Hammer House of Horror: Charlie Boy (Robert Young, 1980)

Episode # 6! This one was very enjoyable.

After all the down at heel suburban atmos of the preceding episodes, we’ve finally got a big ol’ manor house on-screen right from the outset here (Hampden House in Bucks, for the record), furnished with an impressively opulent array of priceless antiques, and soon to be squabbled over by a clan of scheming toffs, when, during the pre-credits sequence, affable Lord of the Manor Sir Jack takes what I believe we’re obliged to call ‘the Rod Hull exit’, tumbling from the battlements as he fiddles with the TV aerial.

Were malign vibes emanating from an especially scary-looking fetish doll he had recently added to his collection of African art to blame? Well, we’re watching ‘Hammer House of Horror’ here, so what do you think?

In the aftermath of what seems to have been an unexpectedly contentious ‘reading of the will’, we join Sir Jack’s nephew, struggling aspirant movie producer Graham (Leigh Lawson), as he picks out a few favourites from the art collection he’s now inherited, whilst setting the rest aside to be flogged.

Much resentment is seemingly in the air, on account of the fact that Graham’s smug and entitled older brother Mark (Michael Culver) has been assigned the house and most of the dough, whilst Sir Jack’s loyal and long-serving housekeeper (and assumed romantic partner) Gwen (Frances Cuka) has been effectively disinherited - a situation exacerbated by the fact that Mark has cruelly decided to sack her with immediate effect for ‘getting ideas above her station’, thus cementing his reputation as a massive twat.

Whilst all this familial bother is brewing however, Graham’s girlfriend Sarah (Angela Bruce) finds herself unaccountably drawn to - yes - that same sinister fetish doll we saw the camera lurking around during the opening. Naming it “Charlie Boy”, she decides that the foul thing (which comes complete with the teeth of former victims hung around its neck and slits in its side for knives to be shoved into) is coming home with the couple to their swankily upholstered (yet comparatively modest) flat in Barnes.

Much could of course be made of the fact that writers Bernie Cooper & Francis Megahy decided that this week’s evil artefact from the darkest heart of the Congo should be latched onto by a black British character, but for better of for worse, this aspect of the story is never really explored.

To the episode’s credit - I suppose? - Sarah’s race is never exploited (or indeed even mentioned) by the script, and any suspicion of questionable intent is further undermined by Angela Bruce herself, who delivers a strong and engaging performance, her Geordie accent and no bullshit attitude clearly marking Sarah out as someone cut from a very different cloth to the sorry stereotypes of black characters generally featured in older British horror films (on the rare occasions on which they appeared at all).

Indeed, one of the key strengths of this episode is the fact that Sarah and Graham are such likeable and unconventional protagonists. For his part, Graham initially seems like a cardboard cut-out of the kind of ‘smarmy yuppie arsehole’ archetype which would become ubiquitous over the coming decade, but as we get to know him, he becomes a lot more sympathetic. He has turned away from a lucrative job in advertising to pursue a more satisfying (but far less profitable) career in the arts, and his choice of a black, working class life partner speaks for itself vis-à-vis his disenchantment with the expectations of his aristocratic family.

The same cannot be said however of brother Mark, who, in the grand tradition of Hammer horror’s own strange brand of Class War ideology, is a bullying, plummy-accented bastard who seems entirely fixated on breeding horses (never a good sign). And so, when he casually breaks off a handshake agreement he had previously made to provide funding for Graham’s dream of a new film studio, well… no prizes for guessing who’ll be first to get the chop.

Although ‘Charlie Boy’s “I inherited a voodoo doll” plotline is old as the hills, and the clumsy scripting necessitates some extraordinary leaps of logic on the part of the protagonists (“why, the doll must be killing people in the exact order in which they appear in this photograph”) - but, that aside, this episode’s execution is generally top notch.

In addition to the aforementioned cast of likeable/unusual characters, we’ve got some excellent production design (not least the fetish doll itself, which is quite a piece of work), plenty of satisfyingly bloody violence (Mark’s demise is an especially good ‘un, as you’d hope), and very strong, imaginative direction from Robert Young (which is perhaps no surprise, given that he had previously directed one of Hammer’s very best ‘70s films, ‘Vampire Circus’ (1972).)

For me, the highlight of the whole affair was probably the vaguely ‘Performance’-esque sequence in which a scar-faced East End villain who had previously menaced Graham & Sarah in a ‘road rage’ incident finds himself stabbed to death in a nightclub basement on ‘Charlie Boy’s behest. Bluntly intercut with footage of the lead couple making love, reflected in the glistening eyes of the fetish doll, his murder makes for a startling psychic juxtaposition of sex n’ violence which any theatrically released ‘70s/’80s horror film would have been proud of.



In short, best episode of HHoH thus far, I reckon.

Horror Express / Gothic Originals: Blood For Dracula (Paul Morrissey, 1974)

On first viewing, ‘Blood for Dracula’ was by far my favourite of the two Paul Morrissey / Udo Kier horror films. Long story short: upon returning to the film for the first time in many years, my opinion remains unchanged.

‘Blood..’ has a genuinely funny / sexy premise (helpfully summarised by the Italian release title, which translates as ‘Dracula Seeks a Virgin’s Blood… and He is Dying of Thirst!!!’), and an interesting and unconventional take on the Dracula/vampire mythos, but more importantly, it also feels far more tonally consistent and comfortable in its own skin than Flesh For Frankenstein had a year earlier.

I’m not quite sure how to quantify that impression exactly, but… this one feels more like the kind of European film which an actual European filmmaker might have made, if that makes any sense? It is a film which actually seems to have risen from the culture in which the story takes place, rather than reflecting the perspective of a cynical outsider looking to tear shit up and upset people. As a result, we’ve got less sniggering from the back row this time around, and more actual stuff-which-is-funny. Taken purely as a black comedy in fact, ‘Blood for Dracula’ is often pretty sublime.

Once again, Udo Kier must be singled out for praise here. Dialling it down slightly from his mincing fascist Baron in ‘Flesh..’, his malnourished, hypochondriac Count Dracula is a truly pitiful creation. It is often reported that Kier starved himself to the point of infirmity before taking on the role, and his frighteningly cadaverous, translucently pale visage certainly bears this out. Barely keeping it together during moments when he is required to present himself in public or interact with other human beings, Keir’s performance is, in its own strange way, just as much of a compelling vision of the vampire-as-other as Max Shreck’s Graf Orlok in Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’.

For all this though, the energy Kier puts into the nauseous bathroom freak-outs we’re subjected to as Dracula expels torrents of tainted blood from his system is remarkable. Both horrifyingly intense and disconcertingly intimate, these scenes of physical collapse prefigure the similarly unforgettable transformations Kier put himself through in Walerian Borowczyk’s ‘Docteur Jekyll et les Femmes’ (1981), whilst the fact that he manages to carry off this disconcerting business without undercutting the film’s comedy is little short of extraordinary. (Indeed, he even manages to deliver one of the greatest lines in film history whilst in the midst of his unnatural convulsions.) (1)

Here though, unlike in ‘Flesh..’, Udo is assisted by the presence of a supporting cast who (for the most part) prove strong and/or interesting enough to go toe-to-toe with him. Arno Jürging is once again very good, playing it less broad and rather more cunning than in the previous film as Dracula’s dedicated valet/servant, and I was also very impressed by British-born actress Maxime McKendry, who is absolutely dead-on as the harried, snobbish matriarch of the poverty-stricken aristocratic family Dracula infiltrates in search of a bride.

Best-known for her work in the fashion industry, McKendry was seemingly cast here as a result of her friendship with Andy Warhol (perhaps his only tangible contribution to these films, beyond lending his name to their American release), but she is so good, it is almost impossible to believe that this was her only acting credit.

Her matter-of-fact response to walking in on the sight of her youngest daughter being raped by the gardener is one of the film’s blackly comedic highlights, although her doddering, crackpot husband, played by no less a personage than Vittorio De Sica, proves equally amusing, seemingly improvising the lion’s share of deeply eccentric performance.

