Horror Express: Draguse ou Le Manoir Infernal (Patrice Rhomm, 1974)

“Just my luck. Some people meet with Ursula Andress or Brigitte Bardot in their dreams. I always meet with some crazy woman who thinks she’s Nostradamus…” 

Also unleashed upon the Parisian public as ‘Perversiones Lubriques’, ‘Draguse ou Le Manoir Infernal’ is a horror-tinged French sex film directed by Patrice Rhomm, a filmmaker probably best known (relatively speaking) for contributing to the script for the thoroughly batzo Italio-Belgium trash classic ‘The Devil’s Nightmare’ (1972).

Armed with the knowledge, the opening ten minutes of ‘Draguse’ had me ready to declare Rhomm an unheralded pulp horror savant. Sadly, I fear things went a little awry as my viewing progressed, but… let’s kick off with the good stuff, shall we?

Enlivened by the strains of a delightfully spooky, propulsive library track, ‘Draguse’s opening credits give us skeletal trees under an overcast sky and brooding shots of one of those shabby / decrepit rural houses so believe of low budget French horror.

As a handheld camera proceeds to explore the house’s suitably rundown interior, silver-haired Eurocine mainstay Olivier Mathot begins to deliver a monologue in voiceover, explaining that he is being transported to this house in his dreams, wherein his spirit is imprisoned within a pentangle (nattily represented by a mirror with what looks like some cake icing daubed upon it) as he is forced to witness the lewd and perverse displays enacted for him by a witch named Draguse (Eurocine & Jess Franco regular Monica Swinn).

Soon, a flash of lightning turns the pink candles black (frankly neither colour is really suitable for the lighting needs of god-fearing citizens, I fear), a gnarly-looking skull and crossbones appears upon the frame of some kind of antique furnace-type thing, and Draguse baptises the skull with a trickle of deep red blood.

With these formalities out of the way, more rockin’ library music kicks in, as Swinn treats us to some lascivious dancing in a baby doll nightie, before spreading her legs across a nearby armchair and proceeding to pleasure herself (non-penetratively, I hasten to add) with a massive bone.

My god, what is this movie? It’s demented, and amazing. Total ‘70s witch-smut nirvana.

It is at this point however that Monsieur Mathot awakens with the standard issue “whaaa, where am I?!” comic flourish, and we discover that, like seemingly all people in ‘70s French movies, he actually lives in a cramped, high rise Parisian apartment with amazing wallpaper and flowery bed sheets, shared on this occasion with his perpetually naked and very much up-for-it wife (Martine Fléty, who also appeared in a number of Jess Franco films in the late ‘70s).

Much to Ms Fléty’s chagrin however, Mathot soon turns out to be essaying that most tedious of sex comedy clichés, the serious-minded, frigid academic who steadfastly ignores the parade of willing female flesh which is constantly paraded before him wherever he goes.

A historian by trade, Mathot’s character dreams of publishing his great historical monograph on The Queens of Scotland, but his publisher (played by director Rhomm) has other ideas - namely, inexplicably hiring this sexless stick in the mud to write a series of erotic novels for the paperback market.

Taking this new assignment rather more seriously than anyone presumably intended, Mathot declares that he will relocate to the countryside and rent the house seen during the opening, in order to gain the solitude he needs to compose his new literary masterworks. In a turn of events more far-fetched than any of the film’s supernatural elements, his publisher not only voices his approval for this idea, but even volunteers to cover the rent.

Before heading out to the sticks however, our hero begins his ‘research’ by conducting an in-depth survey of Paris’s adult entertainment industry - or, in other words, Rhomm’s camera goes on a lengthy, handheld ramble around the exteriors of various sex shops and porno cinemas, whilst Mathot contributes a witless, nattering voiceover over the top.

I’m assuming that the film’s original audience (who would have been more than familiar with such sights) must have found the inclusion of this time-killing filler material absolutely infuriating, but the passage of a few decades has ironically turned it into an absolute goldmine for 21st century smut historians, giving us a fleeting glimpse of all manner of funky, pop art-influenced décor and long-forgotten posters and cinema hoardings, not least some promo material for the Jess Franco sex comedy ‘Le Jouisseur’ (aka ‘Sexy Erotic Job’, aka ‘Roland, The Sexiest Man in the World’). So, count that as another point in ‘Draguse’s favour, if you are thus inclined.

