Hardware (1990)

Hardware is a 1990 post-apocalyptic science fiction-action-horror movie that borrows heavily from other movies in these genres. There’s nothing original about the ideas but the execution is interesting if a bit pretentious at times.

It’s the usual post-apocalyptic setup. The United States is now mostly a radioactive scrap heap. The government is vicious and tyrannical but perhaps not very efficient.

One way to survive in this world is by scavenging. There’s a lot of discarded tech stuff around if you’re prepared take a few risks to find it. Some is just junk. Some is worth money.

A strange wandering dude finds a couple of interesting items in the desert. A mechanical hand and a robot head. He sells them to a scrap dealer, who sells them on to Mo Baxter (Dylan McDermott). Mo gives them to his girlfriend Jill (Stacey Travis). Jill is a crazy artist who makes weird sculptures out of scrap metal, discarded tech and plastic dolls.

Mo is a kind of Space Marine but he’s not particularly motivated. It pays well and he needs the money.

Jill is paranoid, which is a sensible thing for a girl to be in this world. Her apartment has ultra-sophisticated security.

The relationship between Mo and Jill is uneasy. They’re in love but relationships are difficult in this world. Mo’s job takes him away a lot of the time, which Jill resents.

The robot head is not mere junk. Unfortunately it still functions although nobody has realised that yet. It’s part of a military android. The world is in ruins but the government can still find the money to finance horrific killing machines for the military. The Mark 13 combat android is very nasty indeed. It is of course only supposed to kill the enemies of the state which would be fine if it were functioning properly, which it isn’t. It sees everyone as an enemy.

And it’s now sitting in Jill’s living room. This is not going to end well. Of course we know it will go on a killing rampage.

Jill also doesn’t know that she is being watched by a very creepy Peeping Tom in a neighbouring apartment. His name is Lincoln and he’ll play a part in this story.

Mo’s good-natured spaced-out buddy Shades will play a part as well.

There are several rock stars in this movie which is appropriate since it plays a bit like an ultra-violent MTV video. Iggy Pop’s voice is heard for about 90 seconds in total (as a DJ) but he got prominent billing and a pay cheque so I guess he wasn’t complaining. Lemmy contributes a cameo as a water-cab driver.

This was a low-budget movie but the special effects are very impressive. It has a very strong and very effective cyberpunk vibe, but this is a grungy decaying post-apocalyptic cyberpunk world. There’s nothing wildly original about the aesthetic at work here but it’s executed very well. The killer android looks convincingly evil and menacing. The budget may have been small but the money that was spent is all up there on the screen.

The whole thing is hyperactive and gets a bit self-consciously clever at times. It tries very hard to be arty. Sometimes it succeeds. There’s a lot of gore.

The acting is barely adequate.

There is a steamy sex scene which apparently got the movie into trouble with the moral watchdogs.

What this movie does have is plenty of action and energy. It’s reminiscent of Alien in the sense that it’s about horrifying events taking place in a confined space. There’s nowhere to run to for either the monster or his potential victims, so it’s kill or be killed. And that works extremely well.

Hardware offers exciting mayhem done in a visually interesting way and it’s highly recommended.

Hardware looks great on Blu-Ray.

Gor (1987)

Gor is a 1987 American science fiction/fantasy adventure film from the Cannon Group. It was shot in South Africa. It is based on Tarnsman of Gor, the first of John Norman’s rather controversial Gor novels. Harry Alan Towers co-produced and co-wrote the script.

The initial setup follows the novel reasonably closely. It begins in the present day. Tarl Cabot (Urbano Barberini) is an American college professor who is obsessed by a rather wild theory. He believes that a Counter-Earth exists. It’s a planet within our solar system but due to the particular nature of its orbit it has remained undiscovered. It is a very Earth-like planet and its inhabitants are human (in the novel it is explained that the people of Gor came originally from Earth). Tarl has a ring given to him by his father. He believes it is the secret to reaching Gor. And indeed Tarl does find himself on Gor.

It is a planet at roughly the cultural level of the Bronze Age. There is no modern technology. Warriors use swords and bows. There are countless tiny city-states. And there’s a megalomaniac who wants to absorb all the city-states and create an empire. This villain is Sarm (Oliver Reed).

Tarl joins up with a small group of rebels. One of his motivations is the fact that one of the rebels is a very attractive young woman warrior, Talena (Rebecca Ferratti). Sarm has sacked their city and stolen their home-stone (which has immense religious significance to them). Tarl has to learn how to become a warrior. The ultimate objective is to reach a forbidden mountain range where Sarm has his stronghold, destroy Sarm, retrieve the home-stone and free the city-states that he had conquered.

