The Exorcist III (1990)

Exorcist III is the third movie in the series and the story behind the movie is more complicated than the movie.

Willian Peter Blatty, author of the original 1971 novel The Exorcist and screenwriter of the original 1973 The Exorcist movie, wrote a screenplay for a third movie. The production company, Morgan Creek, wanted changes. Eventually a screenplay more or less acceptable to both parties took shape but with a major dispute regarding the ending. Several directors were considered before Blatty decided to direct the movie himself.

After a less than successful preview Morgan Creek ordered extensive reshoots including an exorcism scene. Blatty reluctantly did the reshoots. Blatty remained very unhappy about the exorcism scene. He saw the movie as a story linked to the original story, but not an exorcism movie.

Blatty turned the original version into a very successful novel, Legion. He had always wanted Legion as the title of the movie rather than Exorcist III.

Years later Blatty’s original cut was restored (with the title Legion) using VHS footage in Blatty’s personal possession. Both the Shout! Factory and Arrow Blu-Rays include this Legion “director’s cut” as an extra so it’s possible to see the movie Blatty had wanted to make, which differs in a number of ways from the Exorcist III theatrical cut.

Lieutenant Kinderman (George C. Scott) is investigating a series of horrific murders that remind him eerily of the Gemini Killer murders, but the Gemini Killer is dead. Kinderman expresses his fears to his old buddy Father Dyer (Ed Flanders).

Much of the film takes place in the psychiatric ward of a hospital. A man known only as Patient X claims to be the Gemini Killer.

What is actually going on remains mysterious until the ending, and perhaps even after that. Patient X cannot leave his cell. He cannot be carrying out the new murders. Or can he? This is not just a series of copycat killings. Both the killer and Patient X know things about the Gemini killings that the police have never revealed.

Kinderman is a rationalist. He resists the idea that there could be anything supernatural going on here. He knows that there are things happening that are difficult to explain in any other way, but he still resists.

The plot is complicated. It involves several dead people. Not just the Gemini Killer, but also Father Damien Karris. Kinderman knows these people are dead.

It seems to have been Blatty’s intention to tell a story connected to the events in The Exorcist, and involving some of the same people, but that would not be a sequel in the usual sense. Of course his difficulty is that Morgan Creek wanted it to be a sequel in a much more straightforward sense.

There are grisly murders but they take place offscreen. This is a cerebral slow-burn horror film, until the grand guignol ending (which Blatty vehemently did not want). This is very much theological horror. I wouldn’t say that you have to be a Catholic to appreciate this film but you do need at least a vague knowledge of the basics of Catholic theology. There’s a clever well-executed dream sequence but unless you’re aware of the Catholic concept of Purgatory you’ll misunderstand it completely.

This also seems to have caused tensions between Blatty and the execs at Morgan Creeks who wanted more overt horror content.

The most significant and obvious difference Blatty’s version and the theatrical cut is the exorcism scene which is entirely absent from Blatty’s cut. Blatty was correct to feel that that scene was entirely unnecessary and damaged the film. On the other hand one can see Morgan Creek’s point of view - without that scene it’s a very talky film with very little overt horror.

The movie did poorly at the box office but whichever version had been released it would probably have done poorly. It’s an intellectual theological horror film in which the characters endlessly discuss theological questions. That doesn’t make it a bad movie, but it does make it a movie with limited commercial appeal.

Exorcist III/Legion is interesting but I have to say that it didn’t particularly grab me. But then I’m not much of a fan of The Exorcist either. I’m one of those weird crazy people who think Exorcist II: The Heretic is a masterpiece.

Exorcist III looks good on Blu-Ray. When you Blatty’s version Legion you do have to accept that the VHS-sourced inserts are VHS quality but Blatty’s version is still worth watching.

Sinthia: The Devil's Doll (1970)

Sinthia: The Devil's Doll is a 1970 sexploitation feature that promises sex and satanism but delivers something else entirely, something much weirder.

It was directed by Ray Dennis Steckler so you expect an incoherent mess. That’s what you get, but in its own way this movie works remarkably well. Its incoherence becomes a feature rather than a bug.

Cynthia (who becomes Sinthia in her nightmates) is a young woman aged around twenty who has been undergoing therapy. At the age of twelve she murdered both her parents. Due to her age she was not convicted but she did have to undergo therapy. Now her psychiatrist thinks she’s almost cured. There’s just one more step she has to take. It’s the step that will end her disturbing nightmares.

This is a movie that jumbles dreams, fantasies, memories and hallucinations in a wild cocktail. We don’t know where reality leaves off and her dreams begin, because Sinthia herself does not know. We are in effect seeing everything from within the mind of a very disturbed young woman.

Characters seem to change places with each other, because that’s what happens in dreams. Situations merge into other situations, because that’s what happens in dreams. Some of the things we see are Sinthia’s memories, but they may not be reliable. She has gone over certain events in her mind so many times that she can no longer be certain exactly what happened.

Sinthia saw her father having sex with her mother (or possibly her stepmother). Sinthia went crazy with jealousy at the thought that her mother was going to steal Daddy away from her. It’s not unusual for a child to feel possessive towards a parent but there are very definite sexual overtones to her feelings for her daddy.

