Gothic Originals: Lady Frankenstein (Mel Welles, 1971)

PLEASE NOTE: As a result of the fact that I am still unable to take screengrabs from blu-ray discs, readers should be aware that the images above are taken from an old DVD edition of this film, and *NOT* from the recent restoration carried out by Nucleus Films, which was viewed for the purposes of this review, and which I can confirm looks *absolutely magnificent*. Please buy that one with confidence.
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If you’re in the mood for a classic Euro-horror film, full of wild n’ woolly erotically-charged bloodshed, daring, stylised direction and mind-bending hallucinogenic weirdness, well, I’m afraid ‘Lady Frankenstein’ is not the film for you.

Indeed, the first time I watched it I found it pretty underwhelming, broadly concurring with critic Jonathan Rigby, who writes it off in his Euro Gothic compendium as “a rhythmless, atmosphere-free bore”. (1)

What a difference a few years – and a beautiful new transfer with fifteen reinstated minutes – can make. Returning to the film with expectations appropriately adjusted and (I hope) a bit more of an appreciation of the more, uh, ambient pleasures of the horror genre, I found ‘Lady Frankenstein’ quite delightful.

Before I try to sell you on this nigh-on Frankensteinian change of heart however, perhaps a bit of background might be in order. (IMDB was running hot as I checked up on all the salty characters who played a role in this film’s genesis, so I hope you appreciate my efforts.)

Though he is probably doomed to forever accept second place when the subject of rotund, deep-voiced Americans named Welles who were hanging around in the ‘60s European film industry arises, Mel Welles (1924-2005) can nonetheless claim a certain degree of cult movie immortality via his performance as the kvetching flower shop owner Gravis Mushnick in Roger Corman’s 1960 ‘Little Shop of Horrors’. (His turn as the rhyme-talking gravedigger in The Undead meanwhile… not so much.)

After relocating to Rome in the early 1960s, Welles carved out a niche for himself as a cornerstone of the dubbing industry, overseeing the Anglicisation of countless continental features whilst also using his contacts to occasionally scrape together funds for some small independent productions of his own. A self-professed devotee of gothic horror and fantasy cinema, Welles' first foray into the genre was 1967’s ‘Island of The Doomed’ (aka ‘Maneater of Hydra’), a sort of killer tree yarn starring Cameron Mitchell, on which he served triple duty as writer, director and producer.

By Welles's account, the project that became ‘Lady Frankenstein’ began when an aspiring producer (identified elsewhere as former Hollywood playboy and heir to the Vanderbilt fortune Harry C. Cushing IV) dropped out of the sky with a confirmed production budget and asked him to direct a script named ‘Lady Dracula’, intended as a vehicle for actress Rosalba Neri. (Allegedly, Cushing was trying to seduce Neri at the time, and figured that the offer of a leading role might help his chances; whatever the case, it certainly doesn’t seem to have hurt them, given that the pair were married (briefly) a few years later.)

Somehow however, this initial deal fell through, the rights to the script – written by none other than former Peplum muscleman and ‘Kommissar X’ star Brad Harris - were lost, and Cushing was (seemingly) out of the picture, leaving Welles with a crew and studio time already booked in, but nothing to shoot. (2)

At this point, globe-trotting exploitation producer Dick Randall pops up for cameo, telling Welles “hell, so you can’t make ‘Lady Dracula’, make ‘Lady Frankenstein instead”, and earning himself a generous “original story” credit in the process. Decamping to London, Welles next hooked up with credited writer Edward Di Lorenzo, and after a few weeks of woodshedding, ‘Lady Frankenstein’ was up and running. (3)

In view of the film that eventually resulted, it is instructive I think to consider that ‘Lady Frankenstein’ was written in England, by two Americans. For better or for worse, Welles and Di Lorenzo’s script takes the picture in a very different direction from most early ‘70s continental horrors, rejecting the usual melange of errant craziness and random exploitable elements, and instead telling a story that, though stodgy, conventional and loaded with cliché, is at least coherent and thematically unified, even throwing in a few literary and historical allusions alongside its more obvious borrowings from the Universal canon.

In other words, it is exactly the kind of script Hammer might have filmed for their own Frankenstein series, had they taken a more traditionally gothic direction. This is no bad thing if you’re prepared to take it on its own terms, and indeed, Welles’ solid but unspectacular direction follows suit, as does the careful, moody lighting and the painstaking attention to detail intermittently evident in the production design.

One thing Hammer probably wouldn’t have done however is hire Morricone and Nicolai’s avant garde-leaning right hand man Alessandro Alessandroni to provide a soundtrack, and happily the composer makes his presence felt from the film’s very first second, opening proceedings with a bracing sting of his trademark fuzz guitar, as some thoroughly routine Burke & Hare type business is conducted in a particularly squalid looking graveyard. (4)

The lead grave robber is played by Austrian actor Herbert Fuchs (often credited as Herbert Fux), a possessor of a face-you-won’t-forget whom you’ll probably recall stealing the show in Adrian Hoven’s ‘Mark of the Devil’ (1970). Fuchs makes for a lovably sleazy ne’erdowell here too, aided by the unusual amount of detail the script provides regarding his lifestyle and dwellings, which momentarily reminded me of Jonh Gilling’s excellent The Flesh & The Fiends. (5)

