October Horrors # 4: Sexo Sangriento (Manuel Esteba, 1981)

As the foundations of Franco’s fascist regime in Spain gradually disintegrated through the late 1970s following the dictator’s death, the restrictions governing on-screen content in the previously censorious nation correspondingly collapsed, flooding Spanish screens with an unprecedented backlog of smut, eventually culminating the early ‘80s hey-day of the hastily codified Classificada ‘S’ certification for “adult” (but not quite porn) features.

Soon to be celebrated in a new documentary from Severin Films, the possibilities for low budget filmmaking opened up by this era not only saw ex-pat directors like Jess Franco and José Larraz returning home to produce some of their most distinctive work, but also encouraged a brief outburst of one-off sex-horror films, including the likes of Mas Alla Del Terror, the more widely seen Satan’s Blood, and - delving further into the depths of obscurity - films like ‘Sexo Sangriento’ (I don’t need to translate that for you, do I?), which at the time of writing remains available only as VHS-sourced bootleg.

Interestingly, ‘Sexo Sangriento’ explicitly acknowledges this political context, at least to some extent. Set in 1975, it begins with its characters listening to (and pointedly ignoring) a radio announcement reporting the Generalissimo’s death, as they motor on toward the snow-capped mountains of (we assume) a sparsely populated rural area somewhere on the country’s Northern border.

Despite this curious touch of historical verisimilitude though, real world concerns are soon forgotten (at least for a while), and this is in fact one of the few early ‘80s Spanish horrors which immediately harkens back to the genre’s more escapist golden age a decade beforehand, presenting us with a trope unseen since the glory days of Paul Naschy - namely, that of a group of beautiful young ladies who share a passionate interest in parapsychology and medieval witchcraft, getting way out there on a field trip to a remote, mountainous locale!

Helpfully for the film’s exploitation quotient, two of the girls also share a passion for intense lesbian lovemaking, whilst the third prefers to spend her nights hanging out in abandoned castles with a tape recorder, capturing what she calls ‘psychophonies’.

By which point, long-term readers will appreciate, I was pretty much already sold on whatever happens next.

Before long of course, the girls’ car breaks down (“the distributor is useless,” exclaims the driver, in what I’m going to assume is a movie industry in-joke), and right on cue, a sinister older lady (Mirta Miller, essaying the ‘sadistic/domineering mature woman’ role less than a decade after she was doing her ‘glamorous female lead’ bit in Naschy vehicles like ‘Count Dracula’s Great Love’ and ‘Vengeance of the Zombies’) emerges from the woods and invites them to stay the night at her place.

After a hot night in the sheets, some nude posing for Mirta’s suitably creepy, blood-drenched paintings (she is a reclusive macabre artist, it transpires) and a few strolls around the local ruins, strangely nobody seems terribly concerned about getting the car fixed anymore.

A more threatening note is struck by the presence of Mirta’s lumbering, mute housekeeper, whom she cheerfully declares is “gradually turning into a beast”, but you know, I suppose you’ve got to take the rough with the smooth in this kind of scenario, right?

Truth be told, there’s not much of a story to this one, and things are pretty slow-moving, but with frequent elegiac softcore interludes, plus an equal amount of time spent exploring some of those truly incredible, evocative, derelict locations so unique to Spanish horror, who’s complaining?

During the final act however, things take a considerably darker turn, as the expected supernatural shenanigans are entirely bypassed in favour of gory crotch violence, revelations of historical child murder and some pointed commentary on the trauma suffered by Northern rural communities during the years of fascist oppression. Hmm, didn’t see that coming.

In its currently extant version, this film’s photography has an unappealing Shot On Video kind of look to it, but it’s easy to imagine that a more filmic texture (plus widescreen framing?) might be salvageable, if someone were able to get hold of the original elements. (I’m looking at you Severin - fingers crossed.)

A more intractable problem however is presented by the soundtrack which primarily consists of poorly chosen and poorly synchronised needle-drops on cheesy rip-offs of well known pieces (Goblin’s ‘Zombie’ theme, ‘Star Wars’, ‘Air on a G String’ etc); it’s all very distracting, and far too high in the mix.

