan’s producer / nemesis William Mishkin, who was based out of nearby 42nd street, and frequently worked with other Mishkin brothers on assorted dubious enterprises? My sole reference on such matters, Jimmy McDonough’s essential Milligan biography The Ghastly One, ain’t telling, but either way, the spider’s web of subterranean cultural connections uncovered by my visit to Oxfam grows...

Horror Express / Gothic Originals: The Horrible Sexy Vampire [‘El Vampiro de la Autopista’] (José Luis Madrid, 1971)

Well, I've got to hand it to ‘em - his behaviour is horrible, he’s somewhat more sexy than most movie monsters, and he is, indisputably, a vampire… as well as an invisible man to boot!

Leaving aside its modest success in living up to its unforgettable English language title however, it saddens me to report that, in most other respects, José Luis Madrid’s film is unimaginative, amateurish and astoundingly dull.

Disappointingly short on action or what most viewers would define as ‘interest’, this hum-drum tale of an atavistic bloodsucker returning from the great beyond to (oddly) strangle a bunch of women in the countryside around Stuttgart instead relies heavily on extended, procedural dialogue/investigation scenes, many of which drag on for so long that listening to the long-suffering English dubbing team desperately trying to come up with enough mindless banter to fill all the dead air becomes more entertaining than anything being enacted on the screen.

Even the frequent scenes of female nudity, which have earned the film a certain notoriety over the years, and which must have been quite risqué for some markets at the time of release, now seem laughably quaint. 

Misogynistic to a fault, these diversions tend to centre around the inherently comic notion that the very first thing most women do upon returning home is take off all their clothes and look at their boobs in the mirror (just to check they’re still there, I suppose); thus making best use of those few, valuable seconds before the horrible, sexy invisible-vampire-man inevitably barges in and throttles them.

Why does the vampire become invisible, exactly? This seems to be a question whose answer is lost to the vagaries of time, but possible explanations include: a) to allow additional footage to be shot in the absence of star Waldemar Wohlfahrt, b) to assist in overcoming the technical challenges of shooting scenes in which Wohlfahrt, who also plays the great-grandson of the vampiric baron, needs to struggle with his undead forebear, or c) just for the sheer bloody-minded hell of it.

Although ‘The Horrible Sexy Vampire’ is not a film which could be honestly recommended to anyone on any conventional basis, it does at least present us with such a succession of oddities such as the one outlined above that it nonetheless makes for strangely compulsive viewing for… well, for me, at least. I can’t claim to speak for anyone else around here.

Not least among these eccentricities is the extraordinary presence of Wohlfahrt himself. 

Later known as Wal Davis (in which capacity he stared as an extremely unlikely Maciste in two of the strangest and most elusive films Jess Franco ever made, ‘Les Glutonnes’ and ‘Maciste Contre la Reine des Amazones’ (both 1972)), Wohlfahrt is a lanky weirdo with a shock of unkempt, peroxide blonde hair, who plays the film’s ‘present day’ protagonist, Count Obelnsky, as a kind of gloomy, self-serious aristocrat who wants nothing more out of life than to be left alone to spend his evenings indulging his passion for taxidermy and getting absolutely hammered on hard liquor.

This unusual characterisation becomes even stranger when one learns that ‘The Horrible Sexy Vampire’ was essentially a vanity project for Wohlfahrt, dreamt up to capitalise on the tabloid notoriety he’d gained after being falsely accused of a series of serial strangulation murders which took place on German highways during the 1960s. (Hence the film’s original Spanish release title, which translates as ‘Vampire of the Autobahn’.)

Although Wohlfahrt - who appears to have been some kind of roving playboy chiefly resident in the German tourist enclave of Benidorm - was acquitted of involvement in the crimes when it was proven beyond doubt that he was in Spain when several of the murders were committed, parallel charges brought against him for illegal possession of a firearm (also overturned), and pimping (for which he served a short prison sentence) suggest he was not exactly what you’d call a gentleman of good character - a suspicion borne out by his highly questionable attempts to use the publicity surrounding his arrest to launch a career in show business.

After a novelty pop single (released in Spain under the name ‘Waldemar El Vampiro’) failed to chart, Wohlfahrt appears to have turned to the film industry… which brings us to ‘The Horrible Sexy Vampire’.

