Mosquito (1994)

Who doesn’t love giant bug movies? So how could you go wrong with a movie about giant killer mosquitos from outer space? Such a movie is Mosquito, directed by Gary Jones and released in 1994.

A spacecraft from some unknown planet crashes into a swamp. Pretty soon the locals are having a major problem with mosquitos. A really major problem. These mosquitos are as big as a dog. There’s not much left of a person who has been bitten by one of these gargantuan insects.

Ray and Megan are young marrieds who encounter these bugs when Ray’s car splatters one. They hook up with an Air Force meteor chaser and they run into a nasty bank robber named Earl and his halfwit brother. They also hookup with a ranger from the State Park, the inept Hendricks. These six people will be all that stands between our planet and conquest by the giant killer mosquitos.

They are all pretty standard character types.

It turns out to be an epic battle for survival.

This movie doesn’t bother itself too much with complicated pseudoscientific explanations. The bugs are radioactive which doesn’t have any real significance but is presumably a nod to all those 1950s monster movies that used radiation as an explanation for everything.

This movie also doesn’t bother too much with the standard trope of the genius scientist who discovers the fatal weakness in the alien invaders. Our six heroes just rely on blasting the bugs with shotguns and hacking them with axes.

Earl also uses a chainsaw at one point which is a kind of in-joke - Gunnar Hansen who plays Earl is best known for playing Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

On the subject of casting, Hendricks is played by Ron Asheton, Yes, Ron Asheton the guitarist from legendary proto-punk band The Stooges.

Apart from the obvious influence of 1950s giant bug movies Mosquito also borrows ideas from a stack of well-known movies, from Aliens to Night of the Living Dead.

For my tastes Mosquito relies too much on crude humour, especially early on. It also relies too much on gore but in 1994 that was presumably a commercial necessity. I’m just not a fan of gore. But if you like gore and you like seeing giant insects getting splattered there’s plenty here you’ll enjoy.

There’s a certain amount of excitement and lots of mayhem.

The acting ranges from bad to very bad.

The most interesting thing about this movie is that it was made in 1994 so it was made almost entirely using practical effects, not CGI. The giant mosquitos are mechanical giant mosquitos suspended on wires. There is even stop-motion animation. Some of the effects work well, others not so well, but that’s largely a result of the very small budget rather than the limitations of practical effects.

This is a very bad movie. This is Z-grade schlock. Mostly I like Z-grade schlock but this is just not quite my kind of Z-grade schlock. How much you’ll enjoy this movie is a matter of taste. If you enjoy gore and crass humour more than I do then you’ll enjoy it more than I did. I’m hesitant to recommend it but I’m also hesitant about advising people not to see it.

The Blu-Ray from Synapse looks fairly OK. I suspect that this is a movie that never looked all that great. There’s an audio commentary featuring director Gary Jones and a couple of other members of the crew.

Léon: The Professional (1994)

Luc Besson’s Léon: The Professional came out in 1994 and while it’s not a sequel to his La Femme Nikita it is a kind of spinoff and the two films have lots of thematic affinities.

Both movies deal with professional killers, and with people for whom killing is a vocation rather a job. Besson took that same central idea and came up with two different stories which complement each other. La Femme Nikita deals with a young woman, Nikita, who is a vicious killer and is recruited by the French Government as an assassin. She is totally emotionally disconnected in every way. Léon: The Professional deals with a middle-aged man, Léon, a hitman who is also totally emotionally disconnected in every way.

Léon is a very successful hitman. He refers to himself as a cleaner. He has made a lot of money but lives in a grotty apartment. 12-year-old Mathilda (Natalie Portman) lives in the same building. Her home life is miserable. Her father is a dope dealer. Her entire family is wiped out by DEA agents led by an agent named Stansfield (Gary Oldman). Even by the standards of murderous corrupt cops Stansfield is a nasty piece of work. His fellow DEA officers are brutal thugs.