Elsewhere, Elsa Lanchester-lookalike Milena Vukotic is also memorable as the family’s eldest daughter, and even ol’ Joe Dallesandro is served better here than he was in ‘Flesh..’, despite making no effort either to exhibit any emotion or to disguise his incongruous New York drawl.

Once again, Joe is called upon to embody the brutish, proletariat assassin of Kier’s aristocratic entitlement, but the script’s decision to go all out in making his scowling, sex pest gardener an early-doors communist proves inspired; the sheer misery he manages to pile upon the poor Count’s head, quoting simplified Marx-Leninism as he shags his way through through his employer’s assorted daughters, is comedy gold.

Meanwhile, ‘Blood..’ is, if anything, even more grandly appointed than ‘Flesh..’, with the familiar Villa Parisi, which serves as the film’s primary location, looking absolutely beautiful here, augmented by Enrico Box’s exquisite set dressing and Luigi Kuveiller’s hazy, diffused photography. Ancient and austere yet decrepit, chilly and depressing, the villa provides a perfect visual metaphor for the fading, dysfunctional dynasty who dwell within it, whilst its bright, airy spaces offer a stark contrast to the dusty, shadowed chambers occupied by both the film’s peasants, and its vampires.

Claudio Gizzi’s stately, orchestral score feels more appropriate here than it did amid the comic book slaughter of ‘Flesh..’, particularly during the film’s strikingly melancholy Transylvanian title sequence, during which we see Dracula swathed in near total darkness, painstakingly applying the make up which allows him to pass as human in preparation for his reluctant departure from his ancestral estate.

Largely devoid of camp/comedic intent, these opening scenes are in fact extremely sad. In spite of everything, we feel for the Count, as he is pulled away from his crepuscular world of taxidermy and dried flower arrangements by the ugly realities of seeking sustenance in a cruel world which no longer defers to his aristocratic pedigree.

Sequences such as that in which Kier and Jürging inter the remains of Dracula’s now-expired vampiric sister (Eleonora Zani), who after untold centuries has expired from her ‘thirst’, are simply fine, atmospheric filmmaking, and, in using vampirism as a prism by which to explore aging and mortality, Morrissey even finds himself pre-empting the funereal tone of Tony Scott’s The Hunger to some extent. (Which also makes this pretty much Goths on Film 101, children of the dark should take note.)

Assuming viewers are prepared to roll with the total absence of sympathetic characters (pretty much a given for a Paul Morrissey film), ‘Blood for Dracula’s greatest flaw is probably the performances by the actresses playing the family’s other three daughters. Despite including ‘Suspiria’s Stefania Casini and poliziotteschi stalwart Silvia Dionisio amongst their number, one suspects that these ladies were probably not cast for their thespian talents (their participation in the film’s soft focus sex scenes is both lengthy and relatively explicit), and insisting that they recite their dialogue in heavily-accented, phonetic English strikes me as having been a really bad decision.

Contrary to standard practice in the Italian film industry, my impression is that these Morrissey films must have been shot with live sound, but I wonder to what extent Casini, Dionisio and other Italian performers were aware of this? To my ears, much of their dialogue in the film sounds akin to a ‘guide track’, waiting to be replaced with something better in the dub, and as a result, much of what they have to say is both excruciatingly delivered and also somewhat incomprehensible.

(To be fair, De Sica also suffers from the same problem, but it’s less of an issue given that his character is supposed to be a rambling old duffer who rarely says anything of narrative importance. And yes, SDH subtitles would no doubt help, but I watched the film on this occasion via an old DVD copy which offers no such luxuries.)

Aside from this unfortunate throwback to Morrissey’s earlier bad-on-purpose methodology however, I was surprised at just how well ‘Blood for Dracula’ stands up. Both effective and actually quite affecting in parts, it’s an accomplished social satire and an intriguingly clever / self-aware take on a late period gothic horror film - but most importantly, it’s also still uproariously entertaining despite its decadent languors, easily capable of winning over a suitably cynical/open-minded crowd nearly half a century later. The next time I find myself idly mulling over a list of ‘best vampire movies’ or ‘best horror-comedies’, I definitely feel it’s earned itself a spot.

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(1)Amazingly, it has only just occurred to be that there might actually be a tangible connection between these two Morrissey films and Borowczyk’s ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne’, or ‘Bloodbath of Dr Jekyll’, or whatever you wish to call it. I mean, obviously Borowczyk brought a very different sensibility to the table, and his film was made nearly a decade later, in a different country, but think about it. Intense performance from Udo Kier in the lead; chaotic / anti-authoritarian feel, ‘shocking’ content and overwhelming emphasis on cruelty, excess and perversion. Plus, if you’ve already done Frankenstein and Dracula, Jekyll & Hyde is the natural next step, right? Not that I’m suggesting Borowczyk was directly influenced by these films, you understand, but could the idea of the Jekyll film forming the final part of a trilogy have been floating around somewhere in the background when his film was being conceived and financed..? Who knows.

Horror Express / Gothic Originals: Flesh For Frankenstein (Paul Morrissey, 1973)

 As part of my portfolio of horror-related activities this October, I decided to belatedly revisit the two “Andy Warhol”/Paul Morrissey horror films for the first time in many years, purely to try to decide whether or not I actually like them.

Of the two films, ‘Flesh for Frankenstein’ in particular never really clicked with me back in the day, leaving a bad taste in my mouth which has endured for nearly fifteen years since my last viewing. Long story short: I found a lot more to enjoy in it this time around, but I can definitely still see where my younger self was coming from.

There’s a lot of rather good, really funny and innovative stuff going on here, but at the same time, much of what surrounds it feels tiresomely bad-on-purpose or sophomorically ‘offensive’, conveying a sense of full spectrum cynicism which makes the film difficult to fully engage with, or to even really get an angle on.

By which I mean, it’s hard to shake the feeling that, even as he was leaning heavily on the talents of the exceptional crew which producer/instigator Carlo Ponti had assembled for him (DP Luigi Kuveiller, Production Designer Enrico Job, Second Unit Director Antonio Margheriti and special FX maestro Carlo Rambaldi foremost amongst them), Morrissey still arrived on set thinking he was somehow better than these crazy Eyetalians and their silly horror movies. Newsflash from the Eurohorror Fan Gazette: he was not.

Each time I’m getting ready to turn it off in disgust and cue up some hearty, proletarian fare like Lady Frankenstein instead though, something sufficiently extraordinary or weirdly beautiful happens to keep me glued to this unsavoury epic, come what may.

Along with the sterling work of the aforementioned technicians, the main thing which got me through the film I think is Udo Kier’s performance as the Baron. He is absolutely fantastic here - OTT in precisely the right way to suit the material. Just a perfect, Python-esque lampoon of an effeminate Nazi aristocrat, he fills the oft-torturous dialogue assigned to him by the the script with unexpected, lip-smacking emphases, managing to make almost every line reading laugh-out-loud funny. (I won't quote the famous line at you again, but his despairing “zis is all YOUR fault!” as he throws his own severed hand in the general direction of Arno Jürging’s Otto at the film’s conclusion is pretty hard to beat.)

It’s a shame then that most of the rest of the cast fall so far short of Kier’s form that they might as well crumble to dust and blow away in the breeze when he’s going full throttle next to them. Jürging delivers a solidly furtive/dislikeable turn as the Baron’s dim-witted assistant, and it’s nice to see the iconic Nicoletta Elmi present and correct as one of the Frankensteins’ silent, creepy children; aside from that though, everyone else pretty much just plain stinks (a circumstance which I can well imagine Morrissey, in keeping with his Warhol/NY camp background, finding just heee-larious).

Monique van Vooren in particular is nails-down-a-blackboard bad as the Baroness (I’m surprised to discover she’d been acting since 1950), whilst Joe Dallesandro is stiff as a board, stubbornly ignoring anything in the painfully wordy script which might call upon him to emote or develop a sense of character (a decision I can only assume was deliberate, in view of the far better performances he went on to deliver in other European movies).