The problem is that Sinthia was at that age when a girl first starts to become aware of sex and love. Sinthia is clearly bewildered and frightened by her sexual feelings.

After leaving the psychiatrist’s office the 20-year-old Sinthia meets an artist, Lenny. He wants to paint her. She meets several women who seem to take an unusual interest in her.

Lenny takes her to a play. Sinthia takes the play much too seriously and interrupts the performance. This is a play within a film but it could be a play within a dream within a film.

Sinthia may be falling in love with Lenny.

We cannot be sure of the reality of anything that takes place outside the psychiatrist’s office. Some of it might be real. It’s possible that all of it takes place entirely within Sinthia’s mind.

A lot of movies have tried this sort of thing - mixing dream and reality in such a way that the viewer cannot be certain which is which. This movie does it fairly successfully. In fact more successfully than some much more expensive and much more prestigious films.

This movie really does have an incredibly authentic dream feel. Steckler achieves this without fancy special effects (this was an ultra low budget movie) - he uses camera angles, filters, simple superimpositions and rapid-fire editing. Today it would be achieved by spending millions on CGI and the results would almost certainly be less disturbing and less disorienting. You don’t need money, you need imagination and confidence.

It would be easy to take cheap shots at the acting. On the whole it’s very amateurish. That also becomes a feature rather than a bug. These people could be real people, or just characters in a dream, or real people transformed in Sinthia’s mind into dream characters. Sinthia herself could be a character in her own dream. More polished naturalistic performance would have weakened the spooky dream feel.

There’s no actual satanism, although Sinthia does have nightmares about being claimed by the Devil for her wickedness.

There’s a huge amount of nudity, but this is a story all about sex. All of Sinthia’s fears and guilts, and all of her dreams and fantasies, come back to sex. Surprisingly, given subject matter that would terrify a filmmaker of today, the movie doesn’t feel sleazy. It doesn’t even feel exploitative. It is honest and open about sexual feelings, and that in itself would have filmmakers of today running for cover.

This is a sexploitation movie with at least some serious purpose and with some arty pretensions.

What makes it worth seeing is that Steckler has no real idea of what he’s doing. As I said at the beginning it’s an incoherent mess but it fails in such interesting ways. Its faults (directorial ineptitude and terrible acting) end up making it feel like a genuine nightmare. Nightmares don’t make sense. They don’t mean anything. They’re just there. A more competent director would have taken this material and turned it into something intelligent and provocative. But that wouldn’t have worked. A nightmare is like a horror movie directed by an insane child. They couldn’t find an insane child to direct this movie but they found Ray Dennis Steckler which is the next best thing.

So many sexploitation movies survive in the form of a single release print often in very poor condition. That’s clearly the case here. Don’t expect a pristine transfer, just be grateful that such a fascinating oddity survived at all.

Something Weird paired this one with Satanis: The Devil’s Mass on a double-feature DVD that is now hard to find. It’s also available on Blu-Ray from Severin in a Ray Dennis Steckler boxed set.

Sinthia: The Devil's Doll is weird but it’s weird in a really interesting way and it’s highly recommended.

The Mephisto Waltz (1971)

The Mephisto Waltz is a 1971 gothic horror movie with a contemporary setting. I avoided this movie for years because of my allergic reaction to Alan Alda but I have to admit he does OK in this film.

Alda plays Myles Clarkson. Myles is a music journalist with a beautiful wife (Paula, played by Jacqueline Bisset) and a daughter. My most people’s standards he’s a success but he really wanted to be a concert pianist. He studied for years but never made the grade and as a result he’s always felt himself to be a bit of a failure.

He interviews Duncan Ely (Curd Jürgens), the world’s greatest living pianist. Duncan is struck by Myles’ hands. They are hands that any concert pianist would kill to possess.

Duncan and his daughter Roxanne Delancey (Barbara Parkins) become very friendly with the Clarksons. Myles is flattered. Myles is really an overgrown adolescent blinded by his hero-worship of Duncan. Paula, who is a whole lot smarter than her husband, is puzzled and suspicious.

Paula is very suspicious indeed of Roxanne. Her suspicions intensify when she sees Duncan kissing Roxanne at a party. It is not exactly a fatherly peck on the cheek. It’s a long passionate kiss. Paula has also noticed that Roxanne’s interest in Myles seems to have definite carnal overtones.

Paula also comes to suspect Roxanne of having odd interests in the occult.

Duncan Ely is an old man in poor health. His career as a concert pianist is all but over and he may not have long to live.

It won’t come as a great surprise that Duncan and Roxanne have hatched a plot. Their plan will necessitate making a demonic bargain but they’re OK with that. As Roxanne’s ex-husband puts it, they’re spoilt rich people who use the occult as an excuse for doing whatever they want to do without any regard for morality. What Duncan wants is to keep living, with a young body, preferably a young body with the kinds of hands a concert pianist needs. What Roxanne wants is to keep Daddy alive, bask in his reflected glory. She also has reasons to want Daddy to have a healthy young body, and not just so he can play the piano.

It’s a movie that is very much a part of the late 60s/70s wave of Hollywood movies dealing with Satanism and there’s an obvious Rosemary’s Baby influence.

