October Horrors # 5: The Sex Serum of Dr Blake [aka Voodoo Heartbeat] (Charles Nizet, 1973)

Las Vegas-based filmmaker Charles Nizet’s berserk drive-in oddity ‘Help Me.. I’m Possessed!’ was one of the unexpected highlights of my 2022 October horror marathon, so naturally I was curious to check out Nizet’s other foray into horror territory, previously considered a lost film, but now happily rescued from oblivion (albeit in an alternate softcore sexploitation cut, with burned in Dutch and French subtitles) by Vinegar Syndrome, as part of their Lost Picture Show box set.

The first thing to note here is that, compared to decidedly lo-fi production values showcased in ‘..Possessed’, this one actually seems a bit more ambitious in scope (relatively speaking). By which I mean, Nizet employs a fairly wide range of locations, with shots stolen around airports, military bases and highways, along with some actual, choreographed action scenes, camera set ups that occasionally extend beyond basic ‘point and shoot’ methodology, and so on.

Reassuringly though, the whole affair is also still lurid as a strip club basement and mad as a bag of snakes, with a wild, “absolutely anything could happen next” vibe which makes it feel like an entertainment for a strange and debased form of humanity, beamed in from another dimension.

All of this weirdness however is parsed out on this occasion with lengthy passages of almost transcendental boredom, as if the filmmakers were determined to make every goddamned frame they sent to the lab count.

So, a scene in which a man breaks into a locked briefcase and carefully examines its contents plays put pretty much in real time. A close up of a needle being injected into an arm holds for so long that I actually undertook a brief exchange of messages on my phone, looked back to the screen, and realised it still hadn’t cut. There are many, many phone calls and office meetings in which secondary characters calmly explain the plot to each other. A sixty second shot of a policeman descending a ladder, anyone? You get the idea.

In the context of a film like this though you understand, I am not necessarily criticising the inclusion of all this extraneous footage. On the contrary, it actually has a kind of hypnotic effect after a while, and, whether in a 1973 drive-in or a 2024 living room, it allows ample opportunity for toilet breaks, food and drink preparation and so on - which is helpful, especially within this kind of movie’s natural environment, sandwiched mid-way through a continuously rolling, multi-film marathon of some kind. Grotesque, inexplicable madness, presented in an admirably relaxed, ambient package.

Don’t dawdle too long though, or you’ll miss some of the many “highlights” (for which please interpret those quotation marks to denote a wry and sardonic tone of voice, leavened by a certain underlying leeriness).

These begin with a lengthy, exotica-tastic “African” tribal ritual, in which a gaggle of dancing girls strip out of their zebra-print bikinis, screw a guy and then cut his heart out (shades of Love Goddesses of Blood Island?), observed by a pith-helmeted explorer who sneaks in after the show to steal a vial of what (for some reason) he takes to be the fabled elixir of youth.

Then, at different points, we’re treated to a car chase AND a boat chase, both fairly elaborately staged.

Sleaze junkies meanwhile will want to note the presence of both a harrowing, roughie-esque vampire sex murder, and a later threesome with a few borderline hardcore shots, staged in a desert canyon, which culminates in the participants being shot to death from above and vampirised.

Perhaps best of all from my point of view though was the most awkward father/daughter dinner date in cinema history, which… well, you’ll just have to witness it first-hand, that’s all I’m saying.

Speaking of cinema history though, I would also like to take this opportunity nominate the titular Dr Blake (played by Ray Molina) as a contender for the single sleaziest and most misguided motherfucker ever to grace the screen.

As exhibit A, I present his hairstyle, combining sideburns which extend all the way to the corners of his mouth with a disgusting, tangled, oily kiss-curl which hangs down across his forehead, almost reaching his eyebrows. If I walked into a doctor’s office and he looked like this, I would leave immediately, no questions asked.

It is no surprise therefore to discover that Dr Blake has recently been in hot water for performing unlicensed abortions, and is now being prosecuted for manslaughter by the parents of one of his patients, who died following the procedure. (The doc insists it was nothing to do with him, but I don’t believe him for a second.)

During his drive home after another hard day of.. this sort of thing, Dr Blake happens upon a flaming, overturned wreck on the side of the highway. Rather than notifying the authorities or trying to help any survivors however, his first reaction is instead to steal a briefcase with a severed arm handcuffed to it(!) from inside the wreckage, after which he jumps back in his car and heads straight back to his ugly suburban tract home, where he casually sticks the arm in the icebox(!?), and gets to work on opening the case (see above).

Extracting a vial of unidentified, colourless fluid from the case, he immediately digs out a syringe and ties off, injecting the fluid straight into his veins… only to then remember that - oh no - he’s forgotten to pick his daughter up from the airport!

Gentlemen, I put it to you - in all facets of life, Do Not Do What Dr Blake Does, and your life will proceed in a more harmonious and worthwhile direction.

Charles Nizet, one of cinema’s great moralists - truly he hardly knew ye. 

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Bonus screengrab - the doctor takes a call in his office...

Belated Deathblog: Ted V. Mikels (1929 – 2016)

Last Friday night, my wife and I re-watched Ted V. Mikels’ ‘The Astro-Zombies’ (1968) in tribute to the great man, who passed away a few weeks ago. Back in 2010, I rated this my 20th favourite horror movie of all time, no less, and I’m happy to report that in 2016 it remains just as much of a jaw-dropping masterpiece of audaciously loopy un-cinema.

Though ‘Astro-Zombies’ was Ted’s first horror film, instigating the series of oddball exploitation features for which he was best known, it was most assuredly NOT his first film overall. Indeed, though I have not yet managed to watch them myself, I have read several sources which insist that the black & white thrillers Mikels directed in the early ‘60s (‘Strike Me Deadly’ (1963), ‘The Black Klansman’(1965)) are very impressive and professional pieces of work.

Taking this claim at face value, I can only assume that ‘The Astro-Zombies’ and the astonishing run of movies that followed it represent a kind of American equivalent of Jess Franco’s output in the early ‘70s – an example of a technically proficient filmmaker throwing away the rulebook and just letting it all hang out, doing whatever the hell he felt like from day to day and stapling together the results into a wild n’ wooly collage of garish, over-saturated comic book depravity that must have left drive-in double-bill patrons speechless and appalled, subsequently disappearing down a black hole until they were rediscovered by the SWV/bad-movie-fan crowd in the 90s – an audience who were presumably more able to process them than their forebears.

As far as Mikels’ other films are concerned, his surprisingly small output is… variable, to say the least. Though it has its fans, I didn’t really get much out of his H.G. Lewis-ish gore flick ‘The Corpse Grinders’ (1971) when I watched it a while back, but I do however have a massive soft spot for his next film, ‘Blood Orgy of the She Devils’ (1973) – a sprawling, near plotless mass of treacle-thick early ‘70s post-psychedelic occult freakout vibes, packed with more artlessly discordant electronic music, somnambulantly drawled faux-spiritual blather and near-stationary ritual happenings than the human mind can bear, guaranteed to enrage and repel about 98% of potential viewers, but pure manna from heaven to the likes of me.

I’ll also confess a fondness for the same year’s proto-Charlie’s Angels action/adventure flick ‘The Doll Squad’, and I even had fun with its threadbare pseudo-sequel ‘Mission: Killfast’ (1987). It seems that Mikels found a way to incorporate espionage, walkie-talkies, radio signals and disparate groups of peculiar people chasing each other around into just about every movie he made, so in a way the genre of these films seems a perfect fit for him, although sadly his lack of proficiency in pacing and staging an effective action film is evident throughout.

Such pedestrian drawbacks however are largely irrelevant to the rather different appeal of Mikels’ cinema; the aforementioned films (and indeed, all the films I have seen from Mikels’ shot-on-film era) have an eccentric charm, a beautiful, trash-saturated visual aesthetic and a gutsy dedication to the cause of entertainment that overcomes all of their miscellaneous technical failings. His movies pulse with energy, good humour, sincerity and a keen sense of fun, all laced with just enough flat-out madness to get us to the finish line smiling.

