English-speaking territories primarily knew it as ‘Lips of Blood’ (thus causing confusion with the Jean Rollin film of the same name), whilst Spain got a shorter, sex-free cut featuring alternate ‘clothed’ takes, under the more chaste title of ‘El Secreto de la Momia Egipcia’.
As if to highlight the differences between film markets and censorship regimes in the two co-producing nations, the French distributors meanwhile went to the opposite extreme in their marketing, inviting the public to sample ‘Perversions Sexuelles’. (Well, yes, I suppose being molested by a four-thousand-year-old Egyptian mummy is pretty perverse, but beyond that it’s hard to believe the audience who turned out for that particular release got their money’s worth; blood-drinking aside, this Mummy’s tastes are pretty vanilla for the most past.)
But, it will always be ‘Love Brides of the Blood Mummy’ to me - a title the film first acquired upon its Canadian release under the auspices of David Cronenberg’s early sponsors Cinepix, and which, perhaps surprisingly, captures the spirit of thing more accurately than any of the alternative options listed above.
To get down to brass tacks then, what we essentially have here is a hoary and austere gothic horror framing narrative in which Spanish genre mainstay Frank Braña rides ‘cross the moors to meet his destiny at the sinister Dartmoor Castle. Therein, he meets Baron Dartmoor (George Rigaud), an amateur Egyptologist (and, it transpires, colonial grave robber), who proceeds to narrate in flashback a tale so absurd and offensive it could have been pulled straight from one of those crazy Italian porno-fumetti we all [know and love / grudgingly acknowledge the existence of / are about to google and probably lose our jobs as a result of – please delete as applicable].
So, one fateful day it seems, The Baron found himself unboxing the latest unearthed sarcophagus delivered straight to his gaff from the Valley of the Kings, only to discover that it contained not the usual papyrus-wrapped bag of bones, but the body of a perfectly preserved, eerily life-like young man (one ‘Michael Flynn’, in his only screen appearance).
Having established that his new acquisition is the body of “the depraved son of a priest, put to death for his crimes” (I wonder what the hieroglyphic character for ‘depraved’ looks like, incidentally), The Baron does what any self-respecting reclusive Victorian gentleman-scientist would do, dusting off his best Frankensteinian electrical clobber and setting out to bring the bugger back to life.
Once this small feat has been achieved with a minimum of bother though, we soon start to get an idea of why the Ancient Egyptians felt the need to get shot of this particular bastard ASAP.
Batting aside The Baron’s curious offer of a gravy-boat filled with milk, the Mummy instead hones in on a cut on the arm of Dartmoor’s man-servant John (Martin Trévières), making it clear that what he really needs to maintain his unholy existence is BLOOD, and plenty of it.
Again taking a leaf straight from the mad scientist playbook, The Baron pauses to consider the conflict between his humanitarian and scientific principles - spoiler, science wins! - and promptly sends John out to apprehend the first nubile virgin he can find wandering the blasted heathland which surrounds the castle. (The potential use of animal blood, or non-lethal transfusions from willing donors, is never considered here I note. Only the best for the Blood Mummy!)
As is the case with most of this film’s female cast, the actress who portrays the Mummy’s first victim is effectively uncredited (a list of anglicised pseudonyms on the opening credits is all we have to go on), but anyway - after guzzling down the proffered vessel of her fresh lady-blood, the Blood Mummy makes it clear that his appetites do not end there.
Rising from his slab and casually bashing John into unconsciousness, the Egyptian heads straight for the prone female captive, tears off her clothes, and, well… rapes her, to not put too fine a point on it, concluding his extended ravishment by bloodily chewing her throat out.
Using his hypnotic powers to take over John’s mind, the Mummy soon has The Baron locked behind bars in his own dungeon, forced to look on helplessly as his long-suffering man-servant is sent out again and again to find new girls, bludgeoning them into submission and carrying them back to the castle across his hunched shoulders, there to satisfy the relentless lusts of the Blood Mummy (who, monster fans will note, by this stage embodies traits usually associated with the mummy, the vampire and Frankenstein’s monster).
This creates an odd tonal disjuncture with the sombre and painstakingly atmospheric exterior sequences, during which reflections of twisted tree branches glimmer in icy lakes as horse gallop hither and yon, and as John (who rather resembles Paul Naschy in one his grotesque/simpleton roles) trudges out yet again across the freezing countryside, dragging captured women back to meet their doom across barren, coastal landscapes which resemble something Caspar David Friedrich might have come up with on a particularly bad day.
