The Blood Drinkers (1964)

The Blood Drinkers, released in 1964, offered viewers in English-speaking markets their first exposure to Filipino horror. And it’s quite a ride.

Gerardo de Leon had been directing movies since the 1930s and was a revered figure in the local film industry. This is a movie made by a seasoned professional.

Katrina is dead but she’s not going to stay dead. Dr Marco (Ronald Remy) will make sure of that. Dr Marco is a mad scientist but he’s also a vampire which is the first sign that this movie is going to be slightly out of the ordinary. These are vampires who are definitely supernatural but they make use of medical science and technology.

This movie gets major bonus points for not being yet another retread of Dracula. It boldly strikes out in a totally new direction and creates its own distinctive vampire mythology.

And Dr Marco was, and is, madly in love with Katrina. Thanks to his mad scientist apparatus he has revived her but she needs blood. She will also need a new heart. Another interesting angle in this movie is that blood is more nourishing if it comes from a loved one, and a replacement heart needs to come from a close family member. A sister would be ideal.

And Katrina has a sister, Charito (Amalia Fuentes) although Charito doesn’t know this. Their mother is a rich old lady, Doña Marissa (Mary Walter), although nobody knew about this.

Doña Marissa does not like the idea of seeing her daughter’s heart cut out but she isn’t given much choice. Dr Marco is not easy to defy.

Charito has a boyfriend and he is determined to protect her from the vampires who have been active in the district. The old priest is also determined to stop the vampires.

The police are sympathetic but there’s no evidence against Dr Marco.

Dr Marco has a sexy female vampire assistant, Tanya (Celia Rodriguez). He has mind control powers as well, 

The first striking thing about this movie is that it continually switches between colour and black-and-white, but tinted black-and-white. When the vampires are active everything gets tinted red. At other times a blue tint is used.

This is obviously a deliberate strategy to emphasis that there are different worlds co-existing. There’s the world of the living and the world of the dead, the world of vampires and the world of non-vampires, the world of good and the world of evil. This is also a very Roman Catholic movie so there’s also the world of the Church and the world of Satan.

And de Leon is not afraid to go all out with the gothic trappings. There’s a lot of fog!

What makes it really interesting however is that these are complex vampires. Dr Marco is scary and evil but his love for Katrina is sincere and overwhelming. He will defy heaven and hell to save her. There is a touch of that “love never dies” angle that Coppola would later push even further in his 1992 Dracula. We cannot help admiring Dr Marco’s resolute determination to save the woman he loves and we cannot help seeing him as, at least to some degree, a tragic figure.

Doña Marissa is complicated also - a mother who can only save one of her two daughters.

And Tanya is more than just a sexy lady vampire sidekick. She obviously loves Dr Marco but is so devoted to him that she will help him to save Katrina even though Katrina is clearly her rival.

And there’s a tantalising hint that redemption may be possible, even for vampires. Unlikely, but possible.

Ronald Remy as Dr Marco is one of the great screen vampires. This guy projects immense amounts of masculine eroticism and he has so much charisma that he makes Christopher Lee look a bit on the bland side.

Mary Walter as Doña Marissa is both creepy and ambiguous. Amalia Fuentes manages to be both sweet and glamorous. The acting from the supporting players is overall pretty good.

The Blood Drinkers is both visually and thematically unusual and interesting and it’s a rather good vampire movie with a nice overheated tropical vibe. Highly recommended.

Severin have released The Blood Drinkers on both DVD and Blu-Ray. There are some extras including an audio commentary.

Isle of the Dead (1945)

Isle of the Dead, released in 1945, was the tenth of the eleven movies made by producer Val Lewton at RKO in the 40s. Yes, there were eleven - there were also two non-horror films.

Lewton started his run at RKO with Cat People which was a smash hit. The subsequent films fared increasingly poorly at the box office. Lewton’s idea had been to take an entirely fresh and original, and subtle, approach to the horror genre. Artistically the idea was a triumph but audiences were not too keen on subtle horror. And while Cat People had received rave reviews critical response to the later Lewton films was decidedly mixed. Critics even more than audiences struggled with the subtlety and psychological complexity of these films.

The nine Lewton horror films gradually built huge cult followings and they’re now worshipped by cinephiles but it is important to bear in mind that only Cat People and The Body Snatcher (the most conventional of the lot) achieved massive success at the time.