This small band has lots of misadventures along the way. There’s plenty of action, including a girl-fight between Talena and a slave-girl. It all builds to a reasonably OK action finale.

Not surprisingly Oliver Reed is by far the best thing in this movie. Oliver Reed as a sinister, cruel, power-crazed, sexually depraved super-villain - what’s not to love?

Urbano Barberini is an adequate but rather colourless hero. Rebecca Ferratti is OK and she certainly looks great in skimpy warrior-woman outfits.

Don’t get too excited about Jack Palance’s name in the credits. He gets about two minutes of screen time. His brief appearance is a teaser for the second movie (Gor 2: Outlaw of Gor) in which he plays a major role.

The first problem with this movie is that the low budget made it impossible to include one of the coolest features of the novel, the tarns. These are gigantic birds of prey which warriors ride into battle. Dropping them from the story was a wise idea - in 1987 you would have needed a fairly substantial budget to do them convincingly.

With his Gor novels John Norman was certainly trying to write popular entertaining adventure tales but he was trying to do a whole lot more than that. Norman is a philosopher by profession. He used the Gor novels to engage in all kinds of philosophical, political, social and cultural speculations. This meant that the world-building was a lot more important than the action-adventure plots. Norman created a fictional human society radically different from our own in all sorts of ways. The society of Gor is alien, shocking and totally fascinating. None of that makes it into the movie. The movie is a stock-standard barbarian warrior adventure tale.

A major problem is that this movie is ludicrously tame. There’s one mildly shocking scene (a slave-girl being branded) but overall the violence is very subdued. There’s zero sex. There’s zero nudity. There’s zero sexiness. Even the cat-fight between Talena and the slave-girl is very very tame. This is a movie based on a novel with BDSM overtones set in a society in which female slavery is a central component of that society and it’s clear that the producers were terrified of such subject matter and decided to ignore it.

In fact they ignored every single element that makes the novels fascinating and provocative. This movie has absolutely zero connection to the novels.

And unfortunately as a stock-standard barbarian warrior adventure tale it just doesn’t have enough sufficient pace and energy.

I admit I’ve only read the first three novels but they’re actually extremely interesting and deal with touchy subject matter in a complex and intelligent way. They’re provocative, but in a good way. Norman offers both titillation and food for thought. He’s challenging us to think about how societies work.

I can’t help thinking that this movie would have been a whole lot better with someone like Jess Franco directing, or even Joe D’Amato, or even perhaps Lucio Fulci.

Gor just doesn’t make the grade.

The German release offers both Gor movies on Blu-Ray and DVD, with both German and English language options.

I’ve reviewed the first three Gor novels and I recommend them - Tarnsman of Gor, Outlaw of Gor and Priest-Kings of Gor.

Ninja Scroll (1993)

Ninja Scroll is a 1993 anime film written and directed by one of the anime greats, Yoshiaki Kawajiri. It combines action, adventure, swordplay, fantasy and horror and it is very much an anime for grown-ups.

It is set during the time of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868). A Koga ninja team has been sent to investigate an epidemic that wiped out an entire village. This may not have been a natural occurrence. The Koga ninjas encounter of of the eight Kimon demons and are wiped out with just a single survivor - a young woman ninja named Kagero.

As a result of this disaster she encounters Jubei Kibagami who seems to be a wandering ronin who makes his living as a mercenary. He has had a colourful past which he has perhaps not quite come to terms with. And Jubei encounters a strange little man named Dakuan who is a lot more formidable than he looks. He is a government agent. He’s on a mission as well.

Kagero, Dakuan and Jubei don’t have much in common but they do have a common enemy. The nature of that enemy is not clear at first but the Shogun of the Dark is undoubtedly behind it. The Shogun of the Dark is a member of the Toyotomi clan who ruled Japan before the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate and he aims to restore his clan to power. That would unquestionably trigger a catastrophic civil war.

Jubei has little choice other than to help Dakuan. He has been poisoned. It is a slow poison but it will kill him eventually, and of course only Dakuan has the antidote. If Jubei carries out this mission for him Dakuan will give him the antidote and a hundred gold pieces. This is known as an offer one can’t refuse.

This ill-assorted trio will encounter more of the Kimon demons and each seems a bit more terrifying than the last one. One can produce huge swarms of killer wasps. Benisato is a female demon with several tricks up her sleeve. She can shed her skin in an emergency. She can also produce venomous snakes from her lady parts.

Jubei, Dakuan and Kagero have a few magic tricks of their own. They are after all trained ninja. One of Kagero’s tricks is that her whole body is poisonous. Any man who has sex with her will die. Kagero gives the impression that this doesn’t bother her but it does. She is a ninja but she is a woman also. And as much as she tries to deny it to herself she is strangely attracted to Jubei.

