Track Of The Vampire(Jack Hill & Stephanie Rothman, 1966)

First off, I would personally like to thank the world’s movie reviewers, horror bloggers, authors of the various nerd-tastic reference works I like to consult etc., for keeping me in the dark for so long re: the unique qualities of this obscure AIP schedule-filler, thus allowing it to hit me as a real unexpected surprise. Thanks guys - I appreciate it! In some small way, it feels like Christmas when a film I’d never even heard of (well, maybe I read the title once or twice, or saw a poster somewhere..) turns out to be more weird and wonderful than I could ever have hoped.

I didn’t deliberately set out to watch “Track of the Vampire” - it’s the other movie on a double feature DVD I bought primarily to see Barbara Steele in “Nightmare Castle”. Reading the back of the box whilst sitting through the latter in a narcoleptic haze (it’s the only way to watch “Nightmare Castle”), I was intrigued to note that “Track..” is co-directed by two of American International’s most talented b-team directors, Jack Hill (Mr. Spider Baby himself) and Stephanie Rothman (who went on to introduce a welcome dose of feminism into American exploitation in the ‘70s via flicks like “The Student Nurses”). My interest thus piqued, the least I could do was shift this thing up my viewing schedule and check it the hell out. And I’m very glad I did.

To my surprise, “Track of the Vampire” begins not with one of AIP’s trademark animated credits sequences, but with a brilliantly atmospheric ‘town square at midnight’ scene-setter, reminiscent of the way Mario Bava utilised the creepy geometry of old Mediterranean architecture in flicks like “Kill Baby Kill” and “Lisa & The Devil”.



Those can’t be sets, surely…?

Less surprisingly, a monstrous, black-hatted fellow of some description has emerged from the shadows to prey upon a lone female! Fangs! Groping! Cripes, what horrors!



A pretty cool opening, no doubt, but the moment I knew I was REALLY going to love “Track of the Vampire” was when we cut straight to a bunch of beatniks, who are avidly watching what appears to be a severed eyeball attached to a metronome…



In what I assume is a cheeky homage to Corman’s classic “A Bucket of Blood”, our hep-cats begin earnestly discussing the nature of artistic expression, as Karl Schanzer (Schlocker out of “Spider Baby”) explains his new concept of ‘quantum painting’. I think it looks like a lotta fun, and the beatniks seem to agree!




Where the hell is this movie supposed to be set, you may be asking by this point. Europe? America? No my friends, nothing so crude. With a vagueness that borders on genius, “Track of the Vampire” seems to take place instead in ‘60s-HORROR-TOWN, a free-floating principality that those of us who watch too many of these movies may occasionally find ourselves visiting in dreams.

A place where imposing gothic edifices cast leery shadows across cobbled streets and waves crash hypnotically and unceasingly upon the eerily deserted beach, where beatniks beat their chops in cantinas, eccentric artists skulk in their converted crypt studios, and a seemingly endless supply of beautiful, dark-haired girls practice their roles in daring avant garde ballet productions.



Throughout this whole movie, I don’t think we meet so much as one ‘normal’ person – no squares, no policemen, no shopkeepers, no reporters – just the way out kids, occasional surly innkeepers and seekers after truth… and the guy with the fangs.


Damn, I love it here, I wish I could stay forever. It reminds me of happy times in my youth, staggering around seaside towns by night, pissed out of my brain, with the sobering sea air on my face and all of life stretching out ahead of me… (again, guy with fangs notwithstanding).

Anyway, another thrilling stalk n’ strangle sequence is up next, serving to perfectly illustrate the strange and pleasurable art/trash disjuncture that seems to be going on throughout “Track of the Vampire”…



Seriously - one moment we could be looking at brooding, expressionistic framing straight out of a Murnau or Fritz Lang movie, the next it’s like we’re suddenly transported to that stupid bit in “Astro Zombies” where those guys chase each other around a swimming pool for about a hour and Tura Satana shoots somebody…

And as I probably don’t need to remind you, this weird negative zone connecting the two is pretty much EXACTLY where I like to find myself on movie night.



This scene, in which a girl dances across the beach to pad out the running time a little, just goes on, and on, and on, far longer than such a scene ever really should. Being generally in favour of such dreamy nonsense, I was having a lovely time with all the woozy marimba music and compound-eye lenses and stuff, but when it hit the five minute mark even I was thinking “right, that’s enough of that, can we have some kind of event or something now?”


William Campbell plays troubled artist Antonio Sordi, who does a brisk trade knocking out bloodthirsty paintings like this one;


ANY GUESSES WHERE HE GETS HIS INSPIRATION FROM, HUH READERS?


That’s right! Another one bites the dust.

Campbell is superbly creepy, lumbering about and drawling his lines like Robert Mitchum’s punch-drunk older brother.

The scene in which an unsuspecting girl poses for him whilst he stares at a canvas he’s just painted pitch black, ranting about the fate of his ancestor, a controversial artist who was killed by the inquisition in the 11th century, seeing the laughing face of the woman whose evidence condemned him reflected in the black mess, is one of the most grandly ghoulish and unsettling scenes I’ve seen in a gothic horror flick for a long time.


That alone would have done a really nice job of transforming the standard “cornball explanation of why he’s a psycho” sequence into something altogether more enjoyable, but when the scene shifts into a full tilt, Bergman-esque desert dream sequence in which Sordi acts out the drama of his heretical forebear…. man, it’s a knock-out!



