Tag Archives: Horror

Black and White, Horror, Imaginary British Cinema

#44 – Claws of the Damned

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(1946, GB, 100 min, b/w) Dir Alberto Cavalcanti. Cast Elisabeth Welch, Miles Malleson, Frederick Valk.

A worthwhile addition to the horror subgenre of killer kitties, Claws of the Damned features Elisabeth Welch in a rare lead role as Rose, the maid hired to work at the decrepit Howe Hall without there seemingly being anyone to serve under save a couple dozen black cats roaming the house. It teeters into rote mystery solving by the end with dread family secrets and all that but what the film has to offer in spades is atmosphere – thick, eerie atmosphere. Those who have seen the film (few and far between they may be) all talk in hushed tones of the scene in Rose’s dark bedroom as she finds herself drifting off to sleep. The camera becomes her eyes, the hazy darkness of her lids opening and closing slower each time. With each blink the room grows darker and with each dial down of the darkness the room, it seems, becomes populated more and more with the black cats of the house. The genius of it is like that of The Innocents where the viewer, like the protagonist, is never quite sure of what it is they’ve seen. Of course she wakes with a jolt and, fumbling with the light, gets the room illuminated to find that the cats aren’t there. Just about finished when Cavalcanti left Ealing under a cloud this didn’t receive the kind of a release that it should have and was reportedly disowned by the director too. A truncated version from a scratchy print is up on YouTube for the curious and uninitiated.

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Horror, Imaginary French Cinema

#42 – Sex Lives of the Living Dead, The

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(1973, Fr, 84 min) Dir Jesus Franco. Cast Montserrat Prous, Anne Libert, Francisco Acosta, Howard Vernon.

AKA Passion of the Zombies AKA Lust of the Dead AKA Erotiknomicon AKA one of about a million films that the legendarily prolific Jess Franco is credited with the same year. Jack and his pals have travelled to an off-season resort for some manly times together fishing, getting drunk and shooting passing snakes to bits whilst laughing at nothing much. Thankfully night falls and from the woods around them comes the sound of eerie song followed by a trio of beautiful half-naked women. That’s right – to the relief of some and the consternation of sickos the living dead of the title aren’t as decomposey as might have been feared. No, they’re just spooky forest dwelling nudists and of course Jack and his pals don’t seem to think that there’s anything weird about this either, they just take it in their stride that buck-naked ladies are in the habit of such behaviour. Local man Danny (Vernon) turns up though and he finds the whole set-up a touch out of the ordinary. On top of that thinks that he might have seen these ladies before… Yes it’s slow and yes it’s riddled with all kinds of inconsistencies of tone and behavior but hey, it was probably shot in a weekend. On the plus side is Bruno Nicolai’s soundtrack and some choice badly dubbed awful dialogue such as “Hey asshole, is that a lake?” and “You don’t mean that I just had sex with -gulp- a zombie?” With films like this it’s best to just sit back and enjoy the ham.

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Horror, Imaginary Italian Cinema

#40 – Spanish Inquisition, The

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(1973, It, 80 min) Dir Antonio Marretti. Cast Vincent Price, Barbara Steele, Patrick Magellan.

Reuniting Price and Steele following Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum, Marretti’s The Spanish Inquisition finds the two of them in the same torturer/victim relationship as before. Young Francis (Magellan, still hanging around from Circo Nero and still wooden as all hell) longs to run away with his love Elizabeth (Steele) but when he finally drums up the courage to act he is interrupted by the arrival in town of the dreaded Spanish Inquisition. Price is Inquisitor Medina and from the time he first arrives he has his eyes set on Elizabeth. It all gets a bit Witchfinder General from then on – he concocts an accusation against her so that he can get her alone for some special torturing and, despite Francis’ best efforts, gets her up on the stake for the finale. But, just when you thought that unlike the Python’s Inquisition this was totally expected, Elizabeth’s head turns into a writhing ball of snakes and her unfurling bat wings snap the ropes that bind her to the stake. Yes, that’s right – she actually is some sort of Satanic hell-spawn and of course the Inquisition are running about like headless chickens because this is the first time they’ve actually seen a demon. But Elizabeth quickly blinds Inquisitor Medina and grabs a now not so keen Francis, making off into the dying sun. The special effects are terrible but points are scored for the unexpected.

