Edge of the Axe (1988) dir. José Ramón Larraz

a.k.a. Al filo del hacha

Logline: A psychopath in a white plaster mask is axing the women of a small Northern Californian town some deadly questions. Though the cops couldn't care less, there is, in fact, a pattern to this killer's madness, and it will take the combined efforts of a drifter who moonlights as an exterminator, a girl who once pushed her cousin too hard on a swing, and a pair of personal computers circa-1988 to unravel this bloody mystery.

Crime in the Past: Allegedly, Lillian (Christina Marie Lane) once pushed her cousin Charlie's swing so hard that he flew off, banged his head on the ground, and spent the next near decade in a coma. Over that period, Lillian forgets about Charlie and her guilt over his accident until she learns that he indeed recovered and was recently released from the hospital. We wonder: might Charlie be seeking revenge against his cruel and forgetful cousin, who never even sent him a "Get Well, or At Least Out of Your Coma" card? Might Charlie be connected to the murders, all the victims of which appear to be suspiciously connected to a particular hospital? How many letters do you have to exchange in the name "Charlie" before you wind up with "Red Herring"?

Bodycount: 8 swings of the axe that connect. Additionally, one piggie and one puppy.

Themes/Moral Code: There's an awfully surprising bit of prescience lurking in this bloody affair: it predicts the forthcoming effects of computer and internet technology on relationships. When weirdo computer savant Gerald (Barton Faulks) gifts Lillian a personal computer after they've started dating, things take a short trip to suspicion and e-snooping. Beyond their awkward chats to one another (read aloud by a proto-Siri), the couple individually scan the web for incriminating information about one another and browse each other's internet history without qualms. We also see an incipient form of computer-assisted dating selection on display: Lillian queries a program on Gerald's computer about whether or not he's gay. Ah, love in the age of dial-up.

Killer's Motivation: Psychogenic amnesia, cranial encephalitis, and acute psychopathy. Also some daddy issues. And I suppose also a multiple personality disorder. See, the killer is "Charlie," Lillian's nonexistent cousin, who is actually Lillian herself. The childhood swing accident detailed above in fact befell Lillian herself, and the figure of Charlie was created by Lillian's mind as a sort of coping mechanism (I guess?) to justify and explain her post-coma homicidal tendencies. She's attacking and murdering anyone involved in her long-term care at the hospital (one of whom have gone on to an illustriou career as a prostitute, naturally) as well as anyone her father had a romantic interest in. I cannot explain or read much into any of this. Most of this information is imparted to the audience in a final minute exposition dump, up until which we'd been led (rather hamfistedly) to believe that nebbish Gerald is the killer. Whatever: sometimes a girl has just gotta dress up like a dollar-store Michael Myers and avenge herself against... herself?

Final Girl: See above. Perhaps our alarms should have sounded in re: Lillian's final girl prospects when she is shocked by discovering a creepy file of info concerning the killer's victims on Gerald's computer, only to then proceed to go out with him on a pleasant date in the very next scene. The killer alone would have such confidence in being flirty with such an obvious suspect. The killer, or someone who has bumped her head very hard. In this case, both.

Evaluation: With films like Symptoms (1974), Vampyres (1974), and The House That Vanished (1974), José Ramón Larraz established himself as one of the finest Spanish horror filmmakers of the 1970s. Those early films, released in brief succession, are enigmatic and bizarre, nearly inscrutable through the blanket of fog concealing both their English countryside locations and the motivations of the their damaged characters. But 1974 is a long way away from 1988, and a film like Edge of the Axe does little to herald its filmmaker as one of the latter decade's greats. This is not to say that it's a lousy entry in the slasher subgenre (in fact, it's quite enjoyable, in no small part due to its quaint technological eccentricities), but it lacks that dim, perverse atmosphere that had infected (and so made exhilarating) the best of Larraz's previous features. Edge of the Axe is too sedate and predictable for the reputation of its director. Barring a few inspired moments-- such as an opening attack by the killer on his victim while she sits in a car moving through an automatic car wash, masterfully realizing and exploiting the potential of that singular tension created by those big sponges whomping the space just above our heads-- one might expect the film was constructed by any old independent American hack with a rented camera. From Larraz crediting himself as "Joseph Braunstein" despite being surrounded by the Spanish names of various other crew members, to the cow spotted dress that his heroine unfashionably dons at one point, to the Dolly Parton knockoff that leads us through the end credits, that unmistakable faux-American quality is discernible throughout the proceedings. And that's a shame: the film could have benefited from some European weirdness creeping into frame. I would never have dreamed of a day in which I would wish for a Larraz film to be more like Black Candles (1982), and yet here we are.

Meltdown 09: Yellow Days of Summer (Part III)

Blood Link 

(Extrasensorial) 

(1982) 

dir. Alberto De Martino

The ultra-sleaze of this early '80s giallo is, well, unexpected. Two years after filming the delightfully insipid, MST3K-lampooned children's superhero film Pumaman (1980), director Albert De Martino returned under the pseudonym "Martin Herbert" to buck expectations by delivering Blood Link, a Michael Moriarty-starring giallo that primarily concerns itself with scenes of rape and exposed breasts. It doesn't reach Giallo A Venezia (1979) levels of sleaze, but one can't help but feel dirty watching Moriarty apply his usual amiable slimeball charm to truly horrific ends. Consequently, Moriarty doesn't shine as often here as he does in any of Larry Cohen's films, but he sure savors every moment he gets to play off himself while starring as a pair of once-siamese identical twins-- one a doctor, the other a psychopathic serial killer-- who have an inexplicable extrasensory ability that allows them to, on occasion, transmit visual images to each other with their minds. (In one scene, while speaking to his other identical half, Moriarty whistles through his grin, "I'm a very flip character.") When one twin, Craig, sees the vile, sexualized murders committed by his estranged brother, Keith, though his own eyes, he decides to travel to Hamburg to track down his long lost blood relative and prevent any more violence. Much confusion of identities follows as the police hassle Craig thinking he's Keith while Keith impersonates Craig in order to give a wobbly Cameron Mitchell a heart attack and rape/murder a woman that Craig was cheating on his girlfriend with in the hope of framing his not-so-goody-two-shoes sibling. It's often very amusing, in part-- Keith's murderous psychosis was caused by, of all things, seeing his parents making out in the garage when he was a child, to which he promptly responded by squishing them with the family automobile-- but on the other hand the bulk of it is downright unseemly. When Craig's girlfriend, Julie (Penelope Milford), is raped by Keith and, seemingly, enjoys it, we catch shades of a similar moment in Straw Dogs (1971). But De Martino is no Peckinpah: this is misguided titillation at its lousiest, where rape is considered a horrifying cinematic spectacle only if someone "gets hurt." 