The chief henchman of the Shogun of the Dark is the sinister Gemma. Jubei and Gemma had clashed before, Jubei was certain he had killed Gemma. But Gemma is very much alive.

The key to the plans of the Shogun of the Dark is gold. A huge hoard of gold, enough to put the Toyotomi clan back in power.

There’s huge amounts of mayhem and plenty of gore and gushing blood. The violence gets quite extreme. There’s some nudity and sex and sex is certainly to some degree a motivating factor for several of the characters. This is a world in which sex can be rather dangerous, and sometimes nasty. Sensitive souls may find the violence and eroticism a bit confronting. This really is a story for grown-ups.

Ninja Scroll was one of the animes that at the time were pushing the edge of the envelope in terms of outrageous imagery. It still looks impressive.

The plot is a classic tale of power struggles and betrayals with both Jubei and Kagero being manipulated by both the bad guys and the good guys. They’d both be better off if they could learn to trust each other but trusting people does not come naturally to either of them. They’d also be better off if they could just accept that they’ve fallen in love but that’s not something they’re comfortable with either.

There is a certain amount of cynicism, or at least scepticism, towards authority. The Tokugawa Shogunate represents the good guys not because it’s especially virtuous but because it represents stability. It’s a whole lot better than the alternative which would be civil war.

If you love full-blooded action with lashing of slightly perverse eroticism there’s a great deal here to be enjoyed, and Ninja Scroll is highly recommended, and if you’re fascinated by the ninja thing then it’s pretty much a must-see movie.

Ninja Scroll belongs to the period from the mid-80s to the mid-90s when anime for grown-ups was gradually establishing a foothold in western markets. Vampire Hunter D (1985), Goku Midnight Eye (1989) and Wicked City (1987) were significant titles from this period and Yoshiaki Kawajiri was already becoming a major figure in adult-oriented anime.

The Australian Madman DVD (which is the edition I own) offers a very satisfactory transfer. There has also been a Blu-Ray release.

Viy (1967)

Viy is a 1967 Soviet gothic horror film. There was in fact a long tradition of Russian films about the supernatural. One thing I can say for certain, there has never been another movie quite like Viy.

It is based on an 1835 short novel by Nikolai Gogol. The movie has three credited directors, Konstantin Ershov, Georgiy Kropachyov and Aleksandr Ptushko and they are also credited as screenwriters.

I think it’s safe to say that the filmmakers had no interest in telling us anything profound about the human condition, or in giving us a serious story about the heroic struggles of the proletariat. This movie is pure entertainment. Insane entertainment, but still pure entertainment.

Brother Khoma (Leonid Kuravlyov) is a student at a seminary. He’s a decent enough chap, good-natured and totally lacking in malice, but he’s not exactly one of the seminary’s shining lights. He’s an indifferent scholar, he’s rather lazy and he lacks any really serious vocation.

On a brief holiday Khoma and two friends become lost. They eventually find an isolated farmhouse. An old woman grudgingly puts them up for the night. During the night the old woman takes him for a fly. She is of course a witch. Flying throigh the air with a witch on his back spooks Khoma quite a bit, and he’s even more spooked when the old witch turns into a beautiful young woman. Khoma however survives the experience.

Shortly afterwards a local boyar sends word to the seminary that his daughter is dying. She has asked for a seminarian to read prayers over her for three days. She asks for Khoma by name, which puzzles her father.

By the time Khoma arrives the girl has died but her father insists that Khoma read the prayers over her corpse for three nights. The corpse is lying in the local church. Khoma is not looking forward to this. He is not very brave. Luckily there are hundreds of candles in the church and once Khoma has all of them alight he feels better. He makes it through the night but he would have been a lot happier had the dead girl stayed in her coffin. Dead girls wandering about can be a bit disconcerting.

The next night is worse. Now it’s not just the dead girl who won’t stay put, the coffin won’t stay put either. And there’s still the third night to come.

Gogol claimed that this story was based on an authentic folk tale. The movie certainly tries to evoke the feel of a fairy tale or a folk legend. You could imagine travelling through the remoter parts of central Europe in the 19th century and being regaled with a story such as this in an inn. You would assume the story was part folk tale and part tall story. That’s the feel the film seems to be aiming for - to give its audience a few chills and a few laughs. There’s quite a bit of humour here. We’re expected to enjoy the story without taking it over-seriously.

This is not a movie that makes any effort to look realistic. There are obvious matte paintings and obvious process shots. On the other hand the special effects are impressive - they’re so wild and crazy and imaginative that you’re too flabbergasted to worry about whether they’re convincing or not. Honestly, how many other movies can you name that feature a dead girl surfing on a flying coffin?