When Mathot eventually arrives at his shabby rural hideaway (which, with typical porno logic, is still close enough to town for him to walk to the red light district to buy cigarettes), we might reasonably have expected the film’s horror quotient to pick up again, but sadly that’s not quite the way things pan out, despite a few spooky manifestations from the titular Draguse.

Instead, the movie veers off into a rather lackadaisical series of disconnected vignettes. First, Mathot picks up a prostitute (Sylvia Bourdon, who went on to appear the following year in the inserts shot by Jean Rollin for the bastardised porno version of his own ‘Lips of Blood’). Then, once that’s all over with, he dresses up like Count Yorga and visits a fun fair, somehow convincing an idle, hippy-ish bloke to return with him to the house to have sex with the (apparently now corporeal) Draguse, who subsequently kills him, leaving Mathot (who is apparently now dreaming this whole escapade) to dispose of the body.

After dawdling well past the half-way mark with this sort of thing, ‘Draguse..’ then makes a belated attempt to transform itself into a kind of Amicus-style anthology movie, as Swinn turns up in a second role, playing a sort of “real life” avatar of Draguse.

Ostensibly a secretary who has been dispatched by Mathot’s publisher to help him get his shit together, this lady begins telling him erotic / macabre tales ostensibly based on the house’s sordid history, each of which is dramatised as a stand-alone vignette featuring Mathot as the male protagonist.

So, first we enjoy the ‘tale’ (if it can indeed be termed as such) of a stuffy tutor trysting with a hotpants-clad nymphet (Danièle Nègre). Then, we bear witness to a Nazisploitation-themed light bondage threesome, in which a Hitler-fixated photographer (Mathot again) lures a model (Claudine Beccarie, who appeared in the original version of ‘Lips of Blood’) back to his lair for some jackbooted hi-jinks with a dominatrix (French porno regular Erika Cool).

I could make a point of noting that everyone present in this scene (plus Swinn to boot) reunited two years later for Eurocine’s epic disasterpiece ‘Train Spécial pour SS’ (aka ‘Special Train for Hitler’)… but to be honest, material like this was so ubiquitous in the lower depths of Western European exploitation cinema during this era that you’d almost be surprised if a film featuring Mathot and Swinn didn’t include somebody busting out the swastikas and riding crops at some point.

(A special mention should probably be made however of the fact that, once several Nazi marching songs have been aired on the gramophone, the reminder of the scene is soundtracked with what sounds like a recording of chugging train carriages. Tasteful.)

Anyway - by this point, any vestige of the witchy / horror aesthetic featured in ‘Draguse’s opening scenes is long gone, and sadly it never really returns. Towards the end of the film, there’s even a suggestion that the ‘real life’ Draguse (the secretary lady) may have been spiking Mathot’s drinks, causing him to hallucinate, thus conveniently nixing the film’s supernatural element altogether. (Given that secretary-Swinn doesn’t even turn up until two thirds of the way through the movie, this explanation …. well, hell, it makes about as much sense as anything else here I suppose…)

Whilst ‘Draguse’ is eventually a bit of a bust in terms of horror, it should be noted that it is equally unsatisfactory as a sex film, in spite of all the kinky shenanigans outlined above.

Attaining modest historical significance as the first domestic French production to be awarded the country’s ‘X’ certificate (meaning that it could be legally screened with unsimulated sex scenes), the film nonetheless continues to inhabit an uncomfortable no man’s land between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ cores.

A few, fleeting moments of explicit ‘action’ are included, but the film still largely relies on simulated coupling, often confined to long shots and lacking the artful/imaginative approach which allowed directors like Franco to liven up such ‘hard soft’ material in this period. (And yes, I’m going for a record for “most references to Jess Franco in a non-Franco review” here - thanks for noticing.)