Despite these drawbacks though, ‘Sexo Sangriento’ is as sexy and bloody as its title promises, and delivers a respectable dose of palpable gothic atmosphere into the bargain; dedicated Euro-horror devotees should find it well worth tracking down. 

 

Nippon Horrors: The Lady Vampire (Nobuo Nakagawa, 1959)

Whilst we’ve already seen some pretty curious mash-ups of Eastern and Western horror tropes in this ‘Nippon horrors’ review thread, you’d be hard-pressed I think to find a more determinedly oddball example of the phenomenon than ‘Onna Kyûketsuki’ (‘The Lady Vampire’), another low budget quickie produced for Shintoho studios by J-horror pioneer Nobuo Nakagawa.

Whilst Nakagawa often used techniques and special effects inspired by Western horror in his films (which included Ghost Cat Mansion, ‘The Ghost of Yotsuya’ (1960) and the epic ‘Jigoku’ (‘Hell’, 1960)), the actual subject matter of his work tended to remain firmly grounded in traditional Japanese culture… which perhaps goes some way toward explaining how he got himself into such a muddle with ‘Lady Vampire’, a loopy little number that, to my delight, completely refuses to adhere to the rules of any particular horror sub-genre, or indeed any kind of narrative logic whatsoever.

From the eerie, low key atmosphere of the film’s opening reel, one might speculate that Nakagawa had Val Lewton’s 1940s RKO productions in mind, as we meet Tamio-san (Takashi Wada), a young reporter who works in one of those great movie newspaper offices where a bunch of hip cats hang around with their feet on the desks waiting for someone to phone in with a story. (“What’s that, a murder? I’ll be right there..”, etc.)

Finishing work late one evening, Tamio is driving to the family home of his fiancée Itsuko Matsumura (Junko Ikeuchi), to attend her birthday party. Temporarily distracted, Tamio accidentally runs into the shambling figure of a disheveled, long-haired woman. Stopping to help her, he finds that the woman has vanished, but, after shrugging off the incident and continuing to his destination, he suddenly sees her again, creeping around the garden of his fiancée’s home. Quite an unnerving occurrence one might imagine, but he doesn’t let it worry him too much, because hey – birthday cake!

Itsuko’s father and the family retainer however seem very worried indeed by these events, and, leaving the young folks to celebrate downstairs, they advance to the attic of the grandly appointed Western-style mansion (there’s a suit of armour and everything), where they find that the mysterious female glimpsed in the garden has broken in through a window and lies unconscious on a bed. Furthermore, the father immediately recognizes her – it is his wife (Itsuko’s mother), who hasn’t been seen since she mysteriously disappeared twenty years earlier, during a visit to the Southern island of Kyushu. Not only that, but get this - she looks exactly the same as she did the day she disappeared, having apparently not aged at all in the interim!

Unlikely explanations involving rare medical conditions and “bodily changes resulting from shock” are soon being thrown around, but, as the woman (played by Yôko Mihara) recuperates under the supervision of the family doctor, the plot soon thickens further. (1)

Attempting to escape the uncomfortable atmosphere at home, Tamio and Itsuko visit the “Ueno International Art Expo”, where they discover that the winner of the festival’s jury prize (which, in the grand tradition of paintings in horror films, looks like it would struggle to get a passing grade in a night school life-drawing class) features an exact likeness of Itsuko’s mother, painted as a reclining nude. Immediately inquiring as to the authorship of the painting, the couple learn that it was submitted to the expo by an individual named “Shiro Sofue” whom no one has been able to contact or track down.