There’s nothing remotely original here but in a horror movie the execution matters more than the originality of the concept. The execution here is certainly spirited. Director Paul Wendkos goes to town with spooky trippy visual effects and over-the-top dream sequences. The spooky creepy stuff is done in shamelessly excessive style. It’s all rather schlocky and totally lacking in subtlety but it’s fun.

You could say the same thing about Alan Alda’s performance. There’s zero nuance to it and he overacts outrageously but his performance works in the context of the movie’s overall style.

Jacqueline Bisset makes a bit more of an effort to do some real acting, with some success, and she looks stunning. Barbara Parkins as Roxanne oozes wicked depraved evilness.

This is a movie about Satanism but it’s not about world domination or the triumph of evil or the lust for power. It’s all about sexual desire, and not always healthy sexual desire. Paula is entirely obsessed sexually with Myles. Roxanne is sexually obsessed with Duncan. Duncan is obsessed with Paula. It’s a movie dripping with the decadence and depravity of the rich and fashionable.

Visually it’s very gimmicky in a very 70s way but that’s a large part of its charm. It also has a very TV movie feel, or rather the feel of a TV movie trying to look cinematic but not quite making it.

Whether you like the movie or not depends on your expectations. If you’re hoping for full-on horror you’ll be disappointed. If you’re hoping for something ground-breaking like Rosemary’s Baby you’ll be disappointed. It’s a movie with lesser ambitions which it doesn’t always achieve.

That’s not to say it’s a so-bad-it’s-good movie. That would be an unnecessarily harsh judgment. It’s competently made. The acting isn’t great but it’s right for the movie. It does have some spooky moments, and a few mild scares. The ending works pretty well. It does create an effectively decadent atmosphere - these are people using dark forces purely to enhance their own sensual pleasures. It has its flaws but it’s consistently entertaining and watchable.

Paul Wendkos made a few feature films (including the charming Gidget in 1959) but worked mostly in television, directing an astonishing number of TV movies including the rather good Fear No Evil (1969).

With all its flaws this movie is thoroughly enjoyable. Recommended.

The Antichrist (1974)

Alberto De Martino’s The Antichrist ( AKA The Tempter, original title L’anticristo) is an Italian rip-off of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Let’s be honest. In the 60s and 70s if there was a bandwagon that could be jumped on then Italian film-makers would jump on it. Of course bandwagon-jumping is something that all film industries do. Including Hollywood. The difference is that the Italians could usually be relied on to do it with style.

I’m personally not the biggest fan of The Exorcist although I do have to admit that it’s a movie I haven’t seen for a very long time. If I ever getting around to rewatching it I might enjoy it more than I did years ago. I do however have a soft spot for outrageous Exorcist rip-offs.

Right from the start this movie establishes a mood of religious fanaticism and hysteria. A crowd of desperate people have gathered at a Catholic shrine, all hoping to be cured of various crippling ailments. The crowd grows more and more frenzied until one worshipper goes totally crazy and throws himself to his death from a high wall.

Among this crowd is Ippolita Oderisi (Carla Gravina). She is there with her father, Massimo Oderisi (Mel Ferrer). Ippolita is a cripple as a result of a car accident. Her father was driving so he blames himself. Maybe Ippolita blames him too. It may have been the start of her daddy issues. She has quite a few of those. Ippolita is well into her thirties and she’s unmarried and she knows that realistically she will almost certainly remain unmarried. There aren’t too many men who would want to marry a woman who is paralysed. Ippolita is of course a virgin. She’s been a good Catholic girl. But she is still a woman. She has normal womanly needs, for both sex and love. And no acceptable way of satisfying those needs.

She has grown very close to her father. That’s not necessarily unhealthy or weird. Given her situation she is naturally emotionally dependent on him. But in Ippolita’s case the attachment does seem a bit too intense. When she discovers that dear old dad has a mistress she becomes very jealous indeed.

Her uncle Bishop Ascanio Oderisi (Arthur Kennedy) is worried that Ippolita will fall into the clutches of devil-worshippers. He’s convinced that there are demonic cults everywhere. He thinks that a psychiatrist might be able to help her and he has one in mind, Dr Marcello Sinibaldi (Umberto Orsini). It turns out that there is nothing physically wrong with Ippolita. Her paralysis is psychosomatic. We can of course speculate (and I think it’s fair to say that we’re intended to speculate) that her paralysis may be connected with a fear of sex or perhaps her fear that she has an incestuous attraction to her father.

Dr Sinibaldi is perhaps just a little flakey but this was the 70s and in the 70s it would have been plausible for a psychiatrist to believe in reincarnation. He believes the answers to her problems may lie in a past life. He intends to unlock the secrets of that past life.

You won’t be surprised to learn that in a past life Ippolita was burned as a witch. She was to enter a nunnery but instead joined a sect of devil-worshippers.

Dr Sinibaldi thought that uncovering some trauma in a past life would allow Ippolita to walk again. He was right about that but he unlocked all sorts of obsessions and now Ippolita seems to be possessed by the Devil. And the Devil has plans for her.

Carla Gravina is very effectively cast. It’s not that she’s an unattractive woman but she’s been given a very unflattering hairstyle and very unflattering makeup, her dress sense early on is a bit dowdy. The intention was obviously to make her appear plain and unsexy, which is necessary for the purposes of the film since it makes her fears that she will remain forever unmarried and a virgin more convincing. She is playing a woman who feels herself to be unlovely and unsexy. She gives a totally unhinged performance which is exactly what was called for.

