Barb Wire (1996)

Barb Wire (1996) has a reputation as a trashy Pamela Anderson action thriller. That’s OK. I like trashy thrillers. And it’s a post-apocalyptic dystopian cyberpunk action thriller. That’s OK by me as well. It’s based on a comic book.

It’s the aftermath of the Second American Civil War. Now Steel Harbor is the only free city. It’s city of crime, chaos, corruption, sleaze and depravity. You can have a lot of fun in Steel Harbor and you can get into a lot of trouble.

Barb Wire (Pamela Anderson) runs a bar there, called the Hammerhead. Curly (Udo Kier) manages it for her. 

Barb makes her living in various ways, some legal and some illegal, including bounty hunting and stripping.

She has an uneasy relationship with the local chief of police Willis (Xander Berkeley). Willis is moderately corrupt but Barb doesn’t mind that since she’s moderately crooked as well. There’s some erotic heat between them. An attraction of two morally compromised people.

There’s a totalitarian government and of course there’s a Resistance. There’s a genius scientist named Cora D with the antidote to the government’s most potent bioweapon. She’s on the run. And she needs some high-tech retinal contact lenses to escape detection.

Barb has the contact lenses and they’re worth big bucks and that could be her ticket out of Steel Harbor. But the bad guys (from the totalitarian Congressional government) are determined to get the lenses and to get Axel and Cora D (who are irritating starry-eyed idealists and not that bright).

Axel is helping her to escape. They want Barb’s help. Barb had loved Axel but he betrayed her. Barb has now had enough of causes.

Barb’s brother Charlie is with the Resistance and he’s idealistic and you just know he’s going to get himself into trouble.


Now at this stage you might be thinking that you’ve seen this film before. And if you’ve seen the 1989 Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Cyborg you have seen it before. The plot is pretty much identical. Barb Wire also owes a lot to Casablanca.

The bad guys are cardboard cutout villains.

The main thing wrong with Barb Wire is that the basic concept is not very original and the plot is very unoriginal.

On the plus side the action scenes are extremely good. I can’t really fault the job done by director David Hogan. He keeps things moving and as interesting visually as he can.

And there’s Udo Kier who is always a joy to watch.

In my view the movie’s biggest asset is Pamela Anderson. Barb is a larger-than-life outrageous comic-book kickass action heroine and that’s how Anderson plays her. And with impossibly voluptuous figure, her blonde hair, her leather gear and her corsets she doesn’t look real. She looks like a comic-book heroine. That’s how it should be.

It’s easy to point out this movie’s many faults (and they are many) but if you don’t worry about the plot you can just enjoy the mayhem. There’s very little gore and very little blood. It’s about excitement rather than gore. It’s also very tame where nudity and sex are concerned. Perhaps too tame.

Barb Wire is a comic-book B-movie with a comic-book B-movie heroine and that’s fine by me. Mindless entertainment but it’s not trying for anything more than that. I enjoyed it. Recommended.

And it looks nice on Blu-Ray.

The Vengeance of Dr Mabuse (1972)

Jess Franco’s The Vengeance of Dr Mabuse, released in 1972, was the last Dr Mabuse film. Purists might argue that it’s not a proper Dr Mabuse film but considering the vast differences between the three Fritz Lang Mabuse movies (made over a period of almost 40 years) and the 1960s CCC Mabuse films there really isn’t any such thing as a proper Mabuse film. It was never a rigidly structured franchise. Franco’s movie has a Mabuse vibe and that’s good enough for me.

This movie exists in two different versions. The Kino Cult Blu-Ray offers us the longer German cut, released with the title Dr. M schlägt zu. The much shorter Spanish cut included most of the same footage but totally rearranged.

The movie was shot in Germany and Spain but is set in the United States, somewhere close to the Mexican border.

Even more than most Franco films this is a movie that it going to bring out all the smarmy sneering snarkiness in reviewers with mainstream tastes. The Vengeance of Dr Mabuse is so far removed from conventional Hollywood filmmaking as to inhabit an entirely different cinematic galaxy.

As usual Franco had no money, and as usual he didn’t care. He wanted to create a particular feel in this film and he does just that and does it brilliantly. Everything is too cramped. Scenes look like they were shot inside closets. The framing is too tight. The camera is too close. He uses fisheye lenses when he shouldn’t. Everything is weirdly off-balance. Then there’s the red tint to everything.