After Fuchs and his boys drag their insalubrious cargo across the foreground of a splendidly ominous establishing shot of the Umbrian castle within which much of the film takes place, we are promptly introduced to Baron Frankenstein himself, embodied here by no less a personage than Joseph Cotten. (6)

In contemplating the circumstances that led to Cotton getting mixed up in a film like ‘Lady Frankenstein’, I’ve often entertained the possibility that perhaps he heard that some American blowhard named Welles was directing, and the ink was already dry on his contract by the time he realised his terrible mistake. Amusing as this thought may be however, the more prosaic truth seems to be that Cotten had enjoyed making ‘The Abominable Dr Phibes’ in England the preceding year, and, taking inspiration from his friend Vincent Price, thought he’d stay on in Europe and have a bash at becoming a “horror star”.

‘Lady Frankenstein’ represents the first fruit of Cotten’s brief flirtation with this new career path (Bava’s ‘Baron Blood’ would soon follow, after which he seems to have given up on it), and it was perhaps this fleeting sense of enthusiasm that accounts for the fact that he actually delivers something approaching a performance here, rather than just looking disgusted and cheesed off, as per every other film I’ve seen him in post-1960.

Playing opposite Cotton in many of the film’s early scenes meanwhile is the aforementioned Rosalba Neri in the film’s title role as Tania, the Baron’s daughter, who has just returned from university as a fully qualified surgeon (no mean feat for a woman in the 1820s) and is keen to get stuck in at the business end of her beloved father’s experiments.

In later interviews about the film, Mel Welles liked to declare himself as a feminist (“twenty years before my wife”, he endearingly insisted), and although applying such ideological intent to ‘Lady Frankenstein’ will seem a stretch for most modern viewers, the very idea of female character willing to step up to the plate as a fully-fledged mad scientist must in itself have been a novelty within the none-more-patriarchal environment of a ‘70s Italian gothic horror movie [a fact that was certainly not lost on whoever designed the comically salacious poster for the film’s US release via Corman’s New World Pictures – see below].

Though it is difficult to gain a full appreciation of Neri’s performance given that, like everybody else in the film besides Cotton, she is dubbed in both English and Italian versions, insofar as we can tell she seems to considerably upped her game here, perhaps appreciative of a part that took her beyond her usual sex kitten/shameless hussy roles.

Though demure to a fault through the opening half of the movie, Neri nonetheless manages to imbue all of her scenes with a sense of mature, self-confident kinkiness, and, when she eventually gets to let loose in the laboratory, she is very much in charge, reducing her father’s assistant Charles (the ubiquitous Paul Muller) to an even more subservient role than he took when working with the Baron.

Though stiff and mannered as the material demands, the performances by this central trio within the castle are actually all very good. The hawk-featured Muller – who surely needs no introduction to readers who have seen a handful of Spanish horrors or Jess Franco films - is solid as ever here, shouldering an epic quantity of screen time in a pretty thankless role, whilst, all things considered, Cotten gives us a surprisingly subtle and melancholic take on the aging Baron. There’s definitely a touch of Price in his dialogue delivery I think, but he wisely plays it straight, conveying both his resigned reaction to the apparent failure of his climatic experiment and his evident love for his daughter quite convincingly. It’s a shame that -- uh, SPOILER ALERT -- he gets unceremoniously clobbered by his own monster less than halfway through the picture.

That monster, by the way, is probably the reason for a lot of the bad press ‘Lady Frankenstein’ has received over the years. With the best will in the world, it’s hard to deny that he’s pretty damned goofy. The corduroy trousers and woollen smock he’s given to wear are rather charming, but his bulbous head / mutilated eye make-up job was never going to win any prizes, despite the prominence it took in the film’s marketing, and it’s difficult to find an explanation for the traditional, monster-stompin’ platform boots he is already wearing when he first slides off the operating table.

Blandly over-lit and rendered in artless, point n’ shoot fashion, the subsequent scenes in which the monster strolls around the countryside causing trouble have a crude, second unit feel to them that seems a world away from the more classy material with the principals in the castle. But, the bit where he throws a stark naked girl in a very shallow river is pretty funny, so… there’s that.

Most of the scenes dealing with the local townsfolk and the investigation of the monster’s crimes meanwhile feel similarly slapdash. Mickey “Crimson Executioner” Hargitay is given little to work with as the police chief (there’s certainly no hint here of the kind of dementia he exhibited in his better known horror roles), whilst many of the costumes and set dressing seem to have been recycled from the waning Spaghetti Western boom. Combined with some distinctly 1970s-style male grooming, this serves to rather make a mockery of the more carefully rendered period detail of the castle scenes.

Despite all this silliness however, Welles seems to have been in earnest in his love for old school gothic horror, and, like his cast, he plays it straight. A great deal of effort was clearly invested in the film’s laboratory sequences, which (aided no doubt by Carlo Rambaldi’s effects work) are an absolute treat for connoisseurs of mad scientist movies, incorporating some of the finest fizzing electrical arcs, byzantine glassware and bubbling beakers of blood seen on-screen since the glory days of the 1930s, with some first class ‘pulsing organs in jars’ thrown in to appease the gorier tastes of early ‘70s viewers.