Along similar lines, issues like the confusion of the Baron and Baroness’s husband-wife / brother-sister status also grate. Committing to one scenario or the other could have allowed the characters to be more sensibly fleshed out (sorry), their assorted transgressions made more tangible, but mixing/merging the two feels either like a tiresome bit of “oops, we changed the script, lol” meta-bollocks, or a cheap attempt to shock easily offended viewers, depending on which way you choose to look at it.

That said though, the film’s overall level of perversity, combined with the extremity of Rambaldi’s gore effects, is undeniably pretty audacious. Outside of H.G. Lewis and his competitors in the depths of the Southern U.S. grindhouse circuit, I’m not sure that any filmmakers to this date had dared push their viewers’ faces into the realm of violated human innards with quite the pathological glee Morrissey exhibits here.

Placed alongside the film’s determination to pull every last unhinged erotic possibility from the corpse of the Frankenstein mythos, it’s fair to say that, in terms of pure bad taste excelsis, ‘Flesh..’ takes us to places no horror films had previously explored, and which few have dared return to subsequently (within the commercial/popular sphere at least), even as the kind of graphic splatter pioneered here became de-rigour through the 1980s; an achievement which it is difficult not to admire on some level.

Meanwhile, I also found myself reflecting this time around on the way that, rather than merely taking the piss out of gothic horror movies (which, let’s face it, is all too easy), Morrissey aims higher here by invoking many of the primary themes of mid-century European art-house cinema (bourgeois hypocrisy, echoes of fascism, the fading of the old aristocracy, masochistic sexuality, etc) and playing them as complete farce, as if, as an American, he thought all this wacky Euro shit was just a laugh riot, be it high-brow or otherwise.

Making things feel even weirder meanwhile is the fact that he chooses to express this using a variation on the era’s low-brow British humour (complete with our beloved funny foreign accents, etc), meaning that every scene which takes place outside the gore-splattered laboratory keeps threatening to turn into ‘Carry On Visconti’ or ‘Up Bunuel’ or something - a result only avoided due to the fact that the cast (aside from Udo) are too clueless or disengaged to really wring any laughs out of the absurd material they’ve been presented with.

On relfection, I don't really know whether this approach to socio-cultural satire is a good thing, or a bad thing, or what really, but it's certainly... something.

Which, now that I think about it, actually seems like a pretty good verdict on the entirety of this uniquely troublesome, badly behaved film. 

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Two-Fisted Tales: Brother Cain by Simon Raven (Panther, 1965)

Though the brightly-hued cover photo affixed to this edition of Simon Raven’s second published novel ‘Brother Cain’ carries a distinct whiff of pop-art / psychedelic chic, Panther’s paperback was actually printed in February ’65, too early to have really hitched a ride on the ‘swinging sixties’ bandwagon, whilst the book itself was first published back in the grey, buttoned up world of 1959.

One of those renowned-in-their-day-but-now-largely-forgotten authors whose work always sparks a certain fascination, Simon Raven (1927-2001 - and yes, that was indeed his birth name) wrote voluminously through much of the latter half of the 20th century, and, read today, his books feel both strikingly modern (in terms of their frank and non-judgemental approach to sexuality and general air of shark-ish cynicism) and hopelessly old fashioned (being largely concerned with a segment of upper crust British society whose values and behaviours now seem entirely alien, probably even to those lucky enough to have been born into it).

Freely mixing elements of personal / social writing and thinly veiled autobiography into popular genre thrillers, Raven’s more noteworthy works include Oxbridge vampire yarn ‘Doctors Wear Scarlet’ (loosely adapted into Robert Hartford Davis’s disastrous Incense for the Damned in 1971) and, on the other side of the coin, the ten volume ‘Alms for Oblivion’ sequence, which follows the lives and loves of a cadre of toffs, set against the changing social and political mores of post-war England. (I read the first few chapters of the first volume of this epic saga a few years back and actually found it quite compelling, but unfortunately I lost my copy on a train and haven’t got around to picking it up again since.)

Throughout his early literary career, Raven seems to have been fixated on the dilemmas faced by male scions of the English upper classes who, whether through conscious rebellion or mere lethargy and personal weakness, have squandered the privileges conferred to them by their noble upbringing and must find alternative paths through life. This theme is certainly front and centre in ‘Brother Cain’, whose protagonist Jacinth Crewe (note the Moorcock-ian initials) finds himself in a predicament closely mirroring that apparently faced by the author himself a few years beforehand.

Having been expelled from Eton on the grounds of moral turpitude and subsequently forced to curtail his studies at Cambridge due to what we might charitably call a self-inflicted lack of funds, the novel joins Crewe as he is invited to offer his resignation to the British army’s elite training academy at Sandhurst, having accrued gambling debts sufficiently gargantuan as to bring his entire regiment into disrepute.

“Honour and dishonour are conventions,” Captain Crewe’s understanding commanding officer advises him during their final interview, effectively establishing the theme of the novel to follow. “They are relevant in the world in which you have so far existed: they will not be relevant in the world for which it is clear you are now destined.”

Retreating to London with his tail (amongst other things) between his legs, Jacinth throws himself upon the mercy of his regiment’s allotted merry widow, one Miss Kitty Leighton, who, after a night or two of wild passion at her Chelsea flat, places a call to a mysterious contact who may be able to assist her disgraced and destitute young lover before the debt collectors come knocking.

Thus, Jacinth is summoned to a lunch date at the Trocadero in Piccadilly (decades before it became the tourist-choked hellhole we know it as today), where he is greeted by dirty mac-clad, brown ale supping “professional messenger” Mr Shannon - a character I found it impossible not to imagine being played by Donald Pleasance.

Though highly suspicious on all levels, the proposal Mr Shannon’s anonymous employers wish to convey to Captain Crewe is entirely too good for the desperate young layabout to resist. In short, his gambling debts will be covered in full, and he will be issued with sufficient funds to allow him to fly to Rome and install himself in the swank Hotel Hassler overlooking the Spanish Steps, there to await further instructions.

What with this being the height of the First Cold War and everything, you’ll be unsurprised to hear that when those orders do eventually arrive, they direct Jacinth to an appointment at a shabby ‘Institute for the Promotion of Mediterranean Art’, a flimsy front for a top secret wing of the British government whose job, to all intents and purposes, is to create new James Bonds.

Which is to say, Jacinth and the other young rascals corralled by the nameless ‘organisation’ are pointedly not being groomed as spies or intelligence agents. Instead, they are basically just hatchet men - proponents of what one of their instructors (who is of lower middle class extraction, and so naturally a graceless, grudge-bearing git) bluntly calls “the cold art of murder”.

Taking a more refined view on things, the Big Cheese of the whole operation, who naturally enjoys the benefit of a ‘proper’ education, instead waxes lyrical to his new recruits about how, in the light of communist infiltration and so forth, the democratic institutions so cherished by western nations can only be preserved through the unilateral execution of acts which the champions of democracy would find impossible to countenance, should they become aware of them.

(Being unfamiliar with Raven’s own political leanings, assuming he had any, it’s difficult to get a handle on whether this justification for extra-judicial murder and mayhem, which continues at some length, is being presented as satire, or simply as a statement of the author’s own beliefs.)

Furthering the Bond parallel, Jacinth and his fellow recruits are essentially allowed to adopt the lifestyles of globe-trotting playboys, so long as they follow their orders precisely, ask no questions, and leave whatever moral scruples they may once have possessed at the door. And, if they have any thoughts of ducking out and taking their chances in civilian life, well…. their more ruthless classmates will simply have an easy first assignment to look forward to, won’t they?

Despite his military rank, Jacinth Crewe is still more a feckless dosser than a cold-blooded killer, and, still bedevilled by confused notions of personal honour and brotherly conduct, he is naturally terrified by the prospect of having to immerse himself in the paranoid, compassionless world promised by his new profession - all the more so when, with a neatness which surely defies mere coincidence, he is paired up for training with one Nicholas Le Soir, the former schoolmate whose charms led to his being expelled from Eton for corrupting the morals of a younger boy. (This incident directly mirrors Raven’s real life expulsion from Charterhouse public school, incidentally.)

