The House of Lost Women (1983)

The House of Lost Women (La casa de las mujeres perdidas) was released in 1983 and belongs to Jess Franco’s Golden Films period. With Golden Films he was working on micro-budgets and as an added problem they proved to be spectacularly incompetent when it came to securing distribution outside Spain. On the other hand Golden Films gave him total creative freedom. Franco loved working for them. If he had total freedom he simply didn’t care how little money he had to work with. In this case he’s come up with a script that requires nothing more than a camera and a handful of good actors and as so often he’s also found a perfect location.

The House of Lost Women stars Lina Romay (who as so often at this period is billed as Candy Coster).

As with most Franco films of this era assigning The House of Lost Women to a genre is a bit of a challenge. It’s an erotic movie, but Franco’s erotic movies were not like other people’s. And describing it as an erotic movie is likely to give a false impression. It deals with sex, but it’s unsettling rather than arousing.

Mario Pontecorvo (Antonio Mayans) is an Argentinian actor who now lives on a tiny Spanish island with his family. Mario was forced to leave Argentina after some unpleasantness with the authorities there, unpleasantness relating to his sexual activities with a young woman. Mario is rather vague on this subject.

Mario lives on the island with his wife Dulcinea (Carmen Carrión) and his two daughters by a previous marriage. Paulova (Asunción Calero) has the body of a woman but the mind of a very small child. Desdémona (Lina Romay) is another matter.

Desdémona is the central character and provides voiceover narration.

This is one strange disturbed family. Mario seems to live in the past, dreaming of his past triumphs as an actor. He is entirely unable to satisfy Dulcinea’s sexual needs. Dulcinea is as a result crawling the walls. She has a few other issues as well, including a taste for sexual sadism.

Desdémona’s problem is that she is a virgin. She would very much like to change that situation. Given that there are no men on the island other than her father that’s a bit of a challenge for her. She has considered the possibility that her father might be able to solve the problem for her but her attempts at seduction fail and he rebuffs her approaches. Desdémona spends most of her time pleasuring herself but she desperately craves a man.

Then Tony Curtis arrives on the island. No, not that Tony Curtis. This is a young man who claims to be a hunter. As you might expect both Desdémona and Dulcinea are very excited by his arrival. You might also expect that Desdémona won’t remain a virgin much longer, and you’d be right.

The Pontecorvo family was wildly dysfunctional to begin with but this new arrival makes things dangerously unstable.

This is a classic setup for an erotic thriller or a murder mystery but that’s not at all what Franco is interested in giving us. It’s more of a psycho-sexual melodrama but heavily laced with black comedy. This is a rather amusing movie at times but it’s also at other times quite bleak. We don’t expect things to end well but Franco is not going to give us the bloodbath ending that we might have anticipated.

There’s some crazy humour in this film. Desdémona always has the TV on and while various sexual shenanigans are going on we hear a series of bizarre TV commercials in the background, and the TV station is clearly supposed to be broadcasting Dallas but this is Jess Franco’s crazed idea of Dallas. Surprisingly this stuff is actually quite amusing. It also adds an extra touch of weirdness. This is not the real world. This is Jess Franco World.

Antonio Mayans gives a very impressive performance as Mario. Mario lives in a strange world of fantasy with only the most tenuous grip on reality. It would be wrong to describe him as either villain or a victim. He’s more of a non-participant in life. He doesn’t really wish ill upon others because he’s hardly even aware of their existence.

Asunción Calero is frighteningly childlike and disturbing as Paulova. Carmen Carrión is chilling as Dulcinea.

At first we assume that we’re going to see Lina Romay once again as a sexually obsessed mad girl but as the story unfolds we start to question this. Perhaps Desdémona isn’t mad at all. She’s certainly sexually frustrated but she’s also desperate for love and she’s very bored and very lonely. She seems mad and sometimes her behaviour is unsettling but that’s because she’s in such a mad environment. Desdémona is more of a lost girl than a mad girl. It’s a subtle and poignant performance by Romay.

The House of Lost Women dates from a period at which Franco felt under no compulsion whatsoever to conform to any genre expectations. This is a story idea that appealed to him so he made the movie. The more I see of Franco’s 80s work the more of these odd neglected gems I find. Highly recommended.