Clearly somewhat of an enthusiast for such business, Welles allows time for both of his Frankensteins to describe their experimental processes in quite some detail, including a discussion of how the recent discoveries of Volta and Galvani have been incorporated into their work. I’m fairly certain too that this must be the only Frankenstein film in history that actually took the time to design and construct period appropriate surgical lamps and dry-cell batteries in the name of historical verisimilitude – a detail of which Welles seems to have been particularly proud, on the basis of his later interviews.

The scale of the De Paolis soundstage on which the lab set was constructed is also impressive, as is vast, stained glass skylight seen opening during resurrection of first monster. It’s little wonder that the whole shebang was repurposed in its entirety by Paul Morrissey’s ‘Flesh For Frankenstein’ a year later – a movie that, to a significant extent, basically plays like an exaggerated spoof of this one, I should note.

Indeed, whilst the approach Welles took in directing ‘Lady Frankenstein’ was innately conservative, the central ‘high concept’ that provided the impetus for the film’s script – namely, the idea that Tania plans to create the perfect lover for herself by transplanting Dr Charles’s “brilliant” brain into the body of Thomas, the castle’s beautiful but simple-minded handyman – is actually fairly startling. (7)

Although this notion is not given as much screen-time as more sensation hungry viewers might have wished, when the movie does finally get around to it, it certainly doesn’t flinch, especially as regards Tania’s decision to seduce both of her experimental subjects prior to the big operation - a development that certainly lends itself to some queasily Freudian interpretations, suggesting that she needs to copulate with these two ‘fathers’ in order to ‘conceive’ the new monster that will replace her own recently departed father in her affections. (Not, you will note, exactly the most feminist twist on the Frankenstein mythos that could be imagined.)

Anyway – after using her wiles to ensure the cooperation of the hopelessly devoted Charles, Tania next takes poor Thomas to bed, just in order to, I dunno, test out the merchandise, I suppose. This latter scene culminates in what is far and away ‘Lady Frankenstein’s most transgressive moment, when Charles, who has been discreetly observing Tania’s tryst with Thomas, emerges at the climactic moment to smother him to death with a pillow.

Though reminiscent of a number of ‘erotic asphyxiation’ scenes that had already made their way into Jess Franco’s filmography by this point, this is still genuinely shocking stuff, jolting us out of the ‘ersatz Hammer’ mindset and into the realms of full-on Italio-exploitation. The film’s straight-laced dramatic context renders it more disturbing than any of the tongue-in-cheek outrages Morrissey would soon perpetrate on the same sets, and the scene gains a particularly sinister sex-horror frisson from Rosalba’s reaction shots, which see her biting her wrist in orgasmic ecstasy as her lover expires beneath her.

Whilst there is a touch of ‘House of Frankenstein’s “whose brain goes where” farce to the proceedings that follow, the fact that Tania and Charles seem so casually disinterested in the travails of their first monster – who is still throttling peasants at a steady rate - speaks eloquently both of the growing madness that is consuming them and of the thoughtless cruelty that naturally accompanies their aristocratic background, as does the fact that poor old Thomas’s brain has presumably been tossed in the bin, declared ‘worthless’ in typical proto-fascist fashion, even as his devoted sister frantically searches for him, haranguing various members of the cast about her brother’s disappearance.

All of this is standard issue Frankenstein movie stuff of course, but it is nicely done here, quietly drawing our attention to the moral (and mental) degradation of the characters we are ostensibly following whilst avoiding the need for any ‘message’ speeches or hand-wringing moralising.

Despite its infusion of (moderate) sex and (mild) gore however, ‘Lady Frankenstein’ must nonetheless have seemed ponderous and old fashioned to many of its contemporary viewers. In terms of its pacing and atmosphere, it is very much of a piece with the somewhat patience-testing gothics that Italy largely phased out when Barbara Steele disappeared from screens in 1966, whilst its director’s inspirations were clearly still rooted three decades before that.

Although many gothic horror films were still being produced in the early ‘70s – more than ever before, probably – by the time ‘Lady Frankenstein’ hit screens, just about all of its competitors were in some way reinventing themselves, adding either softcore erotica, psychedelic freak-outs, self-conscious genre deconstruction or goofy comedy to the mix, and even Hammer had almost entirely moved away from their more traditional period pieces by this point.

Though there were a few stragglers in the following years, ‘Lady Frankenstein’ thus stands as one of the very last gothic horror films made anywhere in the world that plays things totally straight. Respectfully abiding by the established conventions of the genre, it never offers the audience a wink or nudge, withholds the easy wins of sex n’ violence from all but its most crucial moments, and tries instead to ensnare its viewers through the simple pleasures of a hoary old yarn, adequately told.

The extent to which Welles and his collaborators succeeded even in this modest goal might be debatable, but it is difficult not to admire the earnestness of their intent on some level, and, for those of us so jaded we can take pleasure in seeing the bones of these old gothic tropes dug out of the closet and paraded around one last time, there remains much here to enjoy.
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Also, this movie had a lot of great posters.

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(1) ‘Euro Gothic: Classics of Continental Horror Cinema’ (Signum Books, 2016), p. 295

(2) For anyone keeping track here, Harris’s ‘Lady Dracula’ script was eventually filmed as a comedy in Germany in 1977. It looks terrible.

