341. Point of Terror

341. Point of Terror (1971)
Director: Alex Nicol
Writers: Ernest A. Charles and Tony Crechales from a story by Peter Carpenter and Chris Marconi
From: Pure Terror (the last Pure Terror; only 3 remain overall!)

A lounge singer begins an affair with a record executive’s wife, but things spiral out of control into a nightmare of murder.

While laying on the beach one day, Tony is approached by Andrea, the woman who owns that stretch of beach. They flirt a bit and he invites her to see his act at a local nightclub. She shows up that night, goes back to his place, and listens to the record he’d released and seen tank. Andrea is the wife of the owner of the largest record label in the country and says she’s going to sign Tony and make him a star.

They work on the record and start having an affair. Her husband, disabled after a car accident from when he was chasing her in a jealous rage, sees them. He confronts Andrea and, in the ensuing struggle, falls in the pool. Andrea stands by and watches him drown. At his funeral, his daughter from a previous marriage, Helayne shows up and catches Tony’s eye.

Tony asks Andrea to marry him, but she laughs him off. He then threatens to turn her in to the police since he saw her husband’s death. She calls his bluff, though, and tells him she’s in control of what he does and what happens to him. She leaves for a long trip and Tony starts seducing Helayne. Helayne has inherited half of her father’s fortune.

Tony’s girlfriend tells him she’s pregnant, but he tells her to get rid of it. Helayne agrees to marry him, and, the night after the wedding, Andrea comes back. Tony tells her he married Helayne and that he doesn’t need Andrea anymore. Andrea says there was a clause in the will that said Helayne gets nothing if she gets married before she turns 25, ie. Andrea’s still in control. Tony says he doesn’t care, Andrea starts attacking him, and he accidentally (?) throws her over a cliff. Police rule it an accident. As Helayne and Tony are about to leave, Tony gets a phone call from his girlfriend. He goes to see her and she shoots him to death on her front porch. As he’s dying, he wakes up on the beach at the beginning of the movie with Andrea saying hello to him. It was all a dream.

Or was it?

Yes, it was. THE END

Let’s get the “It was all a dream” trope out of the way first. The trope is garbage because it means everything that happened, everything you’d spent time paying attention to, didn’t matter. Yes, it’s all made up anyway, but even in the context of being something made up, it didn’t matter. It’s like the movie is laughing at you for taking it seriously. Also, it’s stupid. It’s a stupid move to try to impose a twist upon your film.

This movie, though, was begging for anything to make it interesting. Fitting that we’d close out the Pure Terror set with Padding: The Motion Picture. I had the damnedest time even figuring out what the movie was supposed to be about while I was watching it.

We spend a lot of time watching Tony sing, see that he’s not very good, and be told by other characters how great a singer he is. A quick glance to the top tells me that, yes, the actor playing Tony was one of the story writers. None of that tells us what the plot is or is supposed to be. There is one flash to a woman being murdered by a home invader and I started to wonder if that was going to be the picture—that Tony was a serial killer, or the disabled husband was faking his disability, or there’s a killer running loose in the town and these people are going to get tied up in that drama. Nope, it was a falshback to Andrea taking out a hit on her husband’s previous wife. That information comes much later. You’d think that would be the plot, then, Andrea threatening the people around her or actively ordering hits on women getting too close to Tony. Naw, she just goes on vacation so Tony can hook up with her step-daughter.

I could not tell you what the point of Point of Terror was (alternate pun: Truly, this was a Disappoint of Terror). It’s neither titillating nor terrifying, just meandering along for 90 minutes until the end where he wakes up and it’s all been bullshit. Skip it.

336. The Thirsty Dead

336. The Thirsty Dead (1974)
Director: Terry Becker
Writers: Charles Dennis from a story by Terry Becker and Lou Whitehill
From: Pure Terror (only 1 remains!)
Watch: archive.org

A death cult uses the blood of kidnapped women as an ingredient in their immortality serum.

A cult is kidnapping women in Manila and yet no one thinks to call Black Cobra to save the day. Consider my suspension of disbelief gone! Although we hear that many women are being taken, we follow a specific group of four. They’re taken into the jungle where they meet a cult whose goals are unclear at first. Eventually, our main character Laura learns that they’ve had visions of her coming. Who she’s supposed to be or why she’s important isn’t clear, but the cult wants her to join them.

The cult is an immortality cult that bleeds its victims and mixes the blood with special herbs to remain eternally young. Laura is going to be inducted, but watches the cultist drain one of her fellow captives which makes her refuse. She gathers the other women she was kidnapped with and escapes, but they’re captured and sent back to the cult. The high priest, though, has had a change of heart and decides to help her and her friends escape. One woman refuses, slightly misunderstanding the situation. She thinks if Laura refuses the offer to live forever, one of them can take it instead. She tries to tell the high priestess that she’ll join the cult, but falls into a pit and dies.

The other three women, with the help of the high priest, escape, but he starts aging rapidly once he crosses the magical barrier surrounding the cult’s land. He stays behind and dies as the women flag down a passing motorist and return to the city. Laura comes back with the authorities, but they can’t find any trace of the cult. The high priestess watches through a telescope as Laura says, “I was there.” THE END

Another movie without much going on. While there are two escape attempts and the horrific revelation of what the cult’s doing as well as what awaits those who refuse to be inducted, the moments all stand apart. It’s not that there’s no connective tissue, it’s that there isn’t much lead-up or foreshadowing of anything. The movie has an ambling tone to it, if that makes sense. We don’t jump from scene to scene nor do we gallop through events, we move at a nice casual pace through each essential plot point, never revealing too much or putting much weight on any revelation. What’s lacking from the movie is any sort of tone—either perilous or strange. The nature of the threat the women are facing isn’t particularly clear to the characters and it’s not made clear to us. Likewise, the surrealism of being offered membership of a cult that dreamed of you before your arrival isn’t played with at all. It’s all just kind of bland.

I feel like I’ve had a string of these lately, the movies that I recommend neither for watching nor avoiding. This ones feels a little slighter than the others, a little more nothing, but not so much as, say your typical Marimark film. I feel like everyone involved in this movie did the work, but only the bare minimum, like it was something they worked on between gigs in commercials.

While I’m not recommending it, I will note that it’s in the public domain. I’ve added a copy to archive.org here. I don’t know that it has much riffing potential, but it might be fun to use a b-roll in an editing project or for a music video.

323. The Embalmer

323. The Embalmer aka Il mostro di Venezia(1965)
Director: Dino Tavella
Writers: Paolo Lombardo, Gian Battista Mussetto, Dino Tavella, and Antonio Walter from a story by Dino Tavella and Antonio Walter
From: Pure Terror (only 2 remain!)

A SCUBA diving serial killer is murdering women in Venice and embalming their bodies to keep as trophies.

Not a whole lot going on in this sub-80 minute feature. In Venice, a SCUBA diver hops out of the canals and drags away women he’s been stalking. He takes the bodies to his sunken lair to embalms and display them. The police don’t have any leads. In fact, they’re regarding the disappearances as accidents that they just haven’t found the bodies for. A local reporter suspects otherwise. His hypothesis is that there’s a sex maniac kidnapping and murdering the women. He has nothing to back up his suspicions though, so they’re dismissed.

The reporter meets a group of vacationing students and falls for their chaperone. She introduces him to an archaeologist at her hotel who's seeking out a sunken monastery. Meanwhile, the murders continue.

The archaeologist realizes the monastery must be below the hotel. When he goes into the basement to start looking for a door, he’s found and murdered. The reporter starts putting the pieces together and realizes, based on stories told to him by two drunken street cleaners, that there’s a SCUBA diver using a secret underwater passage. He goes diving looking for the entrance.

Meanwhile, the chaperone realizes her room has a two-way mirror and that someone’s been peeping on her and/or her students. She goes to the apartment of the hotel manager and finds a secret passage leading below the hotel. She finds the killer, is chased through catacombs, and strangled just as the reporter arrives. He chases the killer, they struggle in a piazza on the surface, and the police shoot the killer. It was the hotel manager the whole time (which was obvious because he appeared for only two scenes way back at the start of the movie and was never mentioned again). The police note they wouldn’t have believed the story if they didn’t have his body there. THE END

The movie doesn’t drag, but it doesn’t have any energy to it either. It’s just sort of nothing. A key problem is the characters we follow don’t have any investment in the murders. The reporter isn’t digging that hard, the police aren’t investigating, and the chaperone and her charges don’t even know anything is going on. It’s not until one of her students is taken by the killer that the main characters have a direct investment in solving the case, and then it's very nearly the end.