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Black and White, Horror, Imaginary British Cinema

#33 – Ghost in the Floor, The

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(1962, GB, 95 min, b/w) Dir Eric Conway Bryce. Cast Denholm Elliott, Janette Scott, Martin Stephens, Freda Dowie.

Superior chiller, like an MR James story for Christmas that was never written, and impeccably shot by Freddie Francis. Victorian schoolteacher Reginald Benway (Elliott) is assigned to Oldgrey’s college in the moor bound village of Hampton. The reception, as one would expect in such a film, is chilly. That night, as he sits on his bed, his head in his hands in despair, he makes out what seems to him to be a face in the floorboards made from the whorls in the wood’s grain. As time goes on things improve – he makes friends with one of his pupils, the lonely and awkward Alec (Stephens), and a relationship is tentatively begun with his fellow teacher, Miss Devonshire (Scott). Of course everything goes wrong after that, with false rumours being spread about his relationship with the boy and even Miss Devonshire begins to keep her distance. As his troubles mount each night the face in his bedroom floor changes and grows larger… This all plays out at a superbly measured pace, all leading to an end that’s all the more terrifying for its inevitability.

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Drama, Horror, Imaginary US Cinema

#28 – Mean Average, The

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(2012, US, 100 min) Dir Eric Ceder. Cast Rob Morrow, Brent Briscoe, Laura Regan.

Bizarre Randian horror movie that spitballs the unrest of the Occupy movement into a society wide uprising that targets the innocent one per cent that are safeguarding our society. Our hero here is Alex Forster (Rob Morrow, possibly prepping for his role in Atlas Shrugged Part 3), a stockbroker titan unlike anything seen in The Wolf of Wall Street – he himself would totally never do anything bad ever and has a loving family that apparently exists in a perpetual sunbeam. The supposedly expensive but cheap-looking walls of his world come tumbling down one day when the unwashed drug-crazed hippies protesting outside his office move indoors and begin exacting their revenge on the money men. Thus begins a discount apocalypse in what is essentially a filmed play with CGI inserts and crowd scenes of mass riot that only work if your definition of the word ‘crowd’ bottoms out at two dozen. It’s baffling to conceive as to who this film is aimed at as it seems designed to offend and angry anyone not rich enough to own a gold toilet but, at the same time, is so cheap and stagey in its execution to betray the fact that no self-respecting wealthy person would put their money near it.

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Horror, Imaginary French Cinema

#24 – Extase de l’obscurité (Dark Ecstasy)

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(1975, Fr, 85 mins) Dir Jean Rollin. Cast Christina von Blanc, Maria Rohm, Joëlle Coeur, Britt Nichols, Alice Arno.

Lesbian vampire nuns. If the preceding sentence has left you cold then there’s not much here for you as Dark Ecstasy hasn’t much to offer beyond the allure of those three words. Young novice Caterina (von Blanc) has been sent to the mountaintop convent of Marie-des-Monts by the shifty Sister Elizabeth who lived there herself years ago and now rocks back and forth while cackling incessantly. It seems that Caterina’s purity is just right for the perverted denizens of Marie-des-Monts, as led by the icy and statuesque Maria Rohm, to exploit. And exploit it they do, for the full of the film’s running time, with Caterina of course proving victorious in the end, burning the convent down and sacrificing herself in the process. Slow but fun for fans of lesbians, vampires and nuns. Originally the film ran for a trim 72 minutes but the relaxing of certification laws in later years saw Rollin return (possibly under duress, depending on whose version of events you believe) to insert a lengthy dream sequence that included hardcore sex scenes and, because they were popular at the time, zombies. This hardcore zombie version was released under the imagination-free title Nonnes lesbiennes de Vampire in 1981.

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Horror, Imaginary Italian Cinema

#22 – Circo Nero (Black Circus)

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(1972, It, 93 min) Dir Antonio Marretti. Cast Patrick Magellan, Telly Savalas, Reena Pavlova, Ingrid Pitt.