Tastefully, the film was shot around Stuttgart, near to the locations of the real life crimes of which its star was accused, and its script is packed with references to the murders and to the details of Wohlfahrt’s highly publicised arrest… all of which proves a lot more interesting than anything which actually occurs on-screen in ‘The Horrible Sexy Vampire’, sad to say.

[Readers wishing to appraise themselves of the full details of this sordid affair are advised to consult either Ismael Fernandez’s booklet accompanying Mondo Macabro’s recent blu-ray release of the film, or David Flint & Adrian J. Martin’s audio commentary on the same disc.]

Meanwhile, another aspect of the film which helped to keep me engaged was its English dubbing, which is executed with a vibe of perfect, dead-pan absurdity which put me in mind of classics like ‘The Devil's Nightmare’ (1971).

This is perhaps best exemplified by the faux-British accent assigned to Count Oblensky (who has flown in from London to reclaim his ancestral seat), which has him preface every other remark with “I say..” or “Now look here..”, and also by the unfortunate decision to name the film’s vampire ‘Baron Winninger’ - invariably pronounced by the voice actors as ‘Baron Vinegar’.

Bonus points need to be awarded too for the bit where, having being asked a fairly reasonable question re: how come a coffin happens to be empty, a police detective responds, “there could be lots of reasons... why should I bother to explain? It's stupid!” A feeling keenly shared by everyone involved in the writing or translation of this film, I’m sure.

In a similar vein, I also liked Count Oblensky's weird insistence that, having taken possession of his family’s castle, he must act in strict adherence to the strange rules imposed in the will of his ancestor, who died in 1886. (I mean, who the hell does he think is going to take him to court to enforce them?)

As you’d hope, the wardrobe choices sported by both Wohlfahrt and leading lady Susan Carvasal (who, as the only female character who does anything other immediately stripping and dying, is introduced way after the film’s halfway point) are frequently jaw-dropping in their gaudy splendour, and, finally, I also really enjoyed the score, which contains several memorable cues composed by Spanish film music mainstay Angel Arteaga.

Most notable of these is an absolutely delightful, somewhat Morricone-esque piece for acoustic guitar, vibraphone and shrill female vocals which plays incessantly during the second half of the film, following Carvasal’s belated arrival. It’s a real ear worm, and I’d love to be able to obtain a copy on 7” or something. (“Love theme from The Horrible Sexy Vampire”, anyone?)

And…. that’s all I got. ‘The Horrible Sexy Vampire’, ladies and gents. You can meet him if you wish, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. (If nothing else, the disc will look good on the shelf.)

 

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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Horror Express 2020 #6: Mas Alla Del Terror / ‘Further Than Fear’ (Tomás Aznar, 1980)

The more I learn about global genre cinema, the more I appreciate those increasingly rare opportunities to jump into something with absolutely no idea what to expect. As such, this remarkably obscure Spanish horror - available solely as an extremely smeary VHS-rip, insofar as I’m aware - proved a rare treat.

Going in, all I knew about Tomás Aznar’s film was:

1. It features some pretty great electro-rock music, which was once featured on an episode of El Diabolik’s Psychotronic Soundtracks.
2. It was released in Spain under the auspices of ‘Cinevisión’, the same company responsible for Escalofrío / Satan’s Blood a few years earlier.
3. It was advertised using the fairly awe-inspiring, Frazetta-plagiarising poster you see reproduced above. (1)

All in all then, the omens looked good.

Perhaps one of the things which has led to ‘Mas Alla Del Terror’ receiving so little attention from horror fans is the misleadingly mild pre-credits sequence, which sees a young woman (Lola, played by Raquel Ramírez) being picked up from a roadside café by an older man, with the couple’s earnest dialogue suggesting that they are engaged in some kind of long-term adulterous relationship.

Lola insists on taking her partner to some out of the way, rural idyll, where, in a matter of seconds, things go from second-rate Truffaut to full-on Ruggero Deodato, as she attempts to steal the man’s wallet, prompting him begin savagely beating her, before she in turn pulls a knife and remorselessly carves him up.