Everything is wrong, and it’s all absolutely deliberate. The result is a feeling of paranoia and madness spinning out of control. Franco isn’t interested in being polished - he wants that swirling maelstrom of craziness feel. And it works.

And this is a fine example of one of Franco’s greatest assets as a director - the ability to find bizarre locations that work perfectly and that allow striking disturbing visuals without spending any money at all.

Jack Taylor is odd casting as Mabuse but he’s terrific - he’s a total madman who has no idea just how insane and doomed to failure his madcap scheme is. He’s never specifically referred to as Mabuse, but the German title Dr. M schlägt zu makes it fairly obvious that he is Dr Mabuse. And apparently in the Spanish version he is definitely stated to be Dr Mabuse.

What his scheme is doesn’t matter. It’s a total McGuffin.

Having Mabuse in America, and having him come up against a laidback cowboy sheriff (played in a nicely subtle tongue-in-cheek way by Fred Willliams) adds to the nuttiness.

And there’s the monster, Andros, one of several references to Franco’s early Dr Orloff movies. And yes, there’s a Professor Orloff in this one.

There’s a sinister sexy sadistic kinky female. There’s a stripper. There’s the cowboy sheriff’s girlfriend. There are kidnappings, and murders, and break-ins at secure facilities. The plot makes no real sense, and that’s a good thing. What matters is that things are crazy and they get crazier and everybody is paranoid and they get more paranoid. Dr M and his crew have completely control of events.

And of course there’s a kinky nightclub dancing scene.

It’s quite fitting that the final Dr Mabuse movies should have been made by Jess Franco, given that Fritz Lang was an admirer of Franco’s work.

The Vengeance of Dr Mabuse is not quite like any other Jess Franco movie except that it’s weird and offbeat. Which of course means it’s very Jess Franco indeed. He could make movies that were weird and offbeat in lots of different ways. In this case there’s an odd mistiness to everything and the brutalist architecture is perfect for a Dr Mabuse movie.

I enjoyed this one. Highly recommended.

The Kino Cult Blu-Ray looks nice and there’s an audio commentary by Nathaniel Thompson and Troy Howarth.

Vampyros Lesbos (1970)

If you’re a eurocult fan you’ve seen Jess Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos. And given that it was one of the first Jess Franco movies to be available on DVD way back early in the DVD era, and one of the first European erotic horror movies available on DVD at that time. There’s a good chance that this movie was your first exposure to Franco’s cinematic world. It was my first Franco movie and my first European erotic horror movie.

So it’s easy to take it for granted. But watching it now for the first time in many years I’m struck by just how startling it must have been at the time. That opening sequence! This is not how you begin a vampire movie. First off we know that we are not in central Europe or England in the 19th century. We are in Turkey. And the setting is contemporary.

The avant-garde music is most emphatically not what you expect in a vampire movie.

The erotic elements are also there front and centre right from the start. We get frontal nudity 60 seconds into the movie.

And then we find we are watching a night-club act. Of course there’s an erotic night-club act in most of Franco’s movies but in 1970 it wasn’t standard practice in horror movies.

And we are in seriously arty territory. This was the most arty period in Franco’s career. Necronomicon - Geträumte Sünden (AKA Succubus, 1968) is full-blown surrealism with wild narrative experiments. This was a movie that numbered Fritz Lang among its admirers. Paroxismus (AKA Venus in Furs, 1969) is equally avant-garde. At this time Franco had reasonably serious art-house credentials.

It’s so long since I last saw this movie that I had forgotten that unlike most lesbian vampire movies this is not an adaptation of Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla. It’s an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And while there are some changes it is very recognisably and very consciously an adaptation of Dracula, at least to begin with.

Linda Westinghouse (Ewa Strömberg) works in a lawyer’s office. She is sent on a journey to the remote home of a Hungarian countess, Countess Nadine Carody (Soledad Miranda), who needs some legal document attended to. The Countess is a vampire. In fact the legal documents relate to an estate left to her by Count Dracula. So Linda at this stage is clearly a stand-in for Jonathan Harker. The Countess begins her seduction of Linda, at which point Linda obviously becomes a stand-in for Lucy Westenra (or Mina Harker).

Linda ends up in the care of Dr Seward (Dennis Price) who is clearly a combination of Dr Seward and Van Helsing. Dr Seward his under his care a mad girl named Agra (Heidrun Kussin) who is obsessed with the Countess Carody. Agra is obviously the Renfield character.