It’s clear that sexual frustration is a major factor in Ippolita’s problems. Whether you want to see her sexual issues as the key the Devil uses to gain possession of her or whether you see them as causing her insanity it’s clear either way that Ippolita has some serious sexual issues. There’s not just the hint of father-daughter incest but brother-sister incest as well.

Alberto De Martino isn’t one of the more highly regarded Italian genre movie directors but he did direct one of my all-time favourite eurospy thrillers, Special Mission Lady Chaplin (1966). And in 1977 he revisited the satansploitation genre with the outrageous and thoroughly enjoyable Holocaust 2000 (AKA Rain of Fire, 1977). He was a guy who could certainly make entertaining movies.

The special effects are at times decidedly dodgy. I don’t mind that. It’s a 70s movie. And De Martino certainly didn’t have the budget that William Friedkin had. Maybe De Martino gets too ambitious at times, trying for effects which really would have required a very much larger budget. Modern viewers who cannot imagine a movie without CGI will react very badly to this movie but those viewers are not going to watch a 1974 movie anyway.

This is very much one of those movies in which the awakening of female sexuality is seen as terrifying and demonic, linked to demonic possession or witchcraft or vampirism. It’s a major theme in vampire movies. Curiously enough one of the first movies to make this link explicit was a Hammer movie, the very disturbing Dracula Prince of Darkness (1966). The idea goes back a very long way in gothic fiction, at least as far as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Christabel and it’s pretty explicit in Sheridan le Fanu’s 1872 novel Carmilla on which The Vampire Lovers (1970) was based. Whether The Antichrist actually wants us to equate female sexuality with the demonic or whether it’s attacking the Church for promoting such a view is something you’ll have to decide for yourself. What matters is that the characters in the movie are very uncomfortable with Ippolita’s sexuality.

This movie throws just about every satansploitation cliché you can think of at the viewer but this is what audiences would have wanted and it’s fun.

In the case of The Exorcist it’s worth remembering that it was based on a novel by William Peter Blatty, a devout Catholic. It’s clearly a very very pro-Catholic novel and this is to a large extent true of Friedkin’s film. We’re meant to believe that Regan is literally possessed by a demon and we’re meant to believe in the literal existence of the Devil. In the case of a movie such as The Antichrist made by a European film-maker in the 70s you can’t be so sure that it isn’t to some extent sceptical of the literal truth of demonic possession. Personally I suspect that we’re meant to see demonic possession as the result of a combination of sexual frustration and religious hysteria.

It’s interesting that Ippolita’s demonic possession seems to begin during a dream sequence, and that dream begins with a sexual fantasy. It’s not entirely clear if the woman in the dream sequence is Ippolita herself or the long-dead witch from her past life. When he can also never be quite sure that that long-dead witch ever existed. She may simply be a product of Ippolita’s fevered imagination and her fevered sexual longings.

It’s worth pointing out that the idea that Ippolita had past lives is an idea that the psychiatrist (a somewhat ambiguous character) put into her head. His suggestion may have triggered an elaborate fantasy on her part. It’s also possible that the whole demonic possession thing has been suggested to her by her uncle the bishop who seems to be obsessed with such ideas.

While the movie seems to be treating the demonic possession as real there is still a slight doubt. This was the 70s when the idea that mental disturbance could cause paranormal phenomena was quite widely held.

There’s also a murder committed by Ippolita which is very ambiguous indeed. It could have been just another of her sexual fantasies.

The dream sequence is superbly shot and is the highlight of the movie. I should mention that Joe D’Amato did the cinematography on this film.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray release offers a very good transfer plus an audio commentary and a featurette.

The Antichrist is an Exorcist rip-off but it’s a very good and very interesting Exorcist rip-off, with a very strong focus on the sexual nature of demonic possession. Highly recommended.

Asylum of Satan (1972)

Asylum of Satan was William Girdler’s first movie. He directed it and co-wrote the screenplay and it was shot in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. It has all the flaws you’d expect in a first feature by a very young film-maker but it does have a certain schlocky low-budget charm to it.

Lucina Martin (Carla Borelli) is a concert pianist who wakes up one morning to find herself in a lunatic asylum. She remembers being taken to the local hospital but has no idea how she came to be transferred to Dr Jason Spector’s asylum. She also has no idea what’s supposed to be wrong with her.

The asylum is a pretty disturbing place, even by the standards of madhouses. There are a whole bunch of patients in wheelchairs wearing hooded robes. The few patients she manages to talk to regard Dr Spector with reverence but they seem to be rather vague about his methods, and rather vague even about their reasons for being there. The head nurse looks suspiciously like a man in drag which adds to the general ambience of weirdness.

She starts to have what seem to be hallucinations or visions of some sort but this asylum is such a strange place that it’s hard to know whether anything she sees is real or not. This is the result not so much of skillful contrivance on the part of Girdler as on the sheer incoherence of the script. Poor Lucina can’t be expected to know what’s going on if the writers don’t know either!

