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. 

 

Horror Express 2020 #6: Mas Alla Del Terror / ‘Further Than Fear’ (Tomás Aznar, 1980)

The more I learn about global genre cinema, the more I appreciate those increasingly rare opportunities to jump into something with absolutely no idea what to expect. As such, this remarkably obscure Spanish horror - available solely as an extremely smeary VHS-rip, insofar as I’m aware - proved a rare treat.

Going in, all I knew about Tomás Aznar’s film was:

1. It features some pretty great electro-rock music, which was once featured on an episode of El Diabolik’s Psychotronic Soundtracks.
2. It was released in Spain under the auspices of ‘Cinevisión’, the same company responsible for Escalofrío / Satan’s Blood a few years earlier.
3. It was advertised using the fairly awe-inspiring, Frazetta-plagiarising poster you see reproduced above. (1)

All in all then, the omens looked good.

Perhaps one of the things which has led to ‘Mas Alla Del Terror’ receiving so little attention from horror fans is the misleadingly mild pre-credits sequence, which sees a young woman (Lola, played by Raquel Ramírez) being picked up from a roadside café by an older man, with the couple’s earnest dialogue suggesting that they are engaged in some kind of long-term adulterous relationship.

Lola insists on taking her partner to some out of the way, rural idyll, where, in a matter of seconds, things go from second-rate Truffaut to full-on Ruggero Deodato, as she attempts to steal the man’s wallet, prompting him begin savagely beating her, before she in turn pulls a knife and remorselessly carves him up.

“Dirty fucker - this ain’t shit buddy,” she exclaims as she contemptuously pockets the measly few pesetas which comprised his roll, wiping her blade on his tie and leaving him bleeding out from multiple chest wounds as she sets out to hitchhike back to town. Yikes!

Post-credits, we re-join Lola in what seems to be her more natural habitat, rocking regulation leathers as she trades sneering, scatological insults with the other members of her equally amoral, drug-huffing misfit biker gang (“Fuck, you smell like camel shit - find yourself a good dentist”, she greets a dealer dishing out wraps of hash outside a nightclub).

From here, the movie kicks into gear as a kind of ‘Mad Foxes’-via-‘Last House..’ type psychotic youth-gone-wild gang movie, as these punk kids indulge in all kinds of gratuitous cruelty, exchanging dialogue that (if the fab-subs to be believed) consists largely of increasingly obscene sexual insults, which I won’t recount here lest they offend the sensibilities of the very internet itself.

After an attempt to rob a greasy spoon cafe (dig that low level of ambition) escalates into an impromptu killing spree, the gang - who now essentially comprise Lola plus leader Chema (Francisco Sánchez Grajera) and wingnut Nico (Emilio Siegrist) - briefly go on the road ‘Rabid Dogs’-style with a pair of hostages. So fucked up are our anti-social anti-heroes though, they can’t even keep this relatively straight-forward scenario on the road for more than five minutes of screen time, before internecine bickering leads to a roadside altercation soon leaves them lost in the depths of the countryside with a totalled car.

Spying lights as they trudge across the featureless nocturnal landscape, the gang come upon a well-appointed house, and, as you might well expect, get stuck straight into a dispiritingly gruelling home invasion scenario. After taking a tyre iron to the family dog (mercifully, VHS murk obscures this footage, but I REALLY hope the whines of canine distress on the soundtrack aren’t genuine), they proceed to remorselessly brutalise the elderly lady they find within, whilst her youthful grandson (we presume) hides terrified upstairs.

Mindlessly destructive brutes that they are, the gang have soon set the house alight, leaving the helpless residents to perish. But wait! As it turns out, the poor grandmother they've just left for dead was actually a high-ranking Satanic priestess of some kind, and she proceeds to curse them with her dying breaths, promising supernatural vengeance in the name of Astaroth, Beelzebub and the whole merry gang!

Shortly thereafter, the gang and their hostages once more find themselves shit-out-of-luck transport-wise, holed up in a remote, ruined church with eerie, skeleton-filled catacombs beneath it - by which point, we can probably get a handle on where things are heading next, I should think.