Once established, this grim pattern is broken only slightly when the Baron’s daughter unexpectedly arrives home from university accompanied by a friend (the latter played by Spanish horror regular Christine Gimpera). Dismounting and heading indoors, the pair are giggling like schoolgirls until - in a moment of pure, Bunuel-esque surrealism - they walk straight into a meet-cute with the Blood Mummy, leading to a surprisingly exciting horseback chase in which the malevolent Egyptian saddles up in pursuit of his prey.
After demonstrating such pluck, you might have expected the daughter (played by a very striking actress, who, again, sadly remains unidentified) to emerge as the heroine of a more, uh, ‘normal’ movie, but… nope. In fact, if there’s one thing I love about ‘Love Brides of the Blood Mummy’, it’s its sheer, bald-faced ruthlessness.
Just as a potential hero / hapless boyfriend character was earlier thoughtlessly dispatched when he took a step backwards and fell down a well (the Mummy did not give a fuck), the daughter is soon spread-eagled down in the dungeon, receiving the full Blood Mummy treatment whilst her horrified father looks on. The only girl to get out alive (simply because the Mummy is too busy to deal with her), Gimpera’s character meanwhile flees the scene in a state of mute insanity. Nice.
Alongside exteriors shot primarily around the coast of Brittany, it also features interior/studio work carried out on subterranean sets which I’m pretty sure are the same ones used by another Franco-Spanish co-production, Jordi Gigó’s ‘Devil’s Kiss’ (1976). Meanwhile, the chateau featured in the film is the same one seen in Pierre Chevalier’s ‘Orloff Against The Invisible Man’ (‘La Vie Amoureuse de L'Homme Invisible’, 1970) - a film which often feels like the closest comparison to this one in terms of tone, visuals and weird/unhinged exploitation elements, and with which it was double-billed on at least one occasion [see the poster reproduced at the top of this post]. And, well… there’s a reason for that, which we’ll get on to shortly.
Though credited to a Frenchman (veteran Eurocine DP Raymond Heil), the film’s murky, autumnal photography strikes me as belonging very much in the Spanish horror tradition, heavy on the browns and greens, lending everything an antiquated, rusty/mouldy look similar to that often seen in the work of directors like Amando de Ossorio or León Klimovsky. This adds a melancholy, faintly despairing air to proceedings which is only intensified by the glacial, almost bloody-mindedly languid pacing.
The film’s music - which is fantastic - meanwhile feels very French, running the gamut from propulsive funk and weird loungey stuff to swelling, romantic strings and some creepy, avant garde electronic cues which lend an eerie, Blind Dead-esque quality to some of the Mummy’s antics.
Given the sheer variety of sounds and instrumentation featured, I had assumed whilst viewing that this soundtrack must be comprised of ‘needle-drops’ from pre-existing sources, but no - as part of his exhaustive research into the origins of this film, Mondo Macabro’s Pete Tombs has confirmed that ‘Love Brides..’ music credit - to composer/arranger and former pop singer Max Gazzola - is in fact genuine, and that the music featured here is (so far as we know) entirely original; which is pretty remarkable. (If any obscure reissue label moguls out there - I’m looking at you, Finders Keepers - feel like dredging up the tapes for a soundtrack LP, that would be just lovely, thanks.)
So - we’re definitely dealing here with that very particular liminal zone between Spanish and French ‘70s horror cinema, that’s for sure, with a few potential Eurocine connections swirling around in the mix… but beyond that, the question on every Euro-horror fan’s lips after first viewing this one will no doubt be: who exactly is the hilariously named ‘Ken Ruder’, the mysterious individual, referred to as an “underground American filmmaker” in some of the film’s original marketing materials, who ostensibly oversaw this baleful madness…?
At times - primarily during the exterior scenes - someone definitely seems to have been attempting to make an artistically engaged, atmospheric horror film here, exhibiting an uncanny, almost ‘folk horror’-ish fixation with the natural world, including a lot of quality time spent with disorienting watery reflections, peat bogs, tree boughs, swathes of fog and a lengthy excursion through a field of glistening wheat sheaves.
Although the ‘look’ of the film’s photography remains consistent throughout, this all contrasts pretty sharply with what goes on once we get inside the castle, wherein we’re faced with the aforementioned succession of gruelling, dispiritingly quotidian mummy rape scenes - footage which, though not especially explicit, often veers toward the kind of fetishistic / quasi-pornographic realm in which the presentation of naked woman being tormented and molested becomes the central point of the exercise.