“Dirty fucker - this ain’t shit buddy,” she exclaims as she contemptuously pockets the measly few pesetas which comprised his roll, wiping her blade on his tie and leaving him bleeding out from multiple chest wounds as she sets out to hitchhike back to town. Yikes!

Post-credits, we re-join Lola in what seems to be her more natural habitat, rocking regulation leathers as she trades sneering, scatological insults with the other members of her equally amoral, drug-huffing misfit biker gang (“Fuck, you smell like camel shit - find yourself a good dentist”, she greets a dealer dishing out wraps of hash outside a nightclub).

From here, the movie kicks into gear as a kind of ‘Mad Foxes’-via-‘Last House..’ type psychotic youth-gone-wild gang movie, as these punk kids indulge in all kinds of gratuitous cruelty, exchanging dialogue that (if the fab-subs to be believed) consists largely of increasingly obscene sexual insults, which I won’t recount here lest they offend the sensibilities of the very internet itself.

After an attempt to rob a greasy spoon cafe (dig that low level of ambition) escalates into an impromptu killing spree, the gang - who now essentially comprise Lola plus leader Chema (Francisco Sánchez Grajera) and wingnut Nico (Emilio Siegrist) - briefly go on the road ‘Rabid Dogs’-style with a pair of hostages. So fucked up are our anti-social anti-heroes though, they can’t even keep this relatively straight-forward scenario on the road for more than five minutes of screen time, before internecine bickering leads to a roadside altercation soon leaves them lost in the depths of the countryside with a totalled car.

Spying lights as they trudge across the featureless nocturnal landscape, the gang come upon a well-appointed house, and, as you might well expect, get stuck straight into a dispiritingly gruelling home invasion scenario. After taking a tyre iron to the family dog (mercifully, VHS murk obscures this footage, but I REALLY hope the whines of canine distress on the soundtrack aren’t genuine), they proceed to remorselessly brutalise the elderly lady they find within, whilst her youthful grandson (we presume) hides terrified upstairs.

Mindlessly destructive brutes that they are, the gang have soon set the house alight, leaving the helpless residents to perish. But wait! As it turns out, the poor grandmother they've just left for dead was actually a high-ranking Satanic priestess of some kind, and she proceeds to curse them with her dying breaths, promising supernatural vengeance in the name of Astaroth, Beelzebub and the whole merry gang!

Shortly thereafter, the gang and their hostages once more find themselves shit-out-of-luck transport-wise, holed up in a remote, ruined church with eerie, skeleton-filled catacombs beneath it - by which point, we can probably get a handle on where things are heading next, I should think.

It’s a shame however that the pacing of this horror-themed second half of the film pretty much grinds to a halt in comparison to the frantic, action-packed stuff which has preceded it. Much aimless waiting and wandering fills up the remaining minutes of run-time, whilst I also found the idea of having the evil-doers’ victims return in spectral form to wreak their ironic vengeance - much in the manner of a Japanese kaidan - to be pretty old hat. I mean, couldn’t they have rustled up a few demons or zombies or something, instead of just going with the old EC Comics “b-but I saw you, you were dead - arg!” route?

Well, no matter - on the plus side, they certainly picked a great location for it - an arid, rustic set of ruins which just reek of poverty-stricken misery and menace. There's a lot of great Armando de Ossorio / ‘..Blind Dead’ type atmosphere to enjoy here, not least when the acrid, cobweb-shrouded skeletons in the catacombs are briefly unleashed to take care of the Stockholm Syndromed female hostage, whilst things are livened up considerably by intermittent outbursts of the aforementioned killer, Goblin-esque disco-rock (courtesy of one J.P. Decerf and the ever-reliable CAM library). (2)

Even beyond their penchant for senseless murder meanwhile, there’s something singularly warped and repulsive about the gang members here, as they fill their remaining hours with low level blasphemy and icky sexual perversity (at one point one of the guys aimlessly masturbates into the fire whilst shrieking an improvised litany in praise of “fornication”), sneering and drooling in the face of death like true no-hope punks.

As the remaining characters gradually meet their predestined demise, new elements are added to the medieval ‘triumph of death’ mural which takes pride of place on the church’s walls - a common ‘body count movie’ motif, but nicely done - heralding the eventually reappearance of the avenging witch, and a rather fine, high five-worthy ending which I won’t spoil for you here.