At this time period European directors like Harry Kümel (in Daughters of Darkness), José Larraz (in Vampyres) and Jean Rollin (in movies like The Nude Vampire and Shiver of the Vampire) were radically reinventing the vampire movie. Franco appears to be doing that as well but he isn’t really. He is drastically streamlining the vampire myth, jettisoning the non-essential elements of vampire, but he isn’t going to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The Countess Carody does not sleep in a coffin, she lives in a modernist beach house rather than a castle, she has no feelings one way or the other about garlic and she adores sunbathing.

But all the essential elements are there. She is an immortal creature who feeds on human blood. She has hypnotic powers. She is quite unequivocally a vampire.

So we have major elements of Stoker’s novel established and then Franco starts playing around with them. This is a movie of stylistic excess and as with Succubus the more we see the more we feel that maybe we’re moving in a dreamscape. And we get more touches of surrealism. We know we’re dealing with dreams part of the time. That’s made explicit. But where do the dreams end and where does reality start? And Franco included cool cabaret scenes not just because they were cool. They emphasise that we’re watching a performance. We’re watching the Countess playing a vampire on stage.

Soledad Miranda is mesmerising. She dominates the movie from start to finish.

There are no shadows, no night scenes. Everything is bathed in glorious sunshine. That’s ow Nadine likes it. A girl has to work on her tan, even if she is a vampire. Franco is going out of his way to avoid gothic horror clichés. But it doesn’t feel gimmicky. Soledad Miranda actually has the ability to convince us that she really is a sun-worshipping vampire. This movie is also a great example of Franco’s genius for finding strange but perfect locations.

Vampyros Lesbos is one of the most important movies in Franco’s filmography. This is Franco at his best. Very highly recommended.

The Severin Blu-Ray offers the German cut, Franco’s preferred cut. The Spanish cut was apparently quite different. The most important extra is a perceptive video essay by Stephen Thrower.

Castle of Blood (1964)

When considering Barbara Steele’s career in Italian gothic horror movies it’s easy to focus too much on Mario Bava’s Black Sunday. It’s a brilliant movie but she made at least three others that are just as good - Camillo Mastrocinque’s An Angel for Satan (1966) and the two she made for Antonio Margheriti - The Long Hair of Death (1964) and Castle of Blood (1964). It’s Castle of Blood (the original Italian title was La Danza Macabra) that concerns us for the moment.

Castle of Blood opens with Edgar Allan Poe sitting in a pub in London trying to convince his friend, reporter Alan Foster (Georges Rivière), that his stories of the macabre are not fiction but account of true events. OK, so I don’t know how on earth Edgar Allan Poe could have come to be sitting in an English pub but after the huge success of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe movies if you wanted to sell a gothic horror movie in the U.S. market you had to give it a Poe connection.

Also present in the pub is Lord Thomas Blackwood (Umberto Raho) who happens to own a haunted castle. It has lain empty and untenanted for years. Blackwood challenges Foster to a wager. All Foster has to do is to spend one night in the castle.

Blackwood warns him that many have accepted this challenge and not one has survived to tell the tale.

Foster figures this will be easy money. Once he enters the castle Margheriti (quite correctly) starts to lay on the gothic trappings very thick indeed. Cobwebs, mysterious creakings, portraits that seem to be looking back at the viewer, doors opening and shutting for no reason. Foster is a sceptic and a rationalist and a man of science. He is not worried.

Then he meets Lord Thomas Blackwood’s relative Elisabeth Blackwood (Barbara Steele). This is odd. The castle has been completely empty for years. Even the servants are long gone. Foster is puzzled but when you find yourself sharing a castle with a smokin’ hot gothic babe who gives every indication that she is in the mood for love you can be forgiven for not sitting down and thinking about what’s going on.

Then Julia (Margarete Robsahm) shows up. She’s blonde but just as hot as Elisabeth but there’s some real tension between the two women. We will later find out that Julia wants something from Elisabeth that Elisabeth is not prepared to give her. Elisabeth very definitely prefers men.

And it’s soon obvious that the castle has numerous inhabitants. And it’s obvious to the viewer that there is something unnatural, or supernatural, going on. Are these people really alive? Are they really there? Foster doesn’t want to consider a supernatural explanation because he is still a determined sceptic, and he doesn’t want to think there’s anything unnatural about Elisabeth because he’s fallen madly in love with her. And they’ve had hot steamy sex. So he is sure she cannot be a ghost.