(3) Perhaps stung by being shut out of the production of ‘Lady Frankenstein’, Randall went on to pretty much corner the market in shoddy Italian Frankenstein movies in the year that followed, covertly masterminding ‘Frankenstein ‘80’ and directing ‘Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks’, both in 1972. Of the latter, Rigby accurately notes that “..the childishly nonsensical result makes ‘Lady Frankenstein’ look like an unsung masterpiece”. (ibid.)

(4) For what it’s worth, I get the feeling that ‘Lady Frankenstein’s soundtrack was probably a bit of a mix n’ match affair, much in the manner of contemporary Jess Franco or Paul Naschy films. Although Alessandroni gets sole credit, and was presumably responsible for all the weird, atonal laboratory music and the occasional fuzz-drenched transition cue, the far more conventional orchestral music that accompanies the monster’s rampages and other ‘action’-based moments definitely sounds canned, perhaps pulled off some ancient library disc or something?

(5) Just for laughs, I feel like noting that Fuchs/Fux’s other credits for 1970 include ‘Secrets of a Vice Cop's Wife’, ‘Eugenie… The Story of Her Journey Into Perversion’, ‘The Naked Wytche’, ‘Gentlemen in White Vests’, ‘The Amorous Adventures of a Young Postman’ and ‘Strogoff’, an Italian swashbuckler in which he makes an uncredited appearance as The Pope. What a year!

(6) Identified on IMDB as the Castello Piccolomini in the Province of L'Aquila in Southern Italy, the castle used in ‘Lady Frankenstein’ also apparently played host to ‘Bloody Pit of Horror’, ‘The Devil’s Wedding Night’, Radley Metzger’s ‘The Lickerish Quartet’ and Polselli’s ‘Black Magic Rites’ / ‘The Reincarnation of Isobel’. What a line up! I feel a plan for a new holiday forming… (Also: did Mickey Hargitay live down the road or something? Three of the four Italian horror movies he appeared in were filmed in this place!)

(7) Thomas, incidentally, is played – uncredited - by Marino Masé, an actor who enjoyed a rich and varied career far too extensive for me to spend time running down here. (Would you believe that the same man appeared in ‘Lady Frankenstein’, Visconti’s ‘The Leopard’ AND an episode of ‘East Enders’? IT HAPPENED.)

October Horrors #7: The Undead (Roger Corman, 1957)

More bona fide Roger Corman weirdness here, with what I think must rank as by far the strangest – certainly most unconventional – film he turned in during his black & white double feature years at AIP.

These days, I suspect the film itself is far less widely seen than its striking (if somewhat misleading) poster design… and perhaps for good reason, as, make no mistake, ‘The Undead’ is some real oddball shit. A curious mish-mash of ideas that never really coalesces into anything terribly appealing, but is nevertheless noteworthy, not just for its sheer strangeness, but for the way in which it strongly prefigures most of the themes and aesthetic fixations that would come to define Corman’s directorial career over the following decade.

We know we’re in for something a bit different right away here, as the film opens with a brief introduction from no less a personage than The Devil himself. As embodied here by actor Richard Devon, Satan sports a neat black goatee, a Robin Hood hat and wields some kind of bloody great trident thing. “Behold the subtle working of my talents,” he declares “and pray that I may never turn my interest… upon you”, before bidding us farewell with an outrageous theatrical guffaw.

Once that’s over with, we find ourselves in the spooky, mist-shrouded exterior of the ‘American Institute of Psychical Research’, where Dr Quintus Ratcliff (Val Dufour), whose appearance and mannerisms remind me somewhat of Twin Peaks’ Agent Cooper, is escorting a lady - Diana, played by Pamela Duncan - inside to meet the unassuming Professor Olinger (Maurice Manson), who appears to be the boss of the whole outfit. [Special thanks to IMDB for helping me to get through that paragraph in one piece.]

As it transpires, Ratcliff is a former student of the Professor who has just returned from Nepal (hey, makes a change from Tibet), where he has been hanging about with some Yogis and mastering all kinds of whiz-bang techniques that (he claims) are sure to revolutionise the way that the American Institute of Psychical Research does business. Diana, it is strongly implied in non-production code busting fashion, is merely a hooker he has picked up on his way over. (The two men make various derogatory remarks about her low intelligence and corresponding susceptibility to hypnosis etc, all whilst she is clearly within earshot.)

Anyway, it seems that Ratcliff intends to put Diana into a 48 hour trance state, wherein he will attempt to prove his theories regarding reincarnation and so forth by allowing her consciousness to regress straight through to her past lives.

Now, as I recall, William Hurt had to ingest massive quantities of psychoactive drugs in order to achieve this in Ken Russell’s ‘Altered States’ a few decades later, so Ratcliff must really be some real hot shit, because he manages to get Diana over the wall with little more than a few hand gestures and a bit of the old “you are feeling sleepy..” type patter.

From this point onward, we leave faux-Agent Cooper and the American Psychical Society far behind, as we journey back to a gothic fairy-tale version of medieval Europe, where Diana’s distant ancestor Helene is locked up in ‘The Tower of Death’, facing execution at dawn – by decapitation, no less - on a charge of witchcraft.