The directors also come up with some very bold and ambitious camera moves. The rotating camera stuff is superbly done. That kind of thing is expensive because it’s time-consuming to set up. The same goes for some of the effects shots. The climax of the film, the third night in the church, involves some truly extraordinary special effects sequences. There was clearly some serious money spent on this film.

Viy does get described as a vampire film but this really is stretching it. Gogol’s novella was certainly tapping into the 19th century obsession with the supernatural and the occult but there’s nothing in it or the film that bears any real resemblance to a vampire. It would be more accurate to describe it as a movie about witches and demons.

Viy feels quite different to British, American and Italian gothic horror films of its era. It has its own distinct flavour with its mix of terror and offbeat whimsicality.

The acting is very good with Leonid Kuravlyov being the standout.

This is a wildly imaginative crazy movie that captures the feel of folk legends and fairy tales as effectively as any movie I can think of. It’s creepy and spooky and filled with inspired fantastic imagery. Highly recommended.

Severin’s Blu-Ray presentation is impressive. Extras include a superb mini-documentary on the history of Soviet science fiction and supernatural movies.

The Third Eye (1966)

Mino Guerrini’s The Third Eye (Il terzo occhio) is included in Arrow’s Gothic Fantastico Blu-Ray boxed set so you’re going to be expecting a gothic horror movie. That’s not what you’re going to get. There are some gothic touches but it’s a movie that defies easy categorisation. It’s not a giallo or an erotic thriller. It’s not a murder mystery. It’s perhaps best described as a Hitchcockian thriller in the mould of Psycho.

The young Count Mino Alberti (Franco Nero) is engaged to marry Laura (Erika Blanc). Things are very tense between them, which is our first indication that there’s a disturbing atmosphere at the Alberti ancestral villa. Mino’s mother, the Countess, hates Laura. She is a possessive mother and her relationship with her son is both strained and unhealthily intense. Another source of attention is the family’s one and only servant, Marta (Gioia Pascal). Marta may be in love with Mino, she may be ambitious and she is certainly resentful of the Countess.

So we have four people who are a bit strange, a bit too tightly wrapped and all involved in an emotional web of desires and resentments.

We’re not entirely surprised when a murder results but we are a little surprised about the consequences and each of the subsequent murders is slightly puzzling. The motivations are sometimes obvious, sometimes not so obvious, but it’s the reactions of the various characters to the murders that is really unsettling.

We’re dealing with multiple characters who are dangerously unstable, verging on unhinged. We’re dealing with complex motivations. There are jealousies. There are power struggles within this household. The members of the household who have power are determined to retain the whip hand, those without power want to assert their claims to power.

We’re dealing with a number of characters whose grip on reality may be tenuous. They might be deluded, or their understanding of the power balance may be faulty. It’s not easy to predict what they’ll do next. They don’t know themselves. And they can’t predict what other members of this human menagerie might do next.

There are obvious echoes of Psycho. Lots of echoes of Psycho.

There’s very little blood and no gore but there’s a lot of creepiness. Taxidermy certainly qualifies as creepy in my book, and in this movie it’s very creepy.

Things get weirder when Daniella turns up. I won’t spoil the movie by saying any more abut her.

Franco Nero’s performance is very odd but it gradually won me over. He is after all playing a young man who is prone to disassociation. His performance slowly becomes more disturbing.

The other players are very good. Erika Blanc is always a welcome sight in a movie like this.

It’s a very tame movie. Censorship in Italy was still very strict in 1966 and even the moments of partial nudity attracted the ire of those moral busybodies. They were also upset by the movie’s perversity and it is definitely a very perverse movie.

Mino Guerrini directed and co-wrote the script. He’s not a big name in Italian genre cinema but he does a fine job here. The black-and-white cinematography is effective.

The Villa Alberti would have made a fine setting for a gothic horror movie. This movie does not belong to that genre but, like Hitchcock’s Psycho, it has some of the feel of gothic horror.

I’m told that Joe D’Amato’s Beyond the Darkness (which I haven’t seen) is a remake, of sorts, of The Third Eye.

The Third Eye is a bit of an oddity but it’s an intriguing oddity and it is one of the more interesting Psycho rip-offs. It’s creepy and it has some effective scares and suspense. Recommended.

Arrow’s Blu-Ray release looks very nice and there are lots of extras. The Gothic Fantastico boxed set is very much worth buying.

Lake of Dracula (1971)

The Japanese vampire movie Lake of Dracula, released in 1971, is the second movie in what became known as the Bloodthirsty Trilogy. It is not a true trilogy but it does comprise three gothic horror movies made in quick succession by the same director (Michio Yamamoto) for the same studio (Toho) and all dealing with vampires. They’re three entirely separate movies with no direct links to each other.