Whilst I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to hail it as a lost classic, ‘Mas Alla Del Terror’ is, as you may have gathered, wild as all hell - an off-the-map rampage of low rent sleaze, grime and amoral hell-raisin’ which gradually finds itself enveloped by a cloak of old school, Iberian gothic doom.

Production values are minimal, performances are perfunctory (aside from Ramirez, who is brilliant, and should clearly have wielded her flick knife in more movies) and Azner directs with no great amount of flair, but there is nonetheless a ton of fun to be had here for a certain, special audience. Indeed, I’m amazed that this film’s potential has remained largely untapped by all the late-era Euro-horror / video nasty fans out there.

It would certainly be lovely to see a restored version popping up at some point in the future, but for now, let’s just say that this one is well worth a trip down to the VHS/torrent catacombs if it sounds like your particular cup of rancid, spiked tea.

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(1) Apparently originating on the cover of ‘Vampirella’ # 11 in 1971, this iconic Frank Frazetta witch illustration seems to have had a big impact on horror movie poster artists - it was also recycled just a blatantly for the remarkably misleading advertising which accompanied Matt Cimber’s perennially underappreciated The Witch Who Came From The Sea in 1976.

(2)Once again, thanks are due to the aforementioned El Diabolik podcast for filling me in on the soundtrack info and name of the composer. Check out Episode 46 of their fine programme to hear some of the music from this wild out in the wild.

Horror Express 2020 #3: Escalofrío / ‘Satan’s Blood’ (Carlos Puerto, 1978)

Seemingly one of the first Spanish horror films to take advantage of the “S” (for ‘sex’) certificate introduced to the country’s ratings system as part of the easing of censorship which accompanied the collapse of the Franco regime in the late 1970s, this out-of-nowhere devil worship shocker (Juan Piquer Simón of ‘Slugs’ and ‘Pieces’ infamy takes a production credit, director Puerto had previously helmed Paul Naschy’s little-known political thriller ‘El Francotirador’ [‘The Sniper’]) charmingly opens with a few minutes of run-time padding mondo type business.

First up, a purported professor of parapsychological matters delivers some generic blather vis-à-vis the dangers that dabbling with the forces of darkness continues to pose in our contemporary world. His brief lecture is interspersed with close-ups of illustrations from the same coffee table witchcraft book which will later turn up as a prop in the main body of the film, which amusingly results in an inadvertent guest appearance from the ubiquitous Alex and Maxine Sanders (last glimpsed around these parts when we looked at ‘Legend of the Witches’ (1970) and ‘Secret Rites’ (1971) last year).

This leads into a decidedly sleazy studio recreation of a generic black mass / virgin sacrifice type scenario, which succeeds admirably in demonstrating what I think we can probably all agree is the true function of The Black Arts within modern society – namely, giving creepy bearded men an opportunity to publically molest impressionable young women, often to the accompaniment of dissonant synthesizer music.

After that’s all over and done with, we finally open the movie proper and are introduced to our protagonists, Andrés and Ana (José María Guillén and Mariana Karr), a glumly average young couple who live happily in a pokey Madrid flat with their German Shepard, Blackie (no racial connotation intended there, let’s hope).

Although a night of dancing and drinking is out of the question for the couple (Ana is four months pregnant), they nonetheless decide to cheer themselves up with a night on the town, and so, after taking in a first run screening of ‘Star Wars’ (check out that marquee!), find themselves aimlessly driving around the city, with Blackie ensconced in the back seat.

Little do they realise however that this leaves them in a perfect state of receptive boredom to be hailed down by Bruno (Ángel Aranda, a one-time peplum regular who horror fans might recognise from ‘Planet of the Vampires’ (1965) or ‘A Dragonfly for Each Corpse’(1975)), a well-dressed playboy type who claims he was Andrés’ friend back in his school days, even though he looks considerably older than Andrés, who doesn’t remember him at all.

