The Fifth Floor (1978)

The Fifth Floor is a 1978 thriller that is basically a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest rip-off.

Producer/director/co-writer Howard Avedis had made some interesting exploitation drive-in movies in the early 70s.

The Fifth Floor begins with Kelly McIntyre (Dianne Hull) working in a disco to pay her way through college. She’s just had a fight with her boyfriend Ronnie Denton (John David Carson).

Kelly has a drink to cheer herself up and ends up on the dance floor having convulsions. She is rushed to hospital. The diagnosis is strychnine poisoning. Kelly is convinced that someone has tried to kill her. The doctors are convinced she tried to commit suicide, so she’s locked up in the psycho ward on the fifth floor.

When she tries to explain that she isn’t crazy and that someone really tried to kill her. The psychiatrist Dr Coleman (Mel Ferrer) decides she must be deluded and paranoid. He’s going to keep her in the psycho ward.

The psycho ward is as nightmarish as you’d expect but the biggest problem is male psychiatric nurse Carl (Bo Hopkins). He’s obviously a sadist and a sleazeball but no-one on the staff has noticed because let’s face it, this is a psychiatric hospital and the staff (including the women) are all sleazebags and bullies.

Carl tries to rape Kelly. When Kelly complains it is seen as proof that she’s paranoid.

Kelly is starting to find out how psychiatric hospitals work. It doesn’t matter if you’re crazy or not. What matters is whether or not you have power. The staff have power. The patients have no power, and no rights. They are also not allowed any self-respect. The female patients have to shower while being watched by male nurses.

And Carl is not going to give up on Kelly.

Kelly isn’t the only patient being brutalised. They’re all being brutalised. And she isn’t the first female patient to have attracted Carl’s attention. She’s befriended a woman named Melanie (Sharon Farrell) who has had the same experience.

Melanie wasn’t crazy either, but she is now.

Kelly has no contact with the outside word. Patients are not allowed to make telephone calls.

She knows she isn’t crazy but she knows her sanity can only hold up for so long. She is determined not to break, but everybody breaks eventually. She contemplates escape. But what happens if she escapes? Nobody will believe that an escaped mental patient might be sane.

The acting is mostly what you expect in an exploitation movie, because this essentially is an exploitation movie. But that’s the kind of acting you need in a movie like this. You don’t want subtlety, you want scenery-chewing. And there are some fine scenery-chewers in this film.

Bo Hopkins as Carl is a study in sadistic malevolence. Anthony James and Robert Englund contribute delightfully excessive performances as patients. Julie Adams as the senior nurse is a nasty piece of work, a woman who never doubts that she is right and the patients are wrong. John David Carson is nicely ambiguous as Kelly’s boyfriend. Is he on her side or not?

Dianne Hull as Kelly is the exception. She does give a subtle performance and it works. She’s the sane centre around which all the craziness revolves.

There’s only a small amount of actual violence but this movies manages to be pretty harrowing. There’s not much nudity but there’s definitely a sleazy vibe to it.

The Fifth Floor was obviously a low-budget effort and it’s rough around the edges but it’s effective and it gets its point across. It’s a reasonably good entry in the fascinating psychiatric terror sub-genre. Highly recommended.

The Code Red DVD offers an acceptable if hardly dazzling transfer with very little in the way of extras.

I’ve reviewed another of Howard Avedis’s movies, The Teacher (1974), which is flawed but interesting.

Syndicate Sadists (1975)

Syndicate Sadists (Il giustiziere sfida la città) is a 1975 movie directed by Umberto Lenzi that falls within the poliziotteschi genre.

This is not a cop movie. The police play no part whatsoever in the story. This is more of a lone wolf hero vigilante movie.

It begins with a mysterious stranger riding into town. He rides a motorcycle rather than a horse but this movie does have major western elements.

The stranger is Rambo (Tomas Milian) and yes the name was taken from the books on which the Sylvester Stallone movies were based. Rambo is a loner. He doesn’t like authority. His buddy Scalia (Mario Piave) works for a private police force. This was the period of Italian history known as the Years of Lead, with violent crime getting out of control and regular terrorist outrages. The idea of rich people turning to private cops rather than the official police has plenty of plausibility. Scalia wants Rambo to join up but Rambo isn’t a team player. This is the equivalent of the scene in dozens of westerns in which the hero is offered a sheriff’s badge or a deputy’s badge but turns it down.