It begins with a little girl having a dream in which she loses her dog. At least she (and the audience) assume it’s a dream. It’s not really a very terrifying dream, although perhaps she doesn’t remember the terrifying parts. We then jump forward a number of years. The girl, Akiko (Midori Fujita), is now a young woman living with her younger sister Natsuko (Sanae Emi). They live in a cottage on the shores of Lake Fujimi. Akiko has a boyfriend, a young doctor Takashi Saeki (Chôei Takahashi). He’s a really nice guy. Both girls are very likeable girl. We care about them. They’re typical cheerful bubbly young women.

Akiko cannot forget the dream. It has driven her to produce a disturbing painting of a hideous eye.

A large crate has just been delivered to Akiko’s neighbour’s house. The crate contains a coffin. The neighbour’s servant Kyûsaku is unwise enough to open the coffin.

Akiko by now has another dog and it runs off just as did the dog in the dream. It runs off into the woods, and while Akiko is searching for it Kyûsaku tries to rape her. This is very surprising. Kyûsaku is a very gentle soul.

Another young woman is found near the lake. She is barely alive and has lost a lot of blood. She has puncture wounds on her neck. Dr Takashi Saeki has slim hopes of saving her.

Akiko becomes increasingly frightened. She has seen a strange man hanging around the neighbour’s house. There were the incidents in the woods wth the dog and with Kyûsaku. And Natsuko is behaving rather strangely.

There’s no mystery that there is a vampire abroad and Akiko and her boyfriend eventually figure that out.

The plot doesn’t hold many surprises but atmosphere is what matters in gothic horror and this film has a nicely spooky atmosphere that is achieved in a nicely low-key way. The vampiric transformations are handled well. When someone is vampirised they don’t look much different, in fact most people would not notice anything strange about them other than the fact that they look rather pale. The main clues lie in slight changes in behaviour.

Sanae Emi handles this very expertly. She plays Natsuko as a normal cheerful very likeable young woman and as a vampire she is subtly menacing and seductive in an unsettling way.

This is very much a western vampire story in a Japanese setting. And yes, Dracula himself does play a part albeit indirectly.

It’s not a particularly terrifying movie but I’ve never thought that gothic horror movies were supposed to be terrifying. Or at least they’re not supposed to trade in straightforward physical terror. They’re about the dread of the unnatural, the dread of evil. In a thriller or a slasher movie we’re afraid that the hero or heroine will be killed. In a vampire or a werewolf film we’re worried that he or she will be transformed into a thing of evil. It’s the fear of eternal damnation rather than death. To some extent that’s true of witchcraft movies as well. The witch might not just kill you. She might curse you for all time, and curse your descendants.

From around 1970 to 1972 was an interesting period for the vampire film. In various countries filmmakers were all coming up with the same idea - to revitalise the genre by moving the vampire into contemporary setting. In France there was Jean Rollin’s The Nude Vampire (1970), in Spain there was Jesus Franco’s film Vampyros Lesbos (1970), in Britain Hammer’s Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972), in the U.S. Count Yorga, Vampire (1970) and The Velvet Vampire (1971). It’s intriguing to find that the Japanese were working along the same lines at the exact same time.

Lake of Dracula is enjoyable if you don’t set your expectations too high. Recommended.

Arrow’s Blu-Ray presentation is excellent. I’ve also reviewed the first film in this trilogy, The Vampire Doll (1970). It’s rather more interesting than Lake of Dracula.

Event Horizon (1997)

Event Horizon is a 1997 Anglo-American-Canadian science fiction/horror movie that starts off as a blatant rip-off of Alien but then heads off in a totally new direction.

In 2040 the experimental spaceship Event Horizon disappears without trace in the vicinity of the orbit of the planet Neptune. The craft was designed for deep space exploration but the exact nature of its mission and the exact nature of the spacecraft itself are top-secret. Seven years later a transmission is picked up from the Event Horizon. It’s a very strange transmission which is suddenly cut off. But it’s enough to justify sending a rescue mission.

The rescue ship is the Lewis and Clark. The crew is the usual assortment you expect in such a science fiction movie. There’s the very serious martinet Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne) who has a deep sense of duty. There’s a rebellious misfit. There’s a female medical lab technician who is tortured by personal problems. There’s the young rookie who will almost certainly crack up under pressure. There’s Starck (Joely Richardson), an essential member of the crew because without her the movie wouldn’t have a sexy female cast member.

And of course there’s the outsider, a scientist named Weir (Sam Neill). Naturally the crew don’t trust him. It’s always a bad idea to trust scientists. They trust him even less when they find out that he was the designer of the Event Horizon, and they really really don’t trust him at all when they find out the Event Horizon’s secret. That ship was built to test a gravity drive that would create artificial wormholes allowing faster-than-light travel. At the heart of the gravity drive is a black hole. Black holes are dangerous. Everybody knows that.