While we know that the supernatural really is at work are these people ghosts in the conventional sense? They have one or two unusual non-ghosty habits which I won’t say more about because it might involve a spoiler. But if they are ghosts they are oddly corporeal ghosts. Foster really does have sex with Elisabeth. It’s not quite a straightforward ghost story - it’s something much more interesting.

Margheriti directs with a great deal of assurance. He was in fact a master of the gothic horror genre, for which he doesn’t always get enough credit.

The atmosphere isn’t just creepy it’s also mysterious and puzzling.

Barbara Steele is at the top of her game and this is one of her sexiest performances. Georges Rivière is excellent, managing to be bewildered without seeming to be a fool.

It’s a great looking movie. In 1971 Margheriti remade this movie in colour as Web of the Spider (1971). He later admitted that it worked much better in black-and-white but Web of the Spider is by no means a total failure.

Castle of Blood/La Danza Macabra is a masterpiece of moody atmospheric gothic horror. Very highly recommended.

This movie is part of Severin’s Danza Macabra vol 2 boxed set. We get the rather heavily edited US cut of this film, with the title Castle of Blood, but more importantly we get the original Italian cut, La Danza Macabra (with English subtitles and an English-dubbed option) , which includes important scenes that were cut from the US version. There are lots of extras, the highlight being a lengthy video essay by Stephen Thrower but we also get to hear Barbara’s Steele’s reminiscences of the movie. She has very fond memories of working with Antonio Margheriti (she says that the three directors she most enjoyed working with were Margheriti, Mario Bava and Roger Corman).

Mr Peters’ Pets (1962)

Mr Peters’ Pets is a 1962 nudie-cutie and perhaps an explanation of this genre would be in order.

It started with a 1954 court case involving the nudist camp movie Garden of Eden. In Excelsior Pictures vs. New York Board of Regents the New York State Court of Appeals ruled that nudity was not obscene, as such. That made movies (such as nudist camp movies) depicting nudity legal. Sort of. You still had to tread carefully and go to extravagant lengths to avoid even the slightest hint of sex.

It soon became apparent that nudist camp movies were a dead end. One can only take so much nude volleyball. It was Russ Meyer who came up with the solution in 1959 when, with The Immoral Mr Teas, he invented the nudie-cutie. He realised that there were three key ingredients. Firstly, there had to be a plot gimmick to justify lots of non-sexualised female nudity. It didn’t matter if the plot device was silly. In fact that was a plus. But it had to be silly in a cute endearing way. Meyer came up with the idea of a guy who goes to the dentist and his optic nerve gets damaged. As a result he now has X-Ray Vision, but he can only see through women’s clothes.

Secondly, there have to be lots of gags. They can be mildly risqué but must not be crude. The tone has to suggest lightweight innocent fun. Meyer could come up with the right gags.

Thirdly, the girls had to be beautiful, and they had to be beautifully shot. In 1959 (and up until around 1967) you could only get way with T&A so the idea was to have plenty of it.

The Immoral Mr Teas has all those ingredient combined to perfection. Most subsequent nudie-cuties fell down to some degree in at least one of these areas.

Mr Peters’ Pets has a suitably silly cute plot device. A pet shop owner, Mr Peters, gets hold of a formula that allows him to take on the appearance of an animal for a short period. He can then provide cute animals as adorable companions for pretty girls, and the girls won’t be shy about undressing in front of kittens or puppies, not knowing that they’re undressing in front of the lecherous pet shop proprietor. As I say, it’s silly, but it has a certain charm and it works.

This movie falls down a bit in the second area. The gags are rather feeble, and since the film was shot without synchronised sound we get a never-ending voiceover narration which just isn’t funny enough.

In the third vital area Mr Peter’s Pets scores very highly. These girls are stunners. And there’s an immense quantity of T&A on display.

And it has another major asset. The movie is a series of vignettes as Mr Peters assumes different animal identities. The first vignette is straightforward, just a pretty blonde taking a bath while being watched Mr Peters in the guise of a kitten. But the later vignettes have a bizarre surreal quantity. A girl enjoys a day at the beach but she has with her a beach umbrella, a fishing rod and a fish bowl. She seems to be fishing for a goldfish to put in her fish bowl. And then she wants to play with the fish bowl.

The segment with the three babes having an artistic day out takes on a slightly manic quality as well.

This is an important nudie-cutie ingredient I neglected to mention earlier - a crazy oddball vibe which Mr Peters’ Pets certainly has.

The Something Weird/Kino Cult Blu-Ray provides a pretty solid transfer for Mr Peters’ Pets, plus an audio commentary and two other nudie-cuties.