All of which seems, insofar as I can judge, to be a testament to the unique strength of personality possessed by Ted V. Mikels himself. I actually know surprisingly little about the man beyond what can be gleaned from his films, but perhaps by filling in the gaps between his early appearance as a shirtless bongo player in the incredible strip-tease club sequence in ‘The Astro-Zombies’ and the late period photograph of him you see above (waxed ‘tache, walrus tusk necklace, smile a mile wide), we can simply conclude that he was a force to be reckoned with.

An anonymous trivia entry on his IMDB page states that Mikels “started out as a magician, acrobat and fire eater before becoming a documentary film maker in the 1950s” (well I mean, of course he did), whilst pretty much every piece of writing I’ve ever read about him has repeated the fact that, at at least one point in his life, he lived in a castle in Las Vegas [CORRECTION: in California - see comments] with his own harem of female followers. I have never actually managed to ascertain the truth of this claim, or indeed to find much in the way of further details on the subject, but let’s just go with the “print the legend” option and regurgitate it again here for new readers to wonder over.

Looks like he went a bit ‘off-message’ to say the least after he made a Shot-On-Video comeback from the late ‘90s onwards, but hell, who didn’t? And, for better or worse, at least he kept churning ‘em out – practically tripling the length of his filmography - with his subject matter remaining admirably bizarre, even if only the very bravest of cult film explorers are liable to want to subject themselves to, say, 2015’s ‘Paranormal Extremes: Text-Messages from the Dead’, or 1997’s absolutely extraordinary sounding ‘Apartheid Slave-Women's Justice’ (check the reviews of the latter here).

Whatever you may think of the man and his films however, it is with great sadness that we must reflect that Ted V. Mikels was pretty much the ‘last man standing’ amongst his era’s roll-call of defiantly idiosyncratic, independant populist independent American filmmakers. Meyer, Lewis, Steckler, Wishman, Milligan, Wood, Adamson – all are gone, and now that Mikels has joined them, the line is severed for good, the unique world that all of these men (and women) created and occupied for so many years consigned to the past.

R.I.P. Ted, and once again - thanks for the Astro-Zombies.

Exploito All’Italiana: Zombi Holocaust (Marino Girolami, 1981)

(In the absence of any decent scans of an original Italian poster, let’s enjoy this splendid effort from Thailand.)

When it comes to the “rip off” aesthetic that increasingly dominated Italian genre cinema from the late ‘70s onwards, wherein cash-strapped producers ceased even trying to differentiate their product from the prior hits they were cashing in on, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more glorious example of the phenomenon’s ultimate, self-consuming end-point than ‘Zombi Holocaust’ – an infamously shoddy venture that forms something of a line in the sand for fans of Euro-horror/exploitation.

For many, this film represents the bottom of the barrel in terms of mindlessly derivative cine-sludge, whilst for others of a less discerning / more adventurous nature [delete as applicable], it instead forms the gateway to a whole new subterranean kingdom of trash-horror wonderment. Either way, it’s quite the thing to behold, and even the highest minded aficionados of this-sort-of-thing probably owe it to themselves to sit down and give it a try at some point – if only to test their individual tolerance for further trash-gore spelunking.

Often playing more like an extended cult cinema in-joke than a stand-alone movie, the sheer opportunistic shamelessness of the logic behind ‘Zombi Holocaust’s existence (basically: ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ was a hit? ‘Zombi 2’ [aka ‘Zombie’ (U.S.), ‘Zombie Flesh Eaters’ (U.K.)] was a hit? Et Voila = ZOMBI HOLOCAUST!) is already somewhat irresistible, whilst the fact that one of the films it is chiefly cannibalizing was *already* an unauthorised Italian sequel to a successful American movie (‘Dawn of the Dead’, released in Italy as ‘Zombi’) takes cinematic plagiarism to what at the time must have been new and giddy heights. (I’m sure if you follow the bread-crumb trail a few years down the line, you’ll find that someone in turn started making rip-offs of ‘Zombi Holocaust’, and so the glorious cycle continues.)*

Actually, the lengths to which ‘Zombi Holocaust’ goes to rip off Lucio Fulci’s film in particular are really quite extraordinary. I mean, I can see the rationale for borrowing the basic plot outline, using similar zombie make up and even rehiring the same lead actor (fan favourite Ian McCulloch) - but was there REALLY an audience back in 1980 who were liable to sit there thinking, “OMG, that isolated house in the jungle looks EXACTLY like the one in ‘Zombie Flesh Eaters’, and that low angle shot where the Landrover arrives in the village is exactly the same too! I am so psyched!”..?

I don’t know, but if such peculiar viewers did exist, they certainly would have found themselves well catered for here, as ‘Zombi Holocaust’ repeatedly reaches that baffling point on the “rip off” spectrum wherein the effort taken to painstakingly recreate entirely incidental details from an earlier film exceeds that which would have been necessary to feign originality by actually just shooting some new stuff that might have proved more appealing to the target audience… and scratching one’s head over the twisted logic of such decision-making is but one of many, many small pleasures that help make Girolami’s film such endlessly charming viewing for us jaded 21st century know-it-alls.

Taking a “2 + 2 = ?!?!” approach to combining elements of its two source texts, ‘Zombi Holocaust’s New York set opening – in which cultists belonging to an obscure Asian cannibal sect are found to be rampaging around a city hospital misappropriating body parts – is a pure, politically questionable b-movie delight. Reminding me somewhat of the equally unlikely Quetzalcoatl cultist sub-plot in Larry Cohen’s ‘Q: The Winged Serpent’, I can’t help wishing that they’d spun this idea out into an entire movie of its own.

But at the same time, I’m also glad they didn’t, because then we would have missed out on the earnest discussions conducted between the police and the pipe-smoking “Professor Drydock” (no, really) from the University, and their decision that the best solution to this problem is to ask the Mighty McCulloch (is his character a doctor of some kind, or a policeman? I’m not really sure it’s make clear) to step in and head up an expedition to the remote islands in the East Indies from which the cult originated, where, accompanied by a photogenic anthropology-studying nurse (Alexandra Delli Colli), some other guy and the obligatory interfering journalist, he will uncover the secrets of this benighted cannibal tribe and… well, I don’t know really.

I mean, wouldn’t be easier to just arrest the people who are getting up to all the monkey business at the hospital, and go from there? You know, interrogate them, look for witnesses, that sort of thing? But what do I know of police work. Pack your khakis and don’t forget the mosquito net - the boat leaves at dawn!

And so, as absurdity piles upon absurdity, ‘Zombi Holocaust’ repeatedly demonstrates that, despite its aspirations toward innard-chewing, brain-sawing video nasty infamy, at heart it really has more in common with old psychotronic favourites like ‘Mesa of Lost Women’ (1953) or ‘Horrors of Spider Island’ (1960) – a goofy, comforting little b-movie that is fully aware of its own silliness, whilst simultaneously remaining conscious of the fact that actually cracking a smile would cause the audience’s enjoyment to crumble like the Walls of Jericho.

That the credited director of this mess was actually the FATHER of Italian action supremo Enzo G. Castellari was something I initially found inordinately amusing (it’s easy to imagine Enzo taking breaks from whatever ‘Jaws’/’Dirty Dozen’ rip-off he was making at the time to field excruciating “No Dad, THIS is how you do a tracking shot..” style phone calls) - until that is, I checked IMDB and discovered that ‘Zombi Holocaust’ was actually Marino Girolami’s seventy second film as director, and that he had in fact been calling “action” on lower budget genre pictures pretty much non-stop since 1950.