So Sweet, So Perverse 

(Così dolce... così perversa) 

(1969) 

dir. Umberto Lenzi

Decades before he played a sad old man in Michael Haneke's Amour (2012), Jean-Louis Trintignant snogged and rode jet skis with Carroll Baker, his mysterious upstairs neighbor, because his character in Umberto Lenzi's So Sweet, So Perverse was really bored. Jean Reynaud (Trintignant) is a wealthy businessman suffering from the pangs of ennui that afflict all of those with too much privilege: he's bored with his mundane high-power job; he's bored with his marriage to his beautiful wife, Danielle (Erika Blanc), and no longer even interested in her "slice of cake" that she's been denying him in bed; he's bored with his mistress (Mabille De Lancré herself, Helga Line) who provides him all the slices of cake he could ever desire. "Life is so boring nowadays," he grumbles, so when the noises of his new upstairs neighbor, Nicole (Baker), being beaten and abused by another man (the ever-swarthy Horst Frank) filter down to his apartment below, Jean is quick to jump into the sleazy soap opera drama of her life and aspire to the role of the rescuing white knight. But Nicole is simply a diversion for Jean-- a beautiful image of the tortured woman who requires assistance-- who will in fact rescue him, however temporarily, from his dull, pampered existence. He's not really interested in the particulars of her sad tale: before she relays her story to him and becomes a defined personality, he admits that he's be more content if she remained a mute image for his fascination: "I much prefer your silence." It's this blind, uncritical pursuit of a seeming damsel in distress that leads our pathetic, bored hero into a bramble bush of trouble and murder as the film progresses. In the second half of the film, our attention is focused on Jean's wife Danielle, who attests early on that she's sick of the antiquated Victorian notion of the dominant male and attempts to rebel against it by denying her husband any of her love and carrying on a lesbian affair. Her story, which comprises the remainder of the film, is a little more typical of the subgenre (i.e. gaslighting galore), but her fate is more tragic than usual: we receive the sense that she actually did care for Jean and her guilt over the plot she enacted against him haunts her until her cruel death. The climax of So Sweet, So Perverse is about as delectably bleak and cynical as these things come, but the film's overall story feels diluted by the mid-point twist, which especially leaves Carroll Baker's intriguing storyline (that of a rape victim who remains psychologically attached and sexually aroused by her attacker) by the wayside. It's not Lenzi's finest or most thematically complete, but it does open with a killer track from the great Riz Ortolani, and that counts for something.

Love & Death on the Edge of a Razor 

(Giorni d'amore sul filo di una lama) 

(1973) 

dir. Giuseppe Pellegrini

I suppose that every movie marathon meltdown needs a dud at its center to remind you of the relative qualities of everything else you've been watching. Love & Death on the Edge of a Razor is that dud. Simply, it is the worst giallo I've yet had the displeasure of encountering. This is the only film directed by Italian screenwriter Giuseppe Pellegrini (who co-wrote Renato Polselli's early days Italian horror flick The Vampire and the Ballerina (1960)), and for this I am glad: I would prefer not to feel obligated to watch another film from this man. Despite possessing the most giallo-rific film title in the subgenre's history, Love & Death on the Edge of the Razor is not a horror-thriller. Nor is it anything else of note, besides a partial cribbing of Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). Forcing a label, it would have to be called, I suppose, a... romance crime drama? Perhaps, if one can earn that label without being romantic, dramatic, or action-packed. As the choppy editing telegraphs great spans of time between cuts, we are given the story of a boy (Peter Lee Lawrence) who meets a girl (Erika Blanc, or, as the credits amusingly re-dub her, "Blank") and who together fall madly in love until the girl dies in a car crash and the boy gets sad for a while but eventually picks up with another girl (Ivanna Novak), except it turns out that the first girl didn't actually die in a car crash but is now working as a journalist staging shady textile importation deals with gangsters because the boy's wealthy father blackmailed her into faking her own death in order to protect her own slightly corrupt father. This paucity of dramatic interest is approximately all that transpires in the film, except it's stretched out from a single overstuffed sentence into ninety minutes. Thankfully, the film concludes with an uplifting message: the power of love can save the lives of those people we hold dear who have large, gory gunshot wounds in their chests. Ugh. I'd rather have spent this lost time with my eyelids forcibly peeled open in front of The Bloodsucker Leads the Dance (1975) again. At least that one had some severed heads made from paper mache: Love & Death on the Edge of a Razor has reminded me to appreciate the simple pleasures.

The Red Headed Corpse 

(La rossa dalla pelle che scotta) 

(1972) 

dir. Renzo Russo

A hidden gem of early-'70s Italian gialli, The Red Headed Corpse takes a manic spin on Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" and sprinkles it with the aesthetic content (if not the social critique) of a few earlier troubled-artist-turned-murderer flicks like Corman's A Bucket of Blood (1959) and Lewis's Color Me Blood Red (1965). A slightly wizened Farley Granger plays a drunken, struggling artist named John Ward whose paintings are no longer in demand from the local dealers. He stumbles around town cursing his luck one day and happens to wander into a park full of hippies. He turns down their offer of a joint to smoke ("you like the world as it is?" one of the hippies asks in astonishment), but he does take home an expressionless female mannequin that the lead hippie gifts to him, with the endorsement that it's "better than the real thing: it doesn't talk back." John makes the mannequin his new art project, and he talks to her while he fixes her up into an object that's "lovely, pure, faithful. Everything a woman should be." Of course, he fails to notice that she's also a hunk of plastic, but that's not about to stop his deranged mind, which imagines the mannequin coming to life one evening as a real woman (Krista Nell), who is referred to in the credits as "The Subservient Doll." The term "doll" is appropriate because this animated female becomes John's mute plaything, embodying his notion of the ideal female who is to be seen (to spill champagne on her breasts, mostly) and touched but not heard. 

John and his doll's happy co-existence is one day shattered by John's haunting memory of the rampant infidelity of his former wife (Erika Blanc), who is referred to in the credits only as, interestingly, "The Sensuous Doll." The bulk of the film then occurs in flashback, showing us first Blanc's instrumental hand in gaining John some momentary success as a painter of nude figures with her as his model and then her constant betrayals of marriage by getting randy with just about anyone who asks, including a pimply 16-year-old teen boy on the beach. Her selfish actions eventually lead John to murder... or do they? The film is ambiguous on the point of what exactly is reality and what is the delusion of John's mind. How can John have flashbacks to events that he wasn't present for? Are his memories of his wife's infidelities merely the anguished, misogynistic delusions of some male cuckolding fantasy, one in which a women who says "no" always means "yes"? A man haunted by a bleeding sentient mannequin is not quite an authority on empirical events, so we're never sure what to make of the images and memories on screen. What is apparent is that John is a man torn between two false fantasies of women: he's neither satisfied with the faithful but dull subservient doll who "never asks for anything" or the untrustworthy sensuous doll, whose treachery (real or imagined) is as alluring as it is torturous (the film ends on the kooky but somewhat chilling image of Blanc's giant transparent ghost head imposed over a shot of the outside of John's dingy house, laughing at him merrily as he watches wistfully from the rear window of a car in which he's being carted away to the loony bin). One imagines John's position might have improved if he'd only stopped thinking of women as dolls.