The DEA officers had intended to murder the whole family but Léon saves Mathilda.

Now he doesn’t know what to do with her. He knows nothing about kids. He doesn’t want a kid. He is a loner. And Mathilda knows what he does for a living. He should kill her. It would be safer. But he can’t. He’s an ethical hitman. He only kills people who are criminals anyway and he never kills women or children.

So he’s stuck with her.

Mathilda wants to learn to be a cleaner. She thinks it would be a cool way to make a living. And she wants revenge against her family’s killers. She’d like Léon to kill them but if he won’t she’s prepared to do the job herself. She just needs Léon to teach her to be an efficient killer. Léon begins her training. She learns quickly.

An emotional bond develops between these two troubled loners.

And eventually there will be a showdown with Stansfield, which is likely to end in a bloodbath (and it does).

This is in a sense a coming-of-age movie but not in a sexual sense. Mathilda’s childhood came to an abrupt blood-soaked end and she was hurled into the grown-up world. Not the regular grown-up world but a grown-up world of outsiders and crime and corrupt cops. It’s a lot for a 12-year-old to cope with but she doesn’t have much choice.

It’s also in a way a coming-of-age story for Léon, who is emotionally stunted and now has to deal with the fact that he is now responsible for a kid. As Mathilda tells him, he saved her life so now he’s responsible for her. Their emotional connection is dealt with in a very sensitive and touching way.

The original cut ran for 135 minutes. After negative responses at previews in the U.S. it was cut by 25 minutes. The theatrical release was the cut version. Besson prefers to call the longer version the Extended Version rather than the Director’s Cut.

The Extended Version would have been too much for mainstream American audiences to cope with, partly because it clearly shows Mathilda as an accessory to a series of murders and partly because it explores the relationship between Léon and Mathilda in greater depth.

It’s difficult to see why anyone would object to the Extended Version. There is absolutely no sex and no nudity and not the slightest suggestion of a sexual relationship between Léon and Mathilda. It is obvious that Mathilda has developed a major crush on Léon. She does some very serious flirting. Léon makes it very clear that nothing is going to happen between them.

The problem of course is that in the U.S. there always has been and always will a knee-jerk reaction to any movie that deals with human relationships in a grown-up complex way. Besson was undoubtedly wise to agree to the savage cuts for the U.S. theatrical release. The original cut is subtle and nuanced but the subtlety and the nuance would not have been appreciated by mainstream American critics.

I think the Extended Version is clearly the superior version.

Jean Reno is excellent. Léon is a killer but he really does have ethical standards, which is more than can be said for the law-enforcement officers in this tale. Léon is a tragic figure, a basically decent guy who has never been able to come to terms with life.

Natalie Portman is superb.

As for Gary Oldman, his clownish absurd performance almost sinks the movie (as he almost sank Besson's The Fifth Element).

There are some memorable action scenes.

Léon: The Professional is a great movie with a definite neo-noir vibe. Very highly recommended and a fine companion piece to La Femme Nikita.

Bluebeard (1944)

Bluebeard is a 1944 PRC release directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and starring John Carradine. It combines melodrama and horror in a characteristically Ulmer way and it’s also interesting as being a serial killer movie which was fairly rare at the time.

Ulmer wrote the original story. It is of course inspired partly by the fairy tale but also by a real-life serial killer who was executed in France in 1922.

The movie clearly takes place in the 19th century and during the Third Republic so it has to be the late 19th century.

Gaston Morel (John Carradine) is a talented painter who has given up painting to concentrate on his marionette theatre. We know right from the start that Morel is a killer (in fact he’s the notorious murderer who has been dubbed Bluebeard). He has killed more than once.

We later find out that his killings are connected with his paintings and that he wants to stop painting so that he can stop killing.

He meets a pretty young seamstress named Lucille (Jean Parker). There’s an immediate attraction between the two of them. Morel is anxious to avoid painting her because he has no desire to kill her. She is not like those other women. She is a woman worth loving.