Her boyfriend tries to visit her at Dr Spector’s hospital but is informed that visitors are not permitted. Since he has no idea why she is there he gets pretty annoyed by his, annoyed enough in fact to go to the police. The detective assigned to the case is uninterested and unimpressed by his story, but eventually he does do a little digging around and uncovers some odd things about Dr Spector. For one thing, Dr Spector looks to be in his mid-forties but he was in his early seventies the last time he published anything in a medical journal, and that was ten years earlier. And there have been vague accusations of devil worship!

There’s not much doubt that devil worship is indeed one of the things going on at this hospital. Not to mention that quite a few patients seem to die very unusual and rather grisly deaths.

Asylum of Satan has all the ingredients to make a nifty little satansploitation flick but the screenplay is all over the place and while Girdler, an obsessive Alfred Hitchcock fan, does his best to throw plenty of shocks the audience’s way he lacks the experience to make his visual set-pieces come off. The result is a mess, but an oddly appealing mess. Girdler would go on to make eight more movies, including the wonderfully weird The Manitou (1978) before his tragic death in a helicopter accident at the age of 30.

Carla Borelli as Lucina is reasonably competent and makes a sympathetic heroine. Charles Kissinger is suitably hammy as Dr Spector. The rest of the cast was composed mostly of Girdler’s friends and the general standard of acting is several grades below awful.

The makeup effects are quite good and much of the film was shot in a wonderfully spooky old house in Louisville, a house that sadly no longer exists.

Considering this movie’s extreme obscurity Something Weird have done pretty well to find a print that is at least quite watchable. A commentary track is included which features Patty Breen, a lady whose knowledge of the life and work of William Girdler is awe-inspiringly encyclopedic. The movie is paired on the DVD with another very obscure 70s movie, Satan’s Children (1974).

Asylum of Satan is a long way from being a good movie but if you just let yourself be carried along by the totally incoherent script and don’t try to make sense of anything the experience is weirdly satisfying in a low-budget trashy sort of way. Worth a rental anyway if you’re a 70s satansploitation fan.

The Sentinel (1977)

The Sentinel was Michael Winner’s attempt to jump on the Catholicsploitation/satansploitation bandwagon of the 70s, and it’s a glorious mess of a film.

Fashion model Alison (Cristina Raines) movies into a New York brownstone to have some time to herself sway from her lawyer boyfriend Michael (Chris Sarandon). Michael is pushing her to marry him, but although she loves him she’s still a little uneasy about the mysterious death of his first wife. The apartment seems like just what she was looking for until she meets her new neighbours. Charles Chazen (Burgess Meredith) is friendly, perhaps a little too friendly. He’s always accompanied by a small yellow parrot named Mortimer and a black-and-white cat named Jezebel. The other neighbours are much more disturbing.

When she complains to her landlady she is told that in fact there are no other neighbours, about from the reclusive blind priest on the top floor. Alison is somewhat prone to anxiety at the best of times, since the time when she walked in on her father having an orgy with two prostitutes. An orgy involving cake. Lots of cake.

Michael has his own problems. He has a grizzled old New York detective snooping around after him. The detective who didn’t like him in the first place and still has his doubts about the death of Michael’s wife. Things get really complicated for Michael when Alison is found in the street outside the apartment house covered in blood saying she has just killed her father. Her father actually died some days earlier but a corpse shows up that matches the blood type found on Alison, a circumstance that encourages the detective to take an even closer interest in Michael and Alison.

The climax is perhaps not too difficult to predict but I don’t consider that to be a major flaw in a horror movie.

This film is packed with good or at least interesting ideas, all mixed together in a rather ramshackle plot that leaves loose ends trailing all over the place. The looseness of the plot adds to the fun, giving it in some ways an almost eurohorror feel.

Michael Winner’s direction might not be especially inspired but the movie manages to combine some genuinely creepy atmospheric moments with some over-the-top gore and grand guignol excess. Personally I think he overdoes it a little towards the end but I suspect most viewers will enjoy the outrageousness of the ending.

If you get bored you can always play Spot the Star. And there are more stars here than I’ve ever seen before in one movie - Ava Gardner, Martin Balsam, Arthur Kennedy, Jose Ferrer, Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Walken, Eli Wallach, Sylvia Miles, Burgess Meredith, Jerry Orbach, Tom Berenger and John Carradine all pop up somewhere.

Chris Sarandon makes a rather low-key but fairly effective lead. Cristina Raines is less effective. Of the mammoth support cast the standouts are Ava Gardner (a delightfully tongue-in-cheek performance), Burgess Meredith and Eli Wallach.

It’s not a good movie in any conventional sense of the term. It’s one of those movies that succeeds by virtue of its own faults. It’s a highly entertaining shambles. Plus it has blind priests, lesbians, nuns, freaks, murderers and a cake orgy. And a cat in a party hat (because it’s her birthday). If that’s not enough to keep you entertained then there’s just no pleasing some people! This is what cult movies are all about.

Universal’s DVD is sadly bereft of extras but it’s a nice widescreen transfer.

Land of the Minotaur (1976)

Land of the Minotaur might be a cheap and cheesy satansploitation flick but it does star Donald Pleasence and Peter Cushing. And in any case I have absolutely no problem with cheap and cheesy satansploitation flicks. Although this one is perhaps a combination of satansploitation and pagansploitation.