That’s not to say the movie doesn’t have a body count. The killer is consistently picking off victims. The issue is that the victims aren’t characters so we’re not worried about them and there’s no tension of the killer stalking and attacking them. Each victim only has three scenes: being spotted by the killer, taken by the killer, and embalmed by the killer. There are no misdirections, no near misses, and no struggles. Without those, there’s also no tension around the killer.

So it’s a bit of a curious film for that reason: a thriller minus thrills. As I said above, it’s short and, to its credit, doesn’t wallow in any seediness the way similar movies might. Even though you have a peeping tom, you don’t have any nudity and there’s no suggestion of sexual assault by the killer. So it’s inoffensive, but also unexciting, and I’d suggest giving it a miss.

320. Night of Bloody Horror

320. Night of Bloody Horror (1969)
Director: Joy N. Houck Jr.
Writers: Joy N. Houck Jr. and Robert A. Weaver
From: Pure Terror (only 3 remain!)
Watch: archive.org

The romantic partners of a man with a disturbed past end up murdered. Is he having a relapse or is something else at work?

We open on Wesley having sex with his fiancée. When they finish, Wesley has what looks like a migraine attack and his vision is clouded by a blue swirl. When his fiancée asks if he’s okay, he snaps at her and leaves. She goes to church to make confession and the person posing as the priest stabs her through the eye with a knitting needle, killing her.

Then not much happens. Wesley spends the next year drinking, gets mugged by some guys at a bar, and is saved by a nurse. They start dating but, once again, he gets the blue swirl, snaps at her, and then finds her dead on the beach with an axe in her chest. Wesley is accused of the murder, but his handler/mother’s employee bails him out. When they return home, a female reporter is waiting for Wesley and invites him to a bar that night.

At the bar, Wesley is recognized from news coverage of the murders and gets into a fight. His psychologist is called in to get him out of jail which is when we learn that, thirteen years prior, Wesley was institutionalized for shooting his brother. We’re more than halfway through the film at this point. The doctor takes Wesley home, Wesley’s mom refers to conversations with her husband, and the doctor acts confused.

Wesley has a dream where he’s hooking up with the reporter, but she turns into his mother and he strangles her. Wesley seems to leave, someone kills the doctor, and Wesley arrives at the reporter’s house. They start to sort of hook up (?). It’s unclear because it seems like it is a romantic situation, and then like she’s accommodating him to protect herself, and then her sticking her neck out to protect him when they hear the police have issued an APB after finding another woman’s body.

She goes to the house to get the doctor who can provide Wesley an alibi, the cops catch Wesley at her place, but he convinces them to go to his house. The reporter has been captured by Wesley’s mother, the real killer, and is being held in a room with the corpses of Wesley’s brother and father. The mother explains she’s been taking revenge on Wesley for murdering her other son and driving her husband to suicide; since Wesley took everything from her, she won’t allow him to have friends. Cops rush in, shoot her, and she dies just before Wesley walks in and starts screaming. THE END.

That we don’t learn about Wesley’s past until more than halfway through the movie pretty much sums up what’s wrong with it: nothing is happening and nothing is telling us what to be worried about. The movie would be much better if we had a sense of any of the characters, but, despite all the time spent with them, none of them do or say anything that defines who they are.

Plus the mother being the killer the whole time and channeling her dead husband was kind of obvious. The movie gave off big Psycho vibes from the start so the twist wasn’t a twist at all. Normally, when you manage to recognize that there’s a twist you can start spotting all the clues throughout the movie. Here you have the mother, after the fiancée’s funeral, step into another room to talk with the father. Two characters having a conversation off screen? It’s one person talking to themselves and this is a Psycho rip-off.

However, that happens really early in the movie. We don’t get another nod to the mother imagining conversations with her dead husband until the doctor shows up and looks confused when she says she’s been discussing Wesley with her husband. The doctor is about to say something, then decides to wait. Those are the only two clues. Nothing else happens to suggest the twist so nothing else in the movie is pointing toward the ending. With nothing pointing toward the ending, there's no sense of motion or matter in the movie.

So it’s not a recommend because it’s pretty dull. No energy, no wit, no mystery, it just plods along to its inevitable and obvious conclusion. The only thing in the movie’s favor is that it’s in the public domain. I’ve added a copy to archive.org here.

319. Terror in the Jungle

319. Terror in the Jungle (1968)
Directors: Andrew Janczak, Tom DeSimone, and Alex Graton
Writers: Richard Ogilvie and Enrique Torres Tudela
From: Cult Cinema, Pure Terror (only 4 remain!)

A boy flying to see his mother in Rio becomes the center of several adventures as the plane crashes and he’s rescued by villagers who think he’s the son of their god.

Opens with a precocious child running across a beach and waving good-bye to a duck. Oh boy, am I going to love this flick?! No. No I’m not.

I’d complain about the child, because he’s pretty annoying, but I can’t really blame him. He looks to be about four years old, which by definition means he can't act, but he's crying in just about every shot. I sincerely suspect the producers smacked him just before every take. Keep that image in your head because it sums up the moral tone of this picture.

Yes. It is Christian propaganda. How did you guess?

Anyway, the kid is flying on a plane to Rio to see his mom because his parents might be getting a divorce. Shock and horror! How could such a thing happen? I don’t know because the mother never appears in the film. A series of wa-acky personalities are also on board—an aspiring actress, a groovy band, and a woman who allegedly murdered her husband and stole all his money. Also two nuns with a coffin, one of whom comforts the alleged murderess.

We get a little bit of these characters talking to each other on the plane, but that doesn’t matter because the plane is going to crash and I hope y’all are ready for high comedy! This is hands-down the best part of the movie. People are tossing luggage to help the plane stay airborne and one of the nuns falls out of the plane! But we’re not done! The plane crashes in the Amazon, everyone starts jumping in the water, but they’re all attacked by alligators! The kid is thrown into the river by the staff who promise they’ll follow in a moment, but the plane explodes killing them all! Of the entire flight, all that’s left is this little kid floating down the river in a coffin with his stuffed tiger. Sobbing and calling out for his daddy.

I was laughing and laughing and thought I would never stop.

Unfortunately the movie hits the brakes hard at this point. The kid flags down a plane, but his would-be rescuers are attacked by locals who take the kid instead. One faction wants to sacrifice him to their god. The other faction thinks, because of his blond hair, that he’s the son of their god. The king agrees with the second faction when he sees a halo around the boy’s head. The leader of the first faction really wants to sacrifice him, though, so he keeps working on the king until he agrees to maybe think about agreeing to it. Dude takes that as a yes and arranges to have the kid sacrificed. Just before the priest is about to put the knife in, he sees the halo around the kid’s head and refuses. So the faction leader kills the priest.

At this point, members of the second faction arrive and set the village and temple on fire. Someone escapes with the kid and the king refuses to do anything because he’s found a god stronger than INTI, somehow. So he gets killed. Meanwhile, leader of the first faction is chasing after the kid.

While all this is going on, the dad has flown down, visited the local Catholic church, and asked them for help—not the government or airline. He’s eventually led to a village the day before his son is supposed to be sacrificed and sees the villagers seemingly convert to Catholicism and agree to help find his son. Then they hit a certain point in the jungle and the villagers tell him and his priest friends that they’re on their own.

So the kid is being chased, drops his stuffed tiger, and the man chasing him finds it. The tiger transforms—first into a different stuffed tiger and then into a giant stuffed cheetah which, depending on the shot periodically transforms into a real cheetah. The man is attacked and killed by the beast, declaring with his dying breathe that the boy is the son of god. INTI, not Jehovah. That'd be blasphemous.

Kid is running, falls into quicksand, and calls for dad. Dad hears him, finds him, and saves him. As the two walk away, the pilot and priest who’d been traveling with them marvel at the fact that everyone on the plane except the kid died. The priest says, “The lord moves in mysterious ways to perform his miracles.” THE END

HOW MANY DIED SO THIS BOY COULD LIVE? It’s sort of like people talking about “God-incidences” in regard to 9/11. “I was supposed to work in the towers that day, but slept through my alarm. God specifically saved me while letting 3,000 of my friends and co-workers die in a horrifying way. Truly God is good.” By the way, I’m not making that up.