The Devil Has Seven Faces 

(Il diavolo a sette facce) 

(1971) 

dir. Osvaldo Civirani

Osvaldo Civirani tricked me. With a title, poster, and trailer like that bestowed upon his film The Devil Has Seven Faces, is it any fault of mine that I believed I was being set up to watch a Gothic-tinged giallo starring the formidable duo of the ever-present Carroll Baker and that charming rapscallion George Hilton? My brain starts to drool at the very idea of such a movie existing. But Civirani, the lousy scoundrel that he obviously is, tricked me. Barring a pretty cool but aesthetically jarring scene in which Baker descends into a basement with only a lighter for illumination and discovers-- to her horror-- a cobwebbed corpse, The Devil Has Seven Faces is far from what you might expect. Sure, it borrows liberally from the giallo's cabinet of plot curiosities-- we have twins, duplicitous lovers, mistaken identities, concealed identities, frantic chases, wigs, and fakeouts and twists galore-- but there's no obscuring the reality that the film is, at its core, a diamond heist film. On that action-and-intrigue-oriented level, it's a kooky pleasure: I'll watch Carroll Baker climb ladders in tight black short-shorts and smoosh a crazed George Hilton under the wheels of a bulldozer any day. But it's a crap giallo, and yet Civirani, his producers, and his distributors sold it to me as something special. Shame on them. I will, however, give them credit for one thing, for their's is the only film that's allowed me to see Baker's impressive emotive facial acting on display from underwater while her head is being plunged into a tub full of watery torture by some villainous villains. Spoiler.

The Fourth Victim 

(Death at the Deep End of the Swimming Pool; La última señora Anderson) 

(1971) 

dir. Eugenio Martín

Carroll Baker makes her final flirtatious appearance of the day in Eugenio "Horror Express" Martin's Spanish-Italian co-production, The Fourth Victim. This fine, Lenzi-esque film concerns the unusual occupation of one Mr. Arthur Anderson (Michael Craig), described by a prosecuting attorney as "a professional widower": Mr. Anderson marries women, takes out large life insurance policies against them, and then collects his reward when they inevitably perish in one kind of "accident" or another. This unexpected gender reversal of the old "Black Widow" routine helps Mr. Anderson persuade a jury of his innocence when he's put on trail for the suspected murder of his latest wife. A well-to-do man who would lower himself so far as to kill his wife for the money? Who could imagine such a dishonest way for a man to make his living? That's (clearly) wicked women's work. These thoughts are those that-- ostensibly-- pass through the brain of Julie (Carroll Baker) when she embarks on a love affair and eventual marriage with Mr. Anderson (his fourth) soon after their first encounter during a quick dip she steals in his pool. Julie attests that she harbors no suspicion against Mr. Anderson, a claim which even he's skeptical of: it's only after she presents him with a life insurance policy that she's taken out for him in her own name that he agrees to their marriage. Naturally, Julie hasn't told her new husband absolutely everything about herself, and the arrival of puzzle pieces like secretive late-night phone calls, information about years-long psychiatric hospital stays, and a murder-happy Marina Malfatti serve to further complicate an already fairly loopy plot. Still, the film's most bewildering moment occurs in its denouement when, all deadly secrets and murderous intentions revealed, Mr. Anderson and the latest Mrs. Anderson blissfully decide to stay hitched, having taken out-- together-- a joint life insurance policy. This might be the most sneakily cynical ending of all time: happiness in marriage is always knowing that you can bump off that other lethal crook you call your spouse for fat stacks of cash at a moment's notice. Ah, love.

Fatal Frames

(Fatal frames: Fotogrammi mortali)

(1996)

dir. Al Festa

What was all that about gazing into the abyss and it gazing also into you? A bloated vanity project of epic proportions (it's over two hours long), Al Festa's Fatal Frames is both entirely baffling and weirdly satisfying. On the one hand, the film is obviously intended to prop up the career of its leading lady/director's lover/pop star prodigy Stefania Stella, which we can note due to her central presence in the film despite her possessing the acting talent of an exaggerated stuffed animal with googly eyes and her uncanny ability to mimic the sound of a slurred, drunken computer reading the phonetic pronunciation of words whenever she speaks. We also notice this obvious intention of the film during moments in which the action stops dead so that Stefania can flop around in a fountain and record a music video set to her mush-mouthed non-hit "Eternal City." And yet, on the other twisted monkey's paw, Fatal Frames is a loving tribute to the gialli of previous decades (though specifically those of the 1980s). It remains aesthetically consistent with those grimy, glitzed-out films from the likes of Lamberto Bava and Carlo Vanzina by featuring lots of fashion models, the odd seance or two, several male actors who look exactly like Furio from The Sopranos, pit stops for slinky photoshoots, and sleepy performances from a cavalcade of washed up genre vets. (David Warbeck, Alida Valli, Linnea Quigley, Angus Scrimm, and Donald Pleasence all fatally poke their sleepy heads into frame here, though Warbeck gives his performance a bit more energy than you'd expect. Sadly, Fatal Frames would be Pleasence's final film due to his death during production, leaving his performance incomplete. Naturally, Festa wrote him out of the film in the most tasteless of fashions). Fatal Frames should have gone terribly wrong, been insufferable even, but it's reined in enough that it's actually quite watchable and self-indulgent in all the right ways. Think of it as akin to a giallo helmed by Tommy Wiseau, only starring someone with even less of a familiarity with the English language than him. Stefania help me, I actually liked it.

Meltdown 09: Yellow Days of Summer (Part II)

Body Puzzle 

(Misteria) 

(1992) 

dir. Lamberto Bava

They're never the best of the lot, but it feels wrong to ignore a giallo from Lamberto Bava whenever one watches a whole pile of them in a row. Although they were all produced a decade or more after the subgenre had peaked, there's still something quintessential about his giallo films, or at least quintessentially '80s European horror about them, meaning they're cheaper, gorier, frillier, and more colorful and garish than their forefathers. From A Blade in the Dark (1983) to Delirium: Photos of Gioia (987), Lamberto's gialli forgo subtlety and style in favor of big blades and bigger hair. As the great Mario Bava's talent-challenged son, Lamberto chooses to overcompensate for his lack of cinematographic grace in all of his directorial efforts by piling on the decade-specific sleaze and cheese. And as in the cases of the two films mentioned above, this overabundance can be a lot of fun, as his gialli often border on a sensibility close to that of the frenetic insanity of his biggest horror hit, Demons (1985). But I have to suppose that by the early '90s, after several years of cranking out mostly Italian TV features, Bava had begun to mellow out. Body Puzzle, his chief giallo of the period, is an almost restrained effort, barring the inclusion of a few pieces of inspired lunacy (like a toilet bowl cam that watches from underwater as a severed hand plops down into the bowl, or when the snarling killer pops out from the interior of an icebox full of cubes and corpses). Through its restraint alone the film winds up tonally and aesthetically closer to the traditional gialli of the '70s than Bava had ever come before, and the result is a curious change of pace. Following the Columbo formula, we're presented early on with a killer (François Montagut) who listens to classical music through earbuds while he harvests donated organs from his assorted victims for conspicuous placement around the house of the recently widowed Tracy (Joanna Pacula), and it's up to the efforts of a dedicated police inspector (Thomas Arana) to unravel why. Many convoluted revelations concerning identity, sexuality, and vital statistics follow, along with some cameos from nearly unrecognizable older versions of Erika Blanc and Gianni Garko. Its constant, running-length-stretching plot twists and contortions keep the proceedings involving, but it's both amusing and beguiling to watch Lamberto play-- even fleetingly-- at building a classy production. I mean, consider who we're talking about here.