RKO had started to become just a little disillusioned. They wanted proper gothic horror settings, not contemporary settings, and they tried to force Lewton into more conventional channels by imposing Boris Karloff on him as the star for the final three films.

Isle of the Dead was a bit of a cheat on Lewton’s part. It does have a period setting but instead of central Europe in the nineteenth century it’s set on an island in the Aegean in 1912, during the First Balkan War. And instead of playing a monster Karloff plays a Greek general. There are supernatural monsters in the movie, or at least the idea of supernatural monsters plays an important role in the plot, but the supernatural definitely does not figure in the movie in the conventional way for which RKO was hoping.

An American war correspondent, Oliver Davis (Marc Cramer), has attached himself the the army of General Nikolas Pherides (Boris Karloff) which has just won a major victory against the Ottoman forces. There is just one tiny fly in the ointment - there have been a couple of cases of septicaemic plague in other Greek army units.

The inspiration for this movie was Arnold Böcklin’s famous painting of the same name. Or rather paintings - the Swiss Symbolist artist produced half a dozen versions between 1880 and 1901.

In the movie the General and Davis visit a tiny nearby island (which looks like the paintings) which is uninhabited and used as a cemetery. They intend to lay a wreath on the grave of the General’s wife. 

The island is represented by a matte painting and it’s a fine example of how effective that technique can be. When we reach the island we can’t help wondering if we’re leaving behind the world of science and reason and entering a world of nightmare.

They are in for a surprise. The island is well and truly inhabited. A Swiss archaeologist, Aubrecht (Jason Robards Sr) lives there with his housekeeper, an old peasant woman named Kyra (Helene Thimig). They have a whole tribe of house guests. There’s British diplomat St. Aubyn (Alan Napier), his wife Mary (Katherine Emery), their sweet but timid servant girl Thea (Ellen Drew) and there’s a Cockney tinware salesman named Robbins.

Davis and the General spend the night on the island. In the morning Robbins is dead, and all the symptoms point to septicaemic plague. 

The General, quite correctly, declares that the island is now under quarantine. Now all they can do is wait for the wind to change. The plague is spread by insects. When the sirocco starts to blow the hot winds will destroy the insects’ eggs and the plague will be over. There is no way of knowing when the sirocco will arrive. If it doesn’t arrive in time they are all doomed. There is no cure for the plague.

And to add to their troubles old Kyra is convinced that the evil has been brought upon them by a vorvolaka (an undead creature similar in some ways to both a ghoul and a vampire). She believes that Thea is the vorvolaka.

So until the movie is well advanced the horror comes from the fear of the plague and from Kyra’s superstitious beliefs. The General is of peasant stock and was raised in an atmosphere of superstition. When he reached the age of manhood he abandoned such beliefs and become a modern man, a man who believed in science and progress. But can we ever entirely forget the superstitious fears of childhood?

Early on we learn something that foreshadows the real horror content which hits us in the final third of the picture, and what a gut-punch it is when it arrives. I can’t think of anything from this era that can match it, apart from The Seventh Victim which just happens to be a Val Lewton picture directed by Mark Robson.

And in Isle of the Dead Mark Robson doesn’t put a foot wrong. Cinematographer Jack MacKenzie  shows us that he knows a thing or two about using light and shadow.

All the cast members are solid but it’s Karloff who has the really meaty role. The General is a good man, but a hard man. He has a stern sense of duty, but also a stern sense of justice. We may find it hard to warm to him but Karloff makes sure we respect him and are fascinated by him.

Isle of the Dead has subtlety and an atmosphere of dread and it has some real chills. Very highly recommended. 

Millennium Actress (2001)

Millennium Actress is a 2001 anime feature film co-written and directed by Satoshi Kon. His first feature film, the superb Perfect Blue (1997), had been a surprise hit and received widespread critical acclaim. Millennium Actress was the first feature that was Kon’s own project right from the start and on which he acted as both writer and director. Millennium Actress, like Perfect Blue, deals with the blurring of the line between fantasy and reality.

Millennium Actress was greeted with enthusiasm by critics and is now established as one of the great anime feature films.

This is a movie that you have to stick with. At first it seems fairly straightforward but it becomes steadily more complex and more fascinating.

It begins with the demolition of a movie studio, the studio at which the famous actress Chiyoko Fujiwara had made all of her films. Chiyoko is now in her 70s and retired and lives in seclusion. Somehow documentary filmmaker and Chiyoko Fujiwara  superfan Genya Tachibana has persuaded her to be interviewed on camera. He arrives at her house with his cameraman in tow.