We could speculate as to whether it was a deficit of quality or sheer bad luck that ensured that none of Girolami’s films prior to this one have ever gained much exposure outside of Italy, but given the number of technically accomplished European directors who found themselves delivering absolute rubbish when the VHS horror boom hit in the ‘80s, it would seem manifestly unfair to make a judgment call on his work based solely on ‘Zombi Holocaust’ - so I won’t.

Either way though, it seems likely that the director’s veteran status may have contributed somewhat to the strangely old-fashioned feel of ‘Zombi Holocaust’. Whilst it is ostensibly still a gore-soaked rampage through a tropical hell, the film somehow ends up feeling just sort of… I don’t know… nice, even whilst poorly paid local extras in ridiculous b-western Indian get-up are gobbling cream of tomato soup from some poor unfortunate’s latex torso.

Despite what I take to be the producers’ best efforts to pile on the nastiness, this one entirely lacks the mean-spirited extremity or queasy gross up agenda of a contemporary Fulci or Deodato film. Much like the minimum-of-effort “bloodshed” usually employed by Jess Franco, this is purely emblematic gore – any resemblance to the real thing is purely coincidental. Like everything in ‘Zombi Holocaust’, it’s all offered up in a spirit of pure, casual fun, with little suggestion that anyone is ever actually in pain.

And, essentially, I could continue trudging through a blow-by-blow account of all the great stuff in ‘Zombi Holocaust’ until the cows come home. There’s the square-jawed, cheque-collecting determination of McCulloch’s “I-failed-the-audition-for-Indiana-Jones-and-woke-up-here” lead performance for instance - or how about the perfectly shaped stone mold that the cannibals have lying around ready for Delli Colli after they strip her naked and body-paint her with some pretty flowers? (Hippy cannibals, eh? Well, you live and learn.).

From the adorably off-beat antics of Donald O’Brien as one of the least hygienic yet most strangely sincere mad scientists seen this side of the 1950s, to the to the bit where one of expedition’s dubiously portrayed ‘native porters’ almost throws an “oh man, you mean I gotta bury ANOTHER body..” style teenage strop after our heroes respond to the grizzly demise of his friend with scarcely more than a “huh, there ya go” shrug… well, you get the picture. There is just so much to enjoy here.

You can mock ‘Zombi Holocaust’ all you like, but to give Girolami his due, at the end of the day it is a vastly more entertaining prospect than most of the other bottom-feeding zombie/cannibal snoozefests that emerged in the early ‘80s (yes, I’m looking at you, Eurocine). This is chiefly due to the fact that, for all of its many shortcomings, the picture rattles along like a goddamned freight train, never resorting to dreary ‘padding out the run time’ type footage and rarely going more than a couple of minutes without throwing us something divertingly awesome and/or ridiculous to chew on.

Add one standing ovation-worthy Classic Gore Moment (all I need say is: outboard motor), the eventual appearence of some genuinely kind-of-scary looking zombies (well, I liked them), and a pitch perfect grinding, electronic dirge of a score from Nico Fidenco (whose 70s/80s CV is so sleazy, this almost counts as a career highlight), and, for those with the alchemical suss to suitably process it, ‘Zombi Holocaust’ is pure gold - a mighty anti-classic that no one with even the slightest fondness for Italian trash cinema could fail to love like a disfigured child.

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* On the cannibals-meet-zombies tip, Bruno Mattei’s actually-pretty-great ‘Zombie Creeping Flesh’ aka ‘Hell of the Living Dead’ (which premiered about six months after this film) springs to mind as an obvious ‘Zombi Holocaust’ descendent, although I’m not exactly about to call the lawyers in over that one, y’know what I mean.

Arrow Round up: Hired To Kill (Nico Mastorakis, 1990)

Hitting shelves soon as part of Arrow’s inexplicable campaign to revive the work of VHS-era Greek exploitation kingpin Nico Mastorakis (whose 1986 film ‘The Edge of Terror’ aka ‘The Wind’ we covered here a while back as a VHS Purgatory post), ‘Hired To Kill’s forthcoming release reminded me that I have actually owned the film on DVD for years and never got around to watching it -- until now, that is.

Purchased as part of a “10 DVDs for £10” deal from a local junk shop if I recall correctly, my copy of the film bears the seal of Hollywood DVD – celebrated suppliers of Godfrey Ho ninja movies to Poundland stores across the nation – and, at the time, my rationale for dropping 50p on it probably didn’t extend much beyond “Oliver Reed? SOLD!”, to be honest.

(Further proof, as if it were needed, that whatever inflated pay-packets independent movie producers might dish out to contemptuous, washed up legends to ensure their cooperation in creatively bankrupt genre vehicles, it’ll be worth it in the long run as long as goons like me are still buying the tickets.)

Anyway, as it transpires, ‘Hired To Kill’ is a head-spinningly goofy sub-Cannon action flick starring a charisma-free muscle dude named Brian Thompson, who perhaps ever so slightly resembles a very young Lee Marvin if you squint, but basically spends the bulk of his screen time looking like he just got thrown off the university rugby team for banging his head against the locker-room wall too many times.(1)

Thompson plays a mercenary hired by sleazy uber-capitalist George Kennedy to take down Oliver Reed, who is the tyrannical ruler of some ill-defined rogue nation. This will allow their local power-to-the-people resistance movement (headed by a barely-in-this-movie-at-all Jose Ferrer) to take charge, ready for Kennedy and his shady CIA-backed cohorts to sweep in and exploit the hell out of everybody. Or something.

From this agreeably cynical starting point, things swiftly descend (ascend?) into la-la land when it is explained that security in Reed’s dictatorship is so tight that there is only one possible plan that will get Thompson inside. That of course being that he will pose as a famous fashion photographer, recruiting a dirty half-dozen of beautiful female fighters (a women’s prison boxing champion, a duplicitous Mossad agent, a mute girl who bloodily dispatched the soldiers who murdered her family – you get the idea) to serve as his “models”, thus allowing them to infiltrate the highest echelons of wherever-the-hell-it-is society and to pad out the middle half hour of the movie with gratuitous Andy Sidaris style swimsuit footage until such a point as it is deemed prudent for the girls to change back into their khakis and go all “paintballing weekend” for the inevitable closing reel of exploding barns and low flying helicopters. Splendid.

You might be thinking that seems like a fairly unlikely means by which to effect a coup d'état in a military dictatorship, but look here – George Kennedy says his experts have looked at ALL the possibilities, and this is the ONLY ONE that will work - so you can shut up.

(Let the record state that ‘Doin’ It For The Money’, the sleazed up, sub-Prince electro-pop number that accompanies all of the fashion shoot / pool loungin’ sequences, is a minor masterwork.)

At this point, we should probably address the confusion regarding where this film is actually supposed to be set. Although the text on the back of the DVD box refers to “a volatile Mid East nation”, in practice it looks an awful lot like a quiet Greek island, and all references to the country’s name or location are pointedly avoided during the first half of the film… until that is, Mastorakis suddenly drops the pretense and has his characters begin referring to it as – uh – “CYPRA”. Subtle, Nico.

No one however seems to have communicated any of this to Oliver Reed, who turns up to the party as a full-on South American ‘El Presidente’ type figure, complete with a mangled Hispanic accent, a red star peaked cap and a truly magnificent moustache.

Happily though, Ollie is a lot more engaged and enthusiastic here than he was in many of his latter-day “descent into cheque-collecting ignominy” appearances, probably due to Mastorakis’s wise decision to place his character in a lot of scenarios that the old boy presumably quite enjoyed – shouting at people whilst waving a machine gun around, quaffing wine at a dinner table surrounded by glamorous ladies, and, in one intensely uncomfortable sequence, holding forth about the artistic qualities of his own love-making whilst groping a woman’s breasts from behind.