The movie is saying, directly, that God specifically reached out to protect this child (and none of the other people in the movie including the two priests who died in their effort to save him), but protect him from what? Living with his divorced mother? Quelle horreur.

The movie is just dull and weird for it’s final hour. Sure, you can laugh at the production values—all the actors look like recruits from a community theater troupe whose only membership requirement was “BYO shitty wig”—but that’s such a short, fleeting pleasure. Really, there’s about 15 solid minutes in this movie: minutes 15-30. That’s when they start making preparations for the plane to crash and all the hilarious deaths occur. After that, it’s just the locals sitting around giving the kid dirty looks and the dad traveling to find the priest who knows where the village is. If you can find a copy, just jump to the 15 minute mark and turn it off when the kid is weeping in the coffin. I doubt you’ll have a more joyful cinematic experience this year than that. Beyond that chunk, skip it.

317. The Devil's Possessed

317. The Devil’s Possessed aka El mariscal del infierno (1974)
Director: León Klimovsky
Writer: Paul Naschy
From: Pure Terror (only 5 remain!)

A baron hungry for power turns to black magic to expand his power. He kidnaps and tortures his subjects for the rituals inspiring a revolt.

A Paul Naschy film I didn’t know I had waiting for me. This is an unexpected pleasure.

Naschy plays an evil baron who returns from a visit to the king without the glory he expected. He’s the King’s greatest soldier, but left humiliated. He decides to follow through with his alternative plan: hire an alchemist to create the Philosopher’s Stone and become ruler of the world. To accomplish this, he’ll have to perform all kinds of black magic rituals.

Sic Semper Libertarian

Time passes, the people in his barony come to fear him as the Marshal of Hell because he’s resorted to kidnapping and torture to get his way. Meanwhile his alchemist and consort are conspiring to make him commit every greater atrocities.

Arrive: Gaston, a soldier held prisoner in England these past four years and friend of the Baron. He initially disbelieves the stories about the Baron, but is convinced when the Baron invites him to the castle, invites him to join in the black magic, and tries to assassinate him. Gaston leaves to lead the resistance and the Baron dedicates himself to defeating him.

Things go… not quite as expected, thankfully, which is just further evidence of it being a Paul Naschy film. All the films of his that I’ve watched deal in tropes, but twist them just a little bit. The Baron is slightly sympathetic, roped into this corruption by the people around him who he later turns on for failing him. He feels guilt and tries to seek penance, but his ego prompts him to immediately return to his murderous ways.

As we approach the inevitable final battle, there are a few twists and wrinkles that elevate this above similar schlock. I won’t give away the ending except to say it surprised me in a very satisfying way. It’s an ending that seems to reject both heroes and the aristocracy in favor of the common man and collective action. It could have used more black magic, but that’s a minor quibble. Good sets, visually interesting, and pretty good acting (despite the dubbing). I don’t know that I have to say it’s a recommend because it’s a Paul Naschy film: doesn’t that mean “recommended” all on its own?

309. The Undertaker and His Pals

309. The Undertaker and His Pals (1966)
Director: T.L.P. Swicegood
Writer: T.L.P. Swicegood
From: Pure Terror

An undertaker and two men who run a diner murder people to serve as food.

Insert obligatory joke about a cartoon spin-off of the WWE wrestler here. Done? Done.

I have very little to say about this movie, partly because it’s just a hair over an hour long. It opens in stunning brown & white where we watch a trio of bikers murder a woman. Once she dies, the film switches to lurid color as one biker starts cutting off her legs and the trio leaves with the severed limbs. In case the tone of the movie isn’t clear, during the murder a picture of the woman’s boyfriend keeps changing in reaction to what’s going on. The flick’s a dark comedy that can be a bit hit or miss.

The trio, as I note in the super quick summary at the top is the undertaker, the owner of a diner, and the chef, although the movie sits on the reveal for a little bit for no particular purpose or payoff. The undertaker tries to weasel the grieving relatives out of money for the funeral while the pair from the diner cook and serve the limbs they steal from the bodies, usually offering them as the special of the day with a pun. For instance, the first victim’s name is “Lamb” so they’re serving Leg of Lamb.

The trio murder various people until a clue points to the undertaker as being involved. He and the chef kill the diner owner, go after more people resulting in the death of the chef, and then the undertaker dies when the head detective accidentally stabs him in the face. THE END.

The movie’s sort of whatever: it’s just not enough of any one thing. That may be unsurprising considering the run time. When it’s aiming to be comic, it’s pretty good. The first scene in the funeral parlor is played broad and hits a lot of quick absurd notes. If they’d maintained that throughout, it’d be a better movie.

Part of the problem may be the PI. He’s the boyfriend/boss of the second victim and, for lack of any competition, our hero. Only the actor is really flat. I don’t know if he’s supposed to be funny or if they wrote his part straight despite the rest of the movie being a comedy, but the movie comes to a dead stop when he’s present. The trio playing the killers seem to have the right idea—the Three Stooges as psycho killers. That’s a great idea, right? The movie doesn’t quite manage it, though, never quite reaches that far.

Another issue is that the movie starts with the trio murdering and cooking people. Where do you go from there? If you think of thematically similar pieces like Sweeny Todd or Little Shop of Horrors, you arrive at cannibalism somewhere in the second act instead of long before the story started. The movie starts at its narrative peak and then can’t maintain that energy for an hour.

The movie is legitimately funny, though, and I wish they’d written up more comic sequences. The deaths are whatever, except for one vivisection which was a line I did not expect them to cross, so you’re really waiting for the absurd sensibility of the humor to come back whenever you’re watching a death scene. I’m pretty lukewarm about the whole thing. I wouldn’t recommend it, but I wouldn’t steer anyone away from it either.

265. The Tell-Tale Heart

265. The Tell-Tale Heart (1960)
Director: Ernest Morris
Writers: Brian Clemens and Eldon Howard, based on the story by Edgar Allen Poe
From: Pure Terror
Watch: archive.org

Edgar Marsh murders his friend Carl after seeing Carl being intimate with the woman Edgar loves. Now Marsh is haunted by the sound of Carl’s still-beating heart.

Ever want to know the “true” story behind Poe’s classic, “The Tell-Tale Heart”? No? Oh. Well. This is just awkward for all of us.

Much of this movie is very strange. It’s from 1960, but has a very 20’s/30’s aesthetic and ethic and that difference can be very jarring. For instance, there’s a scene where Edgar is sitting in his apartment looking at pornographic images. That’s fine for a movie from 1960 and is used as shorthand to communicate Edgar’s sexual frustration, but the movie is shot in black-and-white and feels very stagey, like it was made during the early period of cinema where they didn’t quite know what a movie should look like. In other words, this doesn't feel like a movie from 1960 so the dirty pictures feel very out of place.

On top of that, the movie tries to do a kind of blending of realities. We open with Poe waking up screaming. His friend Carl comes in and hands him some drugs. Poe stumbles over to a chair and starts examining some papers. Cut to the actor playing Poe going to a bar/brothel and getting scared away by a sex worker. This is Edgar Marsh who is not Poe, but I think he's called "Poe" several times despite that (?) The end of the movie makes it apparent that Poe is dreaming that he’s Marsh, but there’s no indication elsewhere in the movie. Marsh has a limp, we’re told, but it’s not visually clear at all and only mentioned, again, at the end when Poe wakes up.

As for the plot, Marsh lives alone in a big house. He sees Betty move in across the street and peeps in her window from his. He asks his friend Carl for advice about how to talk to girls and approaches Betty. She goes out with him, but he’s a bit of a damp squib and then tries to force himself on her at the end of the night. For some reason, she lets him take her out twice more, each time becoming increasingly uninterested.

Until he introduces her to Carl. She and Carl hit it off immediately and eventually make arrangements to meet at her apartment, a meeting Marsh watches from his room. The next day, he invites Carl over and murders him. From here, it’s the plot of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Marsh is hallucinating the heartbeat while Betty is trying to get the police to investigate Carl’s disappearance. They say Carl's done this before and laugh at her for being a sucker. More than that, it feels like the cops are laughing at the idea of believing a woman. Finally she breaks into Marsh’s house, finds the murder weapon, and delivers it to the police. They eventually see the blood and hair on it and only then go to question Marsh. He reveals all, gets shot, and falls off a balcony and impales himself.

Then Poe wakes up screaming. Carl runs in to check that he’s okay. Poe says he’s had a strange dream, that Carl was in it, and then looks out the window to see Betty moving into the house across the way. THE END.