After a bit of good advice from the disembodied voice of her 20th century descendent however, Helene manages to clobber her gaoler with a chain and make her getaway. Subsequent to this, we are gradually introduced to a wider cast of spectacularly annoying medieval characters, including a painfully unamusing “bewitched” gravedigger named Smolkin (Mel Welles), a standard issue knight in shining armour (Richard Garland), a proper, no-messing-around pantomime witch (Dorothy Neumann, rocking some of the worst ‘warty nose’ make-up ever seen on screen), and, most pleasingly, Livia (Allison Hayes of ‘Attack of the 50 Foot Woman’ fame), a hella intimidating, shape-shifting femme fatale of a Bad Witch, whose ‘sinful curves’ are displayed to fine advantage by the faux-medieval equivalent of a slinky little one piece number.

Upping the ‘medieval weirdness’ quotient considerably, Livia travels everywhere with some kind of perpetually cackling imp/familiar type creature that I’m going to assume must be played by an actual adult person of small stature, because the alternative possibilities are too weird/horrid to contemplate.(1)

The pair frequently transform into bats (fake, unconvincing ones), cats (real ones) and sometimes mice or spiders (could go either way). This is achieved by means of a sparkler-aided variation on the old ‘Bewitched’ style jump cut effect (which, as Saxana proved, never gets old). Naturally, Livia and her imp are up to their necks in some high level scheming, primarily aimed at ensuring Helene does indeed get executed as a witch, thus allowing Livia to steal the hunky knight-in-shining-armour guy from her.

And, if you’re wondering by this point where the hell all this is going, the answer is… nowhere fast. Whilst ‘The Undead’s heavily atmospheric, overtly fantastical take on a medieval setting – half Edgar Allan Poe, half ‘Wizard of Oz’ – clearly sets the stage for aesthetic sensibility Corman would go on to develop in his epochal Price/Poe films a few years later (and more specifically, the strain of heavily stylised medievalism that fed into both his ’62 remake of ‘Tower of London’ and the extraordinary ‘Masque of the Red Death’ in ’64), ‘The Undead’ is early doors for the director’s exploration of this sort of material, and there is an overriding “horribly misguided community theatre production” vibe to these fairy tale scenes that soon begins to grate. (2)

Indeed, as these tiresome, pantomime-like characters proceed to faff about to no great effect, belting out the charmless cod-Shakespearian dialogue of Charles Griffiths’ script as if they were delivering it to an gymnasium full of noisy school kids, it was only my slack-jawed disbelief at the sheer strangeness of ‘The Undead’ that kept me going at some points.

It is just as well then that the movie’s final act sees things getting even stranger, as, back in the 20th century, Dr Ratcliff suddenly becomes concerned that his meddling with past life regression might have brought about a bunch of temporal paradoxes or something. This leads him to decide that he must follow Diana’s spirit back into the past to set things straight. Achieving this through means that are never really made clear to us, the good doctor arrives in the middle ages naked, Terminator style, and swiftly steals a set of clothes from a passing knight before setting off to track down Diana/Helene.

Shortly thereafter, most of the characters attend a Black Mass(!) in a cemetery, presided over by the Robin Hood-hatted Satan. He is keen on gathering signatures for his black book, and, in return, he hands a big bag of money to some old geezer who complains he’s led a wretched life, and cures Dick Miller’s leprosy (hurray!).

In a scene that must have looked absolutely superb during the fuzzed-out UHF TV broadcasts through which I’d imagine this movie was primarily viewed for many years following its theatrical release, three female dancers in appropriately charnel garb provide the entertainment at this infernal knees-up, swaying and swirling like otherworldly gothic swamp creatures with polystyrene gravestones behind them, before they disappear in a cloud of smoke.

Elsewhere, a couple of people get their heads cut off, Lavinia gets rather gorily stabbed for her trouble and there’s a ‘knock down, drag out’ fight between the doctor and ‘Gobbo, the Jailer’ – all of which helped ensure that ‘The Undead’ was actually refused a certificate by the British Board of Film Censors in 1957.

Thereafter, some deals are done and some conflicts resolved, Satan gets the last laugh, as well he should, and… I dunno, what more can I tell you? A quintessential “what the fuck did I just watch?!” sort of picture, ‘The Undead’ seems to have been specifically designed to leave inebriated late night TV viewers waking up the next morning wondering whether or not they dreamed it. But let me tell you friends, I watched it relatively early in the day, whilst sober, and I can assure you – it is absolutely real.

As well as providing an early demonstration of Corman’s interest in gothic/medieval settings, ‘The Undead’ also touches upon his quasi-bohemian interest in new age psychology and mysticism, and his penchant for disorientating his viewers by flinging them across time and space (something that reoccurs not just in his late ‘60s “psychedelic” movies but also in his remarkable directorial swan-song ‘Frankenstein Unbound’ from 1990).

But, most of all perhaps, ‘The Undead’ simply serves to demonstrate Corman’s increasing dissatisfaction with the back-to-back formula pictures he was churning out for AIP. The film may not have really proved much of success in this regard, but whatever you make of it, it’s certainly a big leap forward from ‘Attack of the Crab Monsters’ in terms of narrative ambition, that’s for sure.

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(1)IMDB confirms that the imp is actually played by renowned littler person actor Billy Barty, who made his first screen appearance in 1927 at the age of three, appeared uncredited as a “baby” in ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ at the age of eleven, and continued to work consistently in film and TV right up to the late 1990s. Respect is due.