Scalia is trying to solve a kidnapping on his own, to further his career. Milan is run by two criminal organisations, the equivalent of rival outlaw gangs in a western. There’s the Conti gang, run by a hoodlum named Conti (Luciano Catenacci), and the Paternò gang, run by old man Paternò (Joseph Cotten). Paternò is old and blind and his hot-headed son has ambitions to take over.

Rambo has no interest in the case, until something happens that gives him a personal score to settle. Now he intends to wage a one-man war against both gangs.

Vincenzo Mannino’s script is basically a grab-bag of clichés. Lenzi wasn’t enthusiastic about doing this movie and wasn’t happy with it. It’s easy to see why but Tomas Milian’s charismatic performance and the excellent action scenes more than compensate for the deficiencies of the screenplay. There are as many car and motorcycle chases as any reasonable person could wish for.

While the plot might be lacking in originality it holds together very satisfactorily and it provides the necessary excuses for the action scenes.

There’s also plenty of violence but it’s not especially graphic. Lenzi is more interested in giving the viewer an adrenalin rush than in relying on gore.

There is however a copious expenditure of small arms ammunition.

The final showdown is superbly executed and very tense and exciting.

Lenzi paces the film extremely well.

There’s no sex and no nudity. The emphasis is entirely on action and Lenzi is not going to distract us from that for a moment.

There’s no complexity to any of the characters. Rambo is just another mysterious gunslinger of the kind so familiar in westerns.

The one possible exception is old man Paternò, who has a strange and interesting attitude towards Rambo. It’s possible that Rambo is the son he’d have liked to have had, instead of the idiot son he actually has. This relationship could perhaps have been developed a bit more. Joseph Cotten has his moments in this film but he looks very old and frail. Of course that’s the point of the character, that he’s an old man losing his grip on his organisation so Cotten’s performance does actually work quite well.

Don’t expect anything profound or ground-breaking from this movie. Just sit back and enjoy the roller-coaster ride and the mayhem, and enjoy watching Tomas Milian giving a master-class in charisma.

My liking for Umberto Lenzi grows with each Lenzi film I see. Syndicate Sadists is top-notch entertainment, highly recommended.

This is one of five films in Severin’s Violent Streets Umberto Lenzi/Tomas Milian poliziotteschi Blu-Ray boxed set. Extras include interviews with various people involved in the film, the most interesting being the Lenzi interview. The transfer is superb. English and Italian language options are provided.

The X from Outer Space (1967)

Criterion’s Eclipse Series 37 DVD boxed set When Horror Came to Shochiku includes four movies made by Shochiku studio in 1967-68 as part of the studio’s short-lived attempt to jump on the science fiction/horror/monster movie bandwagon. The X from Outer Space (1967), directed by Kazui Nihonmatsu, is very definitely a science fiction monster movie.

It begins with plans to send a nuclear-powered manned spacecraft (nicknamed the Astro-Boat) to Mars. Previous missions have ended in disaster. The crew of four naturally includes a beautiful blonde girl scientist, Lisa.

The voyage runs into the usual hazards, such as meteor storms. They make a stopover on the Moon, which leads to romantic complications. Lisa is in love with the spaceship’s commander, Captain Sano, but she has a rival on the Moon. A cute astronaut girl named Michiko.

After leaving the Moon the spaceship runs into real trouble - a UFO. The astronauts find weird stuff on the exterior of their ship. They bring the stuff inside and discover a kind of egg-shaped object. They decide to bring it back to Earth. 

You won't be surprised to learn that this turns out to be a really bad move on their part.

The egg contains a monster and pretty soon he’s a really big monster. He’s 200 feet tall. He’s not very friendly. He wants to stomp things. He wants to stomp cities. Being a monster he has his heart set on stomping Tokyo. After that he’ll see what else there is in Japan to stomp. The monster is given the name Guilali.

He is of course unstoppable. And of course he feeds on nuclear energy.

Tanks and fighter jets don’t bother him in the least.

The only hope is to come up with a scientific answer. Lisa may have the solution - a hitherto undiscovered substance which may destroy Guilali’s power. But it will have to be brought back from the Moon.

It’s now a race against time. Can the astronauts bring the anti-Guilali substance back to Earth before Tokyo gets stomped?

There’s nothing very original here. It’s your basic Japanese monster movie. The studio was clearly aiming at a young audience and the movie contains just about everything that kids were going to love.