In the Eye of the Hurricane 

(El ojo del huracán) 

(1971) 

dir. José María Forqué

In the Eye of the Hurricane is a very Jean Sorel sort of film. It's an erotic thriller in the Diabolique mode concerning a handsome playboy who slyly plots the torment and hopeful death of a wealthy woman that he's romantically involved with in order to gain access to her vast funds. So, it's a lot like some of Sorel's other gialli: Parnoia (1970, written about below) and The Sweet Body of Deborah (1968), in particular. As luck would have it, Sorel happens to star in this enthralling Spanish-Italian co-production too (hooray for type-casting!). I won't deny that I'm a sucker for this type of giallo, as I've found that much joy can be wrung out of the games of domestic treachery and double-crosses even when they're not all that creative in their respective approaches or implementations. But In the Eye of the Hurricane, I'll hazard to argue, holds a dagger of originality up to the sub-subgenre's throat and dares it to make a clever move, resulting in a film that's both more suspenseful and ultimately more satisfying than its formal typicality would initially suggest. 

In this type of giallo, the female protagonist is generally beleaguered and hysterical, driven to madness, beset by paranoia, and left without much hope of saving herself from her own predicament without outside aid. In contrast, In the Eye of the Labyrinth's leading lady, Ruth (Analía Gadé), overhears the unambiguous late-night scheming of her envious ex-husband (Tony Kendall) and her sexy yet duplicitous new boypal (Jean Sorel, naturally) about halfway through, and thus she uses this secret knowledge to shape the events that follow. We spend the rest of the movie observing Ruth's emotional waffling between silent heartbreak over her beloved's betrayal and her cool determination to foil the plans against her before her danged brake fluid is tampered with again. (This waffling isn't always graceful, but it is always enjoyable to watch: in one scene, Ruth pretends to lay asleep and bizarrely resigns herself to death while Sorel's character stands behind her and points a gun at her head, unaware of her cognizance of his presence and intention. The editing in this scene hits a fever pitch as it quickly cuts back and forth between extreme close-ups of their anguished faces waiting far too long for something to happen before it finally does: the bedside phone rings.) Our uncertainty about which perspective Ruth will ultimately align herself with (revenge or resignation) makes the last act (which mirrors Carroll Baker's blackmail home imprisonment at the hands of two nymphomaniacal siblings in Umberto Lenzi's Orgasmo (1969)) a riveting watch as Sorel sneers, a crazed Rosanna Yanni snarls, and the sexual torment commences. Without divulging too many details of the wrap-up, it should be noted that Ruth is a complex and capable female protagonist-- independent, strong-willed, and essentially faultless-- and these qualities alone set the film that rises up around her apart from the pack and their parades of tragic or guilty women. All this, plus a scene in which Sorel and Gadé perform an upside Spider-Man kiss on the beach while rubbing each other's tummies. This corpse is exquisite.

Everybody Deceased... Except the Dead 

(Tutti defunti... tranne i morti) 

(1977) 

dir. Pupi Avati

It's not an arduous task to place myself back into the frame of mind that once thought, "A giallo spoof from the director of one of the subgenre's finest entries (The House with Laughing Windows (1976))? How could this viewing experience possibly go awry?" But, as I was reminded of after watching Everybody Deceased... Except the Dead, one should probably never underestimate the enigma that is 1970s Italian comedy: it will always find new horrendous ways to baffle and repel. We are, after all, speaking of the cinematic output of a country whose horror-thrillers even end, from time to time, on the high note of an anal rape gag (see: Andrea Bianchi's uber-sleazy Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975)). Commercial Italian films of the period were in no way subtle or refined, and the comedies even less so. If you haven't seen any but would like a general idea of how they feel, then imagine the general tasteless tomfoolery of a Screwballs (1983), a Joysticks (1983), or any other lewd and crude American teen sex comedy of the '80s and then skew that exact same content towards a middle-aged audience rather than post-pubescent teens. So, in short: jokes about masturbation, loose women, the mentally-handicapped, little people, homosexuality, cowboys, and... book salesmen. The story concerns just such a bulbous-nosed book salesman (Carlo Delle Piane) who arrives at the Zanotti family mansion on the eve of their patriarch's funeral in order to sell that collected bunch of eccentrics and perverts a reproduction of an old manuscript detailing the finer points of their family curse and a prophecy promising treasure if nine corpses are accumulated over the course of one stormy night. One member of the household, seeing this prophecy, decides to don a fedora and black gloves in the hope of speeding fate along. Hilarity ensues? 

There are certainly some good jokes to be found in-between all the groan-worthy nonsense: I quite liked the exchange between a confused victim and his killer immediately after the latter has stabbed the former in his side: "What's that?" "A nice stab, can't you see?" "(groans, dies.)" The film contains a few of the warm, fuzzy Old Dark House laughs that you'll receive from watching similar yet superior slapstick murder mysteries like Clue (1987) and Murder By Death (1976). For example, when the power is cut by the killer, the perpetually clueless Inspector Martini (Gianni Cavina) shouts at the others assembled, "pay the bills, guys!" (when the lights flicker back on later in the film, he sighs, with relief, "so they paid it!"). The film's most amusing gag occurs when the gathered family members, led by Inspector Martini, attempt to instruct a pair of dogs to follow the killer's scent from one of his victim's severed hands that they've discovered. They toss the bloody hand to the dogs, who then promptly devour it. There's clearly something amusing about the giallo murder mystery ripe for skewering, but  Everybody Deceased... Except the Dead's parody is far from as focused as it ought to be. When's the last time you saw a giallo that featured death-by-electric anti-masturbation machine?