Severin’s Blu-Ray (they’ve released this as a DVD as well) includes some very worthwhile extras. The audio essay by Robert Monell is good and as usual Stephen Thrower’s appreciation of the film is informative and perceptive.

The Seventh Grave (1965)

As much as I love Italian gothic horror movies it’s not easy to find too many positive things to say about The Seventh Grave (La settima tomba, 1965).

The setup is fairly standard. In 19th century Scotland the heirs have gathered in the hopes of getting their shares of the fortune of recently deceased Reginald Thorne, lord of Nofis Castle. 

They’re also attracted by the stories about a treasure concealed in the castle, a treasure that had belonged to Thorne’s ancestor Sir Francis Drake.

A young notary is also there, to read the will.

Young Katy is reputed to be a powerful medium so it seems like a good idea to persuade her to contact Reginald Thorne’s spirit. A séance is held. With inconclusive results.

The first body to turn up is that of the castle’s caretaker Patrick. There will be more corpses. It could be that one of the heirs is a murderer, which would make this more of an Old Dark House movie than a gothic horror. But it could of course be a ghost or some other supernatural entity.

There are empty coffins in the Thorne family crypt, coffins that should not be empty. Corpses appear and disappear. Mysterious lights are seen in the crypt.

The castle is vast. The only one who knew all its secrets was Patrick and he’s dead.

The good news is that the law has arrived, in the person of Inspector Martin. He’s confident that he can find the killer. He doesn’t seem to be having much success.

And then the will disappears.

There are some clues that point to what is really going on but no-one notices since the truth is too strange to be believed.

Director Garibaldi Serra Caracciolo offers us most of the standard gothic horror trappings but there’s something missing. To get the gothic atmosphere right it’s necessary to take some trouble to get the lighting right and the framing right and that doesn’t happen here. It all looks a bit too flat, with no real sense of gothic weirdness or menace or creepiness. That might be because the people who made this movie were just not in the top rank as far as Italian genre cinema was concerned and they lacked the skills, and the instincts. This was Caracciolo’s only directing gig and it’s easy enough to see why.

This is also a very low-budget movie and that might be the problem - there may simply not have been enough time and money to allow the necessary effort to be made. This is a cheap movie that unfortunately looks cheap.

A major problem is the music which is very tacky and obvious and makes the movie seem even cheaper.

There are no major names in the cast. The acting isn’t terrible but on the whole it’s rather dull and the lack of even a single charismatic performer is a weakness. The audience isn’t given enough reason to care about the characters.

The most interesting thing about this film is that it’s a reminder that even the most satisfying genres vary in quality. It’s worth seeing some of the lesser movies in order to appreciate more fully just what it was that made the great movies in these genres so great.

There’s nothing terribly wrong with the basic story. In fact it’s perfectly adequate. It’s just that it’s executed without any real style or sense of menace or suspense.

The Seventh Grave is quite simply dull.

This movie is included in Severin’s Danza Macabra Blu-Ray boxed set. The transfer is good and there’s an audio commentary in which Rachael Nisbet struggles valiantly to find positive things to say about the movie. It’s a fine boxed set and if you’re going to buy it (and you should) you might give The Seventh Grave a spin merely out of curiosity but make sure to set your expectations very low.

The Voyeur (1994)

The Voyeur (L'uomo che guarda) is a 1994 Tinto Brass movie based (loosely) on Alberto Moravia's novel.

Tinto Brass has had a fascinating career. In the 60s he was being hailed as the next Antonioni. His art-movie credentials were impeccable. Then in 1976 he made Salon Kitty and all hell broke loose. It dealt with a subject that obsessed Brass at the time - the links between absolute power and sexual excess. It was not a movie for the faint-hearted. He followed it up with Caligula which ignited an even bigger firestorm.

After which Brass more or less decided to go his own way. He’d make the movies he wanted to make and if the critics hated them then that was their problem. And the movies Brass wanted to make were erotic movies. Intelligent, sophisticated, witty, arty erotic movies.