This has a 5.8 on IMDB and I’m not sure why. I found it incredibly plodding and dull. The movie drags its feet getting to the killing, spending that time seeing Marsh be a bad date and watching him constantly push Betty and Carl together. Time may be a factor in my reaction. I think the movie is trying to make you sympathetic to Marsh’s situation, to see him as a “Nice Guy” that’s just not catching on, but, post Red Pill and GamerGate, I don’t have any patience or sympathy for the “Nice Guy” trope. He’s a creep who won’t take “no” for an answer and murders his only friend out of jealousy. He’s not sympathetic.

The interesting character is Betty. She’s new in town, goes on one date with a guy, and now is trapped in this murder nightmare. Marsh even says to himself after the murder that she’ll come to him eventually because she has nowhere else to go. That’s your horror story. Add the cops not believing her and you’ve got a real source of tension.

This movie is in the public domain (boy does it feel like a while since I've said that) and I’ve added an MPEG2 copy to archive.org here, but I can’t really recommend it. The movie’s boring. So much so that I forgot the William Castle-esque opening title cards suggesting that those who are squeamish close their eyes whenever the sound of a heartbeat plays. I guess it was to make people close their eyes through the “tense” parts of the movie where nothing happens and there’s nothing to be afraid of. I’m sure you can make some jokes about the flick, but apart from that, it’s a dud. Skip it.

233. The Oval Portrait

233. The Oval Portrait aka One Minute Before Death (1972)
Director: Rogelio A. González
Writers: Enrique Torres Tudela based on the short story by Edgar Allen Poe
From: Pure Terror

A woman believes she is being possessed by the spirit of her late cousin.

Lisa and her mother arrive at the house of Lisa’s late uncle Robert. He recently died in an asylum and the family is gathering at his estate for a reading of the will. The only people there are Mrs. Warren and the strange Joseph who largely keeps to himself. Rumors have it that the house is haunted and Lisa, very quickly is spooked by a portrait of Rebecca, her late cousin.

Which is the set-up. What follows is a film that looks like Andy Milligan directing a Hammer Horror film. The movie is set just post-Civil War and is trying to maintain a gothic edge, but it never quite manages it. Frankly, the movie feels like a real movie where the entire cast was replaced by actors from the local community theater.

Lisa stumbles across Joseph in the middle of the night seemingly talking to Rebecca’s ghost and the next day he attacks Lisa because she’s wearing one of Rebecca’s dresses. Lisa continues to imagine the house is haunted and Mrs. Warren finally tells everyone the story leading us to a flashback that takes up the majority of the movie. In fact, the flashback is the story and the opening and closing are merely framing devices.

During the Civil War, Joseph, a traitor who murdered in defense of slavery (ie. a Confederate soldier) breaks into the house while running from Union soldiers. Rebecca and Mrs. Warren hide him from Robert because he’s insanely jealous of men. He tells Rebecca if he ever catches her with a man, he’ll kick her out of the house.

They nurse Joseph back to health and Robert is called up to serve in the Union army. Joseph and Rebecca fall in love, but just as they’re about to get married, the Union soldier returns and arrests Joseph. Rebecca is pregnant with his child, though, and the night she goes into labor, Robert comes home. In a fit of rage, he throws her out of the house causing her to miscarry. Robert slips into a catatonic state leading to him being institutionalized and Rebecca is having fits about the loss of her child.

Finally, Joseph, the traitor who murdered in defense of slavery, returns to find Rebecca, except it’s the day of her funeral. The traitor who murdered in defense of slavery is so distraught that he digs her body up that night and brings it back to the house. Mrs. Warren is allowing the traitor who murdered in defense of slavery to stay there as long as he needs to get himself back together.

Which brings us up to the present moment. The reading of the will happens, but Mrs. Warren has a more recent edition that leaves her the house. Lisa runs in, possessed by Rebecca’s ghost, and has a mad romp through the house until she finds Rebecca’s dessicated corpse. Lisa and her mother leave the house with Lisa still seemingly mad with the idea of being Rebecca, and Mrs. Warren is left alone with the traitor who murdered in defense of slavery.

She wakes up that night to find him romancing Rebecca’s corpse. It’s at this moment that she realizes he’s mad, tells him he’s her son, and then shoots him. The final shot is of the field, the ghosts of Rebecca and the traitor who murdered in defense of slavery walking off together. THE END.

It’s boring and not well-done. On top of that, there isn’t a lot of camp value. Nothing’s particularly over-the-top, even though some of the acting is remarkably bad, so the movie never rises to the level of being funny-bad. Plus there’s the narrative problem of making the wronged romantic hero a traitor who murdered in defense of slavery. The Union soldiers become the villains in the set-up, which is problematic on its own, but it also makes things confusing. The setting feels like a plantation house and if Robert were going to be part of any army, he’d be a member of the traitors who murdered in defense of slavery. Instead, he’s a member of the Union. Which means the estate is relatively far north, so how did this traitor who murdered in defense of slavery get there? The fighting wouldn’t have crept that far north.

Of course, if you try swapping the sides, it still doesn’t work. If Joseph is Union, then the father returns after losing the war, but he’s relatively high-ranking so he wouldn’t be able to return so quickly if he could have returned at all. They could have made Joseph a deserter. Then he’d be a Union soldier, but he wouldn’t have been injured and then in need of a long period of recovery at the house. The set-up itself doesn’t offer any good solutions.

Nor does it offer any surprises. The moment Mrs. Warren finds Joseph, we know he’s her son so the revelation at the end isn’t a twist, it’s just clarification that you did figure it out before the movie told you. The house is haunted, but the ghost doesn’t do much until the final sequence where she closes several doors. Lisa’s gone mad, but since the majority of the movie was a flashback about Rebecca and a traitor who murdered in defense of slavery, we neither see that transition nor care because the movie isn’t about, well, the main character.

So it’s not a recommend for a whole host of reasons, but first and foremost is that it’s dull. You can get away with a lot of crap in a movie, but the moment it’s dull, everyone’s gone.

219. The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave

219. The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave aka La notte che Evelyn uscì dalla tomba (1971)
Director: Emilio Miraglia
Writers: Massimo Felisatti, Fabio Pittorru, and Emilio Miraglia
From: Pure Terror

A man haunted by visions of his dead wife invites women who look like her up to his castle to murder them.

Another movie that lost the thread of what it’s about between the beginning and end. We open with Lord Alan Cunningham trying to escape a sanitarium. He’s running across the grounds hallucinating the guards chasing him, and is ultimately caught. Then we cut to Alan driving a prostitute to his castle in the countryside. He stops the car to switch out the license plates because he was using fake ones when he picked her up.

At the castle, he takes her into the dungeon where he starts whipping her. She tells him people know who he is and that’s when he reveals that he used fake plates so that he wouldn’t be found. Then he has a vision of his dead wife Evelyn sleeping with another man, and he stabs the woman he’s with to death.

Okay, this will be a serial killer movie and he’s the bad guy. Got it. He pays off a witness who turns out to be Evelyn’ brother and then has a brief meeting with his psychologist who warns him about having further episodes. So the impression I got was that he’s killed before and people are covering it up.

Things proceed. Alan is obsessed with redheads because Evelyn was one so his cousin sets him up with a stripper in London. Basically a repeat of the first woman ensues except afterwards, when Alan comes to and is removing evidence, he finds the woman’s lighter. He throws it out only to find it again. What could its reappearance mean? Don’t ask that question because it’s not going to matter for another 45 minutes!

Alan meets a third woman, Gladys, who he immediately marries. They move into the castle and she starts investigating the strange events happening around Evelyn—she seems to be haunting the place. There’s also the looming threat of Alan murdering her the way he’s murdered other women.

Gladys investigates and learns that Alan became delusional and started to believe Evelyn was cheating on him. He was pursuing a divorce, but she was trying to keep the marriage together so went through with a dangerous pregnancy. She died as a result. So Alan’s delusions literally led to Evelyn’s death.

Things escalate, people related to Evelyn and Alan get murdered, and finally it seems Evelyn has risen from her grave. This leads to Alan having a final breakdown and being committed. The not insubstantial estate is split between Gladys and Alan’s cousin. Get ready for a Shyamalaan twist, though—Gladys and the cousin had been working together the whole time! It was all a plot to drive Alan mad and steal everything he owned. He was the victim. You know, the murderer.