Watery flower child Duke (Magellan) is abandoned in the woods one night by his brain-dead hedonist friends and after wandering in the day for night to the accompaniment of a lonesome ballad he happens upon a big top in a clearing and risks a peek inside. On the high-wire is barely animated porcelain doll Reena Pavlova with a lonesome ballad of her own. Duke is entranced, obviously. Unfortunately for him sadistic ringmaster Telly Savalas (his bald head inexplicably, if eerily, painted red) has this doll in his collection and isn’t giving her up easy. Duke parlays his juggling skills into the position vacated by a recently deceased clown and lo he can travel with the circus and moon over Pavlova from a distance all the while seeing off the advances of dancing lady (Pitt, having a ball). Of course everyone in the troupe are Satanic hell-spawn pilfering the bodies and souls of the locals as they traverse the countryside but, despite the obviousness of their schemes and the well shot trippy dreams he keeps having about them being evil, the dim Duke is none the wiser until the final reel. The race is then on to save his captured love but is she what she seems either? Silly fun.

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Detective, Giallo, Horror, Imaginary Italian Cinema

#21 – Quattro gocce di sangue in una stanza buia (Four Drops of Blood in a Darkened Room)

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(1971, It, 98 min) Dir Antonio Marretti. Cast Edwige Fenech, George Hilton, Jack Taylor.

In 1971 Edwige Fenech was in the middle of a hot giallo streak with Five Dolls for an August Moon and Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key just two genre classics she shot around the same time as this. Quattro Gocce, while not achieving the lasting reputation of the others, has plenty for the aficionado. Fenech is an eager student by day and dissolute boot model by night in go-go Rome when her life is turned upside down following the horrible murders, in the same night, of one of her student friends and one of her model friends. It’s obvious to her (but not to the feckless polizia) that someone is closing in on her but who could the killer be? Among the many red herring are Hilton’s photographer friend and Taylor’s sweaty-palmed peeping tom, both caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Of course the reveal makes no sense it’s at least in keeping with the randomness of the rest of the feature and it’s flashy visuals, peppy Morricone soundtrack and some stylish kills make this a fine addition to any Friday night’s viewing.

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Black and White, Detective, Horror, Imaginary US Cinema

#20 – Skull and Jones and the Return of the Scarlet Ghost

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(1942, US, 83 min, b/w) Dir Irving Pichel. Cast Preston Foster, Susan Hayward, Rita Johnson, Joe E. Brown.

Two years from the Scarlet Ghost’s first appearance and for America the war is now in full swing. Joe E. Brown is shipping magnate Forster Blueford who hires our crime fighting hero and his disembodied pal to investigate the sabotage happening in the docks, sending his secretary Hayward along for the ride. Of course the Germans are responsible and at their head is the Ghost herself, who by this time has morphed into the blonde Rita Johnson and has been rebranded as the head witch of an occult wing of the Nazi party. She kidnaps Skull and hypnotises Jones into a hallucinating stupor and reprogrammes him with anti-American sentiment to act as their stooge. Of course he can’t follow through, stopping before he can strangle Blueford as bidden and rescuing Skull but getting the slip from the Scarlet Ghost, who makes off in a U-boat to plot another day. Great fun that belies it’s propaganda purposes with Preston Foster now wearing the role as comfortably as an old jumper, chatting away to his skull in a bag as though it were the most normal thing in the world.

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Black and White, Detective, Horror, Imaginary US Cinema

#19 – Skull and Jones and the Scarlet Ghost

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(1940, US, 70 min, b/w) Dir Albert S. Rogell. Cast Preston Foster, Claire Trevor, Ogdon Marshall.

The fourth film in the S&B series and the first to star their longest serving Jones, Preston Foster. Filming began about five minutes after cut was called on The Laughing Darkness and this is belied by a crossover in the cast, including a tiny role for Lugosi, uncredited, as an Oriental stereotype. Not a supernatural caper, this one – Skull and Jones here find themselves on the trail of a Nazi saboteur called (as the title would suggest) the Scarlet Ghost, who is at large in LA agitating  in some manner or another.  A twist in the tale reveals it to be none other than his socialite pal from the previous feature, the lovely Claire Tracey in a mask seemingly without eye holes and a sparkling ball gown, both of which seem odd attire for a Nazi saboteur. She tumbles from some docks into thick sea fog and is presumed dead in the final act but returns as Skull and Jones’ first recurring villain in later features. A slapdash affair, not a great start to Foster’s tenure (though he equips himself well enough) nor a great introduction such a strong a character in the series history as the Scarlet Ghost. Things pick up subsequently, leaving this one for the history books and completists only.

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