The special effects and the miniatures work might be cheap and cheesy but they’re fun and cool. The monster is goofy but he’s fun and cool as well. OK, he does look a bit like a dinosaur with a chicken’s head but he does look like a monster. Disappointingly he doesn’t breathe fire but you can’t have everything.

The best thing about this movie is that there’s no message. The monster isn’t anyone’s fault. This is just a lighthearted monster movie romp.

Once the monster begins his rampage the movie’s pacing accelerates. Which is a good thing. We’re not given time to notice any technical flaws or to notice the cheapness of the effects. It’s just action scene after action scene.

The acting is fine by monster movie standards. There are likeable heroes. Lisa and Michiko are smart, brave and adorable. The elderly generals and politicians are suitably grave and portentous.

There is the romantic sub-plot alluded to earlier and and given that this is really a kids’ movie it’s kept at an innocent and rather sweet level.

As since it is obviously aimed at kids there’s no point in being hyper-critical about plot holes or any failures in logic, or any lack of scientific plausibility.

The X from Outer Space is silly and goofy but I think it’s fair to say that it was intended to be nothing more than lighthearted fun, and I think it succeeds on the intended level.

The transfer is lovely. Both the Japanese (with English subtitles) and English-dubbed audio options are provided. The only extra is brief liner notes (which take the movie much too seriously).

Devil’s Possessed (1974)

Devil’s Possessed (El mariscal del infierno) was written by Paul Naschy (who also starred) and directed by León Klimovsky. It’s a story of horrific crimes committed in 15th century France by the king’s marshal Barón Gilles de Lancré (Naschy). It was released in 1974.

This movie is either a swashbuckling adventure with quite a few horror elements or a horror film with quite a few swashbuckling adventure elements.

It’s based very loosely on the real-life case of Gilles de Rais (1405-1440), notorious as one of the most prolific mass murderers in history although at various times since then doubts have been raised about his guilt.

In the movie Gilles de Lancré is disillusioned by what he perceives as the king’s lack of gratitude for his political and military services. Gilles withdraws from public life and becomes increasingly obsessed by alchemy and occult practices. He employs the services of renowned alchemist Simon de Braqueville (Eduardo Calvo) who assures Gilles that he will have access to power and unlimited riches. But a price will have to be paid. The magical operations will require the sacrifice of virgins.

Gilles is horrified but his ambitions overwhelm his horrors. He is aiming at nothing less than the throne of France. His ambitions are encouraged by the beautiful but scheming Georgelle (Norma Sebre).

Gilles finds himself with two problems. Firstly the powers and riches promised by de Braqueville have not materialised. Gilles is told that more virgins will have to be sacrificed. Gilles remains confident but he grows impatient, and he has spent most of his fortune financing de Braqueville’s experiments.

Secondly, it turns out that he is not really cut out for a career of evil. He is troubled by nightmares.

Gilles, despite his achievements as a soldier, is in some ways a weak and foolish man. He is easily led. And he is very easily manipulated by a ruthless woman like Georgelle.

Soon he has a third problem, the arrival of his old comrade-in-arms Gaston de Malebranche (Guillermo Bredeston).

Gilles hopes that de Malebranche will take service with him and become his right-hand man. Gaston however is disturbed by what he has seen in de Lancré’s castle and what he has seen in the countryside. The peasants are being crippled by taxation and there is much evidence of the brutality of de Lancré’s men. Gaston is a straight arrow. His instinct is to oppose tyrants and if his old friend Gilles has become a tyrant he will certainly oppose him.

Gaston joins a band of rebels living in the forest. At this point the movie starts to borrow heavily from the Robin Hood legend, with Gaston leading an outlaw band against a wicked tyrant. Gaston disguises himself in order to participate in a joust organised by Gilles in a scene that is very reminiscent of Robin Hood entering the archery contest organised by the Sheriff of Nottingham.

The noble and lovely Graciela (Graciela Nilson) plays a role that brings Maid Marian to mind.

Of course the evil in the Robin Hood legend is also driven by ambition - Prince John’s determination to seize power. Devil’s Possessed is like Robin Hood with 1970s gore and graphic brutality.

Gilles de Lancré is not exactly a tragic figure. He has freely chosen evil and he displays horrific cruelty. We don’t feel inclined to be too sympathetic towards him. At the same time we do get a sense that perhaps he was at one time a good man. Naschy manages to make him look like a man haunted by his own evil. He also has no trouble convincing us that Gilles is man whose hold on sanity is becoming ever more tenuous. There are perhaps a few echoes of Macbeth in Gilles de Lancré.