Peter Perry Jr directed some of the very best of the nudie-cuties. Kiss Me Quick! (1964) is an engaging mixture of monster movie, science fiction and nudie-cutie and it features go-go dancing. The Joys of Jezebel (1970) is a nudie movie set in Hell with some wild 60s visuals. My Tale Is Hot (1964) is another nudie-cutie with devilish overtones. He also directed The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill (1966) for David F. Friedman and that one stars the amazing Stacey Walker. She’s more than enough reason to see that film.

But perhaps the most interesting of the movies directed by Peter Perry Jr is Revenge of the Virgins (1959), a crazy nudie western with a screenplay be Ed Wood Jr.

Peter Perry Jr really does have claims to being the grandmaster of the nudie-cutie genre. I found Mr Peters’ Pets to be oddly endearing. If, like me, you have a soft spot for this much-disparaged genre then Mr Peters’ Pets is recommended.

The Lady and the Monster (1944)

The Lady and the Monster is a 1944 Republic science fiction/horror movie based on Curt Siodmak's excellent 1942 novel Donovan’s Brain.

In this case rather than one mad scientist we get two but they’re obsessed and blinded by hopes of scientific glory rather than being overtly mad or evil. Professor Franz Mueller (Erich von Stroheim) and Dr Patrick Cory (Richard Arlen) are doing brain research. 

They believe they are close to being able to remove a brain and keep it alive outside the body.

Obviously they need a human subject but they’re not evil. They are not prepared to commit murder in order to obtain a brain. Their hope is that they can find someone so ravaged by disease or so horrifically injured as to have no chance of survival. In which case they have convinced themselves that removing the brain and keeping it alive externally would not really be morally wrong.

Of course they would have to do this in secret - the police might misunderstand. Luckily Mueller has a huge isolated old house (which everyone refers to as The Castle) with a well-equipped laboratory in the basement. And he not only has Cory to assist him but also his pretty young ward Janice Farrell (Vera Ralston), an aspiring scientist herself.

A plane crash gives them their chance. They are able to remove the brain just in time. And it survives!

That’s all very interesting but what they now want to do is to find a way to communicate with the brain.

There are things they don’t know about this brain, at least at first. It belongs to a very very rich man named Donovan. That’s unfortunate because it means that his death will attract publicity. There is however a much bigger problem with this brain. I’m not going to spoil the movie by hinting at the nature of this problem.

Professor Mueller is not really evil but he is increasingly blinded by ambition and increasingly obsessed. There is also a suggestion that he has a sexual or romantic interest in Janice. This does not please the housekeeper Mrs Fame (Mary Nash) who seems to be carrying a torch for the professor. And Cory and Janice are in love so there’s plenty of jealousy. Mueller’s judgment becomes more erratic.

There are also factors (which I can’t reveal due to the risk of spoilers) that cause Cory’s behaviour to be become very erratic.

And there are nefarious plots being hatched in the background, unbeknownst to Mueller and Cory.

It’s interesting to watch von Stroheim and Arlen both playing obsessed characters and taking totally different different but equally effective acting approaches. While von Stroheim is outrageous and flamboyant he is more than a mere ham.

Vera Ralston was being pushed towards stardom by Republic Pictures boss Herbert Yates. She’s a bit stilted but since she’s playing the beautiful female assistant to a mad scientist her subtly odd performance and slight accent make her seem suitably exotic.

The very moody atmospheric visuals are the work of the great cinematographer John Alton. And the sets are quite impressive as well and there’s some good miniatures work.

This was an A-picture for Republic and it’s polished and professional and vastly superior to most of the schlock Universal was churning out in the 40s.

The Lady and the Monster is cleverer and more subtle than you might anticipate. This is fine entertainment and it’s highly recommended. And a must for von Stroheim fans!

This is part of a four-movie Republic Horror Blu-Ray set. The transfer is excellent.

Night of the Comet (1984)

Night of the Comet is a 1984 post-apocalyptic science fiction film but it’s not handled in quite the way you might expect.

A comet is about to pass very close to Earth. Scientists reassure everybody that there is no danger. It just will be a spectacular light show.

Regina (Catherine Mary Stewart) misses the show. She’s in the projection booth of an old movie theatre having sex with her boyfriend. Well he’s not exactly her boyfriend. They’re not going steady.

The projection both just happens to have steel walls. That’s important.