Kill the Fatted Calf and Roast It

(Uccidete il vitello grasso e arrostitelo) 

(1971) 

dir. Salvatore Samperi

Salvatore Samperi's ultra-rare and ever-so-excellent Kill the Fatted Calf and Roast It deserves a wider audience, for its peculiar cinematic tale would satisfy genre junky and art film connoisseur alike. Far from a straight-razor wielding giallo, the film has as much in common with one of Poe's darkly humorous Gothic family tragedies as it does the more eccentric, atypical products of the subgenre it has been lumped in with due to historical proximity. This sad but inevitable tale of the doomed Merlo family, who are plagued by ancestral madness, Oedipal complexes, incestual lust, and sibling backstabbing, holds artistic pretensions that would place it in line with the demented, sexually-malformed social commentaries of Samperi's compatriot Pier Paolo Pasolini. The film not-so-subtly posits that Italy's rich old families, who have built their vast ancient wealth on the destruction and murder of whole villages of those less fortunate than them, are diseased at the root and fated to poison themselves through desire and aggression turned back on itself now that there's no one left to subjugate. After the unexpected death (or murder?) of the family patriarch, youngest son Enrico (Maurizio Degli Esposti) begins an investigation that places his shady older brother Cesare (Jean Sorel, making his second appearance today) and his dryly seductive cousin Verde (Marilù Tolo) as the primary suspects. At the same time, Enrico also busies himself with creating a creepy shrine for his insane dead mother and carrying on an illicit affair of motherly affection with his cousin Verde, who has sex with him but also dresses in his mother's clothes before offering him her breast to suckle. Sublime, surreal Freudian weirdness runs high throughout: it's the sort of film that inspires one to jot down a note reading "boob/pudding jiggle juxtaposition." Eventually, Enrico wades deep enough into his family's deadly business that he begins to drown, forcibly. The film submits through its title and some internal dialogue that in this way Enrico is like an innocent calf among hungry wolves, but it also becomes clear through Enrico's damaged psyche and the story's grim conclusion that a calf too long among wolves grows sharp teeth.

Death on the Fourposter 

(Sexy Party; Delitto allo specchio) 

(1964) 

dir. Jean Josipovici

An Italian-French co-production, Death on the Fourposter (also known by the less striking title Sexy Party) arrived in cinemas the same year as Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace (1964), a film of no small importance to the foundation of the giallo subgenre. Consequently, director Jean Josopovici's film doesn't have an ingrained giallo tradition to draw upon when concocting its own murder mystery, and so instead draws upon elements of the Gothic. And yet, those elements of the Gothic that Death on the Fourposter employs-- seances and mediums, chilly castles, returns from the dead-- would soon become as much a part of the giallo tradition as Bava's fashion models and gloved killer. This observation is not intended to give Death on the Fourposter (which is, after all, a rather obscure film) equal or even a significant amount of credit in the development of the subgenre, but it does make clear that Bava's film didn't appear out of the ether: it, like Jean Josipovici's film, was the product of an evolution of a long and storied tradition of murder mystery and Gothic horror cinema in Italy and throughout Europe. That these and other Euro mystery films were, by the mid-1960s, simultaneously beginning to include scenes of more blatant sexuality and bloody violence than those films of previous decades is a sign of the fast-changing times post-watershed horrors like Psycho (1960) and Peeping Tom (1960).

Through almost entirely deficient on the bloody violence count, Death on the Fourposter's proto-giallo cred certainly shines through in its sultry sexual content. There's none of the explicit sexuality or nudity of the '70s giallo canon, but the film's alternately titular sexy party certainly earns that designation. A band of irritatingly rich young men and women whose names invariably end in either "y" or "ie" descend upon a castle for a weekend get-together (one of them quips, "this is better than your father's castle") and their evening soon devolves into a string of naughty parlor games in which there is much seducing, teasing, partner-swapping, wagering, sexy dancing (set, off-time, to a special guest's new hit party record, entitled, naturally, "Sexy Party"), and shattering of illusions. This first half of the film is quite a lot of steamy fun, thanks in no small part to the bewitching presence of actress Antonella Lualdi as Serena, a sort of devilish socialite with devious charm and sex appeal to spare. Serena puts her fellow party guests on trial through her only ostensibly playful games, revealing the others' various hypocrisies and petty vices while she smiles all the while. Serena is such a strong and alluring presence in the film that the action takes a nosedive in its interest for the viewer after she's knocked off at the midway point. Who killed her? Why? Who's dead next? Where are the stolen rings? Who's going insane? These are all questions that the film spends the rest of its length answering, but I would have preferred to have seen some more of Serena putting chinks in high society's armor of respectability.

Cross Current 

(Un omicidio perfetto a termine di legge) 

(1971) 

dir. Tonino Ricci

Like In the Eye of the Labyrinth, Tonino Ricci's Cross Current twists and turns endlessly in its trashy attempt to simulate a Diabolique-inspired murder soap opera. (Also like in that film-- released in the same year, by gum-- the lovely Rosanna Yanni pops up here as a scheming sexpot who favors boogieing in miniskirts. No complaints.) Cross Current isn't as clever or as complex as that other film, but it certainly makes up for that lack in plot complexity. Most of the notes I took while watching the film were mostly intended to help me keep the details straight as it barreled along in its tale of boating accidents, gardener blackmail, midnight stranglings and the like. As is usually the case, everyone here has a hidden agenda and more than likely a hidden lover. More than a few of them "die" before popping up very much alive in order to enact some new nefarious plot. The rich plot and scheme, killing each other and themselves, all over measly business interests. This is the standard score, but Ricci and his crew pull an admirable job by maintaining its appeal. It's kind of hard to frown on a film that ends with a character being so scared by some spooky music playing on the record player that she trips, hits her head, and dies after guzzling down some J&B, only to then have it strongly implied that it was all part of the villain's plan. Ludicrously messy murder-plotting all in good fun, with the added benefit of providing our first sighting of the ever-smirking/ever-dashing Ivan Rassimov this month. No complaints at all.

Paranoia 

(A Quiet Place to Kill) 

(1970) 

dir. Umberto Lenzi

Carroll Baker is a race car driver. If you need me to continue, then your eyes must have skimmed past the previous sentence without fully gleaning its import. Paranoia, Umberto Lenzi's third giallo with the inestimable Ms. Baker and the only in which her character stars as a bonafide prizewinning race car driver, has driven a symbolic race car off of a cliff and into my heart. It might not be the best giallo that this power duo concocted together (my vote would still go to Orgasmo), but-- from its solarized, spoiler-filled opening credits to its closing ironic twist that dooms the villainous victors-- it's awfully close. Three years before the action of the film begins, Helen (Carroll Baker) had all of her money spent by her lazy European boyfriend, Maurice (Jean Sorel, again), before he split, forcing her to spend the next few years making drastic career moves (i.e. race car driving) in order to recoup her wealth and get over her heartbreak. When Maurice's new wife, Constance (Anna Proclemer), sends Helen an invitation to stay at their home in Maurice's name, Helen impulsively decides to take up the offer. What she discovers after arriving is that Maurice is still up to old tricks and that Constance wishes to enlist her help to rid him from their lives, preferably by strategically placed harpoon. However, Helen's rekindled passion for all things Maurice makes her decision a difficult one. A murder, a cover-up, and a guilty conscience later, the film reaches an entirely new level of delirious entertainment when Constance's sultry schoolgirl daughter, Susan (Marina Coffa), arrives at the estate and begins to sniff that something foul is afoot. We're then gifted with a parade of wigs, whiskey abuse, and exploding cars to close events out (complimenting the film's earlier parade of a carrier pigeon, bubble disco dancing, and a frumpy green bikini quite nicely).