They find the Event Horizon easily enough. It’s deserted. They do find bloodstains. Lots of bloodstains. We know what’s going to happen next. Monsters are going to appear. But that doesn’t happen. There is evil aboard the Event Horizon, but it’s a different kind of evil. This is where this movie departs radically from Alien.

It become clear that the gravity drive had worked, after a fashion. The Event Horizon certainly left our solar system. Where it went to is unknown. How it got back is unknown.

The original script was a standard Alien rip-off. Director Paul W.S. Anderson wasn’t interested in doing it unless it was totally rejigged. Anderson wanted to make a ghosts in outer space movie. More specifically he wanted to make a haunted house in space movie. A movie that would draw heavily on two of his favourite movies, Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963) and Kubrick’s The Shining. Anderson wanted to do what Wise and Kubrick had done - not show any actual monsters or ghosts. The evil would be formless, nameless, inexplicable, mysterious and invisible. The audience would see plenty of evil and horror, but all of it would be the consequence of that formless invisible evil.

One of this movie’s strengths is that it doesn’t offer a clear-cut explanation. There is mention of Hell but it would be simplistic to believe that the spacecraft had literally traveled to Hell. It may however have gone somewhere equally nasty, a place that would seem like Hell. We don’t know where the evil comes from or where it resides. We don’t know what it wants. We don’t know if it’s sentient.

The Event Horizon spacecraft is a bit like the Overlook Hotel, but in space. And maybe Weir is a bit like Jack Torrance.

Things get progressively weirder and nastier. With lots of gore and splatter.

I must confess that this is the only Paul W.S. Anderson movie I’ve ever seen. This is a movie in which the characters don’t matter much and the plot is deliberately vague. It’s all about the atmosphere of dread and doom, and even more emphatically it’s all about the visuals.

And the visuals are spectacular. There’s some CGI but Anderson wanted to rely mostly on practical effects. The spacecraft interior sets are impressive, with a bit of a high-tech grunge feel. The miniatures work is extremely good.

Anderson wanted a religious feel. He wanted the design of the Event Horizon to be based on the Cathedral of Notre Dame and surprisingly it’s an idea that works. He also wanted hints of stained glass windows. And curves. Lots of curved surfaces.

Event Horizon is not trying to be particularly profound. Anderson was not tying to make Citizen Kane in space, or The Seventh Seal in space. He wanted to make a horror movie about a haunted spaceship that would be weird and creepy and scary and on the whole he succeeded. It certainly is mostly a collection of ideas from other movies but they’re combined effectively and in a reasonably original way. Event Horizon is a big-budget popcorn movie but it’s fine entertainment. Highly recommended.

The Blu-Ray looks terrific and there are lots of extras including a commentary track by the director and the producer.

Young Hannah, Queen of the Vampires (1973)

Young Hannah, Queen of the Vampires (AKA Crypt of the Living Dead) is a 1973 Spanish-US gothic horror movie. It was part of the trend at the time to do gothic horror in contemporary settings so the story takes place in the 1970s.

Chris (Andrew Prine) arrives on a remote Mediterranean island to find out how his father died. The circumstances were mysterious. He was crushed under a four-ton stone sarcophagus.

The setting might be the present day but in fact it could have been set any time in the preceding hundred years or so. The island is sparsely inhabited and incredibly backward. There are no cars, there seem to be no telephones and no electricity. The islanders are steeped in superstition. They’re still living in the mental world of the Middle Ages.

There are two other Americans on the island, Peter (Mark Damon) and his sister Mary (Patty Sheppard). Mary teaches at the island’s one and only tiny school.

That sarcophagus is the resting place of Hannah. She was a French noblewoman. She was interred on the island by Louis VII on his way to the Second Crusade. She has lain in her sarcophagus for seven hundred years. But nobody on the island believes she is dead. They believe she was interred alive and still lives, in some way. For Hannah was a vampire.

The island was at one time known as the Island of the Vampires. What Chris doesn’t know is that there is still a vampire cult on the island.

Chris wants to bury his father. To do that he needs to move the sarcophagus. To do that he has to remove the lid. Chris is warned that this will free Hannah but he doesn’t believe in such foolish superstitions.

Mary does believe. She cannot change Chris’s mind but events will soon accomplish that. The corpses start to pile up. Chris realises that he has unleashed something evil and terrifying.

There are important things that Chris doesn’t know. He has more to worry about than the vampiress Hannah.

Of course Chris and Mary fall for each other.

There are plenty of conventional gothic horror visual clichés but the great thing about such clichés is that as long as they’re executed with a modicum of skill they always work. They work pretty well here.