We’re not done, though! Oh no, not with a film like this. Gladys goes to a chalet with the cousin and gets poisoned! The cousin betrays her and has secretly been working with the second woman who hadn’t actually died. Double twist! Before she dies, Gladys manages to stab the woman, leaving the cousin the only one alive. He leaves the chalet.

And runs into Alan! Triple twist! He wasn’t committed at all! His psychologist had cured him and his breakdown was faked to lure the plotters out in the open. Alan and the cousin fight, knocking some chemicals into a swimming pool which the cousin then falls into. The final scene is the cousin being taken away by police screaming about how he’s on fire. THE END

Movies don’t have to depict a moral universe, but they are made by moral actors, which raises the question of what is this movie’s about. What’s the message? We open with Alan as a serial killer protected by his money and position. The close should address that. That doesn’t mean the movie can’t have the ending it has, but it has to address its starting point. Since we’re introduced to Alan as a sadistic murderer and have that vision of him reinforced throughout the movie, that needs to be addressed by the end. Close on him laughing maniacally or a close-up of his face as the psychologist says, “You’re cured,” while the face says he’s anything but. End, essentially, on Alan indicating that the story was about him and his arc.

Instead, we freeze on the cousin screaming, signifying that justice has been done and everything set right in the world. Not only will he face criminal prosecution, but, with his insistence that he’s burning, justice in the afterlife as well. That was never a concern of the film.

The movie’s at its best when it’s focused on Gladys trying to sort out the mystery of Evelyn and how she died. In that portion—and it takes way too long to get to it—you have a movie that’s introducing legitimately creepy elements, a real mystery, and a rising sense of threat from Alan. Remember, we’ve seen him kill before. Now there’s a woman living in the castle trying to find out the fate of wife #1 whose body is no longer in her grave.

Other people get murdered along the way: Evelyn’s brother and Alan’s aunt, who apparently were having a relationship or plotting against Alan in some way. It doesn’t matter because they both die and serves as the weakest red herring.

I think I’m disappointed by this movie, which, surprise, is not a recommend, because of the narrative and moral confusion at its core. Alan’s the threat. He’s the monster. Now, characters plotting against him or his situation being engineered by the other characters is a nice twist, but you can’t throw it in and play him up as some kind of victim. At best you can play it as the inevitable victim had outsmarted the monster and won the day. I’d like that movie and twist. This movie, though, missed the mark. It’s not as grim as a lot of the lesser serial killer features I’ve watched, but ultimately comes out dull. The movie takes too long to bring us Gladys, the real main character, and doesn’t know what story it’s actually telling. So give it a pass and find something a little more entertaining for the Hallo-weekend.

217. The Amazing Transparent Man

217. The Amazing Transparent Man (1960)
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Writer: Jack Lewis
From: Pure Terror
Watch: archive.org

An ex-major breaks a safe-cracker out of jail to use as a guinea pig for an invisibility ray with hopes of eventually building an invisible army. Things go awry though when the safe-cracker develops his own plans.

I wrote about this movie almost ten years ago in the second PD Project post. The movie hasn’t improved with time.

Nor is it any worse. The movie itself is just under an hour so it doesn’t get too bogged down with anything—it doesn’t have time to. The basic story is bank robbing safe-cracker extraordinaire Joey Faust is busted out of prison by Major Krenner. Krenner has kidnapped a German scientist, Dr. Ulof, to develop an invisibility ray. Faust will be the titular transparent man dispatched to steal nuclear materials from a nearby government base. After some post-invisibility violent negotiations, Faust agrees to do the job for an exorbitant amount of money.

Krenner’s particularly villainous. He was an Army spy during WWII which is how he found Dr. Ulof. He manages to smuggle Ulof out of Germany, but kidnaps the doctor’s daughter and holds the two of them captive to make Ulof develop the invisibility ray. Krenner’s ultimate plan is to create an army of invisible men and sell the technology to the highest military bidder.

Faust is a bank robber, though, and sees the opportunities invisibility affords him in that field. After doing the first job stealing nuclear material, Faust convinces Krenner’s accomplice to take him to a bank instead of the military base. However, the invisibility starts wearing off during the robbery and Faust is identified.

Krenner hears about the robbery on the radio and realizes he’s been betrayed. Faust arrives in time to knock him out and asks Ulof why the invisibility wore off. Ulof tells him there’s something wrong with the ray and that Faust is going to die. He can either run and live a brief time or sacrifice himself to thwart Krenner’s plans. Faust agrees to stay and Dr. Ulof and his daughter escape. While Faust fights Krenner, the nuclear material stolen earlier explodes and wipes out, we’re told in the epilogue, most of the county. Faust is dead, but so are Krenner’s evil plans. THE END.

The movie’s pretty stripped-down and low budget, but that may be to its credit. The idea at the core of the plot is sound and it ticks every box that you expect from a story like this without any extra baggage. Sure, that does mean certain emotional moments move too quickly, for example, Krenner’s henchman who’s been loyal because he thinks Krenner has info about his daughter breaks down and switches sides when Krenner’s accomplice tells him Krenner’s been lying and the girl is dead. The emotional beats are all the right ones, but they arrive exactly as quickly as I relayed them in that sentence. The henchman’s reason for his loyalty, how he’s been fooled, and him being turned all happens within a minute.

That said, there’s no filler here. Every moment is essential to the plot, defines the characters and their situation, and moves things forward. In other words, it’s competently made, it’s just not remarkably made. When I watched it before, I said it’d be nice to see this redone as a student film because it’s right within the possibilities of what a student film could do. I stand by that assessment.

The movie’s in the public domain and I uploaded it to archive.org here just over a decade ago (how long have I been at this?). The movie’s not a recommend, but I’m not going to warn anyone away from it either. It’s fine for a lazy Saturday afternoon or if you want some easy riffing material. This was featured as episode 623 of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and is available on the forthcoming Vol. XXXIX if you want to see someone else’s take on it.

215. Scared to Death

215. Scared to Death (1947)
Director: Christy Cabanne
Writer: Walter Abbott
From: Pure Terror
Watch: archive.org

A woman arrives at the morgue and narrates, for the audience, the story of how she was murdered.

A brief studio cheapie that’s most notable for being the only color film to star Bela Lugosi. While it’s better than a lot of the Ed Wood movies he did later, it’s still pretty disappointing. There’s a real sense that the movie was banking on his reputation as being a horror icon to do the work of selling the movie.

The film is set up as a giant flashback. Laura, our narrator, has been murdered, but they don’t know precisely how. Then her voice arrives on the soundtrack telling us her story. Only Laura’s voice-over never adds anything to the movie, never provides any foreshadowing, never even gives us a sense of her character by having her describe things that are happening in the flashback. In fact, Laura’s not in the movie much at all. We see more of her lying dead as the movie fades back to her than we do in the movie itself.

Anyway, we cut from her on the table to her being examined by her father-in-law, Dr. Van Ee. He’s trying to put a blindfold on her, but she panics and tells him to stop. She accuses him of conspiring with her husband to force her into a divorce. They’d be happy if she left, but take forever to explain why. She leaves as another patient arrives—a woman seemingly trying to blackmail the doctor with knowledge that only a person he presumed dead would have. The doc kicks her out and then Lugosi, the doctor’s cousin, arrives. They used to run a racket together as touring illusionists and Lugosi is the person presumed dead. He’s not there for blackmail, though, just to rest for the night.

So much for that mystery.

Really Lugsoi’s there to play up the red herring of the doctor being in some way villainous or to be his own red herring. Meanwhile, Laura is in her room and gets sent a mask in the mail that makes her scream. Through details we learn from other characters, we can put together that Laura used to be part of a double-act at The Green Room. Lugosi remembers her and says, to no one, “The Green Man may get you yet.” Things escalate in the house with more people arriving, the maid being hypnotized to feign death, and then everyone goes into the parlor to find Laura hypnotized to perform her act from before.

During the war, Laura betrayed her partner—her then husband—to the Nazis and sent him a green blindfold for his execution. She wanted him to know she’d betrayed him. She did it, not for the money, but to be free of him and his control over her despite him being “good.” The movie’s really invested in you not being that bothered by her murder. She takes off the blindfold, sees a mask coming at her from the window, and dies of a heart attack. The husband is caught in the yard disguised as the woman who came to see the doctor earlier and we fade back to the coroner’s office where he says she was “scared to death.” THE END

It’s pretty stupid. Normally I’d find something like this charming, but it’s just throwing everything into a pot and making nothing from it. The doctor’s past and all his strange behavior, including lying about being attacked, comes to nothing. The house is full of secret passages for no reason. Lugosi has a deaf-mute little person working as his assistant because...creepy? Plus there’s a bumbling private security officer in love with the maid and a reporter who shows up for no reason with his ditzy assistant. Even the son, the man who wants a divorce, vanishes from the movie for the majority. The reason he wants the divorce, by the way, is that he married Laura the night he met her on a drunken bet.