The latter scene, it should be noted, occurs shortly before Thompson – whose fashion designer cover story requires him to undertake the least convincing impression of a homosexual ever seen on screen – kisses Reed full on the mouth, in a sequence you can guarantee never reached take # 2. Whilst I would generally tend toward the opinion that you’d have to be out of your mind to buy ‘Hired To Kill’ for full price on blu-ray, the chance to see Reed’s subsequent reaction shot in HD should be worth the entry price alone.

If, reading this, you’re thinking ‘Hired To Kill’ sounds like a dose of pure trash movie nirvana, well, to a certain extent you’re not wrong. The dialogue and line delivery alone are enough to potentially make this the stuff of snarky Youtube legend, and, if you do the decent thing and wait until the point in the evening when you’ve reached the end of a six pack before hitting play, the sheer ridiculous, wrong-headed grandeur of the whole venture will leave you speechless…. for about fifty minutes or so.

At that point, you might find yourself checking your watch and reflecting that that this cheapo sub-Cannon action movie you’ve been watching has been conspicuously lacking in any cheapo, sub-Cannon action. In fact, aside from the inevitable training montage, there has actually been no action whatsoever, which is something of an astounding oversight for a film of this nature.

Much like its close cousin Ted V. Mikels’ ‘The Doll Squad’ (1973), ‘Hired To Kill’ is the kind of “action” movie in which the campy faffing about that leads up to the action is a sheer delight, but when it gives way to the actual real deal of people in army boots with prop machine guns creeping around door-frames and throwing hand grenades, well…. I guess the basic issue is, to make that kind of stuff exciting (as opposed to a show reel for a second rate stunt team) takes a certain degree of talent for dynamic filmmaking and narrative tension, so… yeah.

I’m sure the dozen or so stuntmen who comprise Oliver Reed’s unstoppable army [cue compulsory Elvis Costello singalong] all did their best, and it’s my duty to point out that some of the women who comprise Brian Thompson’s all-girl commando squad actually seem like fairly capable and interesting actresses who richly deserved better roles than those assigned to them here, but regardless – clearly the all-out, insurance policy defying, seat-of-yr-pants destruction fest that could have sent us out on a high and secured ‘Hired To Kill’s place as an all-time dumb-ass classic just didn't materialise.

At the end of the day, the sad fact is that all Nico Mastorakis movies, however entertaining they may initially appear, seem to eventually succumb to the all too familiar haze of safe, under-achieving blandness common to post-1990 straight-to-video productions, and ‘Hired to Kill’ is unfortunately no exception, with its essential failure to fulfill the expectations of its genre condemning it to splutter out and hit the curb, irrespective of the uproarious highlights that have kept us rolling to within reach of the hour mark.

But still – Oliver Reed in unexpected man-on-man kiss.

By the way, did you know that ‘Nights Of Cabiria’ and Antonioni's 'The Passenger' aren’t out on blu-ray yet?

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(1)A quick IMDB trawl reveals that Brian Thompson previously appeared as “Punk” in The Terminator, and in the no doubt pivotal role of “Night Slasher” in Stallone’s ‘Cobra’. In between numerous Hollywood bit-parts, he also headlined a Fred Olen Ray movie (‘Commando Squad’), and, with crushing inevitability, wrote, directed and starred in a 2014 production named ‘The Extendables’.

Deathblog: Mike Vraney (1957-2014) & Top Five Something Weird Releases.

I’m afraid I’m a bit late on this one, but it wasn’t until earlier this week that I learned – via a tribute post on Tim Lucas’s blog – that Mike Vraney, founder of the legendary Something Weird Video label, passed away at the start of January.

Conditions in whatever passes for the “industry” of restoring and repackaging old films may have moved on considerably since SWV’s glory days in the ‘90s, but the sheer volume of lunatic oddities and forgotten, marginal footage that they unleashed upon the world means that most of us are still playing catch-up, and it’s safe to say that most people who have been fans of weird movies for any length of time can probably recite their famous opening reel from memory. Their releases were certainly pivotal in inspiring me to begin taking an active interest in this kinda thing, and that crazy echo effect that plays beneath their logo still gives me a brilliant “I-have-no-idea-what’s-gonna-happen-next”, thrill of the unknown type tingle every time I hear it.

Of course, what ‘happened next’ wasn’t always all that great – try as I might, I’m really just not in the market for most of the seemingly endless ‘60s sexploitation flicks that they put so much effort into releasing, and, hilarious though most of his movies may be on first viewing, I’m not really that big a fan of their flagship director Herschell Gordon Lewis. But nonetheless, I’m glad that all that kinda stuff exists, and that there was someone dedicated enough to put it all out there – and, as Lucas’s obit makes abundantly clear, when it comes to the legacy of SWV, exists is very much the key word.

In the past few decades, we’ve got used to a world in which the chances of any currently existing piece of art or culture being lost forever is fairly minimal (or so we assume, anyway). But that certainly wasn’t the case back when Vraney was making the scene, and I think it’s fair to say that the impact he personally had on the preservation of pre-video tape era American film was vast.

All of those stranger, trashier, seedier flicks form the ‘50s, ‘60s & ‘70s that so many of us are currently so busy downloading, streaming, watching on Youtube..? A fair percentage of them wouldn’t just have been ‘hard to find’ without the efforts of Vraney and SWV, they would have been destroyed. The kind of material he specialised in fell well below the radar of any ‘official’ archive or film library, and if it wasn’t for his timely intervention, how many movies which are now marvelled over by viewers around the world (to say nothing of their value as a historical record of American life & culture in the mid-20th century) would have ended up in the incinerator? I don’t know much about Vraney as a person, but for that alone I think, he deserves our eternal respect.

As such, a good way to pay tribute seems to be to run through a quick list of some of my all-time favourite SWV releases, most of which would probably never have even reached our eyes without the efforts of Mike Vraney and his collaborators.

5. The Black Cat (1964)

Not to be confused with any of the numerous, more storied horror films inspired by Poe’s most-filmed tale, this out-of-nowhere regional obscurity – strangely accomplished on a technical level, yet utterly batshit in terms of acting & scripting – uses its literary source material as the jumping off point for the story of a strange, cackling man-child who, in between a lot of rather boring talky segments, commands our continued attention by means of force-feeding champagne to his frightened menagerie of animal friends, silently freaking out in an outburst of murderous rage in a ‘Moe’s Tavern’-esque dive-bar as an unknown, eye-patch wearing garage band plays, and finally lamping his long-suffering wife in the face with a fire-axe, in a full-on gore moment that could have escaped from an ‘80s Fulci movie. What does it all mean..? The immediate death of somebody’s dreams of being a great film director, more than likely, but I for one certainly enjoyed the resulting mess.

4. Blood Freak (1971)

My god, what can you possibly say about this one that hasn’t been said already? Truly one of most confounding brain-wrongs ever coughed up from the depths of marginal American film-making, it is staggeringly inept, utterly bizarre and genuinely rather unsettling in its presentation of a world in which everyone seems to be a severely traumatised and/or maladjusted individual under the influence of heavy sedatives, torn between the influence of evangelical Christianity, systematic drug abuse and chemically-enhanced factory farming. It’s like a Butthole Surfers album come to life in the form of a pro-God, anti-drug, Vietnam-damaged turkey-headed psychedelic gore movie, with the fact that it’s confused message seems to be entirely in earnest only rendering it all the more upsetting. Or at least, I think it is, anyway. To be honest, I’m still not sure whether the stern narrator who turns up at the end to warn us about the dangers of drug addiction whilst smoking cigarettes and coughing like a cancer patient is meant as a piece of intentional humour, or just the result of random, unthinking incompetence. In fact, I don’t know if anyone really knows. Most of the other people on screen act like they barely even know how to breathe or stand upright, so they’re not really giving us any clues. In the final analysis: I don’t know where this came from, or what it’s trying to say, but God help us all. UNcinema at its finest, and most terrifying.