By the time we’ve returned to the gallery by night to witness the painting in question being stolen by a dwarf with a distinctive two-tone hair-do (I wish I could credit this actor, he’s great) and his ‘master’, a tall, suave gentleman in a trilby, mirror shades and white driving gloves (Shigeru Amachi), and by the time we have subsequently seen the stolen painting delivered to the Matsumara residence care of (who else?) “Shiro Sofue”, suffice to say, the plot has assumed the consistency of a particularly lumpy gravy. (2)

By this point, ‘Lady Vampire’s combination of intriguing mystery plotting, flamboyantly grotesque evil-doers and an elegant, highly Westernised urban Japanese setting all seems to recall the distinctive atmosphere of Edogawa Rampo’s ero-guro stories, and that atmosphere is indeed captured quite well.

Despite the unavoidable predominance of flat, standing-around-talking type footage, Nakagawa nonetheless manages to employ some of the same clever focus effects and eerie sweeps through empty rooms that stood out in the opening segment of ‘Ghost Cat Mansion’, whilst Hisashi Iuchi’s heavy-handed but nonetheless rather likeable score goes big on the old singing saw / staccato strings / wordless female ululations combo.

Much like the earlier Lewton comparison however, the parallels with Rampo’s work are also ditched pretty quickly, as ‘Lady Vampire’ swiftly rambles on toward dafter and more unhinged realms than Rampo’s eminently logical approach to macabre storytelling would have countenanced.

As the more astute reader will no doubt already have guessed, that chap with the pet dwarf is Shiro Sofue, and furthermore, he is also a vampire. When we next see him, he is in his hotel room, freaking out with his head in his hands as shafts of light creep through gaps in the curtains. Acceptable vampire behavior you might think, but hang on a minute – the sky is dark. It’s clearly supposed to be night time.

“The moon, the dreadful moonlight..”, Shiro groans, before a maid enters the room and inadvisably throws open the curtains, at which point he undergoes a transformation into a sweaty, befanged beast with Nosferatu claws, and attacks her like a ravenous animal, leaving her bloodied body on a couch in the hotel lobby.

Yes, folks – what we have here is a vampire who behaves like a werewolf! Though a bit of a mind-blower for those of us who grew up in the West, with the “rules” governing the classic monsters set in stone, it’s worth remembering that things were probably a bit different in Japan in 1959. It’s all too easy to imagine Nakagawa and his collaborators sitting around, hazily trying to recall half-forgotten screenings of the Universal horror cycle; “ok, anyone remember how those Dracula guys work again?”, “Yeah, they’re the ones with the full moon, right?”, etc. I can only speak for myself, but as far as examples of cultural dissonance go, I found this monster’s apparent identity crisis absolutely delightful.

And, if our heads weren’t already reeling after that, the next thing ‘Lady Vampire’ hits us with is an unexpected history lesson. This is prompted by Mr Matsumura (Akira Nakamura), who begins lamenting “..the curse of those with Amakusa blood” – that being what apparently runs in his wife’s veins – and proceeds to ask Tamio and Itsuko how much they recall of the story of Shiro Amakusa.

Shiro Amakusa, it turns out, was the leader of the Shimbara Rebellion, which took place in Southern Japan in 1638 by the Western calendar. A significant uprising against feudal rule, this rebellion was spearheaded by an alliance of Catholic Christian converts who, under Amakusa’s command, took up arms against the Tokugawa Shogunate, and were soon violently massacred for their trouble.(3)

Amakusa himself was executed along with no less than 40,000 of his followers after the Shogun’s forces stormed their last remaining stronghold at Hara Castle near Nagasaki, and his head is said to have been displayed on a pike outside the castle gates. Subsequently, a legend has sprung up regarding Amakusa’s last words, which are reputed to have comprised a promise that he would return from the grave and seek vengeance one hundred years hence. As a result, Amakusa is often portrayed in Japanese culture as something of a supernatural or demonic figure– a “restless spirit” or wondering ghost of some kind.

Interestingly, this is not the first time we have seen the Shimbara Rebellion referenced in the context of a Japanese vampire movie. It was also mentioned in both Michio Yamamoto’s Lake of Dracula (1971) and that film’s follow-up, The Bloodthirsty Roses (aka ‘Evil of Dracula’, 1974), with the latter going so far as to include an elaborate historical flashback concerning the fate of a European missionary who inadvertently introduced vampirism to Japan after he escaped into the wilderness following the rebellion.