The worst thing the movie does is make the killer someone you couldn’t possibly know. The woman who seemed to be blackmailing the doctor at the beginning was actually a character never named or described until the final scene, in disguise (so you wouldn’t know the person you didn’t know).

This is not as bad as some of the other flicks I’ve watched, it’s certainly not offensive, but it’s strangely bad. Like the decision to cut back to Laura in the morgue all the time. The cuts dissolve to her lying still and then immediately dissolve back to the movie, sometimes the same scene. Plus they’re almost never scenes that she’s in. She’s telling a story of all the things she didn’t witness.

The movie is almost, but not quite, compellingly bad, and I recommend it on those terms. It’s not fun on its own and I wouldn’t recommend it to watch ironically, but if you have friends and want to laugh at something, this movie is so consistently wrong-footed that you’d have a good time. It’s in the public domain and there are several copies available on archive.org. I’ve linked to the MPEG-2 version, because that’s what I do.

213. Satan's Slave

213. Satan’s Slave aka Evil Heritage (1976)
Director: Norman J. Warren
Writer: David McGillivray
From: Cult Cinema; Pure Terror

A young woman visits estranged family members who may have sinister plans for her.

As with so many of these movies, feel free to look at that title and then brace yourself for disappointment. We open on a Satanic ritual with a topless woman on the altar. She gets sacrificed and then we cut to a country house where Steven has brought a girl. He convinces her to stay the night, but then tries to rape her. As she leaves, he kills her, but is seen by Francis, the family secretary, and looks ashamed.

Tonally, not the best opening to a movie, but it’s a double-fail here because the movie plays up Steven as kind, sensitive, and potentially someone who’s going to save Catherine. Except we saw him try to rape a woman in the first scene and murder her. So rather than wonder if he’s going to save Catherine and then get hit by the twist that he’s evil and sadistic, we’re just waiting for him to be evil and sadistic. The movie still tries to play the reveal to Catherine as a twist anyway, but we’ll get to that. The decision to play him up as a potential love interest made me think a bit of The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave. That also opens with a character actively murdering someone and then tries to play him up as the victim. That doesn't work.

Catherine has been having premonitions of something terrible so her family decides to take a vacation in the country to visit her estranged uncle Alexander. As they arrive at Alexander’s estate, Catherine’s father is hit with some psychic blast and crashes into a tree. Catherine leaves the car to get help from the house, but the car explodes with both her parents inside.

As she recovers in the house, she starts to find her place with her cousin Steven, her uncle Alexander, and their secretary Francis. Steven takes her on a variety of walks around the grounds telling her stories of witches who were burned there in the past. Catherine has visions of these events that tend to overwhelm her.

Meanwhile, someone in Satanic robes is stealing things from Catherine’s room to cast spells on various people. Also, Francis is breaking into her boss’ drawers to try to reclaim something as well.

Catherine and Steven start to fall in love and then hook up (COUSINS!). Their increasing familiarity has been getting on Francis’ nerves because she had an arrangement or a relationship (it's not clear) with Steven herself.

Anyway, turns out everyone in the house is part of a Satanic cult that wants to sacrifice Catherine in hopes of resurrecting her witch ancestor. The person sacrificed at the start was Alexander’s wife, but the ritual didn’t take. Francis spills the beans to Catherine and makes plans to escape, but gets killed. Steven and Alexander then take Catherine to the sacrificial spot, she escapes, and as she runs through the woods she comes back to the estate to find her father. He’s not dead at all and all of this has been a dream.

Only it’s not. He’s been part of the plot the whole time and Catherine is captured once again and presumably sacrificed. THE END.

I’d suggest giving this movie a pass. It’s at once too convoluted and too slow. I was never clear on what Francis was doing or why she was trying to prevent the sacrifice because she’s also working very hard to bring it about. Steven is a creeper and a threat so the movie trying to play him up as a romantic interest, especially since they’re cousins, becomes really strange. Then there’s the constant background threat of this impending sacrifice that never seems to be developing in the background. To put it briefly, the movie has lots of violent nudity, but not enough Satan. Overall there’s nice atmosphere and cinematography at points, but the final twist doesn’t carry weight because of the opening rape scene. Throughout the movie, rather than creating an atmosphere of mystery, we’re just left waiting for psycho boy to snap. That's not impressive.

205. The House That Screamed

205. The House That Screamed aka La residencia (1970)
Director: Narciso Ibáñez Serrador
Writers: Narciso Ibáñez Serrador from a story by Juan Tébar
From: Pure Terror

A girl is sent to a strict boarding school where she has to survive the perverted inclinations of the headmistress and desires of the head girl. However, there may be a more dire threat wandering the halls.

A curious film in that there’s very little that happens, but manages to be compelling nonetheless. We start with Sra. Fourneau leading a class on dictation when one of the girls refuses to do her work. Fourneau sends her to solitary confinement and then meets with the guardian of Teresa, a new student at the school. As Fourneau gives them a tour of the grounds, Teresa thinks she sees someone or something following them. She’s admitted to the school and, that night, a trio of girls join Fourneau in punishing the student who was acting up earlier in the day. The head girl takes particular delight in whipping her. Once everyone’s gone to bed, Fourneau confronts her son Luis who was the one peeping on Teresa during the tour. She tells him none of the girls here are good enough for him because they’ve all been “marked” in some way, and that once he gets older he’ll find a proper girl just like his mother.

And that’s it for the setup. Luis is a peeping Tom who meets with a specific girl regularly. She finds a note signed by him with keys to help her escape. When she uses them, someone grabs her in the greenhouse and stabs her to death. It’s forty minutes before this death happens, by the way. No one knows that she’s dead, though. They all assume she escaped, so there’s no panic developing within the school, just a general loathing of Fourneau and fear of the head girl’s wrath.

I’m going to leave it there. The movie has a staggeringly low body count, but maintains a really nice tone throughout. It’s focused on a sordid place and location, but the movie itself doesn’t become sordid. There are overtones of lesbianism, incest, sadism, but they’re always done with the lightest touch. The element is suggested, and then stepped away from. It's just enough for you to get the sense of how it's effecting the characters.

If anything, this feels like a less lurid and dreamlike Suspiria, trading those elements for more of a Gothic foreboding. There’s always the question of what exactly is happening at this school and who’s responsible for it.

The movie takes a curious turn at the end by switching the primary POV character and has a conclusion that’s shocking, but I'm not sure is earned. It’s certainly a horrific ending and clever, but it feels almost unrelated to the content of the film. You could stick it at the end of nearly any film and it’s feel just as coherent.

That said, I really liked this one. It was weird, creepy, and doesn’t get super exploitative or perverse. There is a shower scene, but everyone is showering in their shift which just seems to defeat the purpose of both a shower and a shower scene. How can you take a shower with your clothes on? And isn’t a shower scene supposed to be about casual nudity? The scene itself has a purpose, but I was legitimately confused by the clothes.

This is a strong recommend, though. I’ve avoided saying too much about the content because while there isn’t a whole lot, I liked the tension developed by not knowing what was happening. As autumn is approaching, this is something to enjoy with popcorn and cider.

203. Bloody Pit of Horror

203. Bloody Pit of Horror aka Il boia scarlatto (1965)
Director: Massimo Pupillo
Writers: Romano Migliorini and Roberto Natale
From: Pure Terror
Watch: archive.org; Rifftrax

A group of models looking to shoot book covers goes into a castle that used to be the home of the torturous Crimson Executioner. It’s current resident starts killing them through various medieval means.

Another movie that I watched several times before in the pre-PD Project days. My copy came from The Dead Walk 10-Movie Pack. I already uploaded to the Internet Archive nearly eleven years ago. It’s a silly little piece of Italian not-quite sleaze, and I opted to watch the Rifftrax version this time around. During the opening credits featuring a car driving along a road for minutes on end, one of the riffs is, “Kind of a Manos goes to Europe feel about this.” They’re not wrong.