As Chiyoko reminisces about her life and career Tachibana and his cameraman find themselves inside her memories, filming her life as it happens. But is Chiyoko remembering her life or her films? Are the two indistinguishable to her? It appears that Tachibana and his cameraman are inside her films as well as her memories. In fact Tachibana becomes several characters in her movies.

The central obsession of Chiyoko’s life is her attempt to be reunited with a man she only ever met once, briefly. She spends years trying to find him. Or maybe that happened in one of her movies? It is impossible to separate her memories from her movies. The pursuit of a mysterious man seemed to be the plot of all her movies!

The man is a political dissident but politics plays zero part in this movie. The man is a young girl’s romantic fantasy - a handsome dashing rebel. He’s a rebel in the 1940s but he’s a rebel in lots of other eras as well.  

Does the man exist? He does exist for Chiyoko. Maybe he’s real if she believes he’s real. And of course he could be real.

There’s also the curse, and the key. And the man who hunts Chiyoko’s man across the centuries. We know the key is real. We’ve seen it. Her mystery man gave it to her for safekeeping. It unlocks the most important thing in the world. When she finds him again he will tell her what that is.

You can’t assume that Chiyoko’s whole story is a fantasy. There’s reality and there’s movies and they intersect or co-exist or exist simultaneously. Maybe reality creates movies or maybe movies create their own reality.


And there’s the role played by an older actress Eiko, who right from the start saw Chiyoko as a rival.

It might all sound a bit cerebral but this is also a movie about overwhelming emotions. This is a movie about love.

And it’s a movie about having a quest. About being willing to do anything, dare anything, risk anything, to find the one you love. It doesn’t matter if it takes decades. 

It’s also a movie about movies. It’s a love letter to cinema.

Millennium Actress was made using old school cel animation techniques and it looks great.

Finding a satisfying ending is always a challenge in this sort of movie but Kon pulls it off superbly. Millennium Actress is very offbeat but it’s a fascinating moving magical movie. Very highly recommended.

The Shout! Factory Blu-Ray looks great and the extras include interviews with the producers.

I’ve also reviewed Perfect Blue (1997).

Inn of the Damned (1975)

Inn of the Damned was the first Australian western. It’s also a horror western. It wasn’t the world’s first horror western but this was (and is) are rare subgenre although I’ve never understood why.

There’s an obvious spaghetti western influence. I guess this could be called a Vegemite western!

It’s beautifully shot and it looks like a western but not quite. This doesn’t look quite like the American West. I suspect that this was a deliberate move to give the visuals a slightly unusual flavour.

This was producing team Rod Hay and Terry Bourke’s follow-up to the notorious Night of Fear with Bourke once again writing and directing.

Initially it seems like a standard western. An American bounty hunter, Cal Kincaid (played by American import Alex Cord), has been recruited to hunt down the notorious outlaw and killer Biscayne (Robert Quilter). The local law enforcement are not entirely comfortable with this. Kincaid is paired (against his will because by nature he’s a loner) with Trooper Moore (Tony Bonner). Moore is very much a do-it-by-the-numbers military type and Kincaid is a lone wolf but they develop a certain respect.

Biscayne seems to have a connection with the Bildara Inn and odd things have happened there. Guests have disappeared. Now gold assayist Cummings and his travelling companion, a friendly prostitute, have vanished. They had been on their way to the inn. The old German couple who run the inn insist they haven’t seen these two. Trooper Moore isn’t entirely satisfied but he’s not sure why.

At this point we start to realise that this may not be the story we thought it was going to be. And Kincaid is starting to have some nagging doubts.

The movie now becomes more of a full-blown horror movie than a western. And as in Night of Fear the impact of the horror doesn’t rely purely on gore.

Two more guests arrive at the inn - Mrs Millington (Diana Dangerfield) and Beverley (Carla Hoogeveen). We assume that Beverley is her stepdaughter. Mrs Millington displays what might be seen as a not entirely appropriate affection (an affection of a physical nature) for her stepdaughter. It’s clear that Beverley has in the past reciprocated these affections but now she’s decided that it’s wicked and she threatens to tell her Dad.