Exuberantly friendly, as is the want of OBVIOUS SATANIST SWINGERS, Bruno and his wife Berta (Sandra Alberti) invite Andrés and Ana back to their place to celebrate their ‘reunion’, and, having nothing better to do, our protagonists acquiesce – only to reconsider when, an hour’s drive into the countryside later, they find themselves traversing the kind of foreboding, overcast rural hellhole in which José Ramón Larraz would probably have chosen to shoot a movie.

Many of us no doubt have taken the decision to get the hell out of dodge as soon as we saw Luis Barboo – a towering actor who played muscleman/heavy roles in a number of early ‘70s Jess Franco films – clad in a full length cloak, opening the gates to the Bruno & Berta’s modest country estate. But, unfortunately, Andrés and Ana are as feckless and easily-led as they come – doe-eyed rabbits in the murky headlights of their hosts’ nefarious intentions.

The scenes which follow discomfort us less through means of outright horror, and more just through a sense of acute social awkwardness, as we are forced to contemplate our own likely responses, should be find ourselves guests in the home of a pair of over-friendly strangers who keep blatantly lying to us, in between fingering occult paraphernalia and asking questions of the “do you believe, in the power of the mind?” variety.

Things get even more uncomfortable once the hosts declare that it’s time to get the ouija board out (actually, they have a swanky, specially engraved ouija table for the occasion), prompting a series of unsettling declarations from the spirit world which prompt Bruno and Berta to start sniping at each other about their shared history of suicide attempts.

It’s certainly hellish alright, but more in a Chris Morris/Alan Partridge vein than a Bava/Fulci one for the most part - although, did I mention the bit where Ana walks in on Berta in the kitchen and funds her chowing down on a dog’s bowl full of gory, unidentified offal? Not a good sign.

Again, I’m sure even the most timid amongst us would be WELL ON OUR WAY HOME by this point, flimsy “you’ll never manage to find the roads in this bad weather” excuses or no. But, Andrés and Ana are not like you and I, so we soon find them sitting expressionless in the guest bedroom, awaiting whatever other atrocities the night has in store. (Well, actually they take a bath together – presumably just because there’s not been any nudity on screen for quite a while at this point. There’s not much water in the tub, and it looks freezing.)

The closest thing ‘Satan’s Blood’ offers to a shit-just-got-real moment follows, as Ana’s attempt to enjoy some classic, gothic horror style nocturnal nightgown peregrinations is rudely interrupted by the creepy, hobo-type guy who has been hanging around the house’s kitchens for reasons which are never adequately explained. A jarring attempted rape scene ensues, which seemingly proves enough to rouse even Andrés from his complacency. Setting off together to confront their hosts vis-à-vis the perennial issue of just-what-the-heck-is-going-on-around-here, the couple find Bruno and Berta sitting naked within the pentagram etched into the floor of their living room, backed by a roaring fire!

Apparently entranced by a potent combination of low key lighting and ragin’ psychedelic library cues, Andrés and Ana promptly forget their grievances, doff their dressing gowns, and move forward to partake in ‘Satan’s Blood’s most elaborate, set-piece sequence – a languorous, four-way softcore Satanic orgy.

Heavy on the super-imposed cross-fades and overdubbed moanin’ and groanin’, this scene achieves a fairly epic duration, but sadly misses the ‘erotic’ bullseye by quite some distance, instead prefiguring the “this is merely somewhat distasteful” hard-body simulated sex approach later taken to unsavoury extremes by Larraz’s similarly themed ‘Black Candles’ (‘Los Ritos Sexuales del Diablo’, 1982).

In moments like this, ‘Satan’s Blood’ (or ‘Escalofrío’ [roughly: ‘Shudder’ or ‘Shiver’], as it was originally billed for Spanish audiences) seems to be aspiring to the kind of decadent, libidinous delirium which characterised Euro-horror’s “Erotic Castle Movie” wave of the early 1970s. Even just a few short years down the line though, that kind of oneiric eroticism already seems to belong to another world - a half-remembered dream, impossible to recapture.

It’s as if, in the second half of the decade, somebody turned the overhead lights on, doused the fire and poured the the last few trickles of J&B down the sink. By this point, horror films across globe had (for better or for worse) become nasty, squalid and mean, and this film’s intermittent attempts to swim against the tide prove woefully ineffectual.