There are many neat things to be found in Paranoia for the subgenre buff, but the neatest might be the film's pointed inversion of typical gender roles. It is the film's women, rather than its men, who are the providers. Both Helen and Constance are self-made women, using their earned wealth to lead extravagant lifestyles that cater to the whims and tastes of their hunky but penniless arm candy (like the unemployed Maurice). Helen and Constance both make clear that they've cycled through many young live-in playboys due to lust over the years, as if they've been irresistibly tempted by their masculine charms. This sort of domestic and romantic arrangement is totally typical in giallo films if you reverse the sexes, but Paranoia's evacuation of gendered expectations is unique, and, in a way, sort of total: when the car that Helen and Maurice are driving breaks down on the road, it's Helen who takes a peep under the hood and announces the car's failure while Maurice idles by helpless. Carroll Baker is a race car driver.

Meltdown 08: Francophilia (Part IV)

Count Dracula 

(El conde Drácula) 

(1970)

What begins as a slavishly faithful, po-faced, and stylish adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel eventually devolves into something, well, less than that, but for a movie that credits its editing to Bruno Mattei, hey, we're lucky it even resembles a motion picture. Credit where credit is due: unlike any other adaptation up to 1970, El conde Dracula makes a serious go of adapting the source material with proper reverence (and it predates Coppola's "Bram Stoker's" label of "authenticity" by over two decades). These novelistic aspirations are most noticeable in the film's fantastic first act, which depicts in minute detail Jonathan Harker's visit to the Count's castle in Transylvania (down to the baby-eating). Christopher Lee's performance of Dracula in this film is a wild divergence from his previous portrayals of the character in the series of Hammer films from decades previous. Here he's an intentionally isolated racist, lonely and angry at the world. He's defined through his hunger for power, even if that power can only be the small physical power he wields over those in his vampiric thrall, and not that power implicit in possessing the same mighty conquering military force of his ancestors. In this sense, this incarnation of Dracula is (much like the novel's, but maybe even more so than the novel's) a pathetic figure: dangerous-- surely-- but ultimately ill-equipped for the realities of the modern world. Moreover, he sports a killer 'stache. (Of course, Lee was still playing Dracula for Hammer at this time, so imagining this Dracula alongside the bloodsucker of, for instance, Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) is a draining mental exercise.) Otherwise, the cast is a Who's Who of European genre stars (Klaus Kinski, Herbert Lom, Paul Muller, Maria Rohm, Jack Taylor, Emma Cohen, and Franco's early muse-- Soledad Miranda-- in their first major collaboration together), and though they all do fine in their parts, the stoic tone of the film prevents all but Kinski from standing out. (Kinski is Renfield, naturally, and his mute scenery-chewing at one point earns him the title of "Soup Bowl Pollock.") 

Once the film exits back through the Borgo Pass and returns to London, the adaptation starts playing fast and loose, and this is where the film probably becomes problematic for most viewers. While some changes make sense in light of a need to condense narrative (the collapsing of Arthur Holmwood and Quincey Morris into one character) and others are most likely due to actors' availability (Van Helsing's "slight stroke"), still others appear arbitrary and so less meaningful (like Dracula's death by torch rather than by bowie knife to the heart). Unarguably the most arbitrary and absurd moment in the film is when Van Helsing, Seward, and Morris enter the Count's home with some slaying in mind and are confronted by a room full of snarling, sentient taxidermied animals. It's a more of an, uh, intense stare-off with constant quick edits and zooms, but it's an enlivening dose of batshit Franco spectacle in an otherwise perhaps too staid film. Being Franco, the film does make sure to put extra emphasis on the erotic component of Dracula's vampirism (an emphasis easily conveyed by Soledad Miranda's constant subtle expressions of ecstasy), but-- more interestingly-- it also highlights the unnerving near-glee that our would-be vampire hunters take in bloodily slaughtering sleeping vampire brides (their once beloved Lucy included), adding layers of gender dynamics and human barbarity into the picture. Count Dracula is a fine film earnestly made, but not at all what the typical Franco admirer would expect, nor exactly what the admirer of standard issue classic horror would hope for. It's an unloved mutt, stuck somewhere between past cinematic horrors and the erotic brew that Franco was soon to stir, with no clear place in the world of its time. Kind of like the Count himself.

Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein 

(Dracula contra Frankenstein) 

(1972)

Call me batty, but I find Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein (perhaps more commonly known by the literal translation of its misleading original Spanish title, Dracula vs. Frankenstein) to be a fascinating exercise in updating the performance style and visual language of classic silent horror filmmaking for the 1970s. Moreover, the film simultaneously expresses a cynical contempt for its audience that's unmatched in Franco's filmography. If Count Dracula was an earnest but flawed attempt at portraying a classic literary monster on the silver screen, Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein messily demonstrates how dissatisfying those same monsters can become when commodified as defanged puppets in money-grubbing Hollywood monster mashes. Of course, that's precisely what happened with Universal's stable of monsters when its members were demoted from starring in the artistic successes of Tod Browning's Dracula (1931) and James Whales's Frankenstein (1931) to kindergarten cash-ins like House of Frankenstein (1944), House of Dracula (1945), and the unabashed farce of Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). I can only speculate, but the notion that there might have been commercial pressure on Franco to produce a monster team-up film after the success of Count Dracula doesn't seem unreasonable. And if that was the case, it's easy to read the resulting film as a visual essay on exactly how lightweight that concept is. After all, how powerful, how menacing are our cinematic monsters when they're teamed up like superheroes and expected to execute pratfalls? 

Not very, is what Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein posits. Its monsters are mind-controlled, blank-faced props, mutely enacting the bidding of Dr. Rainer von Frankenstein (Dennis Price). At the climax of the film, when Dr. Frankenstein has decided he no longer has any use for them, he slaughters his primary monsters with nary a tussle: Dracula (a perpetually snarling Howard Vernon) fails to stir from his slumber as he's staked, and Frankenstein's Creature (Fernando Bilbao, in a Boris Karloff costume less convincing than the one your dad wore when you were seven) meekly and willingly shuffles into the electricity-producing box of his doom. The film's title and opening text almost guarantee a monster brawl, but the film seems pleased with itself for almost completely denying any such thing as it wraps up. Besides the anticlimactic deaths of its main baddies, the only monster-tussling provided is a brief scrap between the Creature and a Wolf Man, who enters the film out of nowhere and just as soon departs from it. Did the Creature kill him? We're neither told nor shown, and so again the film is rubbing our faces in what it sees as juvenile expectations for cross-monster encounters: they fought, you got what you came for, does it honestly matter who won? The film's cynicism materializes through both its critique of these sort of commercial horror ventures and its self-awareness of its own production of pure, incompetent schlock.