Now a qualified surgeon, Le Soir has arrived at the ‘organisation’ after being struck off and effectively exiled from the UK for performing an illegal abortion upon the daughter of a prominent Catholic family (oops), and the plot is further thickened once both Jacinth and Nicholas find themselves drawn into an embryonic love triangle with Le Soir’s promiscuous yet sexually dysfunctional cousin Eurydice, who is also resident in Rome, working for an equally questionable ‘cultural mission’…. and who seems suspiciously keen on pumping her two mixed up suitors for information on the nature of their employment.

And, there I will leave my plot synopsis, but suffice to say, Raven proves himself eminently capable of setting up a fast-moving, exquisitely intriguing yarn here, even if his story’s conclusion - following an incident in a bat-infested railway tunnel, a scheme to virally infect the whores of a high class brothel and a head-spinningly convoluted murder scheme set against the backdrop of a Venetian masked ball, amongst other diversions - eventually veers more toward the kind of existential, internecine futility in which John le Carré would later specialise than the two-fisted action-adventure stuff beloved by Ian Fleming’s fans.

In view of the fact that ‘Brother Cain’ was first published a full decade before the legalisation of male homosexuality in the UK, one of the most striking aspects of the book for modern readers is Raven’s forthright and unapologetic presentation of his male characters’ bisexuality. Not only acknowledging this dark secret of the English public school system, which tended to be referred to only through implication and innuendo by other writers of this era, he seems keen on eagerly exploring its every nook and cranny, pushing the book’s language about as far as the era’s censorship would allow.

“I’m not a homosexual, or at least, not very often,” Jacinth muses to himself as he drifts into introspective reverie in the flight to Rome. (“What shall I do about women? Well I suppose there must be brothels..,” he charmingly adds, as if to bolster his own sense of masculinity.)

As soon as he falls asleep though, he finds himself dreaming of a beautiful American boy he once briefly courted at Cambridge (and who will, of course, play an integral role in the unfolding plot), and as the book goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that Jacinth’s most significant and long-lasting relationships have always been with other men.

In spite of its attention-grabbing plotline in fact, ‘Brother Cain’ often reads more like a semi-autobiographical personal novel than it does a thriller. More specifically, it seems like an attempt on Raven’s part to take stock of his life to date, and to redefine his place in the world as he hit his early 30s. As noted, the parallels between the background of the book’s protagonist and that of the author himself are considerable, and, given the multiple accusations of libel which were levelled against Raven as a result of his writing over the years, it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that many of the secondary characters in ‘Brother Cain’ were simply thinly veiled versions of his own friends, lovers and acquaintances.

Suffice to say, Raven was presumably not actually press-ganged into committing top secret outrages on behalf of the British crown, but, at a push, you could perhaps see Jacinth Crewe’s recruitment by the ‘organisation’ as a reflection of Raven’s own unique arrangement with the publisher Anthony Blond, who, when the author found himself in particularly dire straits, is reported to have agreed to pay him £15 a week in perpetuity and to publish his books as and when he completed them, on the understanding that he should leave London and never return.

Elsewhere, the book’s story is jammed with sinister, wisdom-dispensing potential father figures and unbalanced, mothering women, whilst Jacinth’s ruthless generational contemporaries all seem ready and willing to trample on his yearning, sensitive soul, creating a maelstrom of weird moral / psychological angst which can only really end with our protagonist becoming entirely consumed by it as he slips helplessly between the cracks separating the world of ‘honour and dishonour’ from the one in which most of us now live, in which such concepts are simply a quaint irrelevance.

Normally of course, I’d be pretty pissed off to find a book which has all the makings of a rip-roaring mid-century thriller derailed by such a load of ponderous navel-gazing, but Simon Raven was such a fascinating character, and the lost world of foppish decadence in which he dwelled such an enticing one to visit, that in his case, I’ll happily make an exception. 

Whatever you may think about his conduct or way of life, Raven was a strange and unique literary talent; even at this early stage of his career, his prose and plotting are crisp, witty and ruthlessly efficient, and I’ll certainly be redoubling my quest for more of his work as soon as the doors of the world’s surviving second hand bookshops begin to creak open once again.

 

October Horrors Bonus Edition (#15): The Devil’s Men /‘Land of the Minotaur’ (Kostas Karagiannis, 1976)

Yes, I know it’s no longer October and Halloween has long been and gone, but - would you believe that, on the same night that I watched The Flesh & The Fiends last month, I took another random pick from my pile of unwatched British horror films and *accidentally* managed to cue up a Peter Cushing & Donald Pleasence double bill? I didn’t get a chance to finish my review of the second feature in time to slot it into October’s marathon, but, in light of such a splendid synchronicity, it would seem a shame to leave the second Don & Pete extravaganza un-reviewed, so here we go.

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A long, drifting, rather sun-dazed expanse of nothing of particular importance, ‘The Devil’s Men’ (released in the USA under the somewhat more instructive title ‘Land of The Minotaur’) forms part of a small sub-set of ‘70s horror films that attempted to relocate the familiar atmospheric traits of gothic horror to the more ‘exotic’ terrain of Greece - a country that had recently become a lot more accessible to foreign visitors as a result of the contemporaneous boom in package holidays.

Sitting in a loose triumvirate of “Hellenic horror” alongside Robert Hartford-Davis’s troubled ‘Incense For The Damned’ (1970) and Julio Salvador & Ray Danton’s ‘Hannah: Queen of The Vampires’ (an American/Spanish co-production, aka ‘Crypt of the Living Dead’, 1973), I'm sorry to have to report that, even when placed in this less than august company, ‘Land of the Minotaur’ probably stands as the weakest entry in this most marginal of sub-sub-genres, despite being the only one actually directed by a Greek, and the only one to make use of the opportunities presented by Greek mythology and culture.

The story here posits an island (Crete presumably, although I’m not sure where the film was actually shot, and an exact location is never specified in the script) on which a remote, mountainous town has rather unfeasibly fallen under the control of – wait for it - Count Corofax, an exiled Carpathian aristocrat, played of course by Cushing.

In his new home, Corofax (did he live in the next valley over from Count Filofax or something?) has seen fit to revive an ancient Minoan fertility cult, convincing the local populace to join him in a kind of Lord Summerisle-type arrangement that sees them assist him in sacrificing wandering tourists to a fire-breathing Minotaur statue(!) located in a secret chamber beneath the town’s (extremely impressive) ancient ruins.

For some reason, the sacrificial victims must always take the form of a male/female couple, which would rather seem to contradict the conventional notion of the Minotaur being offered an annual selection of virgins, but… well, as you’ve probably already gathered, this is not the kind of movie in which attention to such historical detail plays a big role.

On the other side of the island meanwhile, Father Roche (Donald Pleasence) is an irascible but good-natured Irish priest with a penchant for befriending the happy-go-lucky, hippie-ish traveller types who seem to keep crossing his path in their VW camper vans. Several of the Father’s young friends have already gone missing after venturing into Corofax’s realm, and being at heart a priest of the old fashioned type, he needs little encouragement to begin ranting about how said land belongs to the devil and no god-fearing person should go near it etc etc.

Early on, ‘Land of the Minotaur’ pulls a bit of a ‘Psycho’ by initially presenting some of Father Roche’s archaeology student chums as our protagonists… only to see them fall victim to the Minotaur cult in pretty short order after they disregard the priest’s advice and start mooching about in the cursed ruins.

The girlfriend of one of the missing men (Luan Peters, from ‘Twins of Evil’ and ‘The Flesh & Blood Show’) is subsequently left high and dry at the airport when her beau fails to meet her, and, after she hooks up with Father Roche and explains that their mutual friends have disappeared, the latter decides the time has finally come to take action.

Somewhat surprisingly, Roche’s first step in this direction is to get on the blower to his buddy Milo (Kostas Karagiorgis), a jet-setting New York-based Private Investigator who takes the call whilst hanging out in the nude with a young lady in his swanky Manhattan penthouse apartment.