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the middle-aged Mathot - who ostensibly takes part in every sex scene - did not ‘do’ hardcore, meaning that an obvious body double is employed for his sporadic full frontal / below the belt shots. Disastrously however, it appears that even Mathot’s allotted stunt-cock had trouble performing, lending the film’s sex scenes an awkward, fragmentary quality which somehow feels far more furtive and unsavoury than the, uh, ‘natural flow’, shall we say, of the full-on pornography which would come to dominate low budget French film production over the next few years.

Despite the fact that it conspicuously fails in pretty much everything it set out to achieve however, I must confess that - for some peculiar reason - I found ‘Draguse ou Le Manoir Infernal’ both exceptionally charming and hugely enjoyable.

I’m not sure I can quite explain why this is the case. Perhaps it was watching those Jean Rollin softcore movies all those years ago which warped my brain, or perhaps my recent enthusiasm for the films of Michel Lemoine has something to do with it [see my write-up on his ‘Les Désaxées’ here], but I just love the wonky, off-kilter, frankly ridiculous world in which these pre-hardcore French erotic films take place.

Even in a frankly shabby, low budget effort like this, it just all feels like so much fun; it’s all so inherently, casually surrealistic, full of bright, comic book-like colours and weird, canned music, interspersed with time-killing scenes in which characters sit in outdoor cafes or on patios, sipping white wine and having earnest conversations about utterly irrelevant topics.

In this particular instance, Patrice Rhomm directs with such a hap-hazard, “eh, what the hell” type disregard for narrative and cinematic logic - never mind the expectations of his chosen genres - that this strange effect is only intensified, adding an “anything could happen next, and WE DON’T PARTICULARLY CARE if it does” type insouciance to proceedings which I can’t help but get a kick out of.

So, the next time a furtive man approaches you in the park to ask whether you’d like to go back to his country house and have sex with a spectral witch, why not consider putting your finer feelings aside, and simply replying “well, I’m not doing anything else this afternoon, so, eh, why not?” Then finish off your unfiltered gitane, pull on your fringed velvet jacket and shuffle off after him…. as long as the funky harpsichord plays, you’ll be just fine.

Breakfast in the Ruins: Resurrection.

 

 * click *

Hello? Hello…?

Is there anybody out there..?

So, I just thought I’d give a quick heads-up to any long-time readers, old friends or other foolhardy individuals who have seen fit to keep this blog on their feeds / favourites lists through these dark months of silence, letting you know that, after a very stressful year, I’m gradually returning to a more normal pace of life. Which means, amongst other things, that I’ve recently found some time to start writing about movies and books again, and I’ve really been enjoying it too.

In fact, I’m genuinely thrilled that, in a few days, it will be October, bringing with it the annual challenge of trying to watch / read / write about something horror-related every single day leading up to Halloween.

And what’s more, I’m ready for it this time -- I’ve been preparing. After months of neglecting this blog, I now suddenly have multiple posts pretty much ready to go, just waiting to be spread out nicely across the first week or two of the month, whilst I (hopefully) work on stuff to fill the second half.

So confident am I in fact that I’m going to start early; our first Horror Express review will be in-coming tomorrow, and I’ll try to keep things ticking over after few days thereafter.

Dark gods willing, I may even be able to return to an on-going schedule of regular posting thereafter, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. So for now - welcome back, and my humble thanks for sticking around. The Sabbath beckons…

Revisiting ‘The Damned’ (1962) - literally.

 Black leather, black leather, crash crash crash…

When I began this blog way back in 2009, one of the first films I felt compelled to review was Joseph Losey’s ‘The Damned’ (aka ‘These Are The Damned’, 1962), which at that point I’d just discovered via a bootleg DVD acquired from the much missed ‘Up The Video Junction’ stall in Camden Market.

In the years since then, the film has remained a firm favourite of mine, and has, I believe, accumulated a steadily growing cult following through subsequent legit releases and screenings.