The 70s had been the heyday of art porn, a period when it really did seem possible (to a lot of people) to make erotic art movies. Some put the emphasis more on art than eroticism and some focused more on the eroticism. The results were mixed but some genuinely extremely good and interesting movies were made. By the 80s the advent of home video and hardcore killed the softcore movie market stone dead. What Brass wanted to do was simply no longer possible. He did it anyway. And made a successful new career out of it.

Tinto Brass made arty erotic movies but do not make the mistake of thinking that these movies are going to be dull, earnest and miserable (as is usually the case when British or American directors try to do arty erotica). Most of Brass’s erotic films contain a great deal of humour and quite a few are in fact arty sophisticated sex comedies. Brass is famous for his love of the female posterior but there’s a lot more to him than that. He has a playful sense of humour. He has the crazy idea that sexuality is a good thing and that sex can be enjoyable. It can also be amusing.

Which brings us to The Voyeur. Eduardo (Dodò to his friends) is a professor of French literature. He is married to Silvia (Katarina Vasilissa). They live with his bedridden father who is also a professor. He is bedridden due to an accident but is expected to recover. Silvia has moved out but she still sleeps with Dodò. She seems strangely distant emotionally. Dodò thinks she may be having an affair.

Dodò is a voyeur, in a sense. It is partly a sexual kink with him but it’s also a professional interest. The main focus of his academic work is voyeurism in art and literature, but voyeurism in a wider sense than the purely erotic. To Dodò the pleasure of observing is one of the keys, perhaps the principal key, to an understanding of art and literature.

He met his wife through his interest in voyeurism - he used to spy on her through her open window. Then he found out that she knew he was watching and it excited her. Silvia is an exhibitionist so they’re well-matched.

Dodò begins to suspect that Silvia is having an affair with his father. His father is certainly very interested in sex, and he receives certain sexual favours from his pretty nurse Fausta (Cristina Garavaglia). Dodò has watched them together.

Dodò becomes increasingly obsessed. He is insanely jealous. He has to find out what is really going on even if it leads to disaster.

This is a movie about voyeurism but it’s also a movie about secrets, and lies, and fantasies. Some of the secret things may be merely fantasies. Some of the lies may not be lies. And when we observe things we can’t always be sure that they’re true, and if they are true we can’t always be sure what they mean. Fantasies can be difficult to distinguish from reality. Dodò may in fact be living in a world of his own fantasies. On the other hand it might all be true.

So there’s lots of artiness here. There is also a staggering amount of both male and female frontal nudity. And lots of quite graphic sex. It goes as far as it’s possible to go while remaining softcore, and then a little bit further. Not surprisingly it did not get a U.S. theatrical release.

Tinto Brass himself has never made any secret of his voyeuristic obsession with the female form so this is a voyeuristic movie about voyeurism made by a voyeur and watching the movie is an exercise in voyeurism, all of which is exactly what Brass intended it to be.

Brass’s later movies tended to be shunned by critics who refused to consider the possibility that such very sexually explicit movies might be intelligent and emotionally nuanced. They also failed to understand that Brass was deliberately provoking them. In addition they could not possibly grasp the idea that erotica might be done with humour.

The Voyeur is a genuine attempt to grapple with subject matter that other directors with his early art-house credentials would never dare to confront. It’s intriguing and it’s highly recommended.

This is one of three films included in the UK Fifty Shades of Tinto Brass DVD set. The Voyeur has since been released on Blu-Ray by Cult Epics.

I’ve also reviewed Brass’s excellent Monella (1998) as well as Tra(sgre)dire (2000).

Curse of the Voodoo (1965)

Curse of the Voodoo is an obscure 1965 British horror film that turns out to be not at all what you might expect. There is certainly voodoo here but it’s more a psychological thriller than a horror film.

Mike Stacey (Bryant Haliday) is a big game hunter in Africa. He is employed by safari operator Major Lomas (Dennis Price). His troubles begin when he shoots a lion. In the process of doing so he gets mauled. Not severely, but it’s still upsetting. 

He shoots the lion within the territory of a tribe, the Simbazi, who regard lions as gods. They believe that anyone who kills a lion will pay a terrible price. They will make sure of that.