It’s a shame however that the pacing of this horror-themed second half of the film pretty much grinds to a halt in comparison to the frantic, action-packed stuff which has preceded it. Much aimless waiting and wandering fills up the remaining minutes of run-time, whilst I also found the idea of having the evil-doers’ victims return in spectral form to wreak their ironic vengeance - much in the manner of a Japanese kaidan - to be pretty old hat. I mean, couldn’t they have rustled up a few demons or zombies or something, instead of just going with the old EC Comics “b-but I saw you, you were dead - arg!” route?

Well, no matter - on the plus side, they certainly picked a great location for it - an arid, rustic set of ruins which just reek of poverty-stricken misery and menace. There's a lot of great Armando de Ossorio / ‘..Blind Dead’ type atmosphere to enjoy here, not least when the acrid, cobweb-shrouded skeletons in the catacombs are briefly unleashed to take care of the Stockholm Syndromed female hostage, whilst things are livened up considerably by intermittent outbursts of the aforementioned killer, Goblin-esque disco-rock (courtesy of one J.P. Decerf and the ever-reliable CAM library). (2)

Even beyond their penchant for senseless murder meanwhile, there’s something singularly warped and repulsive about the gang members here, as they fill their remaining hours with low level blasphemy and icky sexual perversity (at one point one of the guys aimlessly masturbates into the fire whilst shrieking an improvised litany in praise of “fornication”), sneering and drooling in the face of death like true no-hope punks.

As the remaining characters gradually meet their predestined demise, new elements are added to the medieval ‘triumph of death’ mural which takes pride of place on the church’s walls - a common ‘body count movie’ motif, but nicely done - heralding the eventually reappearance of the avenging witch, and a rather fine, high five-worthy ending which I won’t spoil for you here.

Whilst I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to hail it as a lost classic, ‘Mas Alla Del Terror’ is, as you may have gathered, wild as all hell - an off-the-map rampage of low rent sleaze, grime and amoral hell-raisin’ which gradually finds itself enveloped by a cloak of old school, Iberian gothic doom.

Production values are minimal, performances are perfunctory (aside from Ramirez, who is brilliant, and should clearly have wielded her flick knife in more movies) and Azner directs with no great amount of flair, but there is nonetheless a ton of fun to be had here for a certain, special audience. Indeed, I’m amazed that this film’s potential has remained largely untapped by all the late-era Euro-horror / video nasty fans out there.

It would certainly be lovely to see a restored version popping up at some point in the future, but for now, let’s just say that this one is well worth a trip down to the VHS/torrent catacombs if it sounds like your particular cup of rancid, spiked tea.

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(1) Apparently originating on the cover of ‘Vampirella’ # 11 in 1971, this iconic Frank Frazetta witch illustration seems to have had a big impact on horror movie poster artists - it was also recycled just a blatantly for the remarkably misleading advertising which accompanied Matt Cimber’s perennially underappreciated The Witch Who Came From The Sea in 1976.

(2)Once again, thanks are due to the aforementioned El Diabolik podcast for filling me in on the soundtrack info and name of the composer. Check out Episode 46 of their fine programme to hear some of the music from this wild out in the wild.

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.

October Horrors #13: Graveyard Disturbance (Lamberto Bava, 1988)

So it occurred to me that if there is one thing missing from Halloween movie run-down thus far, it’s *’80s*.

Scanning over potential viewing options for a way to rectify this, I hit upon ‘Graveyard Disturbance’. Yes, Graveyard Disturbance! It’s a great name for a thrash metal album, and hopefully a great name for a horror movie too. It’s helmed by Lamberto Bava shortly after he came off the ‘Demons’ movies, and, as per just about every Italian horror movie of note made after 1980, Dardano Sacchetti is on script duty. Perfect, barrel-scraping ’88 vintage. Party on!

Well, as I soon discovered, asking “what could possibly go wrong?” of a Lamberto Bava movie is always a foolhardy proposition, but, before Italio-horror’s prodigal son delivered the answer in spades, ‘Graveyard Disturbance’ did at least open in precisely the way I hoped it would.

As a second-rate Duran Duran style electro-pop number plays from a dashboard boombox, we see a series of bold images, all of which are soon revealed to be air-brushed onto the chassis of a van belonging to one of the movie’s gaggle of teenage characters. Amongst the things this dude has painstakingly reproduced on his wheels are: the poster to Dario Argento’s ‘Inferno’; the cover of Judas Priest’s ‘British Steel’ album; the famous barbarian-woman-riding-giant-bird poster from the ‘Heavy Metal’ movie; Madonna circa ‘True Blue’; some leering zombie/vampire heads; a photo-realistic representation of a rock band on stage; some big, Rolling Stones style lips on the bonnet, smokin’ a doobie. It is just about the greatest thing I’ve seen in my life.