Georgelle isn’t the least bit haunted by her evilness. She relishes it. Norma Sebre does a great job here.

Guillermo Bredeston as Gaston de Malebranche does the noble swashbuckling hero thing adequately enough.

Devil’s Possessed has effectively horrifying moments, it has a real atmosphere of evil, it’s fast-moving and it’s action-packed. It has fine performances and it has Naschy in top form. There’s also a rather nice touch at the end. Highly recommended.

This film is included in Shout! Factory’s Paul Naschy Collection II Blu-Ray boxed set. The transfer is very good.

I consider León Klimovsky to be a rather underrated director. I’ve reviewed a number of his movies - Vengeance of the Zombies (1973, with Naschy) is very good and I enjoyed The Vampires’ Night Orgy (1973) and Werewolf vs Vampire Woman (1971)

I’ve reviewed quite a few Paul Naschy movies, including the intriguing gothic horror/giallo hybrid Panic Beats (1983) and the terrific werewolf-in-Japan flick The Beast and the Magic Sword (1983).

Scream of the Demon Lover (1970)

Scream of the Demon Lover (Il castello dalle porte di fuoco) was also released under various other titles including Killers of the Castle of Blood. It’s a 1970 Spanish-Italian co-production directed by José Luis Merino.

It’s a gothic horror movie set presumably in the late 19th century but with so many anachronistic elements that it would probably have been better to have given it a contemporary setting.

Of course all movies with period settings are riddled with anachronisms, it’s just a bit more noticeable in this film.

The heroine Ivanna Rakowsky (Erna Schurer) is a 1970s independent ambitious career woman totally out of place in the period setting. She’s a biochemist and she’s applied for a job working for the mysterious baron Janos Dalmar (Carlos Quiney).

A number of young women from the village have been brutally murdered and the villagers are quite keen on the idea of burning the castle to the ground with the wicked baron in it. They have no evidence that the baron really is wicked, but burning the castle to the ground would certainly make them feel better.

Baron Janos is clearly a bit strange. He’s irritable, unstable and obsessive. Ivanna is not at all sure she approves of him. On the other hand he’s a young, handsome rich nobleman and she obviously thinks he’s a bit of a dish.

Janos is a mad scientist but in Ivanna’s romantic imagination he’s a dedicated scientific visionary whose genius has been misunderstood. As you might expect this makes him even more desirable in her eyes.

There are two other women living in the castle - the baron’s former mistress Olga (Cristiana Galloni) and a cute sexy maid named Cristiana (Agostina Belli). They’re both madly in love with the baron.

So we have a crazy wildly unstable baron living in a castle with three women who are crazed with lust for him, and insanely jealous of each other. That should produce interesting results.

There’s a whole wing of the castle that is closed off, allegedly because it’s falling apart and is therefore dangerous. Of course we know that there dark secrets hidden in the forbidden part of the castle, and we know that the heroine is going to explore that part of the castle even though she’s been warned not to.

There certainly are secrets here. The baron tells Ivanna a story about the nature of his scientific research and the reason for his interest in the possibilities of regenerating dead tissue but that story is not strictly true, although it’s not entirely a lie either.

There are some obvious borrowings from Jane Eyre but to say more on that subject would be to risk spoilers. There are also some interesting red herrings - Ivanna thinks she’s found out the secret that Janos is hiding but she’s on the wrong track.

There is a strong gothic horror plot here but (like Jane Eyre) this is also a gothic romance. Ivanna and Janos are falling in love but there are huge obstacles to be overcome. Their love may or may not be doomed, depending largely on how determined they are to confront the very real horrors concealed in the castle. The love story is at least as important as the horror story.

This was a very low-budget film but director Merino wasn’t going to allow that to cramp his style. He throws in every gothic visual trapping he can think of.

And it works, and it has to be said that he does it with a certain style and the movie does have some very nice gothic imagery. The baron’s initial entrance, accompanied by his two gigantic savage hounds, is very cool. We get lots of shots of pretty young women wandering through gloomy corridors in their nighties, carrying candelabras. Not terribly original but I don’t think any gothic horror fan is going to complain about the inclusion of such scenes. They always work.