A group of young amateur archaeologists (although they really look more like hippies than archaeologists but it was the 70s) are keen to explore an ancient temple site in Greece. The local parish priest Father Roche (Donald Pleasence) is an old friend of theirs and tells them where to find the secret entrance to the ancient tombs but warns them not to go exploring in the because it’s full of satanic influences. It’s never explained why the village priest is an Irish Catholic but one assumes it’s because Donald Pleasence makes a splendid Catholic priest but probably would have been less convincing as a Orthodox priest. And it soon becomes obvious in any case that plot coherence is not going to be this film’s strong point.

Of course once he’s warned them not to go there they just can’t wait to do do. And naturally they fall into the clutches of devil-worshippers.

Father Roche is anxious to find his three young friends and soon finds himself with two allies - the girlfriend of one of the missing archaeologists and a Greek private eye named Milo. The police don’t seem anxious to help and the mysterious Baron Corofax (Peter Cushing) seems a bit too interested in these events. Father Roche has however armed himself with a plentiful supply of holy water and a heavy-duty crucifix and he’s ready to take on the servants of Satan. In this case Satan’s minions are devotees of the ancient Minoan cult of the bull god, the Minotaur.

You know where the story’s going after this and there are no major surprises.

This could be seen as just another third-rate ultra-cheap satansploitation movie but it does have a few features that make it worth a look. Most obviously it has Donald Pleasence and Peter Cushing. It has some nice Greek locations. And while the idea that pagan cults were all just devil-worshippers might be rather dubious it is cool to come across a horror movie featuring a minotaur. It also boasts an interesting an effective electronic score by Brian Eno.

Technically it’s competent if not very exciting although there are one or two effective moments.

This is the first movie I’ve watched from the 32-movie Drive-In Cult Classics boxed set. It’s another offering from Mill Creek Entertainment so they’re all public domain titles. The picture quality on this one was fairly reasonable. It’s a bit soft and a bit grainy but it is widescreen and it’s worth bearing in mind that when you’re paying 62 cents per movie (32 movies for $20) you don’t have too much to complain about. This appears to be the US version of the film which was slightly cut. The uncut UK version, with the title The Devil's Men, was released on DVD but you’re going to pay a lot more for it and it’s not really a movie I’d bother spending big bucks on.

Not a very good movie but watchable popcorn entertainment.

The Devil Rides Out (1968)

The Devil Rides Out is one of the most lavish and most expensive of the horror movies made by Hammer Films. With Hammer’s best director, Terence Fisher, at the helm, a cast headed by Christopher Lee and a script by Richard Matheson you’d have expected the results to be pretty special. And they are. This is possibly Hammer’s finest moment. The larger than usual budget allowed them to depart from their customary 19th century setting. This one is set in the 1920s, and it looks scrumptious. It’s a tale, bade on a Dennis Wheatley pot-boiler, of the dangers of meddling with Dark Forces. Christopher Lee is the arrogant Duc de Richleau, who is something of as control freak, but this time Lee is one of the good guys, battling the Forces of Darkness. Lee actually knew Dennis Wheatley and it’s obvious from the commentary track that he actually believes in the reality of these satanic forces. That may have given his performance added zest, because he turns in a career-best performance. Patrick Mower is good as the naïve young man dabbling in wickedness. The special effects are excellent by the standards of 1968. It’s a movie that stands up very well today – the feel of malevolent agencies lying in wait for the unwary is conveyed extremely well, there’s plenty of action and there’s plenty of suspense. And there are some real chills. This is one of the less camp Hammer movies – it was intended to be taken seriously, and it works as a serious horror film. And the print on the Anchor Bay DVD is absolutely gorgeous, a very sharp picture and wonderful colour. A very good and very entertaining movie.

Satan’s Blood (1978)

Ana and Andres are on their way to the park with their dog when they encounter another couple, Bruno and Berta. Bruno claims to be an old college friend of Andres’ although, oddly enough, Andres just can’t recall him at all. When Bruno and Berta invite them back to their house for drinks they see no harm in accepting. After all, what’s the worst thing that can happen? I mean, they seem like a nice couple and they’re not likely to be devil-worshippers or anything like that, are they? But of course this is a horror movie, so they most certainly can be devil-worshippers! Satan’s Blood (Escalofrío) is an intriguing 1978 slice of Spanish erotic horror released on DVD by those fine folks at Mondo Macabro. And like most of the offerings from this company that I’ve encountered, this movie is a lot better than you might expect.

Ana and Andres are offered some unusual wine, and some rather odd cigarettes, and pretty soon Bruno suggests that they give the old ouija board a spin, just for amusement. This certainly gets things happening, and pretty soon Ana and Andres are joining their hosts for some naughty bedroom fun (although in this case it’s naughty living-room fun). So far it’s been an entertaining evening, but from this point on things start to get unsettling, with disturbing psychological games involving suicide and a series of unexplained and upsetting events. The evening starts to take on the logic of nightmare, and the coming of daylight brings only terror and confusion, as our innocent young couple find themselves in an escalating waking nightmare. Director Carlos Puerto does a fine job in slowly building an atmosphere of the weird and the uncanny. The acting is competent, and the effects aren’t fantastically ambitious but the ones that are used are used effectively. There’s a staggering amount of nudity, but it would be difficult to describe it as gratuitous nudity – it is after all a movie about terrifying sexual and emotional games (among other things) so any coyness about sex would have weakened the film considerably. There’s a certain amount of gore but it isn’t overdone. It’s a movie that relies more on a slow developing of an atmosphere in which the protagonists feeling increasing trapped and out of control rather than on overt scares. In this it succeeds very well. Recommended for eurohorror enthusiasts. The DVD transfer is extremely good, and the extras include an interesting short documentary on Satanism.