One might argue that the incompetence of this schlock was not at all a desired feature, and, sure, that's possible, but underestimating Franco always seems a losing proposition. As it so happens, Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein is fascinating on a technical level, despite whatever intentional or unintentional narrative deficiencies it possesses. It's virtually a silent film, with almost no dialogue whatsoever in its opening twenty minutes and very little after that (so little that it all could have easily fit on a few intertitle cards). The narrative is communicated through the actors' broad performances and the emotional tenor through its orchestral score (like the score for Count Dracula, another Bruno Nicolai effort) and ADR'd sound effects. This stylistic choice is pulled off with surprising skill (no other film of Franco's feels quite like this one) and creates the curious juxtaposition of a trite commercial horror premise in the mode of a film from horror's silent, earnestly horror-minded origins. It's as if the film is trying to show us what it would be like-- and how dreadful it would be-- if halfway through Nosferatu (1922) a Wolf Man jumped out of the bushes and clawed at Count Orlok's elongated face.

Daughter of Dracula 

(La fille de Dracula) 

(1972)

If I were told I was the last living descendant of Count Dracula, I know I'd probably spend my undead afterlife rolling about all day and night with the lovely Anne Libert and her massive hair, much like Britt Nichols does in this film. Released in the same year as Dracula, Prisoner of Darkness, the more typical Daughter of Dracula falls in line with Franco's other erotic lady vampire films like Female Vampire (1973) and Vampyros Lesbos (1971). While failing to create the stylish and melancholy excellence of those superior films, Daughter of Dracula nonetheless survives with the help of a bleeding vampire heart of its own. The main narrative (when the film chooses to stick with it, which is not all that often) concerns the jealous, possessive love that our Dracula daughter, Luisa Karlstein (Britt Nichols), has for her adorable and devoted cousin, Karine (Anne Libert), which evolves into awkward passion before exploding into if-I-can't-have-you-then-no-one-can vampire violence set to a second cousin of the Merrie Melodies tune. Karine's tragic fate (she wasn't even considering leaving the irrational Luisa!) provides a coherent emotional anchor for the film, but even then its often crowded out by all the other stuff going on over the film's brief running time. There's a police investigation (naturally), an occult expert,  the nearly inexplicable basement appearance of the stone-stiff ancestral vamp, Count Karlstein (Howard Vernon, reprising his non-performance from Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein), and a series of voyeuristic (read: eyeball zooms!) stalkings and slashings by a giallo-esque killer. That last bit is especially odd:  for reasons entirely unclear, most of Luisa's vamp attacks occur when she's decked out in a fedora and trenchcoat. This visual association with the giallo film-- at its peak in 1972 and always resplendent in leering, maladjusted peeping toms and janes-- lends some emphasis to Luisa's psychosexual issues, but it also results in the film feeling confused: our villainess trades out a straight razor for a pair of fangs, and we haven't a clue as to why. But this one's undeniably a quickie for the exploitation crowd. Not convinced? Peep the conclusion of Karine's emotional death scene, in which the camera, nonplussed, pans from a close-up of her lifeless face to a close-up of her pubic hair. Classy, Jess.

Revenge in the House of Usher 

(El hundimiento de la casa Usher)

(1988)

Well, one supposes Franco's declining reputation in the 1980s wasn't spurred for no reason whatsoever, and Revenge in the House of Usher is pretty good reason. Though purporting to be based upon the similarly titled E. A. Poe novella, the film is nonetheless another thinly veiled Orloff variation set in a house that crumbles at the conclusion. Howard Vernon returns to familiar territory as Dr. Usher, a hermetic mad scientist with an assistant named Morpho and a daughter with a bizarre, incurable disease named Melissa. Melissa's affliction has led Orloff to commit sundry murders in her name, as the only temporary relief from her debilitating illness comes from complete neck-to-neck blood transfusions by way of nubile lasses. Unlike the Orloffs of past films, Dr. Usher displays a certain intriguing uniqueness by admitting that he's an unremitting sadist who discovered that he enjoyed every scream that his killing for "a larger purpose" produced. This is an explicit dimension of the Orloff personality only hinted at in previous films. Previous films like, say, The Awful Dr. Orlof (1962), which Revenge in the House of Usher helpfully reminds us of by dedicating its entire second act to replaying the greatest hits from that landmark film. Yes, unfortunately, this film is one of those lazy footage recyclers, in the tradition of spendthrift classics like Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 (1987), Boogeyman II (1983), and much of Jim Wynorski's filmography. It's a shame, because what's here apart from the roughly twenty minutes of padding is a moderately intriguing film that interests not due to the ways in which it adheres to the Orloff formula, but rather through its divergences (like the icky ghost of Usher's dead wife who haunts him and desires to drag him down to hell with her; Lina Romay's devoted assistant character, who appears to be supernaturally trapped by the house and who messily makes out with a member of Menudo; and of course the crumbling Usher mansion, the shaky existence of which is tied to the grim fate of its owner). Alas, all of this original material plays a far too minor role in what emerges as a basic retread with rotted foundations begging to give way.

Meltdown 08: Francophilia (Part III)

Jack the Ripper 

 (Der Dirnenmörder von London) 

(1976)

A variation on the Orloff theme, Jack the Ripper replaces one wide-eyed European genre star (Howard Vernon) for another, even wider-eyed European genre star (the incomparable Klaus Kinski) and throws him into much the same situation faced by his his predecessor in The Awful Dr. Orlof (1962). The similarities the films share are less in theme or tone than in explicit narrative structure: once again we have a respected doctor of high society who murders women after wining and dining them; we have a lengthy scene documenting how the ongoing police investigation is aided by a composite sketch of the suspect, drawn from various eyewitness reports; and we even have the chief inspector's gal-pal, a ballerina (another one!), who decides on a whim to involve herself in the investigation, without prompting, as disguised bait for the killer. Befitting of its 1976 pedigree, Jack the Ripper is a whole heck of a lot sleazier than the already-quite-sleazy Orlof, with Kinski's Jack suffering through some debilitating "Mommy Was a Whore" issues that result in him being more likely to stab his female victims half to death before beginning his clumsy, impotent sexual assaults. There's some interesting symbolism (Kinski's predatory owl-like gaze is contrasted with the benign old man's blindness) and a bit of effective, perception-shifting frame composition (Kinski's near murder and rape of Lina Romay's burlesque singer is filmed from a distance in a static shot, replacing the expected leering quick cut closeups that would typically grace such a visceral scene with some distance that creates a disquieting pathos for both victim and perpetrator). Speaking of Lina Romay, she gleams like never before in her cutesy and frivolous song and dance number that winds up as the chief highlight of the proceedings. In a film full of wide eyes, she pulls the widest.