The next morning everybody is dead. Everybody in LA. Maybe everybody in the world. Well, almost everybody. By a coincidence Regina’s sister Samantha (Kelli Maroney) spent the night behind steel walls.

And Hector (Robert Beltran) spent the night in the back of his truck with some chick he’d picked up. It seems like anybody who was safely behind steel barriers of some sort has survived. Which means that everybody is dead except for a tiny handful of people.

They run into Hector at the radio station. That’s important, because that’s how the scientists find out about them.

There are also the zombies. There aren’t many of them. But they’re mean and you don’t always recognise them as zombies at first.

And there are those scientists. They’re holed up in some top-secret laboratory out in the desert. Since they’re scientists and they’re part of a secret research facility we assume they’re evil. They might not be, but it’s highly likely. Maybe they will rescue the two girls. Maybe.

The romantic comedy Valley Girl had been a huge hit in 1983. Writer-director Thom Eberhardt sold the producers of Valley Girl on Night of the Comet by pitching it to them as Valley Girls at the End of the World. Post-apocalyptic sci-fi, but with valley girls.

What makes Night of the Comet oddly appealing is that you expect it to become silly and goofy and it is, but only up to a point. It’s a bit darker than you think it’s going to be. It seems like it’s going to become a black comedy, but it’s more an absurdist comedy. The tone is all over the place but its unpredictability works in its favour.

As a post-apocalyptic nightmare world it’s just desolate and empty rather than terrifying and horrific. But the desolation and emptiness are effective.

Regina does have one big thing going for her. Her dad is a Special Forces officer. Regina can handle a submachine-gun with the same skill as her favourite arcade game. And her dad has taught her that if you have to use a gun, shoot to kill. Regina is more than a match for the average zombie. And kid sister Samantha is a pretty cool customer as well.

Our trio of survivors has no idea what is going on. They know that somehow the comet killed everybody but they don’t know the truth about the zombies and even when they encounter the scientists they don’t know what that desert laboratory is all about. But they are 80s teenagers and they’re not inclined to be overly trusting. And they’ve seen horror movies. They know you don’t take chances with zombies. And they know that scientists and government people are not always the good guys.

The scenes of deserted LA are beautifully and atmospherically shot. The desolation is achieved with commendable subtlety. The slightly red skies are a nice touch. You don’t need a huge budget to make a post-apocalyptic. You just have to know what you’re doing.

The two lead actresses are wonderful. They play off each other beautifully and they’re sassy without being annoying. This is not a movie that offers non-stop mayhem. It’s more a bitter-sweet look at real people trying to deal with the end of the world. It doesn’t need gore because we really care about these people. We really really want them to make it.

This is a much better movie than it has any right to be. It manages to warmhearted and cynical at the same time. Highly recommended.

To the Devil a Daughter (1976)

To the Devil a Daughter was released in 1976 and was the last Hammer horror film, and the company’s second-last feature film.

There is a common misconception that Hammer in the 70s was hopelessly out of touch and that their 70s films were mostly unsuccessful. In fact the problem was that in the 70s the company made some very unwise financial deals which meant that even when their movies turned a profit Hammer did not receive any real financial benefits.

There is another common misconception that To the Devil a Daughter was a flop that ruined the company. In fact the film was a major box-office hit.

Hammer’s 1970s horror movies are extraordinarily varied and they’re as interesting and exciting as any horror movies made elsewhere during that decade.

To the Devil a Daughter is a gothic horror movie in a contemporary setting but unlike Dracula AD 1972 this is not vampires in the modern world. This is Satanism in the modern world.

To the Devil a Daughter obviously has more affinity with movies like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist and The Omen than with the usual run of Hammer horrors (although I believe it slightly predates The Omen).

This film is based on Dennis Wheatley’s 1953 novel To the Devil - a Daughter. It’s one of the three Hammer films based on Wheatley novels, the others being The Devil Rides Out (1968) and The Lost Continent (1968). These are three of Hammer’s most interesting movies.

We know that Father Michael Raynor (Christopher Lee) is up to no good. He’s a Catholic priest who’s been excommunicated for heresy and has formed his own breakaway church. We know that he has plans that involve a young nun, Catherine (Nastassja Kinski). We don’t know what those plans are.

None of this has anything to do with American writer John Verney (Richard Widmark), until a very jumpy very frightened man named Henry Beddows (Denholm Elliott) tells him a strange story and asks for his help. Henry wants Verney to meet his daughter at the airport in London and take her somewhere safe. His daughter is that young nun Catherine.