To the Devil…a Daughter (1976)

To the Devil…a Daughter, released in 1976, is best-known for being the last horror film made by Hammer Studios. It was a commercial success, but it came too late to save the studio. Hammer had been trying desperately to update their image and to get away from the gothic horrors that had been so successful for them but were now starting to feel a little tired, and were also starting to lose their commercial appeal. Dracula AD 1972 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula were attempts to bring their Dracula franchise into the modern world. Unfortunately they tried too hard to be superficially contemporary, with pop music and kids in outrageous (and now embarrassingly dated early 70s fashions. At the same time they felt like the old gothic horrors transplanted uneasily into modern settings. They failed to give Hammer’s image a modern feel and the company teetered towards ruin. Ironically, To the Devil…a Daughter shows that they were quite capable of making the sorts of films that would have allowed them to compete very successful against the new-style horror movies of the 70s. They’ve abandoned the studio entirely, the movie is set partly in modern Germany and mostly in modern Hollywood. It has a very gritty realistic feel. There’s lots of gore, and the violence packs a real punch. There’s also lots of sex, but the sex doesn’t have that traditional Hammer feel. It feels real, rather than being simply naughty. And they’ve assembled the strongest cast ever seen in a Hammer movie. Christopher Lee gives the best performance I’ve ever seen from him, as a renegade Satanist priest. It’s a very restrained performance, and the restraint gives it real menace. Richard Widmark plays an author of books about the occult who tries to stop this renegade priest’s nefarious activities. Widmark hated every moment of the filming and apparently made himself generally disliked. In spite of this he gives a good performance. Nastassia Kinksi is a young nun who only slowly realises she’s been dedicated to the power of darkness. She has to project a mixture of innocence, corruption, and depraved and earthy sexuality, which she manages with no trouble at all. As you’d expect. Denholm Elliott plays her father, a man who is unravelling more and more by the moment, jumping at shadows and completely overpowered by his fears. He always does such parts well, and he does this one extremely well. I’m always surprised, after Callan, to see Anthony Valentine playing a non-evil character. He plays a friend of Widmark’s who gets drawn into this struggle, while Honor Blackman plays his slightly hippie-ish much older girlfriend. They both acquit themselves admirably. There are also some familiar faces from Hammer’s glory days, like Derek Francis as the bishop.

There’s not much to the plot, but there doesn’t really need to be. It simply requires Widmark to stop Christopher Lee from creating an incarnation of the evil Aztaroth, which he intends to do through the nun Catherine (Kinski). Peter Sykes directs the film with flair and imagination. It looks good. It looks modern, but without making the mistake of looking too much of its period. The acting is superb. It should have been an absolutely superb horror film. And mostly it is. The ending, though – to say the ending is anticlimactic would be putting it mildly. It’s as if they just got tired and decided to pack up and go home without bothering with a dramatic finale. Overall, though, this is a seriously underrated movie. If it didn’t save them, it at least allowed Hammer to bow out of horror on a high note.

I Don't Want to Be Born (1975)

I Don't Want to Be Born (also known as The Monster and The Devil Within Her) is a 1975 British horror flick starring Joan Collins. It’s one of several horror movies she made in the 70s. She’s a stripper who has a curse put her on her by her partner in her night-club act, a dwarf, whose sexual advances she has spurned. As a result she gives birth to a demonic child. Now I know what you’re thinking – not another “woman cursed by sex-starved dwarf” movie – but how many movies are there with evil babies that punch people out and drag corpses about? For some reason that is never explained the evil baby concerned did not want to be born, and now that it has been born it’s really peeved. It expresses its annoyance by making large amounts of noise, throwing its toys about the nursery, and killing people. It’s possible that some of the people involved may have believed they were making a serious horror movie. I’m quite certain that Joan Collins did not share this delusion. She gives an outrageously camp performance, and she’s one of the main reasons the movie is worth seeing.

There are other reasons to see it, though. There’s some mind-bogglingly awful dialogue, much of it delivered by Ralph Bates in one of the most unconvincing Italian accents I’ve ever heard. There’s Eileen Atkins as his sister the nun, with an even worse Italian accent. There’s Donald Pleasence as her doctor (and I’m sure Donald Pleasence also cherished no illusions about the quality of this motion picture). When you’re giving birth, what could be more comforting than to notice that the doctor in attendance is Donald Pleasence? You just know everything is going to be fine then. Yeah right. There’s also an exorcism scene, and they’re always fun. The movie tries to copy both The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby, and while it fails miserably it does have the advantage over those films of having the aforementioned sexually frustrated evil dwarf. And the final reason for seeing this cinematic gem is to see the strip club in which Miss Collins earns her living. I have no idea what strip clubs were like in London in 1975, but I’m fairly sure they were nothing like this. It seems more like a combination o a 19th century music hall, a circus and a ballet. Perhaps strip clubs really were like this in England in 1975. If so it’s a scary thought. And I’ve never seen a stripper wearing so many clothes! I always imagined that strippers took their clothes off, but Miss Collins seems to have added several additional layers of clothing. Curiously enough she does do a nude scene in the movie, but not in the strip club, which makes one wonder why they made her character a stripper? One can only assume it was done in the hope that audiences would flock to the film expecting Joan Collins to be naked for most of the running time, when in fact she’s naked for about six-tenths of a second.