Mansion of the Living Dead 

(La mansión de los muertos vivientes) 

(1985)

Yet another example of Franco still possessing cinematic chops in the decade of mullets and denim is his ghosts-and-girls-on-vacation romp, Mansion of the Living Dead. The film is a romp in part, certainly, but we'd be equally as apt describing it as a funeral procession, and one not too dissimilar from the melancholy cinematic dirges of a certain like-minded genre arthouse pioneer. Although Franco and his French brother in arms, Jean Rollin, spent (by all reports) the entirety of their careers having little to do with one another, it would be foolish to proclaim they weren't familiar with each other's work. Mansion of the Living Dead is proof enough of this familiarity, as it's the closest Franco ever came to luxuriating in the same moody supernatural romance elements that Rollin filled his filmography with. What makes the film more curious than a direct theft of Rollin's milieu is that Franco deftly blends the brooding romance with his standard cheeky sleaze and nutty sadism. Four near-middle-aged Spanish lesbians (stock Franco characters if ever there were ones) arrive at a perpetually windy abandoned seaside resort hotel. While they wonder where all the other guests are and writhe around together in the nude, clues like a knife that has been chucked at the ladies by unseen forces and the discovery of the creepy concierge's flower-eating wife chained to a bedpost by the neck provide hints that all is not well in paradise. (Well, to us, anyway. The girls assume the best, asking themselves, rhetorically, "who would want to murder four hotties like us?") From there the Franco and Rollin sensibilities commingle all over the place, allowing scenes of Exorcism-esque torture and sexual sadism to butt up against breathless whispers about reincarnated princesses and the loneliness of being a ghost. These frequent transitions between disparate tones and styles (including playful eroticism, moody romance, sleazy mystery, and occult sadism; one brief moment, concerning the concierge and a desk redirection gag, is more or less a truncated Monty Python skit) are indeed jarring, but this is a film whose villains' motivation rests on a bewildering contradiction ("Bless you and damn you"), so one can't help but feel that the structural chaos is appropriate. Mansion of the Living Dead is thick with atmosphere and ideas (arguably too thick with each), but it's one of the best of Franco's later years and an undeniable treat for the initiated.

The Sadistic Baron Von Klaus 

(Le mano de un hombre muerto) 

(1962)

Despite having the snazziest poster of any Franco film, The Sadistic Baron Von Klaus might be his dreariest. Gosh, what a slog it is, and what a let down after such a promising premise! The premise is this: the OG Sadistic Baron lived 500 years in the film's past, and after having tortured and murdered a young girl from the nearby village he disappeared into the swamps surrounding his property, becoming-- as legend would have it-- a ghost eager to possess his descendants and urge them towards continuing his slaughter of the innocents. That's more or less standard horror stuff, sure, but it's aided (at least momentarily) by a cozy backwoods Gothic atmosphere (this spooky set-up is revealed to us through a hushed conversation at the village's musty bar, for example, with talk of vampires(!), bats (!), and ghosts (!)). But to expect an opulent tale of horror would be to set yourself up for disappointment: The Sadistic Baron Von Klaus falls more squarely into the contemporaneous krimi movement in European mystery cinema-- which often placed flamboyant horror film baddies in the confines of procedural murder mysteries-- than it does into the Gothic horror genre. That  distinction doesn't make it a bad film by default, as krimis are often delightful, but Baron Von Klaus is almost entirely  concerned with its procedural elements, and considering that our not-so-mysterious killer can only be one of two possible suspects, it takes us merely as long as it takes to explain the film's premise for us to have the case solved. The film has a nice jazzy score accompanying it and there's an amusing bit at the climax in which the killer, finally revealed and fleeing from the police, submerges himself into the swamp water, muttering "I am the swamp man!" Baron Von Klaus came out in the same year as The Awful Dr. Orlof (1962), and even though both films hunker down in similar narrative and aesthetic territory, it's no mystery why the latter is held up as one of the key foundational components of European horror and the latter is only remembered for a brief shot of a lady's sideboob.

The Diabolical Dr. Z 

(Miss Muerte) 

(1966)

A madcap, pseudo-scientific revenge thriller with all the fine trimmings of Gothic horror, The Diabolical Dr. Z stands as one of the best of Franco's first decade of filmaking, and-- barring Succubus (1968)-- probably his early weirdest. We find the visual content and narrative concerns of the film both looking forward to future films of Franco's (there's the seeds of images and ideas that would later blossom into Vampyros Lesbos (1971) and Venus in Furs (1969) present here) and backwards to what had already worked in the past (the notion of mind-controlled zombies who desire to defy their master is straight out of Dr. Orloff's Monster (1964). In fact, Dr. Orloff himself is even name-dropped by the diabolical doc). What begins with a serial killer's dark and stormy prison break ends with a man who is being restrained by robot arms bracing for the pain of the giant knitting needles his mind-controlled girlfriend in a mesh spider-patterned bodysuit is about to skewer him with. How these two points of interest join together involves (if you haven't guessed) a few twists and turns. Fortunately, every one of them is a loopy pleasure to watch. The film is scored with skittish jazz and features striking cinematography that's a cut above that of many of Franco's later films while still relishing the sloppy trademarks of days to come (catch those quick zooms!). It sounds smooth, looks delectable, and feels like a knitting needle through the skull. It's one to cherish.

And to make it even sweeter, The Diabolical Dr. Z also sports one heck of a complicated lead villain. One sort of assumes that the titular Dr. Z would be the first Dr. Z introduced to us, a Dr. Zimmer (Antonio Jiménez Escribano), who claims to have discovered the physical capacities for good and evil within the brain, but this isn't the case. In order to eliminate evil entirely, Dr. Zimmer asks a board of his peers for permission to begin experiments rehabilitating violent criminals, and when the other doctors not only deny him this but also call him a Nazi monster for even suggesting it, Dr. Zimmer immediately plops down dead of shock and distress. The adjective of the film's title is then earned by his wicked daughter Irma (Mabel Karr), who is also an accomplished amateur doctor of a sort (she's so tough, she performs facial reconstruction surgery on herself), who fakes her own death (rather disastrously)  in order to carry on her father's work in secret, with the sole aim of using his work to punish the men who she feels are responsible for his death. There's a really interesting dimension-- or, rather, lack of dimension-- to Irma's character: she's a woman who literally and figuratively surrenders her own identity in favor of the identities of others. This aspect of her character is first discernible in both of the film's most common titles (The Diabolical Dr. Z title has her adopting and sullying her father's professional title, while Miss Muerte refers directly to brainwashed dancer Nadja's stage name but more accurately describes the willfully murderous Irma). But this eradication of self is present in Irma's actions throughout the film, too: Irma drops everything in her own life to achieve revenge for her father's death and to continue his work; she callously murders her double (a random woman who closely resembles her) and symbolically burns the body, burning her own face in the process (go figure!) and, in a sense, the most recognizable part of her own identity; she dons disguises throughout the film, concealing her identity from those suspicious parties; and, moreover, she shifts all of the physical responsibility for the revenge murders off onto another woman (who she also vaguely resembles), keeping her own nonexistent hands clean but also denying her the catharsis of doing the deed herself. Irma becomes a sort of nefarious ethereal presence, always machinating from behind the scenes but physically subsumed by her father's ambitions and unable to become even the deadly feminine black widow she must be in order to take revenge for herself. She's diabolical-- naturally-- but also a little bit sad.

Last up: Count Dracula (1970), Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein (1972), Daughter of Dracula (1972), & Revenge in the House of Usher (1988).