3. The Fat Black Pussycat (1963)

Featured on the same disc as the aforementioned ‘Black Cat’ (hence no cover art), it’s been a long time since I watched this one so my memory ain’t all that clear, but my overall impression was that of it being an absolute belter of a weird little movie. As I recall, the story goes that it started life as a sorta New York shot murder mystery in which two square cops go under cover amid Greenwich Village beatniks, prompting much wonderful early Roger Corman / Jack Hill type comedic shenanigans as they search for a giallo-esque killer amid the wastrels and hep-cats of the coffee bar / house party scene. Then apparently, after all this was done and dusted, a new producer (the aptly named M.A. Ripps) got hold of the initial cut, decided it was too dull to release as was, and set out again to shoot a bunch of new foot age and a new ending, splicing additional moments of sex, violence and bomb blasts into existing scenes, and adding a horror-ish plotline about an evil cat taking over people’s minds and driving them to murder! The result? Disorientating moments of spatial and temporal incoherence, jarring and unpredictable shifts in tone, meaningful plot-lines that gradually veer off into drooling insanity, and (as I recall) more fun than those squares who insist upon watching movies that were all shot at the same time by the same people can even imagine.

2. Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973) / Roseland (1971)

You want “something weird”? You got it. And praise be to SWV for helping to disinter two thirds of the extant celluloid legacy of perhaps the greatest unsung hero of American outsider cinema, the one and only Fredric Hobbs. I already spilled much ink on the subject of ‘Godmonster..’ here, so instead we’ll say a few words about ‘Roseland’, which I was meaning to embark on a similarly detailed write-up of, but… just couldn’t face it, to be honest. Shot for producer Harry Novak on the basis of “nudity + whatever = bucks”, ‘Roseland’ is ostensibly Hobbs’ “sexploitation” film, in much the same way that Alabama’s Ghost is his “blaxploitation” film and ‘Godmonster..’ is his “monster movie”. Which is to say: certain images and ideas may momentarily cross over with the conventions of the genre in question, but basically 98% of the completed footage resembles nothing that has previously been seen in any motion picture made anywhere on earth.

Featuring Hobbs regulars E. Kerrigan Prescott and Christopher Brooks delivering their most fevered and theatrical performances to date (the latter in the role of a black Hieronymous Bosch), ‘Roseland’ to some extent concerns with the following: 1) Prescott’s career-ruining performance on the Ed Sullivan show of a big band show tune entitled ‘You Can’t Fart Around With Love’, an event that apparently traumatises the nation. 2) His subsequent mental illness, which sees him assuming the guise of ‘the black bandit’ and stealing prints of pornographic films from what appears to be a giant, echoing gymnasium. 3) The revelations imparted to him by the re-embodied spirit of Hieronymous Bosch, and his ongoing ideological conflict with a sleazy psychiatrist regarding issues of sexual morality that become increasingly unclear as the film progresses. And, 4), extremely lengthy messianic fantasy sequences in which armies of naked hippies trudge across expanses of unoccupied hillside to prostrate themselves in worship before a series of giant phallic statues. In conclusion, I would not recommend this film for viewing by the uninitiated, for that way lies only pain, but for those of us already driven to a state of fanaticism by Hobbs’ two later works, it represents another essential corner of the Bermuda triangle that is his brief but unique filmography.

1. Confessions of a Psycho-Cat (196?)

Yeah, so apparently I just really like cheap, black & white films of uncertain pedigree with vague counter-cultural affiliations and the word ‘cat’ in the title. Deal with it. Anyway, I’ll immediately cop that ‘Confessions of a Psycho-Cat’ isn’t really ostensibly ‘better’ (or weirder, or more entertaining) than any of the other films on this list, but for me, it still stands tall as the perfect example of an SWV release: a vicious, sleaze-packed and total impoverished exploitation picture, seemingly thrown together by a gang of sneering, Nouvelle Vague-digging beatniks, none of whom ever troubled the film industry again, and incorporating footage culled from at least two completely different projects, seemingly shot about five years apart. Pure magic. This was actually one of the first films I reviewed for this weblog, and, whilst I can’t really endorse either the tone or content of my writing back then (never mind the stolen screen-grabs, before I figured out how to do them myself), my enthusiasm for the film itself remains untarnished. In short, an unlikely ‘Most Dangerous Game’ framing story sets the scene for a deranged female huntress stalking the streets of New York in search of three nefarious losers who accepted her “stay alive for 24 hours” wager. Much semi-experimental, hand-held camera based mayhem ensues, incorporating twitchy, Hawaiian shirt-clad drug pushers, Jake LaMotta staggering about like a drunken human cannonball, wild modern jazz freakouts, bloody misogynistic murder flashbacks and a bow & arrow battle in Central Park. Whoa there. Just in case we get TOO excited, there are a lot of languorous, fully-clothed hippie ‘love’ scenes spliced in from the later, post-’67 shooting date too, but hey, it’s Something Weird, so you wouldn’t expect anything less really, would you? Go with it.

Something Weird Video still exists, and you can buy stuff from them here.

Some thoughts on ‘Troll 2’ (1990) and ‘Best Worst Movie’ (2010).

A couple of weekends ago, I attended a sold-out screening at the Prince Charles Cinema just off Leicester Square (the closest thing central London has to a real repository theatre/grindhouse I suppose, although sadly these days they tend to stick to about 99% recent Hollywood output and the kind of senior common room ‘cult classics’ anyone with a TV has already seen a hundred times… but that’s a rant for another day). The event in question was a double bill of ‘Troll 2’, and ‘Best Worst Movie’, a documentary about ‘Troll 2’.

I had not previously seen ‘Troll 2’ and, beyond reading a few reviews on horror blogs etc, I was largely unfamiliar with the kind of word of mouth cult following that has grown up around the film. I just went along because I was curious and bored and, y’know, because I just like this kinda crap, and wanted to support the ambitions of whoever decided it was a good idea to instigate a theatrical screening of something like ‘Troll 2’, as opposed to just showing ‘Bladerunner’ or ‘Goodfellas’ or whatever for the thousandth fucking time.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, I was unable to convince anyone to come with me (“hey, d’you wanna go and see this movie called ‘Troll 2’ with me tomorrow night? I hear it’s really terrible.. tickets are £10”), so decided to go it alone. I was expecting it to be a pretty, uh, ‘niche’ event I suppose. I was completely unprepared for either the size (large theatre = totally sold out, queue down the street, people being turned away etc.) or rabid, Rocky Horror style enthusiasm of the film’s fanbase, whose good-natured whoopin’ and hollerin’ often threatened to drown out the movie’s audio altogether. And, uh, that was cool I guess – I certainly didn’t mind it, but I was somewhat taken aback. I mean we don’t get that shit going to see Truffaut movies at the BFI, y’know. Just what kind of weird cult have I been missing out on here?

Well, the film itself answered that question succinctly within its opening few minutes. For anyone who has yet to experience ‘Troll 2’ - and particularly those who may have been put off by it’s faintly obnoxious fanboy following - I would like to state my opinion that it is a genuinely extraordinary piece of work – an indescribably strange and misguided film whose appeal (for those of us who appreciate this-sort-of-thing) extends far beyond the realm of internet memes and horror-nerd injokes.

As is inevitably the case with films that attract that perennially misapplied “worst movie ever” label, ‘Troll 2’ is clearly not the ‘worst’ anything. Any dedicated fan of strange/low budget films will likely have more than a few joints on their shelves that sink far lower, whether judged in terms of technical prowess, enjoyment or coherence. As critic MJ Simpson sagely points out in ‘Best Worst Movie’, there are plenty of awful, tedious movies out there made by people who have no idea how to make a film. What is so remarkable about ‘Troll 2’ is rather the fact that it was made by people who clearly do know how to make a film – the framing, editing, cinematography etc, if not exactly world class, is at least fairly proficient. ‘Troll 2’s creators clearly had some degree of ability and common sense - and yet they still chose to put all of this shit in front of their cameras?! As Simpson puts it, it’s like a movie put together by professional filmmakers… after they suffered a severe blow to the head.