This all results in a confounding and unsettling viewing experience which often feels like a Eurocine sleaze movie directed by someone suffering from clinical depression; a prospect which very few modern viewers will be likely to even tolerate, let alone enjoy or try to understand.
Amid this entropic torpor though, ‘Love Brides..’ also incorporates frequent outbursts of pure, surrealistic strangeness, tailor-made to fascinate and perplex those of us who are likely to be more sympathetic to this kind of cinematic oddity.
When we first meet Baron Dartmoor for instance, he is thrashing a disembodied arm chained to his living room wall with a riding crop - a bizarre, rather Freudian image which remains unexplained until the film’s final act. Shortly thereafter, The Baron demonstrates his (otherwise unmentioned) magical prowess by presenting Frank Braña with a walking cane which he transforms into a writhing snake on the fireside rug - an effect realised through a totally unexpected application of genuine stop-motion animation.
This latter incident is a total non-sequitur, and is never referred to again during the film’s run time. (Given that the Baron is a collector of Egyptian antiquities, it occurred to me that perhaps he might have recovered Moses’ fabled magic staff, but if that was supposed to be the idea, it was completely overlooked in both the French and English dubbing.)
Elsewhere, more stop motion effects (presumably an expensive and time-consuming addition to a marginal production like this) are used to animate the Mummy’s disembodied hand during the film’s conclusion - which is pretty cool - whilst the incessant use of a primitive, in-camera ‘irising’ effect lends a peculiar silent movie feel to much of the footage in the film’s second half.
Combined with the mysteries surrounding the film’s creation, these inexplicable elements of weirdness seem to hint at a strange, hidden intelligence lurking behind the morbid and frequently rather dull events unfolding on-screen; an intelligence whose aims certainly seem to stretch beyond the brutish commercial concerns signalled by the film’s sexploitation content.
Indeed, if we fall back on the old saw that the best horror stories are those which emerge from genuinely disordered minds, then ‘..Blood Mummy’ ceases to be merely an ill-regarded Euro-trash obscurity and instead becomes something of an inscrutable, rather haunting quasi-classic - like a broadcast from some other cinematic universe entirely.
So, long story short - surviving documentation from the film’s production suggests two potential suspects hiding behind the Ken Ruder pseudonym. The first is Alejandro Marti, a Barcelona-based producer and occasional director who got into political hot water in 1968 as a result of daring to make a film (the musical comedy ‘Elisabet’) in the Catalan language, and was thus presumably seeking alternative avenues for his talents at this point in time.
The second meanwhile is - wait for it - our old friend Pierre Chevalier, director of ‘Orloff Against The Invisible Man’, along with masses of largely forgotten softcore sex films, largely financed and distributed by (yep) Eurocine.
Whilst we have no way of ascertaining the nature or timeline of the collaboration (or lack thereof) between these two gentlemen, now that we have their names on paper, it’s naturally just a hop, skip and a jump toward speculating that Marti must have been responsible for the atmospheric / gothic exterior footage in ‘Love Brides..’, whilst Chevalier - an old hand at sexploitation, often with a fairly rape-y focus - must have been brought in to handle the more overtly sexual / gory stuff taking place down in the dungeons.
The continuity of photography, costumes and actors across the film suggests that these two directors may have worked in parallel (rather than it being a case of the sexy stuff being inserted later or some such), which is interesting, and also raises questions regarding the provenance of the alternate ‘clothed’ scenes included in the film’s Spanish cut… but anyway, not to worry! Basically, we now have a workable solution to the question of who was responsible for ‘Love Brides of the Blood Mummy’. When it comes to the why though, well… that’s a whole other kettle of fish.
Though for most viewers, Ken Ruder’s magnum opus will likely prove an unpalatable cocktail of leaden pacing, gothic misery and poorly-staged rape, for certain epicurean connoisseurs of strange cinema (hi guys, you’re probably both reading), it holds the potential to soothe, hypnotise and fascinate long after the final strains of Max Gazzola’s romantic closing theme have faded away.
As I write this, I know it is destined to be one of those films which will live on, like an itch I can’t quite scratch in the back of my mind, until the next time I’m drawn to pull the disc down from the shelf like some 21st century equivalent of a dusty, thrice-translated grimoire, in search once again of lost esoteric wisdom otherwise left buried in the remains of some condemned film lab in the French-Catalan border.
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