As the remnants of gothic cliché fade into obsolescence, the Satanists’ glitzy accoutrements merely seem tacky and gauche, whilst the ever-more-feral demands of the horror audience instead demand that we’re confronted with dead dogs, steaming bowls of offal and hobo rapists, all arrayed across grimy linoleum floors. Instead of being deliciously disorientating meanwhile, the fact that nobody at any point does anything that makes sense merely seems annoying.

In short, everything in ‘Satan’s Blood’ looks cold, uninviting and shabby. Rather than abandoning themselves to a life of amoral sensory indulgence when they awaken the next morning, our characters proceed about their glum business as if the previous evening’s gruelling shag-fest had never happened - which I’ll choose to read as a presumably realistic portrayal of the embarrassing aftermath of unplanned group sex, rather than just the result of the producers shoehorning the sex scene into the film late in production to up the exploitation factor.

Ana is back in her frumpy jumper, complaining that Berta (confined to bed as a result of the night’s ceremonial exertions) needs to see a doctor, and the familiar, anxious ballet of we-need-to-get-going / oh-no-our-car-won’t-start / why-don't you-stay-for-lunch proceeds apace, until the flagging narrative eventually tries to retool itself as a kind of cracked murder mystery / walking corpses “but-we-saw-you-you-were-dead” type effort.

Viewed from the other side of the mirror however, there are a few aspects of ‘Satan’s Blood’ which stand out as noteworthy within the Pete-Walker-triumphant canon of grim, post ‘75 European horror. In particular, I appreciated the way that, in stark contrast to the hoary old tradition of pulp devil worship yarns, the Satanist couple here are gradually revealed to be disturbed, ineffectual and rather pathetic individuals, locked into some kind of self-destructive, co-dependant mania.

A far cry from the high-handed, baronial masterminds of a Dennis Wheatley novel, they are basically just desperately unhappy neurotics in search of some kind of power and fulfilment – a malign flipside of the emotionally neutered boredom evinced by our ‘innocent’, mainstream protagonists.

Though underexplored here, this attempt to deflate the pomposity of evil takes us all the way back to Val Lewton’s ‘The Seventh Victim’ (1943), even though it is entirely undermined by the film’s rather desperate decision to try to transform itself into a ten-years-late ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ rip-off in its final act, introducing an omniscient societal conspiracy angle, which… makes about as much sense as any of the other slackly scripted rubbish our unfortunate hero and heroine have to contend with over the course of this motion picture, I suppose. Poor bunnies.

Striking an uneasy balance between the transcendental and mundane strands of ‘70s occult horror, ‘Satan’s Blood’ ultimately succeeds at neither, but if you find yourself in the mood for a prime slice of chilly and mean-spirited late ‘70s witch-smut (and don’t we all, once in a while), it should nonetheless hit the spot pretty satisfactorily, sitting comfortably next to such grubby items as Killer’s Moon or Mario Mercier’s ‘La Papesse’ / ‘A Woman Possessed’ (which I briefly wrote about in this post), more-so than the earlier, more ethereal takes on the sub-genre suggested by its storyline.

Krimi Casebook: The Hunchback of Soho (Alfred Vohrer, 1966)

There’s nothing quite like movies which present a mythic/fantastical/completely absurd take on places quite near to where you live, is there? (“Have you seen ‘The Hunchback of Soho’?”, “Seen ‘im? I think I bought him a pint down The White Horse last week!”, etc.)

In fact, this is probably the element which most appeals to me above all about the West German Edgar Wallace ‘Krimi’ films spearheaded by Copenhagen-based Rialto Film - their bizarre conception of a phantasmagorical England that feels like an amalgam of the 1960s and 1890s, defined by strangulations in fog-choked, cobblestoned alleyways, sinister rendezvous in neon-lit, subterranean speakeasies and elaborate tea parties in gothic manor houses, all of which are liable to be interrupted at any moment by dapper, pipe-smoking detectives as they break down the plywood doors (probably using an oversized umbrella), enunciating that cry guaranteed to send shivers down the spine of all rapscallions and ne’erdo wells, “SCOTLAND YARD!”.