Inspector Jacques Lefevre (Nils Asther) is investigating the murders. Assisting him is Francine (Teala Loring) who just happens to be Lucille’s sister. Francine works for the Sûreté. She’s a kind of undercover cop. Neither sister is aware that they are both going to be involved in very different ways with the Bluebeard killer.

He is tempted to paint one of the sisters. He knows it’s a bad idea but he needs money and he’s been offered a very generous fee by art dealer Jean Lamarte (Ludwig Stössel). Lamarte is a less than ethical art dealer and he knows Morel’s secret.

The inspector and Francine have a plan to trap Bluebeard but it’s a very risky plan and Morel is a smart guy, and very cautious.

Gaston Morel is a tortured soul. He is driven to kill against his will. It’s a kind of madness that comes over him. It has to do with a woman in his past, and a painting. Morel is perhaps over-sensitive with an artistic but unstable personality. John Carradine gives his career-best performance and imbues Morel with a strange tragic dignity. Morel is doomed but although in his rational phases he tries to escape that doom he cannot escape his periodic bouts of madness. Carradine had been Shakespearian actor and he plays Morel as a Shakespearian tragic hero. It’s also notable that at no point in this film does Carradine overact. It’s a superbly controlled performance.

Jean Parker is very good. In fact the whole cast is good, and the performances are better than you might expect in a movie made by PRC, usually considered to be the cheapest and shoddiest of the Poverty Row studios.

It’s common to assume that all PRC productions were made on ludicrously low budgets. This has been considerably exaggerated and Bluebeard was not the ultra-cheap production it’s often assumed to have been. It cost $167,000 and the shoot took 19 days.

There’s some fine very moody cinematography courtesy of Eugen Schüfftan (who was the cinematographer but had to remain uncredited due to problems with the union). There are some definite hints of German Expressionism in the flashback sequences. There’s one particularly fine shot with shadows and puppets.

The script ran into some problems with the Production Code Authority. Joe Breen wanted some changes made. Ulmer agreed but when he shot the movie he largely ignored Breen’s objections and most of the material he had agreed to remove is still there in the final film.

Despite his rocky career path Ulmer managed to make some very fine movies and Bluebeard is one of his best. And there’s Carradine’s magnificent performance. Highly recommended.

Kino Lorber have released this movie on Blu-Ray and it certainly looks better than it has ever looked before. It is now possible to appreciate to the full the fine cinematography and art direction. We can now see that this was really quite a classy production.

I’ve reviewed lots of Ulmer’s movies including Ruthless (1948), the very underrated The Strange Woman (1946) and his most acclaimed movie, Detour (1945).

There have of course been quite a few movies inspired by the Bluebeard fairy tale, one of my favourites being Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door… (1948).

The Fifth Element (1997)

To describe Luc Besson’s 1997 science fiction opus The Fifth Element as bizarre would be an understatement of monumental proportions.

The plot is nothing special but this movie is all about style over substance. I have no problems with that. I like movies that take that approach. Sometimes the style is the substance. That’s certainly the case here. Whether you will enjoy the style of this film is a matter of taste.

It begins in 1914 with an archaeologist in Egypt deciphering inscriptions. That’s when the aliens arrive and announce that the stones are no longer safe on Earth. The stones have something to do with an ultimate weapon for defeating evil. There are four stones. Each represents one of the elements - earth, air, fire and water. But the key is the fifth element.

Several centuries later Earth faces a terrifying undefeatable menace from space. Those aliens (the good aliens) promised to send the fifth element to us but their spaceship was destroyed by space pirates employed by the evil businessman/super criminal Zorg (Gary Oldman).

Some tissues samples are saved from the wrecked spacecraft and regenerated. The result is a strange but beautiful redhead named Leeloo (Milla Jovovich).