Whether or not there is any actual folkloric basis for this connection between vampirism and the spread and subsequent persecution of Christianity in Southern Japan in the 17th century, I’m unsure, but to be honest, I kind of doubt it. Basically, the thin thread of logic shared by all of these films seems to be that the vampire is an inherently Christian monster, and as such he must naturally have landed on Japanese shores alongside the European missionaries who arrived to propagate that religion.

Shiro Amakusa’s reputation as a ‘cursed’ figure certainly adds a bit of local colour to this assumption, providing a flimsy basis for an interesting, peculiarly Japanese twist on the vampire mythos, in which vampirism is understood less as a force that exists in *opposition* to Christian morality, and more as a kind of parasitic virus that inevitably accompanies it, reflecting to some extent the underlying suspicion of Christianity that persists in Japan to this day.

In ‘The Lady Vampire’ therefore, it is implied that Shiro Amakusa, in addition to being an evangelical Christian convert, was himself also a vampire (best not think too hard on the practicalities of that one), and that he has passed this curse down through his bloodline to his daughter, Princess Katsu. In a flashback outlining Shiro Sofue’s back-story (imaginatively portrayed via the use of a black-curtained soundstage, a few period props and some scratchy stock footage from an old samurai movie), we discover that he was originally the lover and loyal servant of the Princess (who, needless to say, is also played by Yôko Mihara). As the walls of the Princess’s castle crumble under the bombardment of the Shogunate forces, we see the two lovers embrace upon a Christian altar, as the Princess grants Shiro the gift of vampiric eternal life before being buried beneath the falling rubble.

That Shiro Sofue subsequently spends the next three hundred years lurking in a cave seeking out and imprisoning women who look exactly like his deceased love is somewhat of a no-brainer given that we’re dealing here with a low-budget horror movie rather than a historical epic, and, as Itsuko’s mother turns out to be both an exact doppelganger of the dead Princess and a direct Amakusa descendent to boot, well – that’s the rough outline of yr plot right there, pretty much.

All this is made clear to us – in a manner of speaking - when the mother, Miwako, finally wakes up, and recounts (via flashback) what she’s been up to for the past twenty years.

Wondering happily through a breathtakingly picturesque Kyushu locale having temporarily taken leave of her husband during that holiday all those years ago, Miwako encounters Shiro Sofue, who, elegantly attired as ever, is busy at his easel, working on a landscape.

After some suitably pungent banter (“I’ve been waiting for you for centuries..”, etc), he plies her with a knockout drop scented rose. When she awakens, she finds herself in the vampire’s lair, where Shiro stands over her, now sporting a full opera cape and shades ensemble, wielding a cobweb-coated candelabra with which he subsequently begins beating her chest (using the non-candle end, I hasten to add).

For the purposes of this lengthy flashback sequence, the vampire’s ‘cave’ is created on a blacked out soundstage, creating the impression of a kind of horizonless dreamland in which people and objects emerge from a featureless void – an inspired visual idea that, as well as presumably playing well from a budgetary point of view, helps to convey the dazed perception of the recently drugged Miwako very well, as well as allowing us to enjoy a veritable feast of the kind of tripped out, proto-psychedelic visuals that seem to have been an essential ingredient of Japanese horror filmmaking in the ‘50s and ‘60s.




As Miwako looks around her, a variety of bizarre, capering creatures appear one by one before her eyes, introducing us to the strange bunch who comprise the vampire’s inexplicable retinue of sidekicks. After the dwarf (with whom we’re already familiar), we meet the scary bakeneko lady from ‘Ghost Cat Mansion’ (presumably the Kyushu-set black & white sequences in that film must have been shot simultaneously with this one?), and, most intriguingly, a bald, loincloth-clad heavy whose look seems pitched somewhere between a caveman, a wrestler and a Shaolin monk. (Answers on a postcard please if you have any idea who or what the hell he’s supposed to be.)