The island setting works well too. There’s no escape from the horrors. And on such a remote island the survival of ancient fears seems plausible.

The major problem is that Hannah just doesn’t seem like a very formidable vampire. There’s no real sense of menace.

The acting from the three principals is quite adequate.

The movie was shot in Turkey and there are indications that the island is supposed to be a Turkish island.

The feel of this film is very American. One can’t help feeling that an Italian or a Spanish director would have extracted a bit more from what is a perfectly decent gothic horror movie setup.

The horror is very mild. There’s no nudity and no sex. For 1972 it’s very very tame. There is one very brief tantalising hint of an incest subplot but it’s immediately forgotten and never mentioned again. This movie desperately needed to be spiced up a bit, and livened up a bit.

Oddly enough this was apparently a Spanish movie (directed by Julio Salvador) which was subjected to drastic re-editing and had a lot of extra scenes shot in California by Ray Danton. It would be nice if the original Spanish film surfaced one day as it was apparently much less tame and bland. But the exact details of this movie’s production history are very murky.

Not a great movie but kind of fun if you don’t set your expectations too high.

I bought the very old VCI DVD which is letterboxed. I have no problems with that. I don’t mind as long as a movie isn’t pan-and-scanned.

Web of the Spider (1971)

Antonio Margheriti’s Web of the Spider (the original Italian title is Nella stretta morsa del ragno) is a colour remake of his excellent 1964 gothic horror film Castle of Blood which had starred Barbara Steele. I love the fact that the German title was Dracula im Schloß des Schreckens even though it has nothing to do with Dracula or vampires.

It begins with Edgar Allan Poe (played by Klaus Kinski!) in London which is cool because Poe certainly never visited England. Poe is being interviewed by an American reporter, Alan Foster (Anthony Franciosa). Poe claims that his stories of the strange and the supernatural are all in fact quite true. There really is life beyond the grave. Of a sort. Perhaps the dead are dead in some ways but not in others.

At this point it should be noted that the movie has no connection with any of Poe’s stories, but it’s a gothic horror movie so why not include Poe as a character?

Foster is introduced to Lord Thomas Blackwood. Blackwood owns a famous haunted castle. Foster accepts a wager, that he will not be able to survive a night in the castle. No-one who has ever tried it has returned to tell the tale. Foster is a rationalist. He doesn’t believe in ghosts. He has no doubt that he will have no problem spending a night at Blackwood Castle.

The castle is uninhabited but that doesn’t worry Foster.

To his surprise the castle isn’t deserted after all as he discovers when he meets the beautiful young woman who lives there. She is Lord Blackwood’s sister, Elisabeth Blackwood (Michèle Mercier). There’s another gorgeous babe as well, Julia (Karin Field). As far as Forster is concerned things are looking up.

In fact the castle is full of people. Maybe they’re alive and maybe they aren’t. Maybe this is the present and maybe it’s the past.

There are certainly some romantic and sexual dramas being played out. Perhaps they just go on being played out over and over again.

Foster has of course fallen in love with Elisabeth. She is in love with him, or so he assumes.

Elisabeth has a husband and she has a lover, Herbert (Raf Baldassarre). Or at least she did once have a husband and a lover.

The mysterious Dr Carmus (Peter Carsten) has tried to explain things to Foster. Carmus’ theories are similar to Poe’s. The point at which life ends depends upon what you mean by life.

Foster isn’t sure if he is really involved in these dramas from the past or not. He’s a pretty confused guy. He just knows that he wants Elisabeth.

While this was an attempt to update Castle of Blood by remaking it in colour Web of the Spider doesn’t really feel like a 1970s gothic horror movie. It has a bit of a retro feel. In fact visually it’s reminiscent in some ways of Roger Corman’s Poe movies, but done with a European sensibility. That’s actually no bad thing. It’s also fairly tame by 1971 standards, with nothing more than brief topless nudity.

This is obviously a ghost story, but then again it isn’t. It doesn’t fit neatly into a particular gothic horror sub-genre (which is true of so many Italian gothic horror movies of that era). It deals with what might be described as ghosts but they’re not the kinds of ghosts you find in most ghost stories. They’re not vampires but maybe in a sense they are undead. Whether or not they’re dead or undead depends on your definition of such terms. Of course they might be illusions. Italian gothic horror movies tended to ignore strict genre conventions and also to deal in a certain amount of ambiguity. Web of the Spider revels in ambiguity.

I liked the ending a great deal.

To enjoy this movie you have to take it on its own terms without constantly comparing it to Castle of Blood. It’s a remake but it has a different feel. Being in colour it obviously has a very different aesthetic. I personally like the aesthetic of Web of the Spider. I do have one minor aesthetic quibble - Anthony Franciosa looks too much like he’s just stepped out of the 1970s.