Leeloo is confined within an escape-proof isolation chamber from which she easily escapes. She ends up in the flying cab operated by Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis). He’s a retired special forces officer. Now he just wants to drive flying cabs. He doesn’t want trouble. He should hand Leeloo over to the cops when they order him to do so. But Leeloo seems so cute and helpless and nobody likes cops so he rescues her.

There is of course a secret to Leeloo. Crazy priest Cornelius (Ian Holm) has some idea what that secret is.

Huge amounts of mayhem follow, with Zorg and a bunch of disgruntled alien space pirates trying to get their hands on the stone. It builds to a climax on a report planet.

There are lots of explosions and gun battles.

One of the things that makes this movie interesting is that it was written and directed by a Frenchman, the cinematographer was French and the costumes were designed by a Frenchman. As a result this movie looks totally unlike any Hollywood science fiction movie. This is a very French science fiction movie.

Science fiction movies always predict the future wrongly and always get the aesthetics of the future totally wrong. Except maybe The Fifth Element. The people who made this movie were sure of one thing. Whatever the future was going to look like it was going to be crass and vulgar and an orgy of bad taste. Looking at the world today 27 years after the movie was made we certainly seem to be on track to making that prediction come true.

We are not going to get the uber-cool dystopian future of Blade Runner, but we might well get the bad taste on steroids future of The Fifth Element.

The costumes were designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier. Gaultier was notorious for designing clothes that no sane person would ever want to wear, except perhaps to a costume party with a bad taste theme. The staggering awfulness of Gaultier’s designs actually works well in a science fiction movie context. This is a future in which people dress like insane clowns at a fetish party.

Everything about the production design is overblown and vulgar beyond imagining.

Which does make it interesting.

There’s some staggeringly bad acting. I have no idea what Gary Oldman thought he was doing.

Bruce Willis on the other hand is excellent. He’s a Hero. A reluctant Hero perhaps, but a Hero. He’s cynical but fundamentally decent. He doesn’t let bad things happen to helpless girls. He might grumble but he’ll do his best to save them anyway. As for saving the world, yeah he’s in favour of that, but if you want to get him truly motivated present him with a cute helpless girl who needs to be rescued. Willis also has prodigious amounts of gruff charisma.

The movie’s biggest asset is Milla Jovovich. Playing an alien is tricky. You have to make an alien seem truly alien, someone who just doesn’t react in a normal human way. Jovovich does a great job at doing just that. She also has to be so adorable that even the most reluctant hero would risk his neck to save her. Jovovich takes adorableness to whole new levels here. Any man would be willing to sacrifice anything for such a girl. She’s also incredible amounts of fun to watch.

This is an incredibly bad movie, and yet in its deranged way it’s an incredibly good movie. It just depends on what mind-altering substances you’re consuming while watching it. There is so much about this movie that is so bad. But there’s so much that is so good. There’s just no other movie like it. It’s a badly flawed work of deranged visionary genius. For all its flaws it’s an absolute must-see movie and it’s highly recommended.

It also looks terrific on Blu-Ray.

The Exorcist III (1990)

Exorcist III is the third movie in the series and the story behind the movie is more complicated than the movie.

Willian Peter Blatty, author of the original 1971 novel The Exorcist and screenwriter of the original 1973 The Exorcist movie, wrote a screenplay for a third movie. The production company, Morgan Creek, wanted changes. Eventually a screenplay more or less acceptable to both parties took shape but with a major dispute regarding the ending. Several directors were considered before Blatty decided to direct the movie himself.

After a less than successful preview Morgan Creek ordered extensive reshoots including an exorcism scene. Blatty reluctantly did the reshoots. Blatty remained very unhappy about the exorcism scene. He saw the movie as a story linked to the original story, but not an exorcism movie.

Blatty turned the original version into a very successful novel, Legion. He had always wanted Legion as the title of the movie rather than Exorcist III.

Years later Blatty’s original cut was restored (with the title Legion) using VHS footage in Blatty’s personal possession. Both the Shout! Factory and Arrow Blu-Rays include this Legion “director’s cut” as an extra so it’s possible to see the movie Blatty had wanted to make, which differs in a number of ways from the Exorcist III theatrical cut.