(2) Interestingly, ‘The Undead’ actually debuted a full eighteen months before ‘The Seventh Seal’ – which was certainly a huge influence upon ‘Masque of the Red Death’ – was released in the USA, meaning that Corman significantly pre-empted Bergman’s reinvention of metaphysical medievalism in cinema here, for whatever that’s worth.

Belated Plug: Nucleus Films Euro-CultRestoration Project.

Well, for the moment at least, life goes on, and another blogging responsibility that slipped through the cracks during this Halloween season and its ugly aftermath is the necessity of my telling you about Nucleus Films’ Euro-Cult Restoration Project, a recently launched crowd-funding initiative whose initial goals (it would be nice to think there will be more to follow, should things go well?) involve bringing lovingly restored and reconstructed versions of Lady Frankenstein (Mel Welles, 1971) and Death Laid An Egg (Giulio Questi, 1968) to the people.

To be honest, I recall finding ‘Lady Frankenstein’ a bit so-so when I watched it via a bootleg a while back, but I’m still looking forward to the opportunity of reassessing its virtues via the medium of a shiny new blu-ray. The real prize here from my POV however is ‘Death Laid An Egg’, a surrealist (in the legit sense of the word) art-house giallo whose blackly comic tone (yes, it’s set on a chicken farm) and Godardian formal transgressions ensure that it does just as much of an unforgettable hit & run job on its nascent genre as Questi’s legendary ‘Django Kill’ did on the Spaghetti Western.

At the time of writing, Nucleus’s campaign has not quite reached the amount needed to guarantee ‘..Egg’s restoration, so… I know the world at large has one or two other bigger fish to fry right now, but could you at the very least consider doing your duty for the preservation of bold & weird cinema and pledge some cash before the closing date crashes down at the end of the month? Nucleus are good guys with an admirable track record of movie-related shenanigans, and I am confident that they will do right by both these films and their customers, so come on – what have we to lose but our dignity?

All the further info you could wish for can be found in the link above.

The She Beast (Mike Reeves, 1966)

Pottering about on Amazon recently, ostensibly checking some facts for a previous review (I think I was probably making absolutely sure Michael Reeves’ ‘The Sorcerers’ was still unavailable on DVD before I started clamoring for its re-release), I was surprised to see that Reeves – [who took his own life at the age of 25 shortly after delivering ‘Witchfinder General’ (1968), one of the most uncompromisingly bleak horror films ever made, thus cementing forever his place in cult film mythology] – is also credited as the director of another film I’d never heard of before – something called ‘She-Beast’.

Clicking through to that film’s page, I nearly fell off my seat when I saw that ‘She Beast’ stars none other than Barbara Steele! Yes, THAT Barbara Steele! There’s a big picture of her on the front of the DVD to prove it and everything! Having stilled my beating heart and heading across to IMDB to confirm that it was indeed THAT Mike Reeves in the director’s chair, I immediately got to thinking about why this film is apparently so totally obscure.


As a chance meeting between two such iconic figureheads of all that is mysterious and fascinating and cool in the world of ‘60s horror cinema, you’d think that if ‘She Beast’ isn’t movie dynamite, it would surely at least have done the rounds of the, er, ‘horror community’ as an intriguing/confounding let-down, in the manner of ‘Curse of the Crimson Altar’ or something. I mean, with a plot apparently involving resurrected witches and a heavy-handed political sub-text, surely there’s got to be SOMETHING worth saying about this movie? But no – silence reigns from all of my usual sources of horror info.

What online reviews there are out there would tend to confirm the sad suspicion that, rather than even a grand failure, ‘She Beast’ is generally regarded as a dreary piece of shit that fails to add much to the legacy of either its director or leading lady. But you know what? Fuck that. At this stage there’s no force on earth that’s going to stop me from laying down £3.95 plus postage to see Michael Reeves directing Barbara Steele in some caper about communist witches! ‘She Beast’ is go.


Flash forward a few weeks to me concluding my Friday night encounter with the She-Beast, and what’s the verdict? Well it ain’t no ‘Black Sunday’, that’s for sure. But going in as I was with pretty low expectations, I’ve gotta say I quite enjoyed ‘She Beast’. In fact in its own way I thought it was really rather wonderful – sordid, cheap, stupid, pointless and completely bizarre in the best possible way.

You’ll forgive my rather unwieldy metaphor here, but if we were to see the best examples of ‘60s gothic horror as a collection of grand nobles and learned doctors congregating for a social engagement, ‘She Beast’ is more like the ranting, piss-stained tramp staggering about outside – he may not be exactly what you had in mind when you set out for an evening of stimulating conversation, but he sure ain’t bland company, and he’s got enough salty surprises in store to keep you on your toes.


Of course, it is a sad world that should ever compel a humble reviewer to compare a film featuring the incomparable Ms Steele to a piss-stained tramp, but such was the nature of her undignified trudge through the hinterlands of exploitation following her unforgettable debut in ‘Black Sunday’ and her brief grasp at arthouse cred in Fellini’s ‘81/2’, and if there is one thing that can immediately be said in ‘She Beast’s favour, it’s that at least it doesn’t waste her electrifying presence quite as badly as ‘..Crimson Altar’ or Corman’s ‘Pit & The Pendulum’.