Revisiting ‘The Damned’ with a more critical eye via Indicator’s definitive blu-ray release earlier, I can certainly appreciate the film has a few ‘issues’. As in a number of Losey’s ‘60s films, the narrative has a tendency to grind to halt in order to allow a succession of male / female couples engage in protracted bouts of inscrutable navel-gazing, their dialogue rendered in vague and faintly preposterous terms by screenwriter Evan Jones. In the grand tradition of Brian Donlevy in Hammer’s ‘Quatermass’ films meanwhile, imported American ‘star’ Macdonald Carey makes for thoroughly dislikeable ‘hero’ figure - an ineffectual middle-aged chauvinist with Hemingway/Henry Miller pretentions who spends the bulk of his screen-time trying to molest a clearly uninterested Shirley Anne Field. (1)

Leaving these quirks aside however, the film’s disorientating car crash of mismatched genre tropes (rock n’ roll delinquency, paranoid cold war SF, arthouse existentialism) remains bracing and unique, whilst the photography, locations, music and action choreography are all exceptional, and a young Oliver Reed practically melts through the celluloid with smouldering malevolence.

It is the film’s considerably darker second half that really gives ‘The Damned’ its staying power though, as the focus turns to the science fiction elements, and the intractable moral dilemma faced by the character played by Alexander Knox - sombre, aesthetically-minded civil servant fanatically dedicated to preparing mankind for “when the time comes,” as he euphemistically puts in in his faintly sinister, Ivor Cutler-esque Scottish brogue.

Pre-empting the terrible grandeur of Troy Kennedy-Martin’s BBC mini-series ‘Edge of Darkness’ (1985) by several decades, the events which transpire once Carey, Field and Reed crash in on Knox’s antiseptic underground facility soon become truly harrowing. Expanding the movie’s emotional/thematic scope far beyond the realm of the cheap n’ cheerful ‘Village of the Damned’ cash-in Hammer presumably envisioned when they commissioned it, Losey and Jones propose the idea that there is simply no sane response to a world which remains perpetually on the brink of nuclear annihilation - merely violence, cruelty and chaos, as any notion of rationality crumbles in the face of an unimaginable (and, the ultimate nightmare for a bureaucrat like Knox, unmanageable) reality.

Rarely has a subject been more suited to the kind of hyperbole which tends to infect the director’s work, and when Knox, gazing upon the mighty slabs of Portland stone strewn jaggedly around the landscape surrounding his cottage, observes that, “a force has been unleashed which will melt these stones,” it is difficult not to feel a chill run through you as the matter-of-fact accuracy of this seemingly fantastical statement sinks in.

Thankfully for us all however, the Isle of Portland on England’s south coast (within which Knox’s fictional outpost is located) and the neighbouring town of Weymouth, (where much of the rest of the film was shot) not only survived the era of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but remains unmelted to this very day.

I can personally vouch for this furthermore, because - to finally get to the point - my wife and I visited the area in May this year for a long delayed seaside holiday, thus giving me the opportunity to undertake my very own ‘The Damned’ location tour.

Before we begin, I should acknowledge that the work undertaken by the Reel Streets website proved invaluable in pinpointing some of the shooting locations used in the film, and that my own efforts have essentially added little to the material already gathered by their contributors… but nonetheless, I hope that my photos and observations carry some kind of psychogeographical interest for fans of the film and/or the Dorset coastline.

“What’s the matter, never seen a clock tower before?”

Most of the Weymouth landmarks used in the first half of ‘The Damned’ are pretty easy to spot - not least the memorial clock tower where Macdonald Carey first encounters unlikely urban warrior Shirley Anne Field (complete with a knife in her belt!)

As you can see, background biddies remain a constant sixty years down the line.

“Last one to the unicorn’s a cube!”

Though not quite as accessible as it apparently used to be, Weymouth’s towering memorial to the town’s erstwhile patron George III remains present and correct, including the heraldic unicorn which serves as Reed’s gang’s favoured assembly point.

(Interesting incidentally to note various people - including what looks like a bunch of blokes in the process of delivering some carpets - stopping to watch the filming in the second screengrab above.)

And where there’s a unicorn of course…. here’s the lion on the other side of what is generally referred to as The King’s Statue, with King himself (Reed) lurking beneath, plus a bit of a view of the junction of Westham Road and St Thomas Street, leading onto the town’s shopping streets.