One might well wonder how on earth swinging fellow ended up being close friends with a cranky old priest on a remote Greek island, but 21st century viewers in the British Isles at least will have no time to ponder such questions – they will instead be busy trying to recover from the revelation that Milo looks almost exactly like Father Ted Crilly, as played by the late Dermot Morgan.

Anyway, Ted Milo is soon jetting off to Greece whilst Father Roche prepares his arsenal of holy water and crucifixes and, with Ms Peters in tow, our heroes are soon off toward Count Corofax’s neck of the woods in Milo’s rented Cadillac, where, needless to say, much sinister ‘Wicker Man’ –type business and ‘The Devil Rides Out’/’The Devil’s Rain’ style blasting of evil awaits them.

Now, based on the above plot synopsis you’d be forgiven for thinking that ‘Land of The Minotaur’ sounds like quite a lot fun, and I dearly wish it were so, but… well let’s start off looking at the positives, at any rate.

Karagiannis’s film does at least come through with some nice atmosphere. The genuine ancient ruins and authentically down-at-heel mountain-side town in and around which much of the film is shot convey a slightly different feel from more familiar euro-horror settings, simultaneously sun-dappled and haunted by weird ghosts of classical antiquity. There is a lot of creepy stuff with KKK-hooded cultists lurking around the village and hunting Peters’ character that, though not terribly well accomplished in the technical sense, nonetheless oozes menace in a manner slightly reminiscent of the same era’s more strung-out and poverty-stricken U.S. horror films.

The cave-set cult ritual scenes are pretty great too, with some beautiful lighting, lots of colourful robes, gouts of flame and psychedelic super-imposition effects, all as Cushing’s none-more-cadaverous visage presides over things in an appropriately authoritative manner. (These sequences are significantly undermined however by the use of some deeply unconvincing English language incantations, and the inclusion of an absolutely absurd disembodied voice that is apparently supposed to represent that of the minotaur itself. Really an awful decision on someone's part.)

The film’s soundtrack meanwhile is provided by no less a personage than Brian Eno, undertaking what was apparently his first ever work on a film score. One suspects that Brian – who by my calculations must have been somewhere between ‘Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy’ and ‘Another Green World’ at this point - must have smelled a cheque for a new hair-piece or some shiny shoes in the offing when he turned in this “will-this-do” concoction of eerie, pulsing synths and discordant string-plucking… but it’s groovy stuff nonetheless, a nice example of an early electronic horror score might well serve to induce some low level psychotropic flutter in late-night viewers.

And on the negative side meanwhile, he have… just about everything else in ‘Land of the Minotaur’, I’m afraid. The film’s pacing is slack as hell, full of long, dry passages of tension-free meandering, whilst the editing and direction feel shockingly rudimentary for a film with such a high profile cast, perhaps reflecting Greek crew’s relative lack of professional experience.

It would have been difficult to imagine Cushing or Pleasence appearing in a film this rough n’ ready even a few years earlier, which serves to emphasize ‘Land of the Minotaur’s position as one of the very last gasps of the more traditional British (or UK-financed, at least) horror film. And, sadly, the sense of dwindling enthusiasm for this kind of caper is perhaps reflected in the performances of the two leads.

Though it is rare indeed to find a film in which either of these gentlemen could be accused of ‘phoning it in’, I’m afraid we have one here – a problem that perhaps arises in part from the fact that most (if not all) of the film’s dialogue seems to have been post-dubbed without a great deal of skill or enthusiasm, resulting in uncharacteristically bland and one-dimensional turns from both of these great screen actors.

Pleasence spends a lot of his time getting comically agitated and shouting in heavily-accented single syllables, and in this sense his role here could perhaps be seen as a warm up for the avalanche of “cranky powers of good” roles he would play in horror films in the wake of ‘Halloween’, but if so, it’s not a terribly memorable one in truth.

Cushing meanwhile puts on his faux-charming “come into my parlour..” routine for the film’s young ladies, and it’s always nice to have him around, but, as with some of the other projects he appeared in during the mid-‘70s, precious little of the spark that animated his best performances shines through, and it is painfully clear that, by this point in time, his heart was no longer in these kind of routine assignments.

In spite of all this though… I kind of enjoyed ‘Land of the Minotaur’. To get the most out of it, viewers may have to recalibrate their expectations somewhat – certainly anyone anticipating the relative professionalism and narrative logic of a classic British horror film is going to be in for a shock, but, as mentioned above, the vibe really swings far closer to one of the less note-worthy entries in the wave of hippie-inclined indie horror films that emerged from America in the early 1970s (think ‘Blood Sabbath’, Death by Invitation’, ‘The Velvet Vampire’ – stuff like that).

There’s a whole lot of eye-rubbing, sun-dappled wooziness, a great deal of aimless wondering around and plenty of nice local colour - a stoned, “sea breeze and grimy youth hostel” kind of feel that undoubtedly has a certain appeal. It may be strange to encounter Cushing and Pleasence under such circumstances, but if you can dig the resulting cognitive dissonance and get with the vibe, I think this one can make for an extremely pleasant early hours drifting-off-to-sleep kind of flick. Ambient horror perhaps… a concept I’m sure Mr. Eno might have appreciated.

Actually, reviewing a film like this makes me realise just how heavily my view of cinema is dominated by nostalgic/retro tendencies, and how cruelly unfair I am to more recent films as a result.

Just think, last month I watched The Void – a movie full of nail-biting set-pieces, impassioned direction and superb special effects – and did nothing but bitch about it. Today I consider ‘Land of the Minotaur’, a film that does pretty much EVERYTHING wrong, whose few good elements are largely accidental, and I can give it a pass because…. hey, come on. It has Donald Pleasence running around on a Greek island with some hippies. In the ‘70s. It has Peter Cushing wearing a nice robe, sacrificing people to a fire-breathing minotaur statue, and squelchy synth noises on the soundtrack. The place it was shot in looks lovely. What more could you ask for? A good film? Gedouttahere.

FRANCO FILES: Doriana Gray(1976)

AKA:
‘Die Marquise von Sade’, ‘Le Portrait de Doriana Gray’, ‘Le Porno Storia della Marchesa De Sade’.

Context:

“I hinted at the calamity of my birth – that will have to suffice.”

Jess Franco’s career has seen him dabble in an unholy array of genres and styles over the years, but if you were to ask me hand on heart where his greatest contribution to cinema lies, I’d probably point toward the series of often quite disturbing psychological sex films he made in early/mid-70s, mostly under the auspices of producer Robert de Nesle, and with Lina Romay front and centre in the cast list. Building on the template he’d established with his career-defining late ‘60s run of erotic horror/thrillers, but pushing things in ever more extreme and obsessive directions as censorship loosened and budgets lessened, this vague series could be said to include ‘Lorna The Exorcist’, ‘Sinner’, ‘The Obscene Mirror’, ‘Shining Sex’, and, later, ‘Macumba Sexual’. But the unsavoury carnal fixations Franco was exploring in these films arguably reached their peak of expression with the title we’re looking at today – a contender for the most intensely claustrophobic and fleshy entry in the entire Franco filmography… which is saying something.

Generally speaking, the films Franco made for Erwin Deitrich in the latter half of the ‘70s mark the point at which he abandoned the more personal / experimental streak that had prevailed earlier in the decade, and began churning out tawdry exploitation and cheap genre exercises in earnest. There are definitely some noteworthy exceptions though, and ‘Doriana..’ ranks highest among them. It seems likely it was shot around the same time as ‘Barbed Wire Dolls’ (most of the same cast reappear with the same haircuts, and the locations & cinematography seem fairly similar), but, oh, what a difference!

Content:

“For as long I can remember, I’ve been living in the chateau… when I go for walks after long, lonely, dreamless night, I hear no human voices, only the laughter of a mocking bird..”

As you might reasonably expect, only the flimsiest suggestion of Oscar Wilde’s novel survives in this tale of siamese twins (both played by Lina Romay), separated at birth in a botched operation that we’re told resulted in both ‘damaged nerve fibres’ and ‘lost minds’.