If my generalised talk of ‘girls’ in this review seems a tad crass, I apologise, but the fact is “Track of the Vampire”s general sense of oneiric incoherence makes it very difficult to keep tabs on it’s myriad female characters, most of whom look very similar and sometimes even seem to change places, or come back from the dead, or reappear as their own sisters and so on. The whole thing almost has a kind of constantly shifting, Jean Rollin-like drift to it, and if there are some fine and characterful performances from the female cast hidden in their somewhere, I’m damned if I can figure out who was who by looking at the cast-list in order to acknowledge them.


The fact that most of the actresses look distantly familiar from other AIP movies, but that I can never QUITE put names to the faces, only increases this delicious feeling of dislocation, as I stumble through “Track of the Vampire” wondering whether I last saw that girl who was dancing on the beach hanging out in a technicolour castle with Vincent Price, or riding with a wild black & white hotrod gang… or did I just see her out of the corner of my eye in some movie-inspired dream…? Ah, the truth – forever beyond my grasp! Here I sit, like poor old Vincent in one of those Poe movies where his new wife turns into his dead wife or his daughter turns into his mother or whatever, contemplating the possibility that I’m just DREAMING this whole ridiculous movie…


Later on, we get some shots like this one, that lead me to think, holy shit, that’s no back projection – did Roger Corman actually pack everybody off to Europe to make this damned thing…?


Given Corman’s legendary reputation for penny-pinching, I’ve always been kind of curious about how and why he let Francis Coppola go all the way to Ireland to shoot “Dementia 13” in ‘63, so on that basis I guess an overseas jolly for Hill and Rothman wouldn’t have been *completely* beyond the realms of possibility… although the suits at AIP can’t have been too thrilled when they returned with a film this art-damaged and incoherent.


One thing I absolutely love about the best of the black & white ‘60s AIP film is that even as they were poking fun at beatniks and art world pretension, they really do carry a genuine ‘beat’ sensibility that somehow manages to sit neatly alongside their exploitation / pure entertainment agenda. Certainly you’d be hard pressed to find anything in the early ‘60s avant garde as shocking and fragmented as “Dementia 13”, as insightful as “Bucket of Blood” or as uncompromising in it’s rejection of social norms as “Spider Baby”, even as all three still function perfectly well on the level of goofy horror movie fun.

I guess it goes without saying that Corman and Hill and Rothman and Coppola and Daniel Haller were all smart, talented, literate people, and an uncanny sense of vitality and intelligence can’t help but shine through in their work, even as the moneymen crack the whip. And if that latent sense of experimentation can be seen creeping around the edges of those other movies, it’s a pure delight to find it exploding all over “Track Of The Vampire”, a film that, whilst highly accomplished in technical terms, couldn’t have been much more of a free-wheeling daydream if Corman had hired a bunch of Venice Beach hippies to shoot it.


There is a refreshing ‘first thought/best thought’ feeling about the film’s incongruous mix of beautiful, well-executed sequences and total junk, a spirit of knowing good humour and energy that makes the resulting film a hoot, even as the events on-screen make about as much sense as a 3am conversation in the bar at an Italian scriptwriter’s convention.

“HEY,” seems to be the unspoken message from Hill and Rothman, “WE WENT TO FILM SCHOOL AND LEARNED A BUNCHA NEAT STUFF; NOW ROGER CORMAN’S HIRED US, AND HE LET US MAKE THIS THING! PRETTY CRAZY, HUH?”

A starry-eyed rampage through the back roads of the mid-‘60s subconscious disguised as a commercial b-movie, “Track of the Vampire” blows my mind.


Of course, every dream is followed by the crude awakening when you realise you’ve got to put your trousers on and get the hell to work in the next twenty minutes, and a modicum of internet research reveals that my vision of Jack and Stephanie hanging out on the beach together, sharing a few sticks of tea and crafting this mad movie was sadly pretty wide of the mark.

The real circumstances behind “Track of the Vampire”s creation are as follows:

One day, Roger Corman acquired the rights to an obscure Yugoslavian movie, the intriguingly titled “Operation Titian”, for the price of a milkshake, but subsequently deemed it too dull to bother releasing. (I’m guessing this is where all the atmospheric location shooting and chase sequences came from?)

Meanwhile, Jack Hill was busy shooting a whole bunch of footage for another film that never got finished for some reason (all the beatnik/mad artist stuff, presumably?), and Corman, utilising his uncanny ability to pull a feature film out of just about anything, decided he might as well crowbar the two together into, well… SOMETHING, roping in Stephanie Rothman to write and shoot enough additional scenes to establish some sense of coherence.

And if “some sense of coherence” would be a pretty generous description of the film that eventually emerged, I think we’ve still got to give it up for all concerned – “Track of the Vampire”, ladies and gents, a wholly ACCIDENTAL masterpiece of ‘60s weirdo horror.

As a final note, IMDB tells me that Sid Haig turns up in this movie, portraying “Abdul the Arab”.

I’ve watched it twice now, and don’t recall seeing any “Abdul the Arab”.

He’s probably in there somewhere though. Maybe he’s hiding. It’s just that kinda movie.

Sweet dreams.

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!