Sure, she’s notable by her absence in the film’s second half, but in the gloriously Barbara-centric opening chapters she’s at least got a character and some lines to work with, some decent(ish) outfits, and the good taste to look faintly disdainful at all times as the avalanche of grunting, irrelevant crap that is ‘She Beast’ piles up around her. According to ‘She Beast’s trivia page at IMDB, Steele was only available for one day’s work on the film, meaning all her scenes had to be shot in a single twelve hour block, which certainly gives us an insight into the haste with which this flick was thrown together, given that she appears in a good half hour’s worth of footage.



Before we get to Barbara though, naturally every witch-movie has to start with a pre-credits flashback witch-destruction scene, and ‘She Beast’ is no exception, and from a purely cinematic point of view, this sequence is probably the movie’s high point. As distinctive as it is crude, the pre-credits sequence here reveals that the bleak, brutal medievalism Reeves would later perfect in ‘Witchfinder General’ was already fully-formed even this early in his short career.


Reeves immediately discards the stylised/fantastical approach usually taken by ‘60s gothics, presenting our witch as a drooling, filth-encrusted, bestial hag – a hideous creature who looks like she could well have lived in a cave in the woods eating babies. But as the scarcely less bestial villagers tie her down onto an absurdly complex witch-dunking contraption, piercing her chest with a spike and leaving her to drown in the river, there is no sense of supernatural justice being done. As in his later film, Reeves refuses to soften or fetishise the act of senseless violence he is portraying. There is nothing aesthetically pleasing or ‘fun’ about this sequence at all – it is ugly, abhorrent and unsettling, with none of the good vs evil moralising that makes such spectacles palatable in Hammer or AIP movies – just a straight depiction of some grotesque, ignorant people being horrible to each other.



Fittingly perhaps, the film’s presentation on the Alpha Video DVD I’m watching is about the worst I’ve ever seen on a commercially released disc, the print full-screened and fuzzed out into a morass of sickly greens and browns, and the soundtrack so cavernous I had to crank the volume to about four times the normal level to catch the dialogue. It kinda looks like someone took a battered theatrical print and left it out in the rain for twenty years, and seriously, for a film like this I wouldn’t have it any other way – it’s perfect. In all respects, the opening five minutes are just an assault on the senses of any tasteful, rational movie fan: abandon hope all ye who enter here, etc.



Anyway, for better or worse the opening sequence is as close as ‘She-Beast’ ever gets to making a serious point, or to unsettling viewers for the right reasons. As soon as we cut to ‘the present day’, or some weird Eurohorror variation thereof, it’s goof city all the way. Barbara Steele and Ian Oglivy (who else?) are on their honeymoon, and have chosen to spend it in – I kid you not - “the communist republic of Transylvania”. God knows why, as the whole place seems to resemble a post-apocalyptic wasteland of desolate rural poverty. Ian mentions something at one point about the beautiful scenery, but we never get to see any of it in this movie. Barbara radiates disdain on our behalf.


When they flag down a passing peasant and ask him for the lowdown on accommodation in the nearest village, the guy proceeds to deliver one of the most startlingly incoherent peasant-spiels I’ve ever heard in a horror film. He doesn’t warn them about occult peril or anything, as is traditional, instead he just sort of goes; “Yes! No! I mean, yes, places to stay there alright! But you do not want to stop there – keep going! You go to this one hotel, alright! BUT NO, you go there, is only hotel! You have good time there yes!”

Then he shouts “good night”, even though it seems to be the middle of the day, and careers off on his bicycle in classic ‘mad drunkard’ fashion, driving straight into the path of a man leading a donkey and then narrowly avoiding a passing motorbike, in an extended shot that looks like something cut out of an episode of “Last Of The Summer Wine” for being too disturbing. Ian and Barbara exchange the same kind of looks you’ll probably be exchanging back home on the couch, assuming you’re ever fool enough to try watching ‘She Beast’ in polite company. Something is just UP with this movie, and I’m not sure it’s going to be pleasant.


Arriving in said ‘village’ (which seems to consist of an abandoned looking filling station, some outhouses and a few picnic tables), Barbara and Ian are swiftly introduced to the proprietor of the hotel the peasant was blathering on about, as portrayed by the great comic actor Mel Welles. As the appropriately named Groper, Welles gives us an authentically furtive, sweaty sort of character who, seemingly for the lack of any other actors, will be playing a larger role in the forthcoming drama than we might wish. “Welcome, welcome,” he greets the couple, “you’re just in time for tea!”
With his lurching, hunch-backed walk, exaggerated mannerisms and even his own ‘comedy’ theme music, Groper’s presence rather recalls that of Torgo in Manos: The Hands Of Fate (if somewhat less intense).


As Barbara and Ian sit at one of the village picnic tables sipping Groper’s finest English tea (it doesn’t look good), a bizarre, bright yellow old-timey car putters over the horizon and our protagonists soon find themselves in the company of none other than Count Van Helsing (John Karlsen), here reduced to a lonely old coot who seems very excited about having some people who aren’t surly peasants to talk to.

“Do you know the Draculas?”, Barbara asks him. “Know them? Why, my family exorcised them, drove them from this earth, staked their evil hearts!”, Van Helsing replies, before going on to explain that with the vampires out of the way, he’s all about witches these days, and has done much interesting research, blah blah blah. Apparently not relishing the prospect of being lectured on occult lore by some craggy old weirdo for no apparent reason, Barbara and Ian declare themselves tired from their long journey and fuck off, leaving the poor old Count to enjoy the bottle of vodka he’s ordered all on his own.