After these weirdoes have ceased parading around (and after we’ve enjoyed Shiro’s own flashback-within-a-flashback origin story, as described earlier in this review) the vampire commences work on the portrait of Miwako seen earlier in the film. Haranguing her for failing to smile for his painting, he warns her of the fate she could meet if she fails to co-operate with his artistic aspirations, instigating an elaborate super-imposition shot in which we see multiple, underwear-clad Yôko Miharas emerging from a gilt-edged mirror, frozen like waxy-skinned zombies…. this marking the point, familiar to all devotees of ‘70s Euro-horror, at which we stop even bothering to try following the logic of what’s transpiring on screen, and just go with it.

Happily, the remainder of ‘Lady Vampire’ co-operates with this feeling, comprising as it does a splendid excursion into the realms of pulpy delirium that rarely lets up for long.

In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Shiro, his bedtime delayed by the police investigation into the murder in his hotel room, finds himself trapped in a shady Ginza bar, where, as shards of moonlight creep in through a broken window, he enters monster-mode and goes berserk, launching into a lycanthropic rampage that would do Paul Naschy proud.

Being an elegant vampire of course, Shiro only vents his animalistic hunger upon the necks of pretty ladies, and on this occasion he leaves no less than six of them thrown to the ground with blood gushing from their jugulars before the cops arrive and he flees into the night. And before this has even started, I should point out, his dwarf sidekick has already done a pretty good job of wrecking the place, dancing across the bar counter hurling full whisky bottles at the customers heads. The whole thing is just absolute pandemonium, one of the wildest sequences of old fashion b-movie carnage I’ve seen in recent memory.

And to think, on the other side of the world at this point, censorious types were still getting hot and bothered at the thought of Christopher Lee breathing down some young lovely’s neckline…




For the film’s conclusion, the now fully conscious Miwako is recaptured by Shiro, who promptly spirits her away to his lair in Kyushu, with Tamio, Itsuko and assorted police and newspapermen in hot pursuit, with the latter keen to see the perpetrator of the Ginza massacre run to ground.

Led by a fugitive thief who claims to have been assailed by monsters whilst hiding out in a mountain cave, this gang – who comprise the equivalent of the more traditional pitchfork-wielding mob, more or less - converge upon the vampire’s cave, at which point Nakagawa’s film abandons all pretense of seriousness and proceeds to go absolutely bananas, descending (or ascending, depending on your POV) into a Saturday matinee monster rally that recalls the full strength pulp of some of the livelier horror films being made in Mexico at around this time.

Separated amid the dry ice-swathed mountains on their way to the cave, our heroes are beset by attacks from the caveman / monk guy (who shoots at them with a primitive musket) and Shiro himself (who inevitably kidnaps Itsuko).

Eventually arriving at the ‘cave’ set- which we now see in daylight as a series of crumbly, slightly expressionistic hall and corridor sets that look very much like they might have been repurposed from another production – Tamio encounters flappy rubber bats, a moldering skeleton and (of course) a smoking acid pit, before bravely going man to man with Shiro in a life or death fencing foil / candelabra duel.

Meanwhile, everybody else runs around being pursued by the vampire’s ‘monsters’ for what seems like ages, until the slightly Scooby Doo-esque shenanigans eventually draw to a close when the thief manages to dig up with treasure he left in the cave, somehow triggering an avalanche that conveniently sorts everything out, in much the way these things tend to in the closing reel of horror films.

And, in conclusion, well… there is no conclusion. I can honestly think of nothing more to say about ‘The Lady Vampire’, now that I’ve exhaustively described what happens in it. Whilst the film’s nutty ambitions are necessarily confined by the low key, low budget nature of its production, it is nonetheless a bizarrely inventive melting pot of mismatched monster movie tropes that denies all attempts at rational analysis, and I’m confident that any open-minded fans of wild/weird global horror cinema will enjoy it a great deal.

We will close with a few words from Mr Matsumura, inadvertently delivering not only a concise critique of this review, but arguably of my writing style on this blog in general. Good night all, and careful with that dreadful moonlight.