You might expect the tribesmen to come after Mike to kill him but what actually happens is a lot more interesting. He returns to London where he is haunted by dreams, and he sees African tribesmen stalking him. They appear to be merely visions of a mind that is becoming disturbed but there’s quite a bit of ambiguity in this movie. The lines between sanity and madness and between reality and illusion do become somewhat blurred.

There is definitely voodoo in this movie, although since we’re dealing with Africa it’s probably obeah rather than voodoo (but having voodoo in the title was obviously a much sounder commercial move).

Mike already had a few problems. Drinking too much, plus marital problems. His wife Janet has left him. He wants her back.

Mike’s wound is healing very slowly. His doctor is worried. Naturally he assumes that the signs of mental instability Mike is displaying are caused by a combination of an infected wound and too much alcohol. He’s a London doctor so he certainly doesn’t consider voodoo when making a diagnosis.

Mike’s dreams and visions (if they are just dreams and visions) become more and more vivid. He sees a face peering around his doorway and opens fire with his revolver but there was nobody there. Fortunately no-one was hurt and the police are not too worried.

Mike is quite an interesting character. He’s not an overly loveable guy but he’s not really unsympathetic. He’s a fairly decent man and he really does love his wife. He has tried to be a good husband. Maybe he’s not the husband she wanted and needed but he has done his best.

Bryant Haliday’s performance is a bit detached but that works in his favour since he is playing a man who is haunted but unwilling to reveal his emotions openly. I ended up being quite impressed by his performance.

Lisa Daniely as his wife Janet is pretty good. And Dennis Price is always watchable.

Look out for Dennis Alaba Peters who went on to play Sir Curtis Seretse in the wonderful ITC TV series Department S.

One could see this as a movie about the clash between the world of magic and the world of reason, between two radically different worldviews.

This movie is an example of the need to approach movies with an open mind. It would be a mistake to approach this film assuming it’s going to be a cheap shoddy Z-grade movie. If you do have an open mind you may find yourself being drawn into what really is a quite nicely executed slightly offbeat movie. And it does have that fascinating ambiguity that it never makes the mistake of trying to resolve too neatly.

It’s all very low-budget of course, but I don’t think that’s a problem here.

And it does have a screenplay by Brian Clemens, and quite a neatly done screenplay too.

Lindsay Shonteff directed. He was a minor director but made a few interesting movies including The Million Eyes of Sumuru (1967) and Permissive (1970), the bleakest most pessimistic most depressing sexploitation movie ever made (although it is intriguing). Having watched Curse of the Voodoo ii’m inclined to think I’ve been guilty of underestimating Shonteff. This is a movie made by a director who knows what he’s trying to achieve and knows how to achieve it. He pulls off some quite effective visual set-pieces which were clearly done with very little money. They rely purely on the skill of the director. This guy might not be a great director but he’s certainly an interesting one.

Curse of the Voodoo does not deserve to languish in obscurity. It’s a nice little movie that teases us with the possibility that it’s either supernatural horror or psychological horror. Highly recommended.

The Screenbound all-region DVD offers a perfectly adequate transfer.

The Horrible Dr Hichcock (1962)

Riccardo Freda is generally regarded as one of the lesser Italian genre directors of the 60s and 70s. One reason for this might be that for years his gothic horror masterwork The Horrible Dr Hichcock (AKA The Terror of Dr Hichcock AKA L'orribile segreto del Dr Hichcock) could only be seen in very poor quality grey market releases. It’s now available on Blu-Ray and it’s worthy of re-evaluation.

It deals with classic gothic themes in a rather daring way for 1962.

Professor Bernard Hichcock (Robert Flemyng) is one of the most eminent surgeons in London in the 1880s. He is pushing the boundaries of surgery and of anaesthesia. He has a laboratory attached to his house. His work is somewhat experimental and there are risks. Sadly an experiment goes wrong and his beloved wife Margaretha dies. The professor can no longer stand living in the house and disappears. He is presumably now living in retirement somewhere.

Twelve years later he is back in London, with a pretty new wife. He met Cynthia (Barbara Steele) when he was treating her for a nervous disorder. Cynthia is very much in love with her husband.

