Director: León Klimovsky
Writer: Paul Naschy
From: Drive-In (only 3 remain!)
A woman comes under the spell of an Eastern mystic while voodoo-related murders occur in London.
More Paul Naschy! Always welcome.
We open with grave robbers violating the tomb of the dead daughter of a rich family. Someone locks them in and summons the corpse as a zombie that kills them both.
Cut to Paul Naschy as an Indian mystic, Krishna, leading a small religious group in London. A skeptical psychiatrist is investigating him while Elvira, cousin of the zombie from the beginning, is a believer. Zombies break into Elvira’s, killing everyone there except Elvira. She decides to flee London for a bit and stay with Krishna in the town where her cousin was murdered. He’s bought an abandoned house, known as “the Devil House” because of the supposedly Satanic rituals performed by the family that owned it before.
Meanwhile, back in London, the psychiatrist is researching voodoo while the police investigate the ever-multiplying number of mysterious deaths. At the Devil House, Elvira continues to fall under the spell of Krishna as those who try to warn her get murdered.
Turns out Krishna has a twin brother who’s been doing everything. He raped a girl, leading to her death, so several families tried to burn him to death, but didn’t know that they’d failed. He’s spent the intervening years becoming a powerful voodoo priest and has hunted the families down to turn their daughters into zombies for revenge (the titular Vengeance). The brother has power over Krishna as well and seizes control to kidnap Elvira to make her his voodoo bride. Krishna’s love for Elvira ultimately helps him refuse to kill her, but then he gets mobbed by zombies.
As the brother is about to kill Elvira, he’s stabbed in the back by, I think, the maid (?). She was making out with the psychiatrist in the scene before and was someone I, honestly, kept mistaking for Elvira. Turns out she’s the witness sent to make sure the brother doesn’t betray the voodoo cult the way he has been. He dies, then the maid prepares to kill Elvira and is shot by the cops. The psychiatrist unties Elvira and police goggle over all the corpses. Everyone drives away leaving the house abandoned once again. THE END
What I love about Paul Naschy films is they way they seem to delight in horror tropes and ghost stories. Everything is played straight, but there’s a sense of giddiness underlying it all, like Naschy’s enjoyment of these kinds of stories suffuses the production from conception to script to production. This particular one, though, doesn’t hang together as well as other Naschy films. While the drama moves to country town with Elvira, the action—including deaths and zombies—remains in London. I really wanted to be in the isolated town where Elvira’s nightmares grow more prophetic and her situation becomes eerier and eerier.
In other words, if I’m watching a ghost story, I want to be in the house with all the ghosts. Instead, the haunting is happening in London, but our focal character has gone to the country.
Plus the revelation of a secret brother being responsible for all the carnage feels like a cheap twist. True, there’s a long history in Gothic literature of the deformed relative being locked away somewhere escaping and being the source of all the evil, but it doesn’t feel like a nod to Gothic tradition here. It’s also strange to have a seeming dichotomy set up between the good mysticism of Krishna and the bad mysticism of voodoo—it’s not just that the brother’s evil, it’s voodoo itself that’s evil. The brother kills an assistant who chastises him for using the power for vengeance instead of making voodoo dominant over the world and the maid hasn’t saved Elvira, she’s also planning on sacrificing her to further the goals of the cult.
On top of that, the Devil House and some of the voodoo ritual invoke Satanism which means the movie has three different magics operating at the same time. It’s just too busy.
Also, the music is tonally wrong. This is ending on a nitpick, but whoever did the dubbing dropped in a lot of bad, upbeat 70’s music that almost never matches the tone of what’s happening on screen. The ending has super upbeat stuff while we get “scary” stings when nothing bad or suggestive is happening.
I think this may be the least of the Naschy films I’ve seen in these sets. While it has him living it up in three different roles and the standard of committing as much as possible to the sets and setting, it just never gels and gets kind of boring. If the story had stayed in one place, either London or the countryside, it would have been a lot stronger.
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