Verney is an interesting hero. He’s no knight in shining armour. He’s a cynic. He makes his living writing lurid sensationalistic books about the occult. What Henry has told him sounds like it might be material for a book. A bestselling book. Verney doesn’t believe in the occult and he doesn’t care about Catherine. He has no desire to go about saving people or battling the forces of darkness. But slowly he begins to suspect that unlike 98 percent of Satanists Father Michael Raynor might be more than just a charlatan. He might be the real deal. Verney doesn’t want to be a hero but he may not have much choice.

Not only is Verny not conventional hero material. He’s not quite as much of an expert on the occult as he likes people to think. And frightening things are happening. People are killed. Catherine’s behaviour is disturbing. Verney is out of his depth.

This movie has an extraordinarily strong cast. Richard Widmark gets across to the audience Verney’s not entirely heroic motives and he’s a different sort of hero for a Hammer film. Christopher Lee gives one of his strongest performances - he is very sinister, very fanatical and very scary. This movie made Nastassja Kinski a star overnight and she gives an excellent complex performance as a young woman who doesn’t really understand what is happening to her.

Denholm Elliott is delightfully twitchy and nervous and cowardly and treacherous.

The supporting cast is headed by Honor Blackman as Verney’s agent Anna and Anthony Valentine as her husband David. They’re excellent as two very ordinary people who are totally bewildered.

It’s a rather lurid story and there’s some real creepiness. Father Raynor and his acolytes are very very nasty people with very nasty plans.

It was a major departure for Hammer with lots of location shooting and a starkly contemporary feel. Hammer had finally abandoned the traditional gothic horror aesthetic. It’s also quite confronting. This is Hammer’s answer to The Exorcist and it’s arguably a better film. The most surprising thing is that it was passed by the BBFC without any cuts at all. Hammer had feared that it would be savagely cut.

This was Hammer positioning itself at the cutting edge of 70s horror. The tragedy is that although it was a huge hit the profits did not flow back to Hammer. And by this time the British film industry was a walking corpse. Hammer were doing everything right but making feature films in Britain was no longer a viable proposition.

Hammer made some very fine horror movies in the 70s and To the Devil a Daughter may well be the best of them. Very highly recommended.

Studiocanal’s Blu-Ray presentation looks terrific.

Ninja III: The Domination (1985)

Whenever I see the Cannon Group logo at the beginning of a movie I get a feeling of confidence. Whether it turns out to be a great movie or a not-so-great movie it will be fun. Ninja III: The Domination belongs to the not-so-great category but in its own perverse way it achieves a kind of quasi-greatness.

This is a psycho ninja chick movie. And any psycho ninja chick movie has got to be worth watching.

It begins with a bunch of people playing golf. Then a ninja shows up and kills everybody. Then the cops show up. Lots and lots of cops. Dozens of cops. The ninja kills most of them. Finally, having been shot about 98 times the ninja has had enough and he’s about to expire. But his story is not yet finished. Christie (Lucinda Dickey), a perfectly ordinary young woman, finds him lying in the bushes about to die and something weird happens.

One thing that’s cool is that we never find out why the ninja ran amok on the golf course. We presume someone hired him. We have no idea who that someone could be. Writer James R. Silke knows that we don’t need to know. This is not a mystery or a police procedural, it’s a ninja action picture.

The cop who interviews Christie, Officer Secord (Jordan Bennett) takes a shine to her. Christie doesn’t date cops. But Secord isn’t a quitter and his desperation to get into her pants is finally rewarded with success. And soon there’s a thing between them.

Christie has a sword, a katana. We soon have reason to suspect it’s a magic sword.

The cops who shot that ninja start to die in rather grisly ways. Maybe there’s another ninja about.

There is, in a way. That evil dead ninja has possessed Christie. She now intermittently turns into an evil lady ninja.

And there’s another ninja, Yamada (Shô Kosugi). He has an eye patch. We don’t know if he’s a good ninja or an evil ninja.

More cops get sliced up. Poor Secord doesn’t know what’s going on. Christie doesn’t know either.

Truly immense quantities of mayhem follow.

This is not just a psycho ninja chick movie. It’s also an incredibly bad rip-off of The Exorcist. And it’s a bit of an 80s dance movie as well. Lots of aerobics. And a video game movie. If something was fashionable in the 80s it will show up somewhere in this movie.