Bernard Hichcock is clearly a man haunted by the past. The house is filled with pictures of his first wife Margaretha. This upsets Cynthia - Margaretha may be dead but she still seems to be a rival for her husband’s love.

There is a locked room in the house which Cynthia is forbidden to enter. Being a woman she naturally enters it. It’s all a bit disturbing. Other things make her uneasy - she is convinced she sees the figure of a woman in the house and in the grounds of the estate but her husband assures her that that is impossible.

There’s also a creepy housekeeper, Martha, who seems to resent Cynthia’s presence.

Professor Hichcock’s behaviour becomes more unstable. His colleagues, especially his chief assistant Dr Kurt Lowe (Silvano Tranquilli), worry about him. Cynthia is becoming quite frightened. She fears that there is something threatening in this household and of course she’s right. She really is in danger, but what kind of danger?

Freda obviously never met a gothic visual clichè he didn’t love. He lays on the gothic trappings very think indeed. Which is fine. The gothic is a genre in which nothing succeeds like excess. The Horrible Dr Hichcock is overcooked and overdone and overblown but that just makes it more alluring to fans of Italian gothic horror.

I can’t help wondering if this movie was influenced by the style and mood of Roger Corman’s The Fall of the House of Usher. It has a similar vibe.

I suspect a very definite Poe influence as well. While Hammer gothic horror was very concerned with good vs evil Poe was more interested in decadence, madness and doom and Corman’s Poe adaptations reflect that. The Horrible Dr Hichcock reflects some of that as well.

This movie takes things a lot further in the direction of madness and very unhealthy sexual obsessions. Italian film-makers at this time were still limited by censorship in terms of showing nudity and sex but they were able to push sexual themes much further. This movie pushes them a long way indeed.

Having a screenplay by the great Ernesto Gastaldi certainly helps. This is perhaps more of a Gastaldi film than a Freda film.

While it’s obvious that the professor has a bit of a thing for dead girls the movie perhaps doesn’t make it sufficiently clear that this is what led to the unfortunate demise of his first wife. There are rumours that the film fell behind schedule which resulted in several important scenes not being filmed.

This movie also very obviously owes a debt to Hitchcock’s gothic masterpiece Rebecca.

Barbara Steele is excellent as always and as always looks extraordinary. Robert Flemyng is suitably creepy, tortured and on the verge of complete madness. Necrophilia is not exactly conducive to retaining one’s sanity.

Freda does have to be assigned to the second rank of Italian genre directors but The Horrible Dr Hichcock succeeds by virtue of its sheer excessiveness. It has plenty of flaws, it’s not a great movie in any conventional sense, but it is outrageous and enjoyably deranged. Highly recommended.

The Olive Films Blu-Ray is barebones but looks lovely. The English soundtrack is the only audio option but that’s no real problem given that even the Italian language versions of Italian genre films of this era were post-dubbed.

Cyber City Oedo 808 (anime OVA, 1990)

Yoshiaki Kawajiri's Cyber City Oedo 808 is top-tier cyberpunk anime.

Criminals recruited as cyber-cops. Lots of paranoia and violent action in a high-tech dystopia. And there are also vampires! Of a sort. And a love story. Of a sort.

Lots of style, tragedy, mystery and weirdness.

Read my full review at Cult TV Lounge.

Armitage III: Poly-Matrix (1996)

Several things need to be cleared up in regard to Armitage III: Poly-Matrix right from the start. Firstly, despite the title, this is not the third film in a series. In fact it’s the first film in a two-movie series. It’s called Armitage III because the heroine, Armitage, is a Third. I’ll explain that later.

Secondly, it started life as an OVA (original animation video) with a total running time of 120 minutes. In 1996 it was edited down to 90 minutes as a feature film. The editing required some dialogue changes which made it impossible to use the Japanese language track from the OVA. As a result there is no Japanese language version of the Armitage III: Poly-Matrix feature film. Since the feature film was clearly aimed at English-speaking markets such as the United States and Australia that was no problem. And while so many 1980s/1990s animes were given truly atrocious English dubs by American and British distributors this one has a perfectly acceptable English dub. Armitage is voiced by Elizabeth Berkeley and her partner Ross Sylibus is voiced by Kiefer Sutherland. They’re both fine, and Berkeley is actually rather good - she sounds like an anime heroine.