-------------------------

(1) Though she never really took on any leading roles to my knowledge, Yôko Mihara enjoyed a long and prolific career that should render her a familiar face to any fan of the wilder realms of Japanese cult film. Apparently specialising in pulpy horror roles in the last few years of Shintoho, she also appeared in such choice titles as ‘Girl Diver of Spook Mansion’ and ‘Bloody Sword of the 99th Virgin’ (both 1959, and both now residing on my ‘THAT I GOTTA SEE’ list), before moving to Toei, where roles in several of Hideo Gosha’s revered outlaw samurai films and assorted ninkyo/yakuza titles eventually led to her becoming a regular in the studio’s early ‘70s sexploitation and pinky violence output, appearing in such classics of the genre as ‘Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion’ (1972), Sex & Fury (1973), Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (1974) and ‘School of the Holy Beast’ (1974), not to mention ‘The Lustful Shogun and His 21 Concubines’ (1972), and, my personal favourite title-wise, ‘The Erotomaniac Daimyo’ (1972) – most of the above directed of course by the one and only Norifumi Suzuki.

(2)Top-billed in this movie, and indeed doing a great turn as a pale, aesthete vampire, you may recall Shigeru Amachi for his similarly fine performance as Hirate, the doomed samurai in the first Zatoichi film. Interestingly, he subsequently appeared in a number of other films alongside Yôko Mihara, including Gosha’s ‘Sword of Doom’ (1965), Kinji Fukasaku’s ‘Blackmail is My Life’ (1968), and, somewhat less prestigiously, Norifumi Suzuki’s Girl Boss Blues: Queen Bee’s Counter-Attack (1971). He later played Edogawa Rampo’s master detective Kogorô Akechi in a 1979 TV movie (a role to which I can imagine he was uniquely suited), and subsequently appeared in Paul Naschy’s ‘The Beast With The Magic Sword’ (1983), thus allowing me to continue my tradition of finding an excuse to mention it at least once in every review of a Japanese film I complete for this blog.

(3) Forcibly curbing the foothold that Christianity had established in Southern Japan up to that point and hastening the Tokugawa decision to isolate Japan from the rest of the world (a state of affairs that famously persisted until the arrival of Commodore Perry’s ‘black ships’ in 1854), the Shimabara Rebellion proved a pivotal event in the history of Japan, with its aftermath playing an important role in shaping the country’s culture and society as we know it today. To learn more about Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate, why not visit your local library?

The Canvas Dagger by Helen Reilly (Macfadden, 1970)

Yikes.

“I say, that looks like the body of Grant Melville, the noted painter..”

 

Those drawn in by the gruesome cover may be disappointed to learn that ‘The Canvas Dagger' was originally published 1956 (presumably with rather more restrained artwork), and gives every indication of being a rather tame art-themed whodunit, rather than a rampage of psychotic, knife-wielding nihilism.

#21Driller Killer (Abel Ferrara, 1979)

Ha, wow. Awesome. Whatever happened after that title card I probably would’ve loved it, but what does happen is more strange and exhilerating than anyone probably could’ve expected - a definitive piece of punk rock film-making to rate up there with “Repo Man”, “Liquid Sky” or “Night of the Living Dead”. “Driller Killer” is the only serial killer movie on this list, and it is difficult to put into words why it appeals to me so much. By rights, this should be a disgustingly indulgent ego trip on the part of Abel Ferrara, and in many ways it is. But like all of his better subsequent films, “Driller Killer”s ostensibly depressing, obnoxious, maddening surface somehow opens up to reveal a film that is utterly inspired, magically transformed by that oblique, furious energy that Ferrara-on-form always brings to proceedings.

Oh, but what an incredibly STRANGE film this is, moreso than the relatively cut n’ dried likes of “Bad Lieutenant” or “Ms 45”. I always enjoy it, but I can never quite get an angle on it. The standard line here is to point out that “Driller Killer” is not really a horror movie as such, but a personal, quasi-documentary headfuck of a film about life on the fringes of the art world in New York in the late ‘70s, with all the slasher shit thrown in as a tongue-in-cheek bonus to help secure financing and to get the movie some notoriety/distribution.