As with an Ed Wood or Ted V. Mikels movie, to laugh *at* a film like this, or to single out its moments of incompetence, is to completely miss the point - a reaction as mean-spirited and stupid as laughing at a musician because s/he ‘can’t play properly’. The delirious joy of watching something like ‘Troll 2’ arises rather from trying to put oneself in the headspace of the filmmakers, from trying to fathom the thought-processes that brought this breathtaking spectacle of otherness into being. And in the case of ‘Troll 2’, the fact that it is technically speaking quite good only serves to make this delicious feeling of bafflement all the more poignant.

(VHS Artwork via Lost Video Archive)

I won’t bother trying to summarise the many, many highlights of ‘Troll 2’ – there are other blogs you can go to for that, and besides, once I got started we’d be here all day. The whole thing is a highlight. Let’s just say that for the opening hour or so, I was utterly transfixed, convinced that, yes, this was the real deal. A genuine modern day Ed Wood movie; an earnest attempt to make a good, entertaining film in which every single element – every shot, every character, every line of dialogue – somehow ended up so cracked that it could have been beamed in from another planet.

The combinations of words, images and ideas thrown up by ‘Troll 2’ are of an order that a regularly functioning human brain will never have even considered before - a vision of purest anti-inspiration, rising from the lumbering carcass of a generic PG-13 horror quickie with such force that the result is near psychedelic. Quite what the horror schlubs and VHS hounds must have thought when they rented this thing for the first time back in 1990 expecting a bog-standard Full Moon Productions straight-to-video number (ala the entirely unconnected ‘Troll 1’), I can’t even begin to imagine. A psychotronic holy grail moment, for sure.

And furthermore, this industrial-strength cack-handed weirdness just seems to escalate as the film goes on, getting more and more over the top until it reaches a certain critical mass at about the sixty minute mark, after which my delight began to sour. Ok, I thought, it’s too late now - the filmmakers have shown their hand. I mean, this is just too fucking stupid for words. Those who have seen the film will know what I mean: the dragging-the-guy-in-the-plantpot escape scene; Grandpa Seth’s grinning reaction shots after poleaxing a goblin; the beef baloney sandwich; the whole ‘popcorn’ sequence. There is NO WAY this stuff could have been intended as anything other than total comedy. I figured that, much like Brian Trenchard Smith’s infamous ‘Turkey Shoot’, they must have watched the rushes at some point and realised what a bloody ridiculous movie they were making, then decided to just go with it, amping things up as far as they possibly could in the name of gross-out, LOL-worthy absurdity. It was still hugely enjoyable, no question, but what had begun as a beautifully mystifying piece of outsider art basically ended up turning into a Troma movie, and that made me sad.

But the brilliant thing is – I was wrong. From beginning to end, there was no self-conscious, good/bad movie irony involved in this film’s production. This shit is for real, and that is so wonderful I could cry. You see… well, this is gonna take a few paragraphs to explain…


‘Best Worst Movie’ is a slightly unconventional documentary. Not so much a ‘making of’, it’s more like an ‘aftermath’, catching up with ‘Troll 2’s cast and crew nearly twenty years later, and documenting the rise of the film’s internet-era cult following. ‘Troll 2’s cast was comprised of non-professionals and seemingly random passersby culled from the Salt Lake City shooting location, and as it turns out, at least half of them prove to be real “documentary gold” so to speak, running the gamut from lovable eccentrics to people clearly wrestling with severe psychological problems (the guy who plays the storekeeper somehow ended up appearing in the film on his days out from a mental hospital, and claims he had no idea what was going on and “was not acting” when laying down his brief but unforgettable performance).

Understandably perhaps, much of the screen-time is dedicated to these guys, but whilst it’s a remarkable bit of ‘real-people / real-lives’ filmmaking, personally I was hankering to find out about the Italian crew who actually MADE the movie. ‘Troll 2’s credited director, ‘Drake Floyd’, is clearly an anglicised pseudonym, so who in the hell was responsible, and will they want to take credit for their dubious masterwork..?

When I got my answer about forty minutes in, it was like the unmasking of a supervillian. Claudio Fragrasso?!? I fucking knew it! Now things start to make sense! Or rather, the overall lack of sense starts to make sense.

Admittedly, I’m only really familiar with Fragrasso thanks to his role as the writer and de-facto director of Zombie Flesh Eaters II and III (Zombie II & III if you live in the states), which genuinely ARE some of the worst films I’ve ever seen, but his reputation as one of the most staggeringly incompetent screen-writers in Italian exploitation cinema precedes him.

Yes, that’s right – even by the standards of Italian horror, where critically lauded, landmark films often exhibit about as much logic as a drunken shooting spree in a fairground, this guy is notorious for his sloppy, nonsensical scripting. Imagine that.

Between his work on the Zombi/Zombie/whatever films and his numerous collaborations with similarly ridiculed director Bruno Mattei, Fragrasso managed to carve out a prolific directorial career for himself through the ‘80s and ‘90s, making what I’d imagine must have been very low budget films, some of them filmed in America or featuring American ‘stars’, seemingly angling for the kind of US video release that ‘Troll 2’ eventually achieved in 1990. Apparently in 1986 he made something called ‘Monster Dog’, staring a career-low-point Alice Cooper. Be still my beating heart.

Anyway: when Fragrasso is introduced in ‘Best Worst Movie’, he wastes no time in letting us know that he takes his films very seriously. Like many of Italy’s daftest trash-auteurs, he claims straight-facedly that he wants his films to move people emotionally, and to inspire reflection on important issues. The audience here in London nearly fall off their seats when he stated in broken English that he wanted ‘Troll 2’ to address “life… and death… and the challenges that a family must overcome to stay together”, or something along those lines.

Fragrasso can’t take sole credit for the majesty of ‘Troll 2’ though. The original idea, and the surreal English-as-second-language script, are the work of his wife and frequent creative partner Rossella Drudi. Drudi seems a little more down to earth in her inspiration. “Some of my friends had recently become vegetarians,” she says, explaining the genesis of the film’s somewhat unique anti-vegan food-based horror conceit, “and this pissed me off.” Suddenly the path that led us to the deux-ex-beef baloney sandwich becomes a little clearer.


‘Best Worst Movie’ follows Fragrassi and Drudi as they travel to America to attend some cult circuit screenings of ‘Troll 2’. Initially Fragrassi seems somewhat awed to see people queuing up outside a theatre to see his movie, but after witnessing their reaction to the screening, he quickly becomes cagey. “They laugh at the parts that are funny,” he says suspiciously, “but also at the parts which are not meant to be funny?”

He seems to be pondering whether or not this is standard practice for American audiences, but slowly the penny begins to drop. “You understand nothing!” is his winningly concise response to a smirking fanboy who asks him in a Q&A session why there are no trolls in ‘Troll 2’, and by the time we get to a full-scale cast reunion/Troll 2 mini-convention at the original Utah shooting location, things have become outright uncomfortable.

The American cast members sit on a makeshift stage, sharing anecdotes about how none of the Italian crew spoke English, and how they were handed crudely rewritten script pages from day to day and forced to stick to the dialogue as written, rather than trying to adapt it into something slightly less ridiculous. Fragrasso meanwhile stalks the back of the hall, largely ignored and denied a microphone, heckling the actors. “Lies!”, he yells. “That is not true! Everyone had whole script”, “these actors, they are dogs”, “I know the way Americans speak better than they do”, and so on.

You get the impression that the director’s failure to ‘get’ his own film, or to adopt the kind of self-deprecating attitude that would be expected of an Anglo-American filmmaker in similar circumstances, cast rather a pall over the whole occasion.