Lieutenant Kinderman (George C. Scott) is investigating a series of horrific murders that remind him eerily of the Gemini Killer murders, but the Gemini Killer is dead. Kinderman expresses his fears to his old buddy Father Dyer (Ed Flanders).

Much of the film takes place in the psychiatric ward of a hospital. A man known only as Patient X claims to be the Gemini Killer.

What is actually going on remains mysterious until the ending, and perhaps even after that. Patient X cannot leave his cell. He cannot be carrying out the new murders. Or can he? This is not just a series of copycat killings. Both the killer and Patient X know things about the Gemini killings that the police have never revealed.

Kinderman is a rationalist. He resists the idea that there could be anything supernatural going on here. He knows that there are things happening that are difficult to explain in any other way, but he still resists.

The plot is complicated. It involves several dead people. Not just the Gemini Killer, but also Father Damien Karris. Kinderman knows these people are dead.

It seems to have been Blatty’s intention to tell a story connected to the events in The Exorcist, and involving some of the same people, but that would not be a sequel in the usual sense. Of course his difficulty is that Morgan Creek wanted it to be a sequel in a much more straightforward sense.

There are grisly murders but they take place offscreen. This is a cerebral slow-burn horror film, until the grand guignol ending (which Blatty vehemently did not want). This is very much theological horror. I wouldn’t say that you have to be a Catholic to appreciate this film but you do need at least a vague knowledge of the basics of Catholic theology. There’s a clever well-executed dream sequence but unless you’re aware of the Catholic concept of Purgatory you’ll misunderstand it completely.

This also seems to have caused tensions between Blatty and the execs at Morgan Creeks who wanted more overt horror content.

The most significant and obvious difference Blatty’s version and the theatrical cut is the exorcism scene which is entirely absent from Blatty’s cut. Blatty was correct to feel that that scene was entirely unnecessary and damaged the film. On the other hand one can see Morgan Creek’s point of view - without that scene it’s a very talky film with very little overt horror.

The movie did poorly at the box office but whichever version had been released it would probably have done poorly. It’s an intellectual theological horror film in which the characters endlessly discuss theological questions. That doesn’t make it a bad movie, but it does make it a movie with limited commercial appeal.

Exorcist III/Legion is interesting but I have to say that it didn’t particularly grab me. But then I’m not much of a fan of The Exorcist either. I’m one of those weird crazy people who think Exorcist II: The Heretic is a masterpiece.

Exorcist III looks good on Blu-Ray. When you Blatty’s version Legion you do have to accept that the VHS-sourced inserts are VHS quality but Blatty’s version is still worth watching.

Adventures of a Private Eye (1977)

Adventures of a Private Eye was the second of the three “Adventures of” British sex comedies. It was Britain’s biggest box office hit of 1977. The previous film in the series, Adventures of a Taxi Driver (1976), had been a box-office smash as well.

Stanley A. Long was both producer and director and he owned the production company and he owned the distribution company as well. Which meant that he made a great deal of money out of these films. And they were very low-budget movies so the box-office receipts were mostly pure profit.

Bob West (Christopher Neil) is a private detective. Or at least he works for a very successful private detective, Judd Blake (Jon Pertwee). Bob West is just his assistant. Judd considers that Bob is just about capable of making the coffee and that’s it (and he’s right). When Judd heads off for a holiday with his gorgeous dolly bird secretary he gives Bob strict instructions not to try to handle any cases on his own.

Needless to say Bob ignores these instructions and when glamorous blonde Laura (Suzy Kendall) asks him to take on a case Bob agrees.

Laura is being blackmailed over some salacious photos, which is a problem because a scandal could cost her her inheritance, and that inheritance is enormous.

Naturally Bob proves to be a totally inept private eye.