There really isn’t anything at all wildly original in this movie, either visually or in the script, but it’s all put together with energy and flair. There’s some nudity and there are very real hints of strange sexual kinks. And there are some effectively creepy moments.

The acting performances are all perfectly competent.

This is a well executed gothic horror/gothic romance movie and it’s highly recommended.

Scream of the Demon Lover is included in Severin’s Danza Macabra boxed set. The transfer is very good given that the original 16mm negative was in poor shape. The highlight of the extras is a typically informative and perceptive visual essay by Stephen Thrower.

Colt 38 Special Squad (1976)

Colt 38 Special Squad was the last movie directed by Massimo Dallamano before his death in a car accident in 1976. It belongs to the poliziotteschi genre, as does his earlier Super Bitch.

To understand the poliziotteschi genre you have to understand that these were violent times in western Europe with widespread terrorist activity by groups such as the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy as well as organised crime due to the boom in the drug trade. There was an air of paranoia, and a certain sympathy for the idea that the police sometimes needed to be ruthless. There was of course at least some of the same paranoia in the United States in Britain, but the sheer extent of terrorist violence in Italy kicked the paranoia there into overdrive. The emergence of a genre of hard-edged ultra-violent crime films should have come as no great surprise (and crime movies in Britain and the U.S. were become more hard-edged at the same time with movies like Get Carter and Dirty Harry).

The poliziotteschi genre emerged at the end of the 60s, just a couple of years after the rise of the giallo. By this time the spaghetti western genre had fizzled out and gothic horror was in decline.

Colt 38 Special Squad gets off to a flying start. A police raid led by Inspector Vanni (Marcel Bozzuffi) turns into a full-scale gun battle. The brother of the gang leader is shot to death by Inspector Vanni. The gang leaders is known as the Black Angel, and he takes a terrible revenge.

Inspector Vanni now has a personal score to settle.

He’s been angling for the formation of an elite four-man squad of motorcycle-riding cops with special firearms training. Now he’s been given the go-ahead. The Special Squad are not exactly given carte blanche but they’re given to understand that they’ll be given some leeway in their methods. A certain degree of ruthlessness is expected of them.

They prove to be not just ruthless but undisciplined hot-heads who will be more trouble than they’re worth unless Vanni can lick them into shape. But they’re brave and they’re keen.

A stroke of luck may point Inspector Vanni in the direction of the Black Angel. A large shipment of dynamite has been stolen. One of the thieves is caught quite by accident, and he is linked to the Black Angel.

It doesn’t help much, but at least the police know that the Black Angel is planning something that requires a lot of dynamite.

The Black Angel holds a few aces that the police don’t know about and he is always a step ahead of them. He plans to hold the city to ransom.

This is a very violent movie with a very dark tone. Innocent people get killed. The body count is very high. The police cannot protect people. Inspector Vanni is a smart tough cop but he’s up against a criminal who is also very smart and has the advantage of not having to care about his methods. He’d cheerfully kill hundreds of people if it would further his plan. Vanni finds some leads but they don’t lead to quick results, time is against him and the most promising leads go nowhere.

Ivan Rassimov (who also starred in Dallamano’s Super Bitch) makes an effectively ice-cold villain. Marcel Bozzuffi gives some real substance to Inspector Vanni, a man driven to the brink of despair by his inability to catch the Black Angel.

Carole André is very good as Sandra, a pretty young nightclub owner who is mixed up in the Black Angel’s plans. She’s a nice girl but she’s naïve and she has a bad boy boyfriend and she gets much more involved than she wants to be.

There’s as much action as you could want. There are explosions, gun battles and car and motorcycle chases. Some of the violence is pretty gruesome, after dynamite has done its work.

Dallamano handles the action scenes with confidence. Dallamano really was one of the great Italian directors of his era and has never received quite as much recognition as he deserved.

Colt 38 Special Squad deals with terrorism but it doesn’t deal with specifically political crimes. Perhaps there was a feeling that it would be unwise to give the film anything that could be interpreted as a political slant.

This is a fine if rather grim action thriller. Highly recommended.

Arrow have released this movie in their Years of Lead poliziotteschi boxed set. The transfer is excellent. Those who care about extras may be disappointed that there are virtually none for this movie.

I’ve reviewed a couple of other movies in this genre - Revolver (1973) which is extremely good, the incredibly nihilistic Milano Calibro 9 (1972) and the superb Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man (1976).