(In fairness to Fragrasso, it is not only bad Italian directors who have experienced this sort of linguistic/cultural disconnection when filming in English – I was strongly reminded of the stories of Sergio Leone presenting Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef with pages of ham-fisted dialogue that they point-blank refused to say, or of his later insistence that ‘Duck, You Sucker’ was “a big phrase in America”, in spite of the legions of actual Americans desperately trying to convince him otherwise.)

Although Fragrasso comes across as a rather charmless individual, it’s hard not to feel a vast sympathy for him as he looks at the reels of the 35mm print of ‘Troll 2’ that has been made for the screenings, admitting that this is the first time he has ever seen an actual theatrical print of one of his films – “normally we just get the video”. What can he be feeling, as he reflects that after three decades of toil in the film industry, his only opportunity to see his work actually touch a projector comes because he made a movie that a bunch of Americans really like laughing at?

And the crux of the matter is of course that no matter how deluded his inflated view of his own work may seem, on some level HE IS RIGHT. Without Fragrasso’s earnest, unshakeable self-belief, ‘Troll 2’ would never have been anti-masterpiece that it is. For all its hilarious, ugly absurdity, there is something incredibly compelling about the film, something beyond mere mockery that has allowed it to strike a chord with a huge number of people.

I mean, I’ve seen a lot of objectively pretty good films in the past six months that I can barely remember at all, beyond a basic acknowledgement that they were pretty good. But I think about ‘Troll 2’ EVERY DAY. Seriously. There is something genuinely unsettling about its blunt, poorly realised imagery that makes you kinda shudder, even as you’re laughing; something unhealthily fascinating about the inhuman illogic of the script that can keep you up in the dark hours of the night, just sorta… trying to get an angle on it. After only one viewing, I feel like the whole film has lodged itself in my mind almost shot for shot, and how many movies can you say that about? Only a special few, whether for better or worse. And it is Claudio Fragrasso’s self-belief, his refusal to take the bait of cheap irony or self-parody, that has made that happen. God bless him for it.

According to a 2004 “Where Are They Now” entry on IMDB, “..after writing and directing a series of cult classics, [Fragrasso] married his high school sweetheart and settled down to a quieter life. He currently operates a conch-fishing vessel off the coast of northern Italy.”

According to a none-more-LOLworthy announcement at the end of ‘Best Worst Movie’ on the other hand, he has come out of retirement to work on - wait for it - “Troll 2: Part 2”.

So far, that has no entry on IMDB, and I pray it never gets one, because frankly the 2004 option sounds about as close to a happy ending as poor ol’ Claudio is liable to get.

“Troll 2: Part 2” would make a great name for a band though, wouldn’t it?

Bloody Pit of Horror (Massimo Pupillo, 1965)

Yes folks, it’s ‘Bloody Pit of Horror’! You’ve hit ‘play’, and there’s no turning back now! A jewel in the crown of pan-European exploito-horror mulch, this lively ‘shocker’ was allegedly lensed in 1965, but features a cartoonish matinee spirit and winningly naive approach to sleazy thrills that just screams NINETEEN SIXTY ONE to me. Nonetheless, ’65 it is, a year in which director Pupillo seems to have cut a bloody swathe through the world of cheap Italian horror movies, directing Barbara Steele in ‘5 Tombe Per Medium’ (aka ‘Terror Creatures From The Grave’), then knocking out this one and a third gothic horror called ‘La Vendetta di Lady Morgan’ in quick succession, despite having done little of interest either before or since.

To spare.. oh, I dunno, subterranean exploration enthusiasts, maybe?.. from disappointment, it should be noted that ‘Bloody Pit of Horror’ features no pits, bloody or otherwise. It does have a castle, and within that castle is a dungeon, which you’d think would have done nicely for an exciting title-noun that was at least vaguely accurate. But no, they had to go with ‘pit’. Whether or not the film inspires ‘horror’, and the extent to which it may be deemed ‘bloody’ are matters for further debate, which we shall perhaps return to.

Original Italian title is the slightly more dashing ‘Il Bioa Scarletto’, and the movie will also answer to ‘A Tale of Torture’, ‘Virgins for the Hangman’ or ‘The Crimson Executioner’, depending on where and when you happen to reside. ‘Bloody Pit of Horror’ seems to be the one that stuck though, and why not - that title’s gleeful, boneheaded absurdity suits the film in question perfectly.



Supposedly inspired by the writings of the Marquis de Sade (presumably in much the same way that ‘Hot Tub Time Machine’ takes inspiration from the work of H.G. Wells), goofball levels are off the scale right from the outset here, as we see an unhinged looking gentleman in a bright red KKK hood with attached cape being man-handled into a shockingly cheap looking iron maiden by some guys in sorta Roman Solider-via-Conquistador get up. An echoing PA system voiceover drones on about how this chap’s nefarious deeds will live in infamy.

“Fools, all of you! I am the Crimson Executioner!”, says The Crimson Executioner, shortly before the oversized butter knives glued onto a plywood door descend to end his life. “Ah-hahahahahahahahahahahahaha!”, he adds. “This day shall be written in blood! No man can judge me! I am the supreme law! I shall have my REVENGE!”

But more on The Crimson Executioner later. For now, we cut to the present day, where we join a group of employees from the art department of an Italian publishing house. Split evenly between dashing young photog/design guys and vapid glamour models, they are busy touring the countryside in a fleet of sports cars, in search of the perfect gothic castle in which to shoot some sexy covers for their new range of horror novels.


Whilst that concept sinks in, let us pause a moment while I make a brief appeal to any readers who may have connections in the Italian publishing industry;

I know that I don’t have much experience in photography or design per se, and I realise that my command of Italian is – how to best put it? – entirely non-existent, but all I’m saying is – if you have a vacancy, keep me in mind. After nearly a decade of gainful employment in various sectors, I really feel that your industry is one in which I could truly realise my full potential. If you were to give me a chance, you would not regret it. I understand that there might not be enough space at first for me to tag along on the expenses-paid gothic castle location scouting tours and such, but I’m willing to work my way up. Thank you.

Anyway, as you might expect, this jolly crew do manage to find a castle to fit their (apparently quite specific) needs. When no answer is received to their bangings ‘pon the front door, they assume the place to be uninhabited, and persuade a guy who seems to be the lone male model to utilise his impressive ‘jungle jim’ style skills, scaling a tower and gaining them access.



As you might also expect, the castle turns out to be far from uninhabited. It is actually the home of a reclusive individual named Travis Alexander, played by legendary muscleman and Jayne Mansfield husband Mickey Hargitay, and his… uh… (ok, deep breath) … and his squad of strapping, moustachioed man-servants, all of whom wear identical stripy sailor jerseys and tight white jeans and apparently march around barking orders and stamping their feet like soldiers on parade 24 hours a day, unquestioningly obeying their master’s every command. Many ways to finish this paragraph spring to mind, but I ain’t saying a word.

Upon discovering the intruders in his castle, Mr. Alexander indulges in some Torgo-esque toing and froing, but eventually opts to let them to stay the night, on condition that they leave him alone to enjoy his hermetic isolation, and that they do not enter the dungeon. So, naturally, the next scene sees our gang setting up their photo shoot in the medieval torture dungeon, happily swinging around on some blood-curdling looking implement, girls in bikinis and one guy wearing a skeleton suit! These publishing types, honestly.

I’ll admit that up until this point I had my suspicions that the rationale behind the whole ‘pretty girls cross-country castle tour’ concept might be less than entirely work-related, especially when it became clear that the boss of the publishing house and one of the writers were along for the ride. But in all fairness to these guys, as soon as they’re in situ it’s straight down to business, setting up the gear, ordering the models around, calculating how many rolls of film they can shoot before sunrise, etc. Rarely has the act of shooting pictures of a girl in a sexy pirate outfit being strangled by a skeleton been handled with such consummate professionalism.