It also seems likely that the OVA was shot in the 1.37:1 aspect ratio and cropped to 1.85:1 for the feature film release. Some shots certainly look like they might be cropped.

Armitage III: Poly-Matrix is very much in the cyberpunk mode. The setting is Mars at some future date. Mars now has huge cities and a large population. A significant segment of the population comprises robots. These are mostly Seconds (second-generation robots). They’re quite suitable for undemanding routine work and there’s a lot of tension as a result - the humans on Mars resent the robots for taking jobs away from them.

There are also Thirds (third-generation robots). They are almost indistinguishable from humans and are regarded with enormous suspicion.

Chicago cop Ross Sylibus has just arrived on Mars to join the Martian PD. He has personal reasons for not liking robots.

He is partnered with Naomi Armitage, a tiny but formidable female described by one of the other cops as a terror in hot pants. Armitage doesn’t wear too much in the way of clothing. Too much clothing cramps her style.

On arrival on Mars Ross finds himself in the middle of a pitched gun battle. Left behind is the corpse of a famous female country singer, except that it’s not a corpse but the remains of a robot.

Someone seems to be trying to destroy all the Thirds. That’s a crime problem that needs to be solved but there are other puzzles as well. Why are all Thirds female? And Why exactly were they created? The Seconds were quite adequate when it came to performing most of the functions required of robots. There was no obvious need for robots that were indistinguishable from humans.

The audience will be pretty aware from the start that Armitage is in fact a Third. Ross however does not know this and when he finds out it comes as something of a shock. He has to figure out exactly how he feels about the fact that he has been partnered with a non-human.

Armitage has always known that she was a machine but she has never quite come to terms with it. She feels like a woman. She has emotions. She has a woman’s emotions. She wants to be accepted as a cop but she’d like Ross to accept her as a woman as well. That’s not to say that she fell instantly in love with him or had an overwhelming urge to sleep with him but being female is important to her. It becomes more important to her. Ross becomes more important to her.

The plot is quite complex. There are all kinds of secrets and conspiracies and there are important things that Armitage needs to discover about herself. She needs to know these things for her own sake, and for the sake of Mars.

One of the things Armitage doesn’t know is why she even has emotions. A robot doesn’t need emotions. A cop doesn’t need emotions. This seems like a design flaw. She is definitely a robot but she is definitely a woman as well, and she was deliberately designed that way.

This is anime so you won’t be surprised to find out that Armitage’s learning experiences involve a huge amount of mayhem and a lot of explosions. The Japanese have no problems whatsoever with the idea of combining mayhem with intelligent provocative themes. Armitage III is typical cyberpunk anime in the sense that it combines rollercoaster action sequences, extreme violence and sexiness with big ideas and complex emotions.

Japanese cyberpunk was heavily influenced by Blade Runner both aesthetically and thematically. Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell and Armitage III all deal with similar questions - what makes us human? And all three movies deal with female characters having to grapple with the question of whether they are women or machines, and having to grapple with what this means in terms of their emotional lives. All three movies tackle these questions in slightly different ways. Armitage III has never attracted the same degree of critical adulation as those other two films and that may perhaps be a little unfair.

All three movies also deal to some extent with the Uncanny Valley phenomenon - the idea of a robot that is almost totally physically indistinguishable from a human is inherently disturbing and if the resemblance is total it becomes even more disturbing. Anyone who has encountered AI-generated art knows just how disturbing the Uncanny Valley effect can be.

The great thing about this movie is that it’s Japanese. An American movie would have handled the subject matter in a much more predictable and safe way.

Oddly enough the makers of this film claimed to have been influenced by Lovecraft and there are a couple of Lovecraft references that are fun to spot.

Having been made as an OVA this production did not have a feature film budget but on the whole the visuals are quite satisfactory.

Armitage III: Poly-Matrix is a pretty good cyberpunk anime that does not deserve to languish in obscurity. Highly recommended.

The Madman Australian DVD release dates back a few years. It’s letterboxed but the transfer is fine.