A group of cover girls arrives at a castle that their producer hopes to use as a set for book cover photos. Cause that was a thing at a time I guess? I was born in 1980 so my only experience with book cover models was Fabio, and even then, he’d pose for portraits as opposed to photos. But anyway. The castle is locked and no one answers the bell so, naturally, they break in. The owner initially tells them to leave, but relents upon seeing the producer’s female assistant. Then, during the shoots, a male model is impaled by a pendulum device.

The photography sequence reveals both the motive and tone of the movie—scantily-clad women in peril and a Scooby-Doo-ish level of camp.

Gradually every character ends up in a torture device at the whims of the Crimson Executioner, but everything looks terrible and hokey. The end result of every device is to gradually strip the women a little further than they are at the present moment. Imagine lingerie models having their lingerie removed literally thread-by-thread and you’ll have the right idea. There’s never any nudity, but there is the suggestion that with enough time, and if the victim doesn’t die, and the devices aren’t clearly cardboard, there might, eventually, conceivably, be a bit of titty.

I'm the metaphorical budget literalized!

I do have to note that the torture devices are at once hilariously cheap and hilariously convoluted. One women is tied to a spider web with a giant stuffed spider coming ever nearer to eventually prick her with a poisoned needle. No one can save her because the floor is criss-crossed with massive tripwires that will set off arrows embedded in the wall, killing whoever tripped them. Our hero tries to save her by crawling along the floor, which is pretty easy to do (as would be walking around the edge of the room or just stepping in the massive gaps between the tripwires), but gets there just a moment too late.

Huh?

I’m all over the place with this movie because it doesn’t follow any plot, it’s just, “people show up, start dying.” So the Crimson Executioner was a 17th-century madman obsessed with purity who tortured people he regarded as sinning to death. He gets sealed in the hokiest iron maiden I’ve ever seen and dies. The castle’s current owner is an ex body builder, also obsessed with human perfection, who lionizes the Crimson Executioner and starts murdering everyone in the castle. The woman he saw is his ex-fiancée, but when she tells him to stop killing, he rejects love as weak and an imperfection.

Anyway, inevitably the hero gets caught, escapes, the villain thinks he’s dead, but they have one final battle. The villain falls against one of his own traps, gets poisoned, and dies. By this point, everyone except the hero and the fiancée are dead, but it’s cool cause they’re each other’s love interest and they leave. THE END.

The movie’s stupid, but it’s short, clocking in at just under 75 minutes, and it’s just silly. It’s a cheapo exploitation flick, but it doesn’t fall into the trap a lot of those do by being grim or rapey. As I said above, it feels like an adult Scooby-Doo, only the gang is too stupid to figure out what’s really happening.

The movie’s in the public domain and, as mentioned above, I uploaded a copy here almost eleven years ago. The Rifftrax version is a much better print, but the riffing is only generally okay. It’s not bad, but it feels like they hammered on some things a bit and went for the obvious targets. You could do as well with a group of your friends, and I recommend you do. It’s not good enough to watch on its own, but perfect for laughing at with people, even kids in the preteen age group. Your mileage may vary, but it doesn’t get too sexually explicit and, like I said, there’s no nudity, so it may not be the worst movie to use to bring an 11 or 12-year-old into the world of riffing and camp cinema.

191. Terror Creatures From the Grave

191. Terror Creatures From the Grave (1965)
Director: Massimo Pupillo
Writers: Romano Migliorini and Roberto Natale, adapted by Ruth Carter and Cesare Mancini, based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe
From: Pure Terror

A lawyer arrives at a villa with a letter requesting that he update the owner’s will. Only the owner has been dead nearly a year and, as the lawyer investigates further, was involved in occult activities that maybe haven’t ended.

A Barbara Steele movie! Barbara Steele is 110% goth and has amazing presence. She’s great as a femme fatale, a witch, a vampire, anything. She was a real-life Morticia Addams and your movie could be about puppies and clowns, but you drop Barbara Steele in, it’s immediately a goth classic that you misremember as having Vincent Price in it as well.

This, unfortunately, doesn’t use her to her full potential and, to give you a preview of the movie’s quality, the director had his name removed from it and replaced with the producer’s. However, the movie is not as terrible as that would suggest, either, it just isn’t all that it could be.

We open with a man nervously drinking in a closed bar. Someone slaps their hand against the window and he runs to get his horse. Only the horse gets spooked as he’s untying it and knocks him down, trampling him to death.

With the tone established and the body count already running, we go to the villa where the lawyer arrives. He has a note from the villa’s owner requesting the attorney Morgan come out to update the will. Morgan is traveling, so his colleague has arrived instead. He’s met by the daughter of the man and her step-mother and is told the man has been dead nearly a year. The only reason they’re at the villa is that his will stipulated that he be exhumed a year after his death.

The lawyer stays the night, but finds that he can’t leave the next morning because an owl got into the engine of his car. I’m sure that’s a thing, but it still seemed hilarious. He meets the town doctor and, with the daughter, goes into town. In the interim we learn that the man had been doing occult research and was convinced he could speak to the dead that haunted the villa. It had been the place of trial and punishment for the “plague spreaders,” people who were infected with the plague and deliberately took it to other locations. Their hands were cut off and are on display in the villa and their bodies are buried there in unconsecrated ground.

Your typical gothic horror moments arise: a townsperson tells them to leave as “the night of revenge” is approaching, the daughter starts seeing her dead father, and the town’s pharmacist/mayor is found dead. The doctor’s assistant had the paperwork written up before the death because he’d heard “the corpse collectors” in the night and knew it would be the mayor. The mayor had been one of five people present at the death of the occultist. Two are still alive: the man who warned them to leave and an indecipherable name.

That night, the man who warned them, who uses a wheelchair, secures a sword in his dresser and impales himself upon it. Something comes into the house and, with a putrescence-covered hand pulls the chair back, drawing the sword from the body. The sword is covered with the material which is also seeping from the man’s wound.

The grave is opened the next day and, surprise, there’s no body. The lawyer figures out the last name must be Morgan who happens to be showing up at the villa. Morgan sees the occultist, but the body is gone before anyone gets back. Turns out Morgan and Barbara Steele had been having an affair and they know what really happened to the occultist. It turns out he’d set up his revenge before his death with the help of the gardener.

The hour of the occultist’s murder hits and a mirror reveals the moment of his death where the five plus Barbara Steele tell him to leave town. His meddling with the undead is bothering everyone, but he has the dirt on each person in the room, so they kill him. The plague spreaders rise from their graves, but you never see them, and kill everyone except the lawyer and the daughter who escape when it starts raining because, as a nursery rhyme the occultist taught his daughter, the cure is “pure water.” The two leave to live happily ever after. THE END.

The movie just misses its mark on a lot of levels. It has some nice sets, a good enough tone, but it never executes with the precision you’d want. I started by excitedly noting that Barbara Steele is in the movie, but she’s not in it a lot. She’s sidelined most of the time and really only has one solid scene where she tells her step-daughter that she didn’t love the girls’ father. He’d basically tricked her into quitting her acting career to join him. Since that element was there, I was kind of disappointed that they wrote her as having an affair with Morgan. The occultist becomes just that much more monstrous if he’s coming back for revenge and to exercise control over this woman he deceived.

It’s telling that I don’t give character names for anyone. It’s because I don’t know them, and I just watched this and took notes. I refer to the occultist as “the man” because even IMDB doesn’t list his name and I don’t know if it was Hieronimusch, Geronimusch, or if those are even close. The characters don’t stand out so neither do their actions.

One element of the movie I did like was watching the lawyer play recordings of the man’s notes. You hear his voice talking about his research and experiments and, as he’s talking, it seems to cause the ghosts in the house to manifest. It’s very Evil Dead and that’s always a plus in my book.

There are nice ideas here, but in the end the whole thing’s kind of boring and gets wrapped up too coincidentally. I mean, rain will save the day? Good thing it’s always cloudy in movies like this then. So it’s not a recommend, but I don’t discourage anyone from watching it either. It’s merely okay. I’ve seen some websites claiming this is in the public domain, but it appears to have a valid copyright notice on it. If I hear otherwise, I’ll upload it to the Internet Archive because this is 100% midnight movie fare and would be great on a public access show or being riffed. At the moment, it looks like it’s not.