The name of Reed’s character, his violent and high-handed behaviour, and the focus Losey places upon this ostentatious bit of royal statuary, are surely no coincidence, methinks. Indeed, whilst Weymouth’s seafront certainly has its charms, the uneasy atmosphere which results from the town’s long-standing association with royal patronage, an extensive naval/military presence in the surrounding area and the Esplanade’s continued function as a magnet for aimless youth and passing biker gangs (the latter admittedly now of a more wholesome middle-aged / middle class demographic)… all this makes it a pretty inspired location for the depredations of the umbrella-wielding King and his strange band of quasi-militaristic Teddy Boys / proto-Droogs.

Unfortunately, remodelling of the exterior of the 18th century Gloucester House on Weymouth’s Esplanade means that the conservatory-style hotel bar in which Alexander Knox meets Viveca Lindfor’s bohemian sculptor character is no longer really extant / accessible, but visitors can at least thrill to the sight of the surviving gatepost adjacent to the steps outside. 

Over in Weymouth’s harbour area meanwhile, The Royal Oak pub on Custom House Quay - which gets quite a lot of screen-time in ‘The Damned’ after Carey moors his boat outside it - happily still abides as a thoroughly unpretentious boozer. (An extension added to the Ship Inn opposite now covers most of the car park / bomb site area seen in the third screengrab above.)

Incidentally, the former home of the Devenish Brewery, whose wares are proudly advertised on the frontage of the pub’s 1962 iteration, can be found on the other side of the harbour in Hope Square (coincidentally home to what I’m confident in hailing as Weymouth’s best current pub, The Red Lion). An impressive Victorian edifice, the brewery was subsequently home to Weymouth Museum, and is now undergoing redevelopment into the usual flats-plus-god-knows-what.

 

Hopping up the steps toward Town Bridge, Losey’s crew used the elevation to get a great, high-angled shot of King’s gang departing after their confrontation with Carey.

Nice to see that the railings and phonebox are still present and correct, but the goods train seen chugging past in the background of the 1962 shot (presumably used to transport unloaded goods from the harbour) is most definitely a thing of the past.

Panning over to the bridge itself, the gang saddle up. 

And, just to bore you further, here’s a quick shot from earlier in the film of Field’s bike whizzing ‘round the corner by the Crown Hotel, just opposite the bridge.

Which brings us, finally, to Portland, a mile or two down the road, in which most of the rest of ‘The Damned’ was shot. This vast, rocky outcrop of elevated land existed as an island until the mid-nineteenth century, when an artificial sandbank was created to expedite transportation of the island’s titular stone to the mainland via a purpose-built rail line.

A strange and fascinating place by anyone’s estimation, Portland’s identity is defined by an unlikely combination of insular, coastal gothic (ancient cottages, derelict medieval churchyards, Roman remains, weird superstitions), heavy industry (the ubiquitous quarrying) and sinister institutional secrecy (former and current prison buildings, small military facilities of uncertain purpose, weather stations, incongruous brutalist barracks etc).

Checking Portland’s Wikipedia page [linked above], I was delighted to find a quote from much-loved theorist and documentarian Jonathan Meades, who in his 2012 book Museums Without Walls wrote: 

“Portland is a bulky chunk of geological, social, topographical and demographic weirdness. It is the obverse of a beauty spot. ‘Beauty’ in this construction implies the picturesque. Portland is gloriously bereft of this quality. It is awesome. There is nothing pretty about it.”

Having visited the place, it is difficult not to see this ‘weirdness’, in all its monolithic, misbegotten glory, mirrored in the unsettling mash-up of genre tropes executed by Losey and his collaborators in ‘The Damned’, suggesting that the location itself might have played as great a role in inspiring the form and ‘feel’ of the film as any of its human contributors.

The location which forms the focal point of much of the action in ‘The Damned’ - the “bird house” which Knox allows Lindfors’ character to use as a studio - is, it transpires, an outbuilding at the rear of a remote property known as Cheyne Cottage (which also appears in the film), still clearly visible halfway down Portland’s east coast.