The special effects were kept to a minimum, and you don’t see the evil baby performing any of its numerous acts of mayhem and murder. Presumably it was felt (quite rightly) that there was no way you were going to be able to convincingly portray a baby wielding an axe. The few special effects that are used are remarkably unexciting. Peter Sasdy had directed several quite good horror films for Hammer in the early 70s but he never really gets a grip on this one. I Don't Want to Be Born has just about everything you could hope for in a bad movie, and the end results are wonderfully entertaining. A true camp classic.

The Devils (1971)

Ken Russell’s The Devils was one of the most controversial movies of the 1970s, and its power to shock has been diminished by time. Russell was often accused of setting out to shock just for the sake of shocking, which I think is nonsense. His purpose in this movie was extremely serious. It’s a very angry movie, the anger being directed at those who mix religion and politics, and use religion for corrupt and dishonest and mercenary purposes, and those who use religion to destroy those who stand in the path of their pursuit of power.

The movie is based on real events in the city of Loudon in 1634. A popular priest who had made powerful enemies was accused of bewitching the nuns in a Ursuline convent. Oliver Reed gives the performance of his career as the priest, Father Urbain Grandier. Vanessa Redgrave is truly terrifying as the Mother Superior of the convent whose sexual frustration overpowers her and leads her to actions with horrifying consequences. The sets, designed by Derek Jarman, are quite simply superb, and the combination of Russell’s extraordinary visual imagination with Jarman’s is electrifying. The impact of the film comes largely from the images – this is a very cinematic film. It’s a powerful film, and it’s a very great film.

Black Magic Rites, AKA The Reincarnation of Isabel (1974)

Renato Polselli’s 1974 film Black Magic Rites (AKA The Reincarnation of Isabel) makes an interesting comparison with Lucio Fulci’s slightly later eurohorror offering The Beyond, which I saw and mentioned here a couple of days ago. The acting in both films is equally bad, the plots are just as incoherent, and both films rely very heavily on gore. There ate two main differences, to my eye. Firstly, the gore in Black Magic Rites has some connection with the story (such as it is) and contributes something to the feel of the movie; the gore in The Beyond is simply thrown in so you won’t notice how boring the movie is. Secondly, Black Magic Rites at least conveys some sense of actual horror, of events that challenge rationality, some sense of real weirdness, and these are elements sadly lacking in Fulci’s movie. That’s not to say that Polselli’s effort is a great movie. It does, however, offer a certain amount of fun, and it has some truly bizarre moments. A sex scene accompanied by dixieland jazz music is not something I’ve encountered in any other movie that I can remember, and after seeing this one it’s easy to see why it’s an idea that hasn’t exactly caught on.

The plot is a fairly stock standard horror movie plot, involving an attempt to bring back to life a woman who was burned in the 14th century as a witch, who was also apparently a vampire. If you’re a fan of very strange eurohorror movies, movies that are very strange even by eurohorror standards, then Black Magic Rites may be just what you’ve been waiting for.

Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)

The success of Hammer’s horror movies in the late 50s and early 60s encouraged a number of other British companies to try their luck in the horror genre. Among Hammer’s competitors were Amicus and Tigon British Films. While their output varied widely in quality, the best of their movies were worthy competition for Hammer. Tigon’s best-known horror film was probably their 1971 production Blood on Satan’s Claw, and it’s a very good film indeed. In feel it’s much closer to Michael Reeves’ excellent 1968 Witchfinder General than to Hammer’s movies. It’s an attempt to explore in a serious way the subject of witchcraft, and the persecution of witchcraft, in late 17th century England. A young farmer unearths a strange skull. Subsequently, the young people of the village are drawn into the worship of the devil and a cult develops, a cult that soon becomes murderous. A judge with links to the village is eventually convinced that the reports he has heard of witchcraft have some substance to them and he determines the crush these dark practices regardless of the cost.

Patrick Wymark gives a powerful and finely nuanced performance as the judge. It’s a very restrained performance, and it suits the mood of the film. He’s chilling, and he’s chilling because he’s really a reasonable and essentially decent (and by nature somewhat sceptical) man who believes he has no choice but to act. Linda Hayden is quite good as Angel, the young girl who has assumed leadership of the followers of Satan. Michele Dotrice is excellent as a young witch who finds herself adopted by a family of farmers who believe they can save her from her evil ways. The movie benefits from some rather lyrical cinematography by Dick Bush. The movie portrays both the witches and the witch-hunters as people who are misguided and driven by forces they only dimly comprehend, driven to acts of violence and horror without any clear understanding of their own actions. It’s a clash between opposing belief systems, neither of which are very attractive. It makes its point without sensationalism, and it builds to an effective and satisfying conclusion. A very fine movie, made at a time when the British film industry was producing some extraordinarily good serious horror films.

9 out of 10