Given that Diana Dangerfield and Carla Hoogeveen spend almost all their screen time naked one might assume that this is just a way of adding some commercially desirable exploitation elements (which would have been a smart move) but it does add an extra helping of perversity to an already perverse movie and so it’s keeping with the overall tone.

It builds to a very suspenseful climax.

There’s not a huge amount of gore. It’s the twisted bizarre motivations that provide the real horrors.

Judith Anderson was lured back to her native country to star as the old German woman running the inn. She’s very good without going too far over the top.

Alex Cord at the time seemed about to make the transition to major stardom, which sadly never happened. He just never got that big breakthrough role. He’s an excellent hero here. He doesn’t try too hard with the tough guy thing but we get the message that Kincaid is a formidable guy and he’s smart as well as tough.

There are lots of fine Australian actors here with John Meillon amusing as Biscayne’s hopeless drunken accomplice. Tony Bonner provides a perfect contrast in styles to Alex Cord. Carla Hoogeveen must have been delighted that she actually gets to speak in this one (unlike Night of Fear).

Terry Bourke keeps the momentum going. The action scenes are good. It’s a polished handsome production with terrific location shooting.

I just love the horror western idea and Inn of the Damned carries it off well. Highly recommended. 

I’ve also reviewed Terry Bourke’s previous effort, the superb Night of Fear. 

Sisters (1972)

The release of Sisters in 1972 marked the arrival of Brian De Palma as a director. Before that he’d made lots of experimental avant-garde stuff, much of it totally improvised. By 1972 he had realised what a waste of time such stuff was. Sisters was his first real movie. There’s nothing improvised here. De Palma had it all planned out. Sisters was made on a low budget but it’s polished and professional. It gets seriously weird and perverse and twisty but De Palma is in complete control.

He unsettles us right from the start. Why are we watching a goofy TV game show? Well, the goofy TV game show is called Peeping Toms and it sets the stage for a movie that deals heavily in voyeurism.

He’s doing some serious riffing on Rear Window early on and he’s being very open about it. A woman is looking out her window and sees a murder through the window of another building across a courtyard. Just like Rear Window. In Rear Window the witness is a photojournalist. In Sisters the witness is Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt), a journalist. And like L.B. Jefferies in Rear Window she has not a shred of hard evidence. 

But De Palma is playing with us because he’s doing some riffing on another Hitchcock movie as well but to reveal the name of that movie would give away a major spoiler. 

Then the major plot strand kicks in. The murderess, a cute French-Canadian model named Danielle (Margot Kidder) has a sister, Dominique. And that’s a really bizarre story that is  slowly unfolded.

The murder victim might have escaped had he recognised the presence of Danielle’s ex-husband Emil shadowing her constantly as a red flag but he had no reason to be suspicious. He cannot be blamed for accepting Danielle’s explanation at face value. Like so much in this story the ex-husband is not what he seems to be.

Grace’s newspaper hires a private detective to help her out and he provides some amusement. There are in fact some very funny moments in this film, which help De Palma to unsettle us just a little more.

De Palma is doing more than homaging scenes from Hitchcock movies. He’s exploring territory that Hitchcock explored in numerous movies - questions of identity and reality. Things, and people, are not what they seem to be.

Split screen, a technique very rarely seen today, had been used lots of time before but no-one has ever used it more cleverly than De Palma. He doesn’t just use it in an obvious way to show us the action from two points of view he also uses it to show us different actions occurring simultaneously which ramps up the suspense and accelerates the pacing.

This starts as a suspense thriller but will become a very creepy horror movie. And it’s a woman-in-peril movie with a real twist.

For all its twists and perversities and its over-the-top ending the plot of Sisters hangs together surprisingly well.

There is some body horror (De Palma being a bit Cronenbergian before Cronenberg) but he’s more interested in the psychological mutilation inflicted on the sisters.

De Palma’s pacing is faultless and given that this was his first major foray into this territory his mastery of the techniques of suspense is impressive. And De Palma demonstrates his ability to be clever without being gimmicky.

William Finlay as Emil is creepily enigmatic and Charles Durning as the private eye is quite fun but the acting performance that matters is that of Margot Kidder and she’s excellent - very sweet and very scary.

To make it all even more Hitchcockian Bernard Herrmann did the music.

Sisters might be De Palma’s first real movie but it is a real De Palma movie and a very good one with his personal signature very much in evidence. Highly recommended.

The Criterion Blu-Ray looks OK.