185. The Vampires' Night Orgy

185. The Vampires’ Night Orgy aka La orgía nocturna de los vampiros (1973)
Director: León Klimovsky
Writers: Gabriel Moreno Burgos and Antonio Fos
From: Pure Terror

A busload of workers on the way to their new jobs get diverted into a seemingly deserted town. The next morning, the townspeople show up, but strange things are afoot.

An unintentional vampire double feature. When this title came across my itinerary, I joked with my friends that I’d be surprised if the movie actually featured a night scene. There’s a tendency with these movies where the more salacious the title, the less interesting the film. This does at least have vampires and nights, but I’d say “orgy” is pushing it a bit. Also calling this “a film.” Or expecting any display of interest during the film.

Very little of consequence happens here. A bus of people who have all been hired on as servants at one castle are on their way there when the driver has a heart attack and dies. Frankly, I kind of want to see a modern group of people suddenly working in a gothic castle, wondering why they were all hired at the same time, but, hey, that’d make for an interesting movie so what do I know. They take a detour into a nearby town to sleep and see what they can do about the body. Curiously, the town isn’t listed on their map.

S P O O K Y

Wait, no, I meant “hackneyed.”

The town is abandoned when they arrive but the inn has a fire in the fireplace and all the rooms are made up. A tourist who’s already been there for an hour says he’s walked around but couldn’t find anyone. There isn’t even a church.

S P O O—actually, I like that as a set-up to a horror RPG session. That’s a nice seed, isn’t it? Characters arrive in a town that’s completely empty, but everything’s prepared for visitors. So many ways you could take that story. One you’d never choose is the one this movie does.

Anyway, everybody goes to sleep, the tourist finds a peephole in his room and peeps on his neighbor (our hero), and one of the group members investigates a sound at midnight and is attacked by a mob of vampires. The next morning, the townspeople are there serving the group, but there’s no meat. So the leader of the town sends a man with an ax, under orders from “the Countess,” to cut off the leg of one of the villagers which is then served to the group.

There are no consequences for the group eating human/vampire flesh, by the way. It’s just part of the movie.

One by one, the members of the group are killed by the vampires including a little girl who follows the man with the ax and sees him cut off someone’s arm. She’s not particularly impacted by it, though. Nothing in this movie is particularly impactful, even within the movie itself. The tourist figures out something is up, fixes his car, and helps the woman he’s been peeping on escape. They have some difficulty getting out of the town, but manage it only to have the Countess pop up in the back seat and attack them. She gets staked and immediately rots and decays once they hit sunlight.

They reach the next town, but the police don’t believe their story saying there’s no such town. They all drive out to the location and nothing’s there except the rusted remains of the bus that was driving the workers there originally. THE END.

It’s stupid. Skip it.

I want to say more, but nothing here matters. The people are tricked into being cannibals which comes to nothing. The little girl sees a grizzly attack which comes to nothing. She’s playing with a little ghost boy who tries to protect her from the vampires, but ends up smothering her instead, and even that comes to nothing. The movie’s only 80 minutes long but drags because none of the characters stand out—they have no desires and no one’s curious about anything. No one’s even trying to figure out what’s happening. Even the townspeople, where there’s some variety with the man the ax, the town’s leader, and the Countess, offer no story or mystery of their own.

It just feels like at every level of production and even every level of the story, everyone involved went, “Yeah, whatever.” That’s even the dominant emotion of the characters. Hell, if you’re not going to get excited about your own movie, I’m certainly not going to put the effort in.

182. The Dungeon of Harrow

182. The Dungeon of Harrow (1962)
Director: Pat Boyette
Writers: Pat Boyette and Henry Garcia
From: Pure Terror
Watch: archive.org

A man shipwrecked on an island has to endure the machinations of the mad Count living there.

The movie opens with a voice-over by an on-screen character who refuses to show us his face. That’s as good a clue as any as to what to expect both in terms of quality and story. The narrator is the last of the Fallon family relating the tale of woe that left his father dead and him the sole surviving member. We then flashback to that story for the entire movie.

So the first thing the movie tells you is that it’s going to flashback to a story of danger and woe that we know the narrator survived because they’re telling us the story. I have to wonder if Jonathan Franzen watched this while writing The Corrections. It would explain a lot.

We cut to the real start of the movie where the captain of the ship tells Fallon to leave his quarters immediately as a storm is threatening to sink them all. Fallon balks, then runs. The opening credits then play out over some of the funniest toy boat footage I’ve seen. This toy ship just rocks up on an outcropping and stays there, letting you drink in just how terrible the model is.

Finally we cut away to Fallon and the captain on an island, the sole survivors. A tarp with the Fallon family crest also washes up which they later use as a roof. The captain talks about how good a man Fallon’s father was and Fallon, in voice-over, realizes his social standing no longer means anything, but he keeps treating the captain like a servant. That night, they hear a woman screaming while getting attacked by animals.

Cut to the castle of Count de Sade (yup. The writers called him “de Sade.” Guess what happens) where his slave—not servant—informs him that the dogs got loose and killed a woman. The Count surmises that if one person washed ashore, there may be others, and he starts worrying about pirates. Then the Devil appears to him, says he’s a manifestation of the Count’s madness, and harries him with rubber spiders and bats. Then he vanishes from the movie entirely. Thanks for taking the time Satan.

Anyway, Fallon and the captain are attacked and taken to the castle, the captain seemingly mortally wounded. Fallon meets Cassandra, a young woman living with the Count, who initially is dictating the castle’s rules to Fallon. She tries to cover up the disappearance of the captain and keep Fallon in the dark about what’s going on, but he wakes up to see a woman getting whipped. He confronts Cassandra about the strange things going on and she’s tells the castle’s sad story:

The Countess came down with leprosy and was exiled to the island. The Count followed her, but she went mad and he sealed her in the cellar where she’s still alive, believing it to be her wedding day. The situation drove the Count mad and now he’s constantly paranoid about pirates trying to infiltrate the island and tortures Ann, the mute servant Fallon saw getting whipped, because he consistently believes she’s trying to poison him. Cassandra is the nurse. The only other resident is a black man who’s literally the Count’s slave and does all the torturing and killing for him despite his own wishes.

So, yeah, that’s where we stand.

The captain has been taken by the Count who suspects he’s a pirate and tortures him. Ann falls in love with Fallon and tries to save the captain, but he’s seemingly dead when she unties him from the rack and she gets caught. The Count puts her on the rack, leaves, and the captain wakes up and doesn’t untie her! What’s even going on? The captain faces off against the slave to save Fallon because. . . reasons(?) and dies. Fallon is locked in the cellar to face the mad leper, Cassandra comes down and kills the Countess, and the two try to escape. The Count immediately follows, the slave falls over (literally), and the Count kills him. Then Fallon wrestles with the Count, shoots him, and he and Cassandra wait for a ship to arrive so they can leave. It takes two years and that’s when Fallon realizes he’s contracted leprosy and can never leave the island. Cut back to the opening shot and we see him and Cassandra with oatmeal all over their faces. She’s gone mad so he’s locking her in the cellar just like the Count had done to his own wife. THE END.

What can I say? There’s narration throughout telling us what we’re literally seeing on screen plus we have a “hero” who’s not only does nothing, but who nearly every character sacrifices themselves for. Ann dies, off-screen, from the injuries she incurred trying to save the captain for Fallon. The captain dies trying to rescue Fallon. The slave, who’s one of the only sympathetic characters, gets killed for failing to capture Fallon as efficiently as the Count wants. Even the Countess gets killed because she’s too close to Fallon. And he doesn’t do anything! It’s a bit of a shock when he shoots the Count. I half expected the Count to go mad hunting Fallon through the woods and then fall off a cliff. Fallon’s a doorknob—why is everyone so eager to help him?

The movie is, and maybe this is already clear, hilariously bad, but it’s sort of immediately hilariously bad. Narration, characters telling the main character how good he is, a spectral Satan, rubber bats and spiders, but all that happens right at the beginning and doesn’t get built on as the movie persists. Those bats and spiders never return even though those are always good for a laugh. And Satan. Satan. Where is my Satan? Everything’s better with Satan and, once again, this is a campy Satan. It’s not James Coco as Satan campy, but it still promises a nice side of ham with this movie.

But, no, it all disappears pretty quick and we’re left with the flat, affectless acting of the cast. It’s kind of boring, but you can get some good mileage out of riffing it. Fortunately, the movie is in the public domain and I’ve added an MPEG-2 copy to archive.org here. You may enjoy it more than I did. Plus the gothic sets and shots may prove useful for some editing project.