And that, essentially, is our whole dramatic set-up for ‘She-Beast’s unforgettable tale of nothing in particular. In their haste to get away from this tiresome place, Barbara and Ian end up crashing their car straight into the river. Barbara’s body disappears! A murderous witch-monster is on the loose! Only Van Helsing’s occult know-how can save the day! Random, squalid events pad out running time! Yawn! I wish Babara Steele would come back! SHE DOES! And that’s yer lot! Hurray!

Naturally it’s the scattered points of interest along the way that make “She Beast” such a unlikely pleasure, most of them probably stemming from the presence of a headstrong, inexperienced director who seems determined not follow the signposts of gothic horror formula, but who lacks either the commitment or resources to come up with anything better, resulting in barrels of the kind of delightful “well we’ve got to film something – let’s film THAT” anti-inspiration that keeps trash-horror archeologists glued to video-era regional obscurities, but is rarely seen in ‘60s cinema, when producers and distributors had to exhibit their goods in public, in theatres, and thus usually at least TRIED to make sure they weren’t embarrassing themselves too much.

For instance, I loved the bit where Ian catches Groper leering through the keyhole as the couple attempt to get frisky in their room, and instead of merely telling him to push off, our ‘hero’ proceeds to beat the unfortunate landlord’s brains out against the wall, leaving a thick sheen of blood, in an outbreak of senseless violence just as brutal as the crimes perpetrated by the movie’s monster! Another example of Michael Reeves’ peerlessly misanthropic view of human behaviour perhaps, or did the actors and make-up artist just get carried away and no one could be bothered to reshoot..? I’m assuming the latter, as the next time we see Groper, he’s skulking around as usual, rubbing the back of his head and muttering to himself as if he’s just got a bit of a hangover.


I also enjoyed all the comically sped up car chases between Count Van Helsing’s weird car and the local keystone commissars (they literally do prat-falls and say things like “hey boss, somebody done stole our car”) that pad out the film’s final half hour. (You see, they just want to kill the witch, whereas Van Helsing knows that only be keeping her alive can Barbara be resurrected, or, y’know, something.) Watching a sped-up motorcycle guy zipping along the country lanes made for particularly pleasing viewing – such larks! There’s even one bit where the old geezer has to manually crank the car’s engine in order to get back on the road before his pursuers arrive – turn that hand-crank Count, crank for all you’re worth!


Then there’s the bit where the scene abruptly changes, and we see footage of some guys staging a cock fight (largely off-screen thankfully - no animal cruelty footage) while a kid whose sole purpose in the narrative is to briefly get attacked by the witch sneaks out of his bedroom window and assembles a pile of packing crates to watch the action… all of which we are seeing, well, why exactly…? Ten bucks says it’s more spiritually fulfilling that whatever’s on TV right now, so quit yer complaining and chow down.


Although filmed in some authentically grim and hopeless looking place in Yugoslavia, ‘She Beast’ was actually a British/Italian co-production (it went by “La Sorella di Satana” in Italy), and the English language track sounds dubbed, or at least post-synced. And with this process presumably being carried out with the same sense of care and attention that went into the film itself, naturally the result is conversations that sound as if they were written on another planet;

“What am I doing here?”
“You were lying in the middle of the road, you could have been hit by a bus!”
“Ridiculous!”
“Why were you in the road?”
“That damned fool hit me with a bottle!”
“Why?”
“I asked to use the telephone.”
“Ah – yes, I see”

And so on.

What I loved most of all about ‘She Beast’ though was the simple, self-contained little world it inadvertently creates. This is something I find fascinating in a lot of low budget horror films actually – the way that, thanks to strict limitations on cast, shooting locations and sets and a sense of narrative background that is hazy at best, these films can seem to take place within a restrictive, Truman Show-like entropy circuit, completely cut off from the real world, and functioning according to their own cracked internal logic.


Of course, many really good films have recognized this dislocated feeling and turned it to their advantage (“The Child”, “Messiah of Evil” or “Phantasm” are all good examples), but I love how in a film like ‘She Beast’ the sense of isolation seems completely accidental – the strange result of a film that seems to have been made with no production values whatsoever, and a script that simply can’t be bothered to anchor any aspect of the story into a real-world context.


As the film concluded, I wasn’t thinking about witches and occult power, or communism, or even about Barbara Steele. Instead I was just trying to picture what day to day life must have been like in the Communist Republic of Transylvania, before those attractive Britishers came along and messed everything up by falling in the lake.

Let’s go there together;

Groper sits in his filthy shack, scratching his belly and looking at porn. Groper’s niece keeps out of his way. Count Van Helsing putters around the hills in his stupid-looking car, desperate for someone to talk to. Flies buzz, meat rots. That’s the whole world. It is certainly not a happy place, but maybe, after a while, we’ll each grow to appreciate its charms.

Maybe we should thank the ill-starred Michael Reeves for giving us a rare window into that world, with only the clunk of the DVD returning itself to the menu screen serving to awake us from our slumber, to save us from a dream-life in which we are trapped there… forever.

END!