Riding in this magnificent vehicle are a gaggle of hapless, instantly dislikeable teens, straight from slasher movie central casting. I suppose we must consider the possibility that they may have been slightly more endearing in the original Italian, but the English dub (my only option for viewing) is brutal.

Enraging me right from the outset, the characters irk the van driver/owner guy by variously referring to his beloved van not only as a “heap of junk”, but even more insultingly, as a “car” and, on one occasion, a “truck”. The fucking idiots. I know sloppy post-sync dubbing isn’t necessarily their fault, but I still can’t wait for them to die. Because that’s what happens is these films. Isn’t it? Lamberto, Dardano, can you clarify…?

Anyway, before we get ahead of ourselves - I’m not sure what part of the world these kids are supposed to be from, where they’re supposed to be going, or where they currently are – aside from a single reference to them being on “vacation”, we’re left in the dark. But what does it matter, once the Horror Movie Fun begins. Because, it will begin. Right guys…?

After they ill-advisedly steal some chocolate bars from a convenience store and swerve through a line of red & white tape to avoid a police check-point (what?), our young protagonists find themselves hopelessly lost in a remote, fog-shrouded woodland area of whatever-place-it-is-they’re-in, where, for no reason, they see driverless, Dracula-style coach.

Abandoning the van (nooo) after an unsuccessful attempt to cross a river, they are forced to continue on foot with their camping gear, and their annoyingness intensifies. One guy’s sole personality trait is that he is a would-be wilderness survival type, so he decides what to do (“follow the river, rivers lead to towns”), whilst the others mockingly call him “Rambo”. Another guy meanwhile plays jokes and does a Bela Lugosi voice. Van owner guy (his thing is, he owns the van) rounds out the male trio, whilst the fairer sex is represented by one girl who is “dumb”, and another who has no discernable personality traits, but she does wear glasses and looks grumpy, so there’s that.

The gang soon find themselves in a wonderfully atmospheric set of ancient ruins – a mixture of real locations and studio sets, it is lit with heavy phosphorescent blues and clouds of slightly lit smoke emerging from doorways, creating a look faintly reminiscent of that achieved by Lamberto’s dad Mario in his masterpiece ‘Kill Baby Kill’/’Operatione Paura’ in 1966.

Simon Boswell’s music – a period appropriate mixture of synth, gated drums and fretless bass, quite possibly composed for one of the ‘Demons’ films – comes to the fore here, and it swiftly becomes clear that what we’re actually looking at is the film-within-a-film that the patrons/victims watch in the cinema during ‘Demons’, remade and extended into a full length movie. Not such a bad idea really, and it certainly helps explain the prevailing tone of tongue-in-cheek slasher pastiche idiocy.

What happens next is that the bedraggled teens rather unexpectedly stumble upon a bar (well, a pub, taverna, what you want to call it) operating out of one of the mouldering dungeons, complete with a neon Miller Lite sign hanging outside in surreal fashion.

Initially, things don’t look so good for protagonists as they enter to find that the place hasn’t been refurbished (or cleaned) since the middle ages, whilst some scraggly-haired troglodytic types hack away at hunks of meat behind the bar and the only other patrons glare at them with glowing eyes. But, things improve as they engage in some banter with the one-eyed inn-keeper (who throws a rousing “Ar-HA-Ha-HAR” into his speech after, and frequently during, each sentence), swap gags with one of the scary customers and enjoy plates of sausages, hunks of bread and cold beer all round.

Clearly this place rules. As a veteran of numerous camping expeditions, I can scarcely express how happy I would be to stumble across such a hospitable joint in which to spend the evening, but, being a bunch of graceless idiots, our teens (aptly described by the inn-keep as “chicken-hearted sprattlings”) don’t quite see it that way, and keep bellyaching about how scared they are and how much they want to leave.

They begin to get a bit more interested however when they notice a big bell-jar stuffed full of cash, gold trinkets and priceless jewellery. The inn-keeper explains, in between garrulous guffawing, that the roots of this go all the way back to some guy who once attempted to steal the legendary thirty gold pieces from Judas Iscariot. Eternally cursed for his trouble, he was buried beneath these ruins, and thereafter the denizens of the tavern have for many centuries made a wager with passing travellers, asking them to add their worldly goods to the bell jar, whose entire contents will be their reward if they can spend but a single night in the catacombs. And of course, none have ever returned (AR, Ha-Ha-HAR, haar).