Despite its magnificent title however, there is sadly little Soho ambience (either real or imagined) to be found within Alfred Vohrer’s ‘Der Bucklige von Soho’, even as it opens in attention-grabbing fashion with the titular hunchback committing exactly the kind of back alley strangling described above, callously throttling a young lady in black lingerie and high heels as she flees from what appears to be another one of those sinister nightclub-brothels which seem to proliferate in Krimi London.

In fact, the vast majority of this caper takes place on a series of interior sets, variously representing the opulent drawing room of the elderly General & Lady Peabody, the authoritarian religious school for wayward girls which they sponsor, the secret subterranean workhouse / villain lair within which the criminally-minded proprietors of said school conduct their dastardly business, and the casino-cum-nightclub wherein the imprisoned girls are put to work as dancers / hostesses.

All of these locations seem to be inter-connected in a way that I never fully understood, allowing characters to move between them as if they were merely popping between rooms, and thus largely doing away with the need for exteriors, beyond the aforementioned alleyway set and a few stock shots of police cars zooming around Westminster and Piccadilly. Efficient though this must have been from a production perspective however, it lends the film a rather claustrophobic, repetitious feel which doesn’t necessarily serve it well.

Achieving a delicate balance between illogic and boredom, the plot here is likewise a bit sub-par, rehashing elements of Vohrer’s earlier, arguably definitive, krimi The Dead Eyes of London (1961, itself a loose remake of the similarly-named 1939 Bela Lugosi movie), with a distinct sense of diminishing returns. The familiar material is given a bit of a Women in Prison makeover this time around, making it feel reminiscent at times of Pete Walker’s later ‘House of Whipcord’ (1974) – albeit,  a somewhat softer, more innocent variation on the scenario in which the doddering elderly couple remain blissfully unaware of the kinky depredations being perpetrated below stairs, or in the dungeon, or round the corner, or wherever the heck the ‘school’ is supposed to be in relation to their house.

Though the perennial theme of girls being kept imprisoned against their will is explored in abundantly suggestive fashion here, the film’s mid-‘60s production date ensures that the floodgates to full-on sleaze remain closed, with the obligatory lechery and low-key sadism presented in a prim, buttoned down fashion that, ironically, makes it all feel far more icky and perverse than would have been the case if they’d just thrown in a bit of good ol’ no nonsense nudity and brawling to relieve the tension.

So, no shower scenes, cat-fights or lesbian frolics here, but we instead get to enjoy such curious sights as the imprisoned girls being forced to sing jaunty hymns against their will, and – in probably the film’s weirdest tableau – a newly captured heiress in elegant evening wear being thrown on the filthy floor of the ‘workhouse’ set and doused with a hosepipe by the leering hunchback, whilst the other girls toil on around her, paying no mind.

Earlier in the ‘60s, Vohrer had established himself as by far the most inventive and accomplished director on Rialto’s payroll, but unfortunately his work proves disappointingly pedestrian here, suggesting that he was either working under greater time and budgetary pressures than usual, or was simply dog tired of making these damned things.

As such, uninterrupted master shots tend to predominate, and the bizarre stylistic experiments which proved so memorable in Vohrer’s earlier films are notable by their absence. No shots taken from the POV of a newspaper, or from the interior of someone’s mouth, here, sadly. About the best we get are a few strangling and/or gun-wielding hands looming into frame from the bottom left, comic book style. A nice touch, but pretty trad, dad, by the wacky standards set by Vohrer’s earlier work.

Meanwhile, ‘Hunchback..’ suffers further from the absence of the majority of the group of actors I’ve come to think of as the “Krimi gang”. Although Siegfried Schürenberg returns as the perpetually flustered ‘Sir John’ (a role he played in over a dozen Wallace adaptations), big hotters like Dieter Eppler, Werner Peters, Karin Dor and Klaus Kinski were all AWOL for this one - as, regrettably, was our usual dashing silver fox, Joachim Fuchsberger.