Unscathed on the surface at least, Lady Doriana has grown up to become a reclusive aristocrat and mythic sexual libertine, but her mentally deficient twin, long forgotten by everyone, hasn’t been quite so lucky. Confined to an asylum in what seems to be a perpetual state of delusional sexual frenzy, she is a howling mad, naked wretch – the reverse mirror image of Doriana’s outwardly icy, refined demeanour, her rampant id personified in full fury.

As Doriana drifts through life, wrestling with loneliness and her inability to truly ‘feel’ anything in the course of her frequent, impersonal sexual encounters, she finds herself becoming increasingly overwhelmed by the malign psychic influence of her ‘shadow’, and when her lovers begin to die at the point of climax, their life energies drained and consumed, well… obviously we’re talking about a Jess Franco film here, so a bit of self control, some long walks in the country and cold showers etc, are not really on the menu.

In terms of Franco genealogy, ‘Doriana Gray’ recycles much of its general business from ‘Female Vampire’ (the lone aristocratic wonderer who leaves her lovers dead, the presence of an intrusive reporter, the mixture of frenzied sex scenes and brooding, ethereal weirdness etc.), and its basic plot-line would soon be re-worked in far more light-weight fashion for the self-explanatory ‘Sexy Sisters’. Despite this though, ‘Doriana..’, like all of Franco’s best films, is very much its own beast – a wholly unique experience, even as it rampages over territory that will prove over-familiar to even the director’s more casual fans.

Kink:

“Don’t go… stay here and look… I have a little mound, and a valley deeper than the village well, and breasts you could crack an egg on..”

It is a common line of thinking when looking at the emergence of explicit sex films in the ‘70s to see them as essentially stifling the creativity of the filmmakers who chose to partake in them – killing all momentum stone-dead, reducing potentially talented directors to mere camera pointers, filming ugly, static camera fuck scenes when they could be doing something far better with their time, and so on and so forth.

Doubtless there were some individuals for whom this was the case (Jean Rollin is perhaps a good example), but the establishment of a viable market for pornographic films actually seems to have had the opposite effect on Jess Franco, allowing him to get straight to the heart (or rather, straight to the crotch) of what really made him tick, as the distant and sometimes distracted feel of his ‘60s work began to mutate into something both far more graphic and far more emotionally involving, resulting in a crude but startlingly uncompromising form of low budget cinema – unsettlingly perverse, genuinely erotic and so relentlessly voyeuristic that even Europe’s most dedicated porno freaks must have started to wish he’d pull the bloody camera back for a bit of fresh air every now and then.

In essence I think, Franco was (and hopefully still is) an old fashioned sensualist – a man who lives for the pleasures of music, food, culture, cinema, travel, and women. (And, whatever you might think of his movies, you’ve got to at least admire the way he managed to shape his career as a film director into a routine that allowed him to indulge all of these passions on a regular basis.)

It is natural therefore that his more personal films should reflect this approach to life. And as he reached what the more pretentious amongst us might wish to term his ‘mature style’ in the early ‘70s, it is hardly surprising that he should begin to address the ugly shadows that are always lurking in the corner when decadent behaviour is taken to extremes.* Y’know - mental and physical collapse, guilt and moral turpitude, addiction and loss of sensation, madness, despair – that sort of thing. Not a path that’s often much explored by conventional pornography, for obvious reasons, but the genius of a film like ‘Doriana Gray’ is that it manages to cut right to the quick of such heavy subject matter whilst still functioning as lusty, grade A erotica that leaves 90% of the other filmmakers attempting such stuff in the dust.

Much of the credit for allowing the film to successfully straddle (if you will) this gap between arousal and disgust lies of course with the wonderful Ms Romay. I don’t know whether I’ve thus far had a chance in these reviews to pay tribute to the astonishing presence Lina Romay brings to Franco’s ‘70s films… but then I don’t know if the feeling conveyed by her performances in movies like this one can even really be communicated in words. I mean, I’m not usually the kind of guy to get all misty-eyed about actresses in adult movies and so forth, but - those who have seen her in ‘Female Vampire’ or ‘Lorna’ or even the Dietrich-directed ‘Rolls Royce Baby’ will know what I’m getting at.

It would be easy to put the strength of her performances down to her apparent exhibitionistic tendencies and seemingly endless enthusiasm for appearing in this kind of material (a rare virtue indeed in the patriarchal and oft-abusive world of smutty movies), but I don’t know if that quite covers it. Let’s just say that Lina operates on a whole other level from anyone else I have ever seen try to do ‘sexy’ in front of a movie camera. Even when it in the midst of the ‘action’, she seems able to unleash a reservoir of raw, amped up emotion that goes way beyond the standard male-fantasy moves usually demanded by such scenes. Without wishing to labour the point, I would defy anyone of a woman-fancying persuasion – hell, anyone period – to sit through one of her peak-era performances without experiencing *some* kind of strong reaction. If not necessarily sexual arousal, then fear, unease, mesmerism, hilarity, repulsion and wordless fascination are all equally valid responses, just as they are valid responses to Franco’s cinema as a whole. But just like his camera, you won’t be able to ignore her, that’s for sure.

And speaking of Franco’s ever-roaming phallic gaze, ‘Doriana..’ is also notable for taking the director’s penchant for genital close ups to a level of absolute insanity, frequently zooming to the point of utter pubic oblivion, ensuring that Lina’s bush gets as many close-ups as her face. Actually, one or the other of them is on screen for practically the entire movie, an approach that could have taken on a horribly invasive quality in the hands of most other filmmakers, but as is often the case, Jess’s fleshy obsessions play out here in a manner than seems more worshipful than demeaning, and that fits the film’s densely claustrophobic, internalised narrative pretty well.

That said, I’m afraid there are some pretty grim moments here too (in particular, a grisly hetero scene between Raymond Hardy and Martine Stedil nearly made me lose my lunch), but whenever Lina is on screen in either of her incarnations, the sparks fly. 4/5

Creepitude:

“Tell me, is this girl in the clinic of the mysterious Dr. Orlof your sister? Is she insane? Is she a nymphomaniac?”

As was discussed in my review of ‘Macumba Sexual’, what makes Jess Franco’s particular brand of sex-horror films work so well is that, rather than presenting us with a horror film plus some sex (or vice versa), he hits us head-first with a scenario in which the sex IS the horror, internalised within the characters partaking of it.

In these films, sexual dementia (as a symptom of Franco’s preferred notion of carnal vampirism) seems to travel through the air like some kind of psychic plague, emanating from the ‘bearers’ (Doriana and her twin) and possessing each character in turn, as logic crumbles, naked writhing becomes an epidemic and the world becomes a very frightening and disorientating place indeed, reality reduced to “an incoherent nightmare of sex”, to borrow a choice phrase from the Westminster Gazette’s memorable dismissal of Arthur Machen’s ‘The Great God Pan’.

Although the deaths of Doriana’s lovers are pretty perfunctory here – more implied than graphically depicted – it is the sex scenes that surround them, and Lina’s performances within them, that form the main source of the horror, as we’re treated (and/or subjected) to perhaps Romay’s single most unhinged, uninhibited performance in a career full of unhinged, uninhibited performances – a visceral and terrifying portrayal of mental collapse that sometimes cuts too close for comfort, channeling a nameless catharsis worthy of a Zulawski film.

As befits ‘Doriana Gray’s schizophrenic themes, the film’s overall effect relies heavily on Lina’s trademark move of shifting her expression in a split second from euphoric ecstasy to pain, to mindless screaming madness - capturing the viewer off-guard in that awful, frozen moment when the music warps or vanishes in a strangulated echo effect, as our assumption that you’re watching a decadent, easy-going sex scene falls away, twisting a knot in our stomach as we’re forced to suddenly recalibrate our expectations, before we look back again and realise that Doriana is panting, staring blindly with glazed eyes, drooling on the corpse of her partner, as the camera cuts to her incarcerated sister’s inhuman primal scream… oof.