Now, as much as I appreciated the ambience of the tavern, I will nonetheless cop that handing all your money over to the proprietor and his friends and allowing them to lock you in the basement overnight doesn’t really sound like a very good idea. But, as we have already established, our gang of teens are card-carrying idiots, so naturally they like those odds, and are well up for the challenge.

For my part meanwhile, it was shortly after this that I began to feel that I had signed up for a similarly idiotic wager when I suggested to my wife that we might want to watch this movie on Friday night.

Up to this point, I’ll freely admit that I was quite enjoying ‘Graveyard Disturbance’; even the bad dubbing had generated enough sniggers to keep us going. But, this enjoyment rested largely upon the promise of some good ol’ Italio-horror business yet to come – a hope was to be cruelly dashed at every turn for the remainder of the movie.

Had I taken the time to seek out but one review of ‘Graveyard Disturbance’ before taking the decision to watch it, a few vital facts would undoubtedly have been made clear to me. Firstly, despite being widely issued on VHS etc as a stand-alone feature, the film was actually produced for Italian television (as part of the ‘Brivido Giallo’ series of TV movies that ran 1988-89).

Secondly, as befits its TV origins, ‘Graveyard Disturbance’ is NOT the violent / exploitative horror film promised by the name, poster and personnel involved. Instead, it is a PG rated, family friendly type affair, akin perhaps to Lamberto’s take on ‘The Goonies’. Which is to say, a take on ‘The Goonies’ in which all the characters are interchangeable, charmless assholes and all of the humour falls completely flat.

Imagine if you will, the kind of slasher movie set-up I’ve described in the first few paragraphs of my plot synopsis above. But, rather than being killed off one by one as tradition dictates, the dislikeable teens instead all live happily to the end of the picture, whilst we meanwhile spend the best part of an hour trapped with them as they troop back forth across a handful of claustrophobic sets, nattering incessantly in an ever more grating and ignorant fashion.

Yes folks, it’s a grim prospect. Without wishing to sound too much like a gore-fixated psychopath, I’m afraid this party is *over*.

What is most frustrating about the decision to turn ‘..Disturbance’ into.. this kind of movie.. is that, if they had gone all out for a full strength horror film instead, the potential would have been there to make a pretty good one.

Eccentric touches early on – the van, the inn-keeper – are great, and, as has been mentioned, the sets, lighting and production design in general are all very nice here too; pleasantly atmospheric and full of loving nods to the way Bava Senior and Uncle Dario used to do business. The special effects used to realise the film’s assorted ghouls and zombies meanwhile are actually really good, probably even a step up from the workmanship seen in the ‘Demons’ movies – which makes it all the more disappointing that they basically just pop up occasionally and wander about a bit, without presenting any kind of real threat.

Probably the most memorable and accomplished sequence in ‘Graveyard Disturbance’ in fact is a scene in which a family of ghouls – including a ‘mother’ figure in a Marie Antoinette dress with multiple eyes, and a “heavy metal” kid with a single massive front tooth and a Kiss t-shirt – pop out of their tombs and enjoy a grand meal of slugs, spiders, worms etc. As a standalone effects set-piece, it’s rather delightful, so again, it’s a shame it doesn’t play into anything that happens in the rest of the movie.

But, as is probably clear by this point in this review, the whole thing is a shame. A damn shame. All the ingredients for a minor classic of shamelessly trashy, late period Italian horror were lined up and ready to go. With whom then did this idea of trying to turn it into some kooky, teen-friendly caper originate? The result is a film that fails on all levels and most likely appealed to absolutely no one, so please, can we get someone to blame up here? Was it the producer’s fault, or the TV company? Lamberto? Dardano? Would you like to take the stand?

Meanwhile, I’m afraid my advice to anyone faced with the prospect of viewing ‘Graveyard Disturbance’ must be: watch the first forty minutes, then turn it off and spend the remainder of your evening drawing pictures of what you think should have happened in the rest of the movie. Then perhaps post them to Lamberto Bava. Trust me, it will prove a lot more fulfilling.