In his absence, Günther Stoll (who for some reason would later go on to corner the market in Italian-German giallo/krimi crossovers, appearing in Dallamano’s ‘What Have They Done to Solange?’ (1972), Duccio Tessari’s ‘The Bloodstained Butterfly’ (1971) and Freda’s ‘Double Face’ (1969)) steps into the obligatory suave, pipe-smoking detective role, but, despite a peculiar bit of comedic business about him doing his laundry, Stoll lacks that patented Fuchsberger charm; as a result, he is assigned relatively little screen-time and ultimately proves a bit of a non-entity.

One familiar presence we cannot escape here though is, naturally, that of ubiquitous funnyman Eddi Arent, although mericfully, his role actually takes quite an interesting turn during the film’s second half, as he ditches his usual ‘finickety, simpering choirmaster’ shtick, donning mirror shades as he reveals that that persona was actually nothing more than cover for his true identity as a dastardly criminal mastermind overseeing the whole ‘white slavery’ operation – a role which he throws himself into with hard-edged gusto .

There is, however, no shortage of gratuitous comic relief to be found elsewhere, between a bungling, short-sighted solicitor, the delusional General Peabody perpetually re-living WWII tank battles, and the aforementioned Sir John. Together, these over-enunciating oddballs conspire to make sections of ‘The Hunchback of Soho’ pretty tough sledding, especially as the English fan-subs on the version of the film I watched did little to preserve the no doubt uproarious phrasing and comic timing of their high-pitched German exclamations.

I swear, during one drawing room tea party scene which united all of these characters, plus Arent in his comic persona, I thought I’d died and become trapped in some kind of particularly fiendish purgatory. It was only the sight of the generous platter of shortbread and bourbon biscuits they were enjoying alongside their Earl Grey which kept me going, together with pondering the political ramifications of a West German film which presents a retired British general as a bumbling, senile buffoon with a tendency to end sentences with things like, “..and that’s why we won the war!”.

On the plus side, ‘Hunchback..’ has the distinction of being the first Krimi made in colour, and I must say, they did a very good job of it too, capturing that very specific, mid-‘60s grungy/atmospheric pseudo-Technicolor look in which deep pools of black contrast with vast swatches of brown and dark green and intermittent blasts of bright red, lending the film a visual depth which, if it’s not quite up to the standard of Hammer’s pre-’66 gothic horrors, at least compares favourably to some of their more handsome imitators.

By far the best thing here though is Peter Thomas’s characteristically hellzapoppin’ score, which arguably proves more exciting than anything which actually transpires on screen, beginning with a title theme that takes the “hoo, hah” backing vocals from Sam Cooke’s ‘Chain Gang’ down for a beating in some subterranean, reverb-drenched hell, before proceeding to take us on a chamber-of-musical-horrors tour incorporating bulbous, Residents-esque discordo-jazz, spidery, Ventures-at-Halloween surf guitar and assorted screams and wails of the damned, all set to a persistent pulse of thunderous caveman drumming.

I know that Thomas has something of a cult rep amongst the more shadowy corners of the soundtrack/library collectors world, but seriously, has anyone ever reissued the music he recorded for these Krimis..? If not, they really should. It’s completely out to lunch, some of the wildest, most errant aural craziness I’ve ever heard crow-barred into a motion picture (this side of the Indian sub-continent, at least), and I’m sure it would go down a storm with whatever remains of the garage punk/exotica contingent.

That aside though, I’m afraid ‘The Hunchback of Soho’ is, on every level, a disappointment. In addition to featuring very little Soho, it even has the audacity to give us a FAKE hunchback, if you can believe that. Richard Haller, who portrays Harry the hunchback here, proves a pale imitation of Ady Berber’s unforgettable turn in ‘The Dead Eyes of London’, and yes, in the final reel, Stoller pulls aside his jacket to reveal a false hump! Hopeless. (Though it must be said, the mystery of quite why this guy found it necessary to go around pretending to be a drooling hunchback 24/7 proves far more perplexing than anything in the film’s ostensible plotline.)

In spite of the novelty of colour and a somewhat higher sleaze quotent than was permitted for entries earlier in the decade then, we must sadly chalk this one up as weak tea for Krimi enthusiasts, and a total write-off for any viewers hoping to make a sideways move into the genre from straight horror. It’s a perfectly reasonable time-killer, and nice to look at, but really - only completists, WIP historians, Peter Thomas archivists or the terminally bored need knock upon this door.