But, necessary though that observation may be for any newbies renting this one expecting “The Toolbox Murders” or whatever, the logic of it never *quite* sits comfortably with me. As jarring and ridiculous as all the driller killin’ may initially seem, crowbarred into the mumblin’, slice-of-life un-drama of the film’s wider post-Warhol, post-CBGBs era whole, Ferrara definitely ain’t making no fucking cissy art film here – the whole thing is slathered in vicious, cheap imagery, fast edits, rock n’ roll and total sleaze, all parachuted in straight from the grindhouse. Which is great! Thematic/emotional commitment, beautiful, harrowing street-life footage AND manic trash craziness – that’s a combination I can live with. After a few viewings (I know, I know), I started to treat “Driller Killer” as a comedy, and that is the approach to the material I would definitely recommend for optimum enjoyment. You may have this pre-established idea that “Driller Killer” is some grim exploration of urban alienation and psychosis, but seriously: put it on, keep thinking “THIS IS A COMEDY”, and you’ll have a pretty good time.

Ferrara’s performance as Reno is so over-the-top with all his alienated New Yorker mannerisms, it’s just flat out hilarious, and I love the way that rather than suffering from any serious psychological dysfunctions that more traditionally tend to lead characters in movies to take up mass homicide, he’s basically just really grumpy. I mean, ok, so his relationship with his old lady’s not going too smoothly, his neighbours are making a godawful racket, his flatmate bugs him, and he doesn’t wanna pay the phonebill. That doesn’t exactly make for a perfect weekend, I’ll admit. But I daresay dear reader that you and I have probably dealt with similar issues at various points in our lives, and have probably managed to resolve them without even considering the possibility of running around the streets ventilating hobos with a powerdrill. Not our Reno though. No, he JUST CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE, MAN! He’s GONNA SNAP! I mean, what other choice does he have..? It’s like tuning into an episode of ‘Hancock’s Half Hour’ where Tony flips out and starts beating everyone to death with a hammer.

And, squalid and sickening as they may be, the killings themselves just crack me up – less real crimes, they’re more joyous acts of self-righteous catharsis – Billy Liar mind-machinegunnings on a bloody, mass scale. So much more random and beserk than the carefully mapped out, heavily fetishised murders we’ve become accustomed to in a million Giallo and slasher flicks, it’s hilarious to see Reno just running around the streets in an uncaring rage, plunging his drill in the general direction of whoever gets in his way before charging off to cause more mayhem. And I love the fact that at no point does he even *consider* that the police might be looking for him – the film presents New York as a city in the grip of such terminal despair that you can wander around murdering people for the hell of it in the middle of the street and no one will even bother clearing up the mess, let alone try to stop you.

So many great moment of bizarre, deadpan humour in this film – I love the scene where he eats all the pizza (no explanation needed), or the ‘foreshadowing’ bit where Reno helps Pamela drill a hole in the door, and they’re all like “so you wanna hole to go here, or here, or over dere?”, “uh, I think I wan one dere, NO – over there” and so on, without either of them raising the issue of why she’s just got up in the morning and suddenly wants to drill a hole in the front door.

“Tony Coca-Cola” makes for a wonderful big-mouthed rock star asshole, who oddly doesn’t get drilled despite being the character in the movie you immediately wanna strangle, and his band’s rehearsal / concert sequences and the power struggles in the strange cult of groupies that follow them are fucking beautiful punkoid footage, at times becoming so involving it almost takes over the whole movie.

Oh yeah, and what IS that whole sequence at the start where Reno goes to the church and encounters that strange old man all about? It has nothing to do with the rest of the movie whatsoever! But it’s a stunning scene, a great opening, a really unusual introduction to our central character, so I don’t much care. I’m guessing Ferrara just thought likewise after whatever reason he’d had for filming it fell out of the script, so he left it in. Good attitude!

Above all though, I love the caption card that closes the film –


You still wanna tell me it’s not a comedy?

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.