The members of the family of Laura’s deceased husband might be behind the blackmail but Bob convinces himself that the culprit is photographer Scott Radley (Robin Stewart).

The case gets complicated by murder and Bob’s crime-solving efforts cause mayhem.

It has been said that the trouble with the British sex comedies of the 70s is that they’re not sexy and they’re not funny. That’s a bit unfair, but it is true in some cases. It’s certainly true here.

The basic premise is fine. One can certainly imagine a private eye getting into situations with the potential for sexiness and humour. But it all falls flat.

This is the least sexy sex comedy in motion picture history. In fact it’s a movie that gives the impression that Long was going out of his way to avoid being sexy. Time and again a situation is set up with overwhelmingly obvious potential for sexy shenanigans and absolutely nothing happens. In the entire movie there are about three very brief very tame nude scenes which occupy in total about 15 seconds of the film’s 96-minute running time.

This is a sex comedy without the sex.

There is some comedy. There are some amusing scenes. There is some amusing dialogue. But nowhere near enough. There’s plenty of frenetic action but comedy requires frenetic action and gags, and the gags are few are far between. There's too much plot and not enough fun.

Of course comedy is very much a matter of personal taste and I have to lay my cards on the table here - I am not a fan of slapstick. And this movies relies heavily on slapstick. I just don’t think that a hero who keeps falling over things is particularly funny. This was apparently deliberate. Stanley Long disliked double entendres and tried to avoid them. Which is a problem, double entendres being pretty much an essential ingredient in a sex comedy. Long loved slapstick. If you share his enthusiasm for slapstick you might enjoy this movie a lot more than I did.

Stanley A. Long was a major player in British sexploitation cinema for two decades. Which makes it intriguing that Adventures of a Private Eye is so incredibly coy.

Christopher Neil handles the lead role extremely well. I like Suzy Kendall as an actress but she was an odd choice as the female lead. She had obviously made it clear that she would not do any nude scenes or sex scenes. Since she’s not given any really funny lines either it was hardly worthwhile casting her.

Sex comedies were being made in lots of different countries at this time, for the same reasons - film industries were going down the gurgler and sex comedies at least had a chance of making money. There were Italian sex comedies, such as The Nurse (1975). Japanese sex comedies, such as Nurse Girl Dorm: Sticky Fingers (1985). And Australian sex comedies, like Alvin Purple (1973). For my money the Italian, Japanese and Australian efforts were a lot sexier and a lot funnier than the British efforts.

I’ve also reviewed Adventures of a Taxi Driver (1976) which I think is a marginally better film. For comparison I’ve also reviewed the first of the Confessions movies, Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974). And I’ve reviewed Come Play With Me (1977) which is one of few British sex comedies that I’ve really enjoyed (and it really is very very sexy). Interestingly, Stanley A. Long despised that film. Mary Millington's other notable sex comedy, The Playbirds (1978) is also worth seeing.

I have a high tolerance for 70s British sex comedies but Adventures of a Private Eye is a bit disappointing. It’s worth a look if you’re going to buy the boxed set anyway.

All three Adventures movies are included in a Powerhouse Indicator Blu-Ray set. This movie gets a good transfer, and extras include a director’s commentary track and a fine video essay by Simon Sheridan.

The Blancheville Monster (1963)

The Blancheville Monster is a 1963 Spanish-Italian gothic horror movie made mostly in Italy but with some location shooting in Spain. It was one of the first films directed by the young Alberto De Martino and was his first foray into horror. He was rather dismissive of this early effort but it’s actually very enjoyable.

It was also released under the title Horror with Edgar Allan Poe’s name prominent on the posters. In the 60s lots of movies made use of Poe’s name despite having no connection to any of his works. In this case however this really is a very Poe-like movie. It’s not an adaptation of a particular Poe story but the Poe flavour of aristocratic decay and decadence and doom and old families descending into madness is very very strong. It uses elements from The Fall of the House of Usher and from another Poe story which I won’t name since that would reveal a spoiler.