In between these encounters, the atmosphere cools off, and we’re treated (in the rather bizarre English dub at least) to an eerie, monotone voiceover that works to effectively somnambulant effect, elucidating Doriana’s thoughts in the form of some rather Poe-like brooding soliloquys, as she explains her understanding of her sister’s psychic domination in terms of a gothic curse, outlining the long history of genius, melancholy and madness that have tormented the women of her family for generations, taking a leaf or two from Vincent Price in ‘House of Usher’ in the process, and rather unexpectedly investing the film with a rich, ennui-wracked gothic tone, reminiscent of Franco’s earlier ‘A Virgin Among The Living Dead’. 4/5

Pulp Thrills:

“A lady as smart as you are, who owns a whole publishing house for erotic memoirs, isn’t gonna indulge in tiddlywinks..”

Not much doing from this angle I fear. In the film’s lighter moments there’s certainly fun to be had with the goofy English dub (see the quotes at the top of these sections), and with the idea of a world where reclusive aristocratic publishers of erotic memoirs engage in off-the-cuff lesbian seductions at the drop of a hat. But relentless genital close-ups and screaming, demonic hysteria do rather tend to distract from the ol’ pulp thrills I find. 1/5

Altered States:

“I am endowed with an unlimited lust for pleasure, which is the secret of eternal youth..”

Mention must initially be made of the incredible, minimalist sitar-rocking score from Walter Baumgartner**, mainly consisting of just a few languid, resonating notes that repeat throughout the film, hanging in the air like some attempt at a melodic progression left forever unresolved as its composer drifted off into stoned slumber.

Also contributing to a heavy-ass psychedelic atmosphere are all the usual tricks Franco utilises to squeeze as much oppressive disorientation out of his tropical paradise locations as he possible can: palpable heat haze, abstract close-ups and drifting, variable focus. Blinding, overlit sunshine and black, impenetrable shadows (often combined in the same shot). Baroque mirror shots fill the screen with jagged, conflicting angles whilst distant, fuzzy yachts bob back and forth on the tide of the picture-book harbour, as all the time that infernal sitar twangs away, never quite finding the right note it needs to finish things off.

Soon even the genital close-ups begin to take on an abstract, alien character, as frantic zoom shots fill the screen with beige blurs, strange goose-pimpled landscapes and stray pubic hairs curling in the foreground like spider webs, as Franco's lust inspires him to simultaneously break every conceivable rule of cinematic etiquette.

On the soundtrack meanwhile, a constant, deafening chatter of canned birdcalls, hooting owls and mewling cats mixes with the hypnotic voiceovers of the English dub track, as Lina’s vocal stand-in recites verses from a totally tripped out Wickerman-style plain song nursery rhyme (“Your hands wave like a bird’s wings, but they cannot grasp the stars”).

One particularly incredible moment combines all of this, as thunder rolls overhead and the creepy singing continues, as Franco zeros in on a rainbow shining in an overcast sky above a row of slummy looking apartment buildings, contrasted with a monolith-like fern leaf (or maybe it’s an overturned parasol or something?) in the foreground. The camera pulls back to reveal Lina’s shadowed form, encased entirely in shadow as she walks forward, away from us… “your rainbow coloured eyes… dive into the blinding light..” intones the disembodied voice as the shape of Lina’s fuzzy black breasts depart stage left and the camera zooms further into the clouds and the slowly fading rainbow…

I hear Kubrick’s people put a lot of time and effort into that hyper-space sequence from the end of ‘2001’. Franco just grabbed his camera one day and looked out of the hotel window. I think I’m give them about a draw in the psychedelic stakes. 5/5

Sight-seeing:

I’m not sure where ‘Doriana Gray’ was shot, but the setting has a tropical sort of look to it that adds weight to my theory that it was filmed back to back with ‘Barbed Wire Dolls’ in Central America, or possibly the Caribbean. The scenes set inside Doriana’s chateau though also recall the kind of Moorish splendour Franco often captured so well in Spanish and Portuguese locales – especially the echoing marble entrance hall, wrought iron railings etc. – but I guess it’s equally possible that such architecture might have been replicated in some grand, colonial outpost across the Atlantic or whatever. So the jury’s out, but it’s all pretty nice to look at anyway. 3/5

Conclusion:

If you’ll allow me a bit of a generalisation, most of the international film industry’s attempts to sell ‘sophisticated’ erotic films to a wider audience during the 1970s were a total bore, producing movies that were tacky, thoughtless and decidedly un-erotic, irrespective of the veneer of ‘class’ that was crow-barred into them. What a difference then to witness Jess Franco at the top of his game here, working pretty much single-handedly with extremely limited means and singularly grimy technique, but managing to craft a sex film that is visually stunning, emotionally devastating, thematically coherent, and that could probably give a corpse a hard-on. That it probably never got an airing outside of the kind of unimaginable flea-pit porno houses that presumably ran these Deitrich hardcore flicks, whilst down the road semi-respectable citizens could have been flocking to see some worn out Emmanuelle/Story of O derivative, is something of a tragedy, if a wholly predictable one.

I mean, in many ways this is a pretty difficult film to watch, and probably something of a head-fuck for those unfamiliar with Franco’s general mode of operation; but for any existing fans out there who’ve yet to see this one, be assured that it’s just about the most uncompromising, undiluted dose of Franco genius business you could hope to find from the mid ‘70s, and pretty much a definitive statement of where he was heading through the first half of that decade.


*Not that I believe Franco himself ever took his behaviour to extremes, I should make clear – as far as I’m aware, he has always been a very moderate, well behaved and agreeable sort of fellow. In fact in some ways, you might say that the true genius of his life lies in the way he found a legitimate excuse to spend about thirty years hanging out in tropical beauty spots, listening to hot jazz and staring at naked ladies all day, without ever even having to act like a jerk.

** Herr Baumgartner appears to have provided music for pretty much every Erwin Dietrich related Swiss/German sex film released between 1970 and 1990, leading me to initially suspect he might be a pseudonym used to cover for the use of recycled and/or library music. But an earlier career scoring German b-movies, and the IMDB-provided knowledge that he born in Switzerland in 1904 and died there in 1997, would tend to suggest he was in fact a real composer, so, uh, good on him I suppose. It’s not often you get to hear a porno soundtrack written by an 80 year old survivor of two world wars.

The Hellfire Club by Daniel P. Mannix (Four Square, 1961)

Ah, now we’re talking! An absolute classic of this hypothetical ‘edusploitation’ genre, and one I’ve been meaning to write about for a long time.

Although not as gothic horror-y as the cover art implies, Daniel P. Mannix nonetheless gives us the full run-down on what Sir Francis Dashwood and his rakish cohorts got up to, in meaty, no nonsense prose that the ale-drinking layman can really get stuck into of an evening.

Obviously proper history has tended to record more of the ‘political intrigue’ side of the Hellfire Club members’ activities than the ‘despoiling of innocent virgins’ side, but that doesn’t stop Mannix (who has little time for such academic niceties as acknowledging his sources) riding rough-shod over the facts, and editorialising mightily on the subject of what they all allegedly, probably, might have got up to in the (genuinely incredible) purpose-built subterranean caverns beneath Dashwood’s West Wycombe Estate in Buckinghamshire.

Which is not to say though that Mannix is any slouch when it comes to running down the details of the club’s not inconsiderable political influence; leaving all the Satanic hooey aside, he makes a good case for seeing them as a kind of 18th century equivalent of the Bilderburg Group or the Bullingdon Club, but thankfully with a more socially progressive agenda than either (virgin despoiling notwithstanding). In fact, if you follow Mannix’s line of thinking then the roots of the American War of Independence can eventually be traced back to a feud that resulted from a practical joke that saw John Wilkes unleashing a baboon dressed in a devil costume in the middle of one of the Club’s rites – a story that’s worth the entry price alone.

Regardless of what you make of all that though, what we can say for sure is that ‘The Hellfire Club’ is perhaps the most intensely concentrated compendium of decadent 18th century ribaldry and grand, rakish cynicism ever committed to print, and I heartily recommend tracking down a copy. (If you can’t find this edition, it was reissued – with lousy artwork, sadly – by a publisher called I Books in 2001.)