The acting is terrible. If you’re wondering why Lucinda Dickey did not become a major star then watch this movie and you’ll have your answer. The gal just can’t act.

But then this is not exactly a character-driven movie so that doesn’t really matter. It’s all about the martial arts action and there’s plenty of that and it’s pretty entertaining with a very high body count. And Miss Dickey can dance and trained dancers always handle fight scenes pretty well.

There are some really bad special effects as well, which adds further layers of fun. I have no idea why some of these effects were even there except that I think they wanted a video game vibe.

What do you want in a psycho ninja chick movie? You want a cool lady ninja and you want her to be totally nuts and you want her to leave a path of death and destruction behind her. That’s what this movie offers. It doesn’t offer anything else. It doesn’t need to.

Ninja III: The Domination is in truth a very bad movie but that’s what makes it fun.

I have the Spanish Blu-Ray release which sadly doesn’t provide a very good transfer. On the other hand this is the sort of movie that is more enjoyable if it looks like you’re watching it on a VHS rental from Blockbuster back in the day.

Murderock (1984)

Murderock (AKA Murder-Rock: Dancing Death) is a 1984 Lucio Fulci giallo.

The setting is a dance school in New York. This was 1984 so it has a bit of a Flashdance vibe. There’s fierce competition. Out of more than a dozen young dancers only three will be chosen for bigger things.

Candice Norman (Olga Karlatos) runs the class. She was once on the brink of a glittering career, until she was knocked over by a motorcyclist. She recovered, but not fully. Not fully enough to have a career as a dancer. Now she teaches.

One of the girls in her class is murdered, in a rather odd way - a hatpin through the heart.

Lieutenant Borges (Cosimo Cinieri) has insufficient evidence to make any moves. It appears likely that someone in the dance school was the killer. Likely, but not certain.

There’s a second murder. Another girl pupil. The same murder method.

There’s no certainty as to whether the killer is male or female. The victims are knocked out by chloroform first.

Candice is worried. Her boss Dick Gibson (Claudio Cassinelli) is worried. He knew some of the girl pupils. He knew them intimately. That makes him a suspect but there’s so much jealousy and backbiting within the school that everybody is a suspect.

Candice has strange dreams. There’s a man in the dreams trying to kill her. She knows the man from somewhere but she can’t remember having actually met him.

There are romantic entanglements between the various students as well as entanglements the students and the staff. There has been a relationship between Dick Gibson and Candice. Candice also has a hot new boyfriend, male model and unsuccessful actor George Webb (Ray Lovelock).

There’s another murder. This time the killer was photographed but frustratingly the photo shows nothing useful. The paranoia builds. Everyone is jumpy. And nobody believes that the killings have stopped.

There are a lot of interesting aspects about the way Fulci made this movie. It’s a giallo with almost no gore at all. I don’t mind that. There are other things that matter more in a giallo. Style is more important, and this movie has style. An atmosphere of indefinable menace matter, and this film has that. Hints of sexual motivations are essential in a giallo and they’re found here as well. And while there’s no gore there’s a hint of kinkiness in the murder method.

Many giallo fans consider plot coherence to be of minor importance but in this case the plot does all come together even if there are some offbeat outrageous elements. Offbeat and outrageous elements are always welcome in a giallo.

And there are plenty of clues. Lieutenant Borges does not rely on inspiration. He has spotted those clues and he has noted their significance. He’s a good cop. He notices clues and he thinks about them, about what they really mean.

When the solution is revealed it makes perfect sense. The motivations make sense.

I love the automated message that warns the students to vacate the premises within fifteen minutes every night before the whole school is locked down tight by electronic means. It adds to the suspicion that the murder was an inside job and it also adds a touch of paranoia. The school itself is a character in the story.

There are cameras everywhere in the school. Everybody is being watched by somebody - and not just by those authorised to be watching. There’s visual surveillance and auditory surveillance. This is a movie with a definite interest in voyeurism of various kinds.

I love the way Fulci shoots so many scenes in a fragmented way. The frame is fragmented. Some parts of a shot will be lit while other parts are unlit. Lights keep flashing on and and off. Music recordings switch on and off. It’s as if reality is being splintered. It’s very unsettling, and deliberately so.

I’m increasingly fond of 80s Fulci. This was a fascinating extremely varied phase of his career, and Murderock is Fulci in top form. Highly recommended.

The 88 Films Blu-Ray looks great.

Other 80s Fulci films that I recommend - The Black Cat (1981), The Devil’s Honey (1986), Aenigma (1987).