Apparently Margheriti was disappointed by this film but directors are often poor judges of their own work. He was obviously proud of Castle of Blood (and rightly so) and presumably was therefore inclined to judge Web of the Spider harshly.

All of Margheriti’s movies were made on very limited budgets. He was used to that. Like all Italian genre directors of that era he knew how to get good results with very little money.

Of course Michèle Mercier was no Barbara Steele. She can’t match Steele’s magnetism, charisma and sense of dangerous exotic eroticism. No-one could. Mlle Mercier does a pretty effective job. Klaus Kinski is, it goes without saying, delightfully deranged as Poe. Poe was obviously added as a character because his name was a major box-office draw but the framing story involving Poe works quite well.

Web of the Spider is enjoyable slightly offbeat gothic horror. Highly recommended.

The German DVD release, with the title Dracula im Schloß des Schreckens, includes the English dubbed version. That’s the release I have. The transfer is very good. Lots of scenes had been cut from the English dubbed version (which probably explains the movie’s poor reputation). They’re restored here, but in Italian (or sometimes German) with English subtitles and from an inferior source. On the whole the DVD is excellent. There is a German Blu-Ray release as well but I am not sure that it is English-friendly. There’s also a hard-to-find Garagehouse Pictures Blu-Ray.

The Stepmother (1972)

The Stepmother is a 1972 erotic thriller released through Crown International so you’re expecting standard drive-in fodder. 

It was written and directed by Howard Avedis. More about him later.

Structurally this movie is as much a police procedural as an erotic thriller and it can also be regarded as an inverted mystery, in which the viewer knows the identity of the murderer right from the start and the interest of the story lies in the way in which the killer is brought to justice.

The movie opens with a woman having sex with a man somewhat against her will. This encounter is witnessed by a man whom we presume to be the woman’s jealous husband. The husband then kills the other man.

I’m not giving away any spoilers here. This all happens in the first few minutes.

This movie adds an interesting twist. There’s a second murder at roughly the same time and it would be obvious to even the greenest cop that the two murders are related. That’s the one thing in the case that is an absolute certainty. Inspector Darnezi (John Anderson) has no doubts on this score.

I’m not giving away any spoilers here either. All of this is just the initial setup.

That jealous husband is architect Frank Delgado (Alejandro Rey). The woman we saw at the start is his second wife Margo (Catherine Justice). Frank is successful and he and Margo are part of a little circle of rich people with slightly arty tendencies. There’s a hint of early 70s Southern California decadence. This was a world in which drugs and bed-hopping were popular pastimes in such circles. Frank doesn’t quite fit in. He’s Mexican and he’s a devout Catholic.

This little circle includes Frank’s business partner Dick Hill (Larry Linville) and Dick’s wife Sonya (Marlene Schmidt) as well as a maker of blue movies who goes by the name of Goof and Goof’s girlfriend.

There are some tensions. For one thing Frank isn’t entirely sure he can trust Margo not to sleep around.

Things get more complicated when Frank’s son Steve (Rudy Herrera Jr) arrives from Mexico. There’s definitely tension between Steve and Margo. Maybe not surprising given that Steve’s stepmother isn’t all that older than he is and she’s very hot and she’s a woman in touch with her sexual appetites.

There’s also another killing.

We know that events are moving towards a crisis and Avedis handles the sense of impending doom quite well. We don’t know what form the crisis will take. There are several distinct possibilities.

The plot is a bit loose. Avedis’s screenplay has a few clunky moments.

The biggest problem is that it’s all very tame. The ingredients were there for a steamy erotic thriller and in the 80s or early 90s that’s how it would have played out (and that’s certainly how an Italian director would have approached it). The Stepmother however never develops any real erotic heat and never really catches fire. It’s not quite sleazy enough.

Alejandro Rey is good as a man on the edge. His life is out of control. Catherine Justice is pretty good as Margo although the script doesn’t give her enough opportunities to smoulder.

Directed Howard Avedis was born Hikmet Labib Avedis in Iraq. He directed several movies in Iraq before relocating to the United States where he produced and directed a series of low-budget movies. He gets virtually no respect as a film-maker, being generally dismissed as a director of cheap drive-in trash. That’s rather unfair. I’ve now seen three of his movies and they’re rather interesting and slightly offbeat. Both The Teacher (1974) and The Fifth Floor are worth seeing.

The Stepmother is nowhere near as bad as its reputation would suggest. Not as good as the other Howard Avedis movies I’ve seen but it’s enjoyable in a 70s drive-in movie way. Recommended.

It’s included in several multi-movie DVD sets from Mill Creek. The transfer is very good.