Long Hair of Death (Antonio Margheriti, 1964)

One of the more obscure items in Barbara Steele’s catalogue of Italian gothics, it’s easy to see why Antonio Margheriti’s supremely named ‘Long Hair of Death’ (god bless those literally translated titles) has ended up being somewhat overlooked in the history of such things. Appearing towards the end of the era in which these comparatively bloodless, black & white horror flicks were considered commercially viable (not that it stopped Steele ploughing through another four entries in the cycle before packing it in in ’66), ‘Long Hair..’ is a game of two halves really – uninspired through much of its run time, the film’s best sequences nonetheless contain some of the most powerful moments ever realised in Italian gothic horror.

Things certainly start off all guns blazin’, as we emerge from the opening credits into a vague, late-medieval mid-European setting (which at least makes a change from the vague, Victorian mid-European settings of most of these things), where condemned witch Adele Karnstein is being burned alive in the town square as her distraught and uncomprehending young daughter looks on. Meanwhile, Adele’s older daughter Helen (Steele) finds herself in the bed chamber of the local feudal lord, reluctantly submitting to his lecherous advances in a last-ditch attempt to delay her mother’s execution, as he assures her that his subordinates wouldn’t dare commence the burning without his presence, even as the flames take hold.




An extraordinarily bleak scenario for all concerned, with Margheriti's cross-cutting between the excruciating death of a mother and the rape of her daughter by a treacherous aristocrat leaving us in little doubt as to where the film's sympathies lie re: the old 'suspected witches vs church & state' debate, prefiguring the real-world hypocrisies dramatised by Michael Reeves’ ‘Witchfinder General’ and the raft of witchhunter-sploitation (if you will) movies that followed in the wake of Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’ by a number of years.

This in itself is pretty unusual – I could be wrong, but I think ‘Long Hair..’ is the only Italian horror movie I’ve ever seen in which the ‘witches’ are presented as sympathetic victims rather than satanic evildoers – and Margheriti’s decision to hit us with such gruelling human drama is brave indeed, dredging up some slightly more visceral emotions than we’re used to experiencing in gothic horror movies, with their rather more emblematic expressions of ‘mourning’ and ‘despair’.

(In fact, as an aside, it’s interesting to note how easily ‘Long Hair of Death’ could be read as a feminist horror film, if admittedly on a rather shallow level. Throughout the film, the evils of patriarchal society are wheeled out in the form of sexual exploitation, forced marriage, domestic confinement and the use of innocent women as scapegoats for male crime. And when the Karnstein sisters eventually return to wreak their vengeance (hope I’m not giving too much away here), the implied collaboration of the castle’s taciturn matron/housekeeper character in their plans points not just to a personal or familial revenge, but to an organised cabal of women striking back against their oppressors. Not exactly PHD level stuff I’ll grant you, but interesting food for thought in the midst of the ultra-masculine Italian film industry, no?)



Anyway, getting back on track, the production design in this opening sequence is pretty stunning too. Bypassing the traditional ‘tied to the stake’ burning, the execution sees Adele confined within a kind of makeshift maze of burning hay bales, forcing her to flee in vain from the flames begging for mercy, and eventually to voluntarily climb the crucifix which acts as a central pillar, from whence the crowd can clearly witness her gruesome demise. Imaginative touches like this, along with the solemn hooded monks, iron-masked soldiers etc, lend the scene a disturbing sense of brutal medievalism, culminating with a beautifully tragic shot of Steele cradling a handful of ashes from the burnt out pyre, as the blackened crucifix looms above her, and the dead woman’s voiceover pledges supernatural vengeance. Carlo Rustehelli’s stately, genuinely haunting score undoubtedly helps add poignancy here too - he had scored Bava’s ‘Whip And The Body’ the previous year, and his work here is similarly subtle and effective, featuring only occasional theremin abuse.



Sadly, the very next scene sees the lustful lord ambushing Barbara in a remote stretch of countryside and unceremoniously hurling her off a bridge into a watery grave, after which the film pretty much follows suit, largely devolving into a stagey, poorly written melodrama with witchery and vengeance entirely forgotten. All verve and character seems to vanish from the direction and cinematography, and the remaining cast stride around a handful of shoddy interior sets (the crypt is ok, but I’ve seen better) like they’re killing time in an am-dram Shakespeare production.

And needless to say, whilst it may cop a riff or two from Macbeth, the drama that proceeds to unfold is far from Shakespearean in stature;

Leaping forward a few years, we’re reintroduced to the younger daughter we saw weeping at the execution – now an indentured servant at the castle – who has come of age in the shape of Halina Zalewska. As you might well expect, Elizabeth (for that is her name) is a rather sullen and troubled young woman who doesn’t really appreciate the crude advances of the Lord’s boorish son Kurt (the distinctly Shatner-esque George Ardisson), who had smugly presided over her mother’s execution. You’d think he might have at least realised that wasn’t an ideal basis from which to build a relationship, but then, he is a complete arse, so who knows.

Things do perk up briefly for another superb gothic set-piece in which Barbara Steele returns from the grave. Flinging open the doors of the family chapel amid a howling thunderstorm as the pastor conducts a plague mass based around the Book of Revelation, her appearance inflicts a fatal heart attack upon the by now elderly and guilt-ridden Lord, who dies clutching a ring he stole from her mother’s corpse. I mean, beat that for yr gothic atmosphere! Amazing!



After that though it’s back to the grind, as Barbara announces herself to be not an avenging spirit of the past, but Mary, a traveller marooned at the castle by the storm and fearful of continuing across hostile countryside. She swiftly sets her sights on seducing Kurt and… well let’s just cut to the chase and say that the major problem with the next thirty or forty minutes of the film (aside from the fact that nothing particularly cool or interesting happens) is that the previously established motivations of both our female leads seems to have been completely forgotten, whilst Kurt, who never had much motivation in the first place beyond being evil, just moons around like a goon. Elizabeth, who hates Kurt and was forced into marriage with him against her will, now suddenly seems to be desperately in love with him, and Barbara, or Mary, or whoever, seems all too happy to act as the happy-go-lucky femme fatale coming between them, with no hint as to what the hell she’s actually trying to achieve re: the whole returning from the grave thing.

Doubtless this was all wrought in an attempt to create a sense of mystery, and it’s all sorted out nicely in the big reveal at the end, but prior to that it’s a case of Bad Writing 101, resulting merely in confusion and disengagement from the narrative, as we assume one of those lazy-ass Italian scriptwriters was sleeping on the job again and just shoved in a bunch of pages from a different movie in the hope no one would notice.



It’s hard to overstate how dreary and muddled this middle section of ‘Long Hair of Death’ is, but things do at least rally for a brilliantly macabre finale that seems to eerily prefigure ‘The Wicker Man’ (pretty forward-looking film this, all things considered). And despite the stodge, the accumulated power built up during the good scenes gives the film an exquisitely foreboding aura that’s hard to shake, a feeling that is only enhanced by the apocalyptic shadow of the black death hanging over proceedings, and the accompanying sense of cloying medieval darkness that takes hold whenever the camera ventures out into the plague-ridden streets (a touch presumably inspired by Corman’s ‘Masque of the Red Death’, released six months earlier). Another interesting note is that, between the burning crucifix in the opening, the scene in the chapel, the severe bearded priests and the sight of hooded monks dragging plague victims from their homes, the film is absolutely drenched in oppressive, negative images of Christianity that must have carried particularly blood-curdling resonance for audiences in Italy.

If Margheriti had managed to keep up the momentum of ‘Long Hair of Death’s best scenes throughout, it would have been an unqualified masterpiece. As it is, connoisseurs of the Italian gothic will definitely want to check it out for its standout sequences, oddly radical political undertones and overall atmosphere - and Barbara Steele fans will certainly appreciate her relatively large amount of screentime - but newcomers to the sub-genre would be well-advised to start elsewhere.


Presumably a public domain item, 'Long Hair of Death' can be viewed in its entirety on Youtube.