Unfortunately, the building is not accessible to the public (it’s on private land, and stands on a steep plateau impossible to scale without climbing gear), meaning we were unable to get a closer look or check out the interior. From the nearby Cheyne Weares car park and viewpoint though, bolder visitors can at least scrabble a few hundred yards through the undergrowth to get a better view, and to access the lower quarry area which was also used extensively in the film (from the atmospheric cliff-top opening sequence, right through to the harrowing conclusion, in which our assorted characters struggle with the radiation-suited functionaries rounding up the cold-blooded children). 

(One of the only significant changes to the landscape since the film was shot is the fact that I’m pretty sure the path which once allowed vehicular access to the quarry area - as shown in the second screengrab above - has now been blocked off. Otherwise, I’m sure we would have followed that path back to the road / viewpoint rather than scrambling back up the hillside - encountering a bloody great adder along the way, incidentally.)

Further on down the coast toward Portland Bill, I’m fairly sure that the scene in ‘The Damned’ in which one of the children rescues Reed’s character after he falls from the cliffs must have been filmed on these flat, rocky stretches of shore - their forbidding and inaccessible location in the film rather undercut by the fact that turning the camera 180 degrees would have revealed rows of cosy, brightly coloured wooden beach huts. File under ‘magic of the movies’.

(It’s a shame incidentally that ‘The Damned’s crew couldn’t find an excuse to crowbar the nearby Portland Bill Lighthouse in the movie -- if only to allow it to be paired up with David Greene’s The Shuttered Room on an unlikely double bill of “arthouse-adjacent ‘60s British genre films in which Oliver Reed menaces an aging American actor involved in an inappropriate relationship with a younger woman in close proximity to a lighthouse”.)

After rounding the horn of the island (as it were), having a look around the lighthouse and enjoying a few much needed refreshments at the café, the return leg of our journey around Portland took us back along the island’s west coast, which has a considerably bleaker and more foreboding feel to it than the comparatively tourist-friendly east side.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a direct match for the entrance to the film’s ‘Edgecliff Establishment’, but the kind of hurricane fencing seen in both of the above screengrabs remains a ubiquitous presence around the south-west quarter of Portland, shutting off various areas and creating an odd network of self-contained compounds, each dotted with lonely pre-fab buildings and military vehicles.

All perfectly innocuous I’m sure, but it can’t help but make the place feel like catnip for UFO nuts or conspiracy theorists in search of precisely the kind of scary, underground facilities which ‘The Damned’ chose to locate here six decades ago. (Indeed, the film’s nocturnal chase scene, in which King’s gang pursue Carey and Field around the perimeter of Knox’s ‘establishment’, still capture the ‘feel’ of this area uncannily well.)

Located more or less slap-bang in the centre of Portland meanwhile, the suitably imposing St George’s Church is bordered on one side by the dust and desolation of a working quarry, and on the other by the outskirts of the town of Wakeham.

 

As you can see, the church yard now appears to be maintained more actively than was the case in 1962, although unfortunately, I was unable to locate either of the monuments Oliver Reed clambered upon to whistle commands to his gang members. Either they’re no longer extant, or murky reference pics and general exhaustion prevented me from locating them.

(The idea of King using this location to marshal his troops will have been recognised by locals as a complete nonsense incidentally. The church is not on raised ground, and is the better part of two miles from the other locations used in the film… but what director could resist the appeal of a location like this sitting just around the corner..?)

After this detour, our original plan had been to hoof it up to Portland’s northern settlement of Castletown to try to find the quiet side street in which King’s gang beat up Carey at the start of the movie (another geographical absurdity of course). But, suitably chastened by the weird awesomeness of Portland’s monolithic totality and bone-tired after a full day of hoofing around its fearsome coastal paths, the call of the nearby bus-stop and a swift return to the comforts of our Weymouth B&B could be resisted no longer.

---- 

(1) Just as a quick side-bar, I seem to remember that in my original 2009 post on ‘The Damned’, I spent some time criticising Shirley Anne Field’s performance - a foolish judgement on my part which I would hereby like to formally retract. I now believe she is actually pretty great here - charismatic, smart and self-possessed, despite having to contend with reams of deathless dialogue, questionable motivations and some distinctly uncomfortable scenes with Carey. What was I thinking, etc.