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A young home health aide finds out her new patient, a comatose old woman in a dark, gloomy mansion, was once a famous ballet instructor who's said to have a fortune hidden somewhere in the house. That night, the girl tells her beau about it and together with a friend they go back to rob the place -on Halloween, no less. Once they break in, the nightmare begins...

A less garish blend of Mario Bava's "A Drop Of Water" (BLACK SABBATH) and Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA with a stately, "sedated" sort of style that gives the rural landscape, crumbling estate, and supernatural happenings a weird kind of MASTERPIECE THEATER vibe. The budget wasn't bad and the FX were pretty good but overall a 7/10. It would have been nice if whoever did the subtitles actually knew English.

Mexican comedian Clavillazo stars as a funeral parlor employee who comes to the aid of a penniless girl burying her last relative but their budding romance is interrupted when she's kidnapped by a mad scientist and Clavillazo must enter the monsters' castle to get the damsel in distress back. Once inside, he battles Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Mummy, and even the Creature from the Black Lagoon as he dodges all sorts of mayhem in what's basically a south-of-the-border ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN with "everything but the kitchen sink" thrown in. "Mexico's Christopher Lee", Germán Robles, guest stars as the vampire, a signature role for him. I fully expected "painfully unfunny" but it wasn't that bad if you're in the right frame of mind for this sort of nonsense and I guess I was. Otherwise, it's strictly "kiddie matinée".

A troubled young Count (Franco Nero), living in a crumbling villa with his domineering mother, takes comfort in taxidermy (sound familiar?) until he falls in love with a girl (Erica Blanc) his mother naturally doesn't approve of. The old battle ax tells a servant she treats "like a daughter" that she'd be forever grateful if the girl would make her son's fiancée disappear and not only does the servant kill the son's intended, she offs his mother, too. The Count takes his mom's death hard but not as hard as his fiancee's, whose body he stuffs before he starts strangling strippers. The servant tells him she'll help cover up his crimes if he'll marry her and he agrees but when his dead fiancee's look-alike sister (also Erica Blanc) shows up looking for answers, complications ensue...

To say THE THIRD EYE was inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO would be an understatement but it does go off on a crazy tangent of its own and was obviously capitalizing on a spate of Hammer "mini-Hitchcock" thrillers popular at the time (MANIAC, PARANOIA, HYSTERIA). In black & white with cool-looking red subtitles, the damn thing was never dull, that's for sure. Cult director Joe D'Amato "unofficially" remade this as BEYOND THE DARKNESS in 1979.