Even after the film’s first fatality – which sees the guy in skeleton suit impaled with more butter knives when the rope holding aforementioned torture device in place ‘mysteriously’ snaps – the boss is determined that his team should overcome this tragedy and keep working. After all, he’s got a schedule to keep! Deadlines! I mean, can you imagine a pulp horror novel coming out a bit late, with an imperfect cover photo? It simply wouldn’t do.

So this movie’s been good woozy fun so far, but the next thing I remember is a scene that really raised the stakes big time. A scene that left me speechless, unable to even evoke the holy syllables of Whaa – Thaa – Fugg? A scene, in short, that reminds me why I got into the business of watching movies like this in the first place.

Get this: one of our male characters (who seems to be emerging as the hero of the piece) hears a cry for help from a neighbouring chamber. Rushing in, he finds one of the girls tied by her wrists and ankles in the middle of a huge artificial spider’s web! Don’t come any closer, she warns him, explaining that the killer has rigged up loads of arrows around the chamber’s walls, which are primed to fire as soon as anyone touches the web! And indeed, the walls are lined, not with crossbows and some other kind of practical arrow-firing devices, but actual longbows, mysteriously balanced against the walls somehow! Furthermore, the unfortunate lady continues, there is a poisonous spider slowly making its way towards her, and once bitten, she will die immediately! The spider in questions looks kinda like some furry, mechanical beastie straight out of puppet show, wobbling along on a plainly visible string.



After slapping myself about the face a few times to ensure that I was still awake, and that, yes, this insane spectacle was actually unfolding before me, I saw our hero lie face down on the ground, and proceed to slowly wriggle along the floor like a worm, propelling himself with odd, spasmodic movements, in a tension-building attempt to reach the doomed girl without setting off the arrows! At this point I simply raised my hands in supplication and tearfully offered praises to the gods of WTF b-cinema for showing me this thing.

And really, you could spend a lifetime pondering the whys and wherefores of how the scriptwriters came up with this deranged scenario in the first place, how it ended up actually being realised for the film in such utterly ludicrous fashion, and how the actors felt at being asked to perform in it … I mean, it’s not even clear whether we’re supposed to read the spider and web as being ‘real’, or whether they’re supposed to be mechanisms built by the killer, although frankly either scenario is equally fucking crazy. If you value your sanity, probably best put such questions aside and just let it all wash over you.


What troubled me above all about this incredible sequence though is the fact that the girl apparently seems pretty enthusiastic about the idea of dying in the middle of this spider web contraption, explaining the whole set-up to her would be rescuers in detail, and begging them to abandon her to her singularly weird fate - “Don’t you see? It’s a diabolical trap! It’s impossible for anyone to reach me! Nobody can stop the mechanism!”, etc. The killer must have been a pretty good talker, I suppose – which we can maybe take as foreshadowing of a sort.

I also loved the way that when our worm-crawling hero reaches the centre of the web-maze seconds too late to save to save the girl from the venomous bite, he expresses his frustration by picking up the ‘deadly’ spider and drop-kicking it into the middle of the web, causing a few arrows to half-heartedly flop to the ground posing no danger to anyone! Outstanding.


By this point, my goofball-measuring equipment (it’s sort of a prototype, loosely based on the Rock-o-meter from ‘Rock N’ Roll High School’) had long since overheated and ceased to function, which is just as well, as there is no way its limited capacity could have survived the white hot hurricane of goofery that is Mickey Hargitay as The Crimson Executioner – for naturally it is he who has been perpetuating all this mischief, convinced that he is the reincarnation of the aforementioned medieval torture-monger.

Taking on the guise of The Crimson Executioner, Hargitay sports a get up that makes him look rather like a pro-wrestler who decided to attend a costume party dressed as The Phantom, got drunk, lost his shirt and then decided to go for Flavor Flav instead by adding a huge, clock-like gold medallion to the ensemble. You might have thought it would be difficult for a scene featuring only one man to strictly be termed ‘homoerotic’, but then you presumably haven’t seen Hargitay gazing lovingly into the mirror, oiling his muscular torso as he rants to himself at length about the virtues of his perfect body – claims that are somewhat undermined by the fact that he adopts a slightly hunchbacked ‘gorilla posture’ and hobbles around grunting like a pirate, his features contorted into a kind of snarling mask of perpetual discomfort.



When setting out to assess Mickey Hargitay’s performance here, stock phraseology about how he ‘chews up the scenery’ or somesuch seems woefully inadequate in trying to convey the sheer ham-fisted delight he brings to the role as he capers around his torture dungeon in a state of delirious, childlike glee, accompanied at all times by the incessantly repeated ‘Crimson Executioner’ theme, which sounds a bit like the proud inventor of the world’s first underwater theremin giving a bathtub demonstration (word to composer Gino Peguri for a varied and enjoyable soundtrack all round actually).

Hagitay’s Shatner-esque cadences must be heard to be believed as he sets about tormenting the remaining characters in a manner that might have seemed fairly sadistic in a film that was less… well… y’know - a film that was less like ‘Bloody Pit of Horror’.

“The Crimson Executioner… invented the torture of icy water… for creatures like you!”, he taunts, shaking his fist at a girl who is having icy water dribbled across her back.

“I will punish you for your lechery!”, he promises, spitting in the face of the head of the publishing house, whom he has confined in a comically oversized neck manacle.

“The Crimson Executioner will torture you! Yes… will torture you… until DEATH!”, he announces to nobody in particular, spreading his arms and gazing skyward in joy.

Man, this guy is something else.

Watch entranced, as he straps two of the models onto some kind of rotating wooden contraption and pushes knives through slats in an adjacent screen at boob level, causing the fabric of their brassieres to be veeeery slowly stripped away, and their tender flesh to be cut, just a little bit! I mean, let’s not get carried away here, right? Standards of decency must be upheld. What’s that you say, Crimson Executioner..?

“My vengeance needs blood! The Crimson Executioner... CRIES OUT for blood!”



Such an instantly iconic, endlessly quotable character – I’m surprised that The Crimson Executioner hasn’t cast a wider shadow across subsequent horror history. Surely more than one ‘trash auteur’ must have watched this over the years and thought “this is great, all I need to do is get some theatrical goof-off to run around in a hood, and the rest of the movie writes itself”? One thing’s for sure – nobody who’s ever stumbled across this movie is liable to forget him, and the temptation to spend weeks after viewing wondering around the house in exaggerated wrestler stance, muttering “The Crimson executioner does this, The Crimson executioner does that”, is probably not an uncommon affliction.

Brilliantly, The Crimson Executioner’s reign of terror isn’t ended when he is outwitted or bettered in combat by our hero, as is traditional. I dunno whether I missed an important plot point here, but I’ve watched the film several times now (god help me), and it still appears that he just gets so overwrought about all the evening’s excitement that, after delivering one last fevered monologue about how his beautiful body has been “defiled” by earthly corruption, he simply keels over and dies!

A long tracking shot lingers over the multitude of carcasses that are now strewn around the dungeon floor, and the surviving couple stand in shock, wracking their brains to for some kind of profound closing message they can pull from this thoroughly meaningless outbreak of anachronistic barbarism.

“Well I won’t write any more horror stories, that’s for sure… the man who said truth is stranger than fiction made no mistake!”

You said it buddy! I mean, people in the real world made this movie – beat that, fiction.

‘Bloody Pit of Horror’ has long lurked in the Public Domain, and a splendidly murky, degraded, pixellated print of the film can be streamed/DLed from just about anywhere on the internet, including archive.org here or Youtube here. If you’ve got a reliable net connection, why, you could watch it everyday! What a world we live in! In fact, pesky family or relationship responsibilities notwithstanding, I’d go as far as to say you SHOULD watch it everyday! Go on, you know you want to.

Man, Psychovision looks pretty crappy.