This movie was also clearly influenced by the success of Roger Corman’s Poe films, especially his 1960 The House of Usher. The Blancheville Monster is therefore Poe with a Corman flavouring and with an Italian sensibility.

The names of the characters can be confusing since there are huge differences between the Italian-language version and the English-dubbed version. The English version indicates the setting as Brittany but the Italian version makes it clear that this is Scotland in 1884. The decaying aristocratic Blackford family in the Italian version becomes the de Blancheville family in the English version.

It’s obvious from the start that De Martino is going to throw at us every gothic trapping and cliché he can get his hands on. That’s part of the reason this movie works. If you’re going down the gothic road you might as well go all the way. Gothic horror cannot be too excessive.

We start in the forest and then we get a glimpse of a decaying gothic castle. The film was clearly shot in autumn. There’s not a single leaf on any of the trees. There’s a feeling of desolation and death.

A carriage arrives at the castle. Emily Blackford (Ombretta Colli) is fresh from school and is to be reunited with her brother Roderick (Gérard Tichy). She is accompanied by her friend Alice Taylor (Irán Eory) and Alice’s brother John (Vanni Materassi).

It’s not entirely a joyful homecoming since old Lord Blackford (the father of Emily and Roderick) was burnt to death in an accident a year earlier.

Emily discovers that old of the old familiar servants are gone, and when she asks what happened to them she gets evasive answers. This immediately offers a hint that something is not quite right at Blackford Castle.

And then Emily is introduced to the new housekeeper, Eleonore (Helga Liné). Eleonore is much too beautiful and much too glamorous and the two women distrust each other on sight. Eleonore is dressed in black and looks like a young sexy version of Mrs Danvers. We know there has to be something sinister about her.

De Martino immediately has the viewer feeling uneasy about all of the inhabitants of this crumbing castle. Roderick has taken to brooding. Eleonore is obviously sinister. The family doctor, Doctor Atwell (Leo Anchóriz), is shifty. The new butler, Alastair, is evasive.

And De Martino keeps us guessing about these people. Is Roderick haunted by the past, is he crazy, is he evil or is he just gloomy and moody? Is Emily going crazy? Is it some hereditary madness, is her mind being poisoned, is she being actually poisoned or deliberately driven insane or is she just unable to cope with the atmosphere of gloom in this castle? Is the doctor involved in some mysterious plot? Is Eleonore involved in a sinister conspiracy? De Martino offers us some hints and some red herrings as well.

The screenplay by Giovanni Grimaldi and Bruno Corbucci takes Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher as a jumping-off point but it’s not even vaguely a faithful adaptation. It’s more of a Poe-esque gothic horror mystery romance.

The Spanish locations (in a spectacular ruined abbey) are used with considerable skill. The location shooting, the matte paintings and the miniatures effects do not combine to achieve anything approaching realism, but this is gothic horror. It’s not supposed to feel realistic. This is the gothic world, a world where dream and reality intersect, where the past and present co-exist, and it’s a world of unconscious fears, drives and longings. This movie has exactly the right gothic feel. And it does look great. The black-and-white cinematography is very impressive.

There’s a rather nicely done dream sequence.

It was a very strict rule at the time that a gothic horror movie had to include a scene with the pretty heroine wandering down a mysterious sinister castle corridor in a filmy nightdress and carrying a candelabra. And preferably descending or ascending a spooky stairway. Since this movie includes every known gothic trope it naturally has such a scene.

De Martino may have been inexperienced but he was already very competent.

The Blancheville Monster may not be groundbreaking and it may not be top-tier gothic horror but it has all the right ingredients nicely combined and the result is fine entertainment. Highly recommended.

This is part of Arrow’s Gothic Fantastico Blu-Ray boxed set which also includes Lady Morgan’s Vengeance (1965), The Third Eye (1966) and the excellent The Witch (La strega in amore, 1966). The Blancheville Monster gets a lovely transfer and there’s an audio commentary.