The Terror of Dr. Hichcock (1962)

Madness and necrophilia are the themes of Riccardo Freda’s 1962 masterpiece of Italian gothic horror, The Terror of Dr. Hichcock (the original title is L'Orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock and it was released in the US as The Horrible Dr. Hichcock). Dr Hichcock is a great surgeon who has invented a new and very useful anaesthetic, which has the property of slowing down the metabolism; in large doses it slows the heartbeat and respiration so much that the patient almost seems dead. The good doctor has discovered that it also has some interesting recreational uses. Some years after the rather mysterious death of his first wife he returns to his home with a new bride, Cynthia (Barbara Steele, looking even more luminous than usual). The marriage has its problems, however – Professor Hichcock still seems obsessed with his first wife, and Cynthia suspects that there is something amiss in his feelings for her.

This movie gives Barbara Steele more opportunities for real acting than many of her other Italian movies, and she makes the most of it. Robert Flemyng is quite amazingly creepy as Dr Hichcock. Freda throws in just about every gothic trick in the book, even resorting to thunderstorms, but the results are remarkably effective. The pacing is excellent, the direction is skilful, lively and imaginative (with some very clever uses of the architectural layout of the doctor’s house), the Technicolor cinematography is gorgeous. Even the dubbing is reasonably good. This is a movie on which a good deal of care has been lavished. Italian horror is often accused of being stronger on style than plot, and while style and mood do predominate in this film the plotting is quite solid. This is Italian gothic at its best, in the same league as the best of Mario Bava’s gothic films.

This is the first DVD I’ve bought from Sinister Cinema. While it’s slightly disappointing that it isn’t widescreen I was pleasantly surprised by the image quality. It isn’t in the same class as some of the superbly restored recent offerings from companies like Blue Underground but it’s still reasonably satisfactory and a lot better than I’d expected. The colours are fairly vivid. The sound quality is good as well. I honestly don’t know if it’s uncut or not, although the running time of 84 minutes (compared to the 88 quoted on the IMDb) suggests that if it has been cut it’s still substantially intact. I’ve been wanting to see this movie for a long time, and it did not disappoint.

The Sorcerers (1967)

The Sorcerers, made in 1967, was the second feature film directed by Michael Reeves, the wunderkind of British horror in the 1960s until his suicide in 1969 at the age of 25. . It stars Boris Karloff as an elderly scientist who invents a machine that allows the operator to experience the exact same sensations that someone else is experiencing. The scientist and his wife (a deliciously evil performance by Catherine Lacey) use a young man (a fine performance by Ian Ogilvy) as their test subject, but naturally things get out of hand.

The Sorcerers is not a horror film that relies on gore, rather it relies for its effect on its unblinking acceptance of the moral nihilism and cynicism of its characters. It’s also (despite a very low budget) a very stylish movie. The following year Reeves went on to make Witchfinder General, an even better movie.

Danger: Diabolik! (1968)

There have been countless attempts to translate comic nooks to the cinema screen. The only completely successful effort to date has been Mario Bava’s 1968 Danger: Diabolik!. It succeeds partly through Bava’s visual magic. Bava of course had no CGI back in 1968, but what he did have was a superb visual imagination and a complete mastery of the art of film-making. He does things with old-fashioned techniques like matte paintings and glass shots and the use of miniatures that make most modern CGI-fests look puerile and boring. Danger: Diabolik! also succeeds because Bava understood that a movie based on a comic had to be dynamic, it had to be fast-moving and exciting. And the movie also works because it’s camp, but not too camp. Like the best of the 1960s Bond films it combines camp and cool.

Diabolik was an immensely popular example of the fumetti neri, Italian comic books that combined sex and violence with glamorous criminal anti-heroes. Diabolik is a criminal mastermind, but he’s no Robin Hood. He steals from the rich, and he keeps the money. And he has no compunction about killing anyone who gets in his way. John Phillip Law, who also starred in the adaptation of the Barbarella comic at about the same time, is Diabolik. While no-one would accuse Law of being a great actor he is perfect for the role – he’s sexy and very cool and he’s totally convincing as an action hero, without needing to resort to the macho posturing that we associate with modern cinema action heroes. Naturally Diabolik has a beautiful blonde girlfriend, Eva, played by Marisa Mell. Interestingly enough, although Diabolik is ruthless and often violent, his relationship with Eva is not quite what you might expect. It’s very erotically charged, it’s very romantic, but it’s also affectionate and it’s based on mutual respect - Eva isn’t just his girlfriend, she’s his partner in crime and a very active and useful partner. She is most definitely not portrayed as an airhead. Diabolik’s devotion to Eva makes the audience far more sympathetic to the character than we might otherwise be, given his other rather anti-social habits. The Italian fumetti are quite unlike American superhero comics, and Bava’s movie reflects this. Thief and killer he might be, but our sympathies are with Diabolik rather than with the forces of law and order. Danger: Diabolik! is enormous fun. It’s sexy, but it’s that 60s kind of teasing sexiness, with no explicit nudity or sex, but still very erotic. The acting is great – none of the actors try to make their characters real, just as Bava has no interest in making his movie look like the real world. The comic book feel is maintained in every aspect of the movie. The DVD includes a good short documentary on the movie and on the fumetti, and a commentary track by John Phillip Law and Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog. The picture quality is first-rate, and the film also boasts a wonderful Ennio Morricone soundtrack. What’s not to love? Buy this movie immediately!

Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968)

Back in the early 1960s Roger Corman bought the rights to a Soviet science fiction epic called Planeta Bur. He decided it was a tad too serious for the audiences he was aiming at, got a director to shoot some additional scenes and combined them with footage from the original. In fact Corman used footage from this Soviet film in no less than three sci-fi movies. For the third of these he hired a young director named Peter Bogdanovich to shoot the extra scenes, and the result was Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women. He came up with the idea of creating a movie about a rescue flight to Venus, where personnel from a previous mission were stranded, and his extra footage shows us the inhabitants of Venus. Who are, in fact, prehistoric women. Why prehistoric women? Because prehistoric women don’t wear as much clothing as modern women, obviously. And because it’s well-known that prehistoric women were blonde and glamorous, and wore tight-fitting flared stretch pants and bras made from sea-shells. The prehistoric women worship a pterodactyl. Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women works for two reasons. Firstly, the footage from the original Soviet film is fabulous – it features some wonderfully odd scenes on a space station, an absolutely fantastic space car, and a very cool robot. Secondly the footage Bogdanovich shot is so outrageously camp that you just can’t help loving it. What you end up with is a movie that is really remarkably entertaining. For cult movie fans, an absolute must-see.

Vamp (1986)

Martin Scorcese’s After Hours was a big hit back in 1985. Vamp, made the following year, is more or less a remake but with vampires. Which is not an entirely bad idea. Two clean-cut college boys who think they’re pretty cool find themselves outside their familiar environment, in a strange threatening world where they don’t know the rules and everybody seems to want to kill them. All they wanted was to find a stripper for a college party, but the strip club they’ve chosen is full of vampires and is situated in an urban wasteland populated almost entirely by the undead. Now all they want is to get back to their nice safe dorm room.

It’s in the execution that Vamp falls short. After Hours succeeded because of the surprising lightness of touch with which Scorcese filmed it, and because it had a strange off-beat charm blended with real menace. The innocent caught in a strange and terrifying world was confronted with characters who were both scary and weird and genuinely quirky. Vamp is just a little too predictable, a little too straightforward, and a little too bland. It does have Grace Jones in the cast, so the potential was there for some serious weirdness. Her dance at the club is a step in the right direction, but she doesn’t get enough to do and she’s a little too restrained. The strange androgynous sexuality she projects could have been exploited to produce some disturbing erotic undercurrents, but sex in this movie doesn’t go much beyond schoolboy sexual humour. Eroticism is one of the many things this movie lacks. It’s rather odd to use a strip club as the main setting and then make a rather sexless movie. As straight horror it isn’t particularly scary or horrifying, it isn’t funny enough to work as a spoof, and it isn’t odd enough to have any great camp value. And it’s too competently made to work on a so-bad-it’s good level. It’s like a routine late 50s or early 60s drive-in movie that was made a couple of decades too late. I have to admit that I do have a serious bias against 80s movies, and against just about everything else from that sorry decade - has there ever been a period in human history so completely lacking in style as the 80s? So that may have coloured my feelings for this film a little. And it does have worrying teen movie tendencies, another quality that fails to fill me with enthusiasm. It may be that it just wasn’t the sort of movie I was ever really going to like very much.

Jess Franco's Demoniac

Demoniac is one of those 1970s Jess Franco movies that exists in many different versions under many different names, including L’Éventreur de Notre-Dame and Exorcisme. In some ways it’s his reply to The Exorcist, but with the exorcist as the bad guy. It’s actually a more interesting movie than The Exorcist. Franco appears in most of his movies, but generally in supporting roles or cameos. This time he’s the star, and the entire success of the movie hinges on his performance. And it works – he delivers a performance that is really exceptionally chilling. He plays Vogel, a defrocked priest, whose defrocking was apparently the result of his over-zealousness in pursuing those he suspected of being in league with the Devil. To say he’s obsessed would be an understatement of colossal proportions – he sees himself as, in his own words, the sword of the Lord, and he sees evidence of Satan’s handiwork just about everywhere. Especially in women. Especially in sexually active women. He earn his living writing lurid tales of demonic possession and devil-worship for and S&M magazine, and when he stumbles across a group of enthusiasts whose main pastime is staging mock black masses, you just know there’s going to be trouble. Vogel’s grip on reality is fairly tenuous at the best of times, and he is entirely unable to understand that these people are simply playing harmless games. He is determined to save them from the clutches of Lucifer, and if saving their souls happen to involve killing them then that’s a price Vogel is willing to pay. Franco plays the role absolutely straight, and in an extremely restrained manner, which makes him genuinely scary. Franco’s wife, muse and regular collaborator Lina Romay is one of the women who perform the fake black masses, and her performance is reasonably effective (and while she’s not Soledad Miranda I think she’s underrated as an actress). The rest of the actors are at best adequate, but no worse than the actors in the average exploitation movie. This is a Jess Franco movie, so you expect plenty of nudity, sex and (given the subject matter) plenty of S&M as well, and that’s definitely what you get. But given that the movie is about a religious fanatic obsessed with satanism, S&M and sex it’s possible to argue that in this case it isn’t really especially gratuitous. It’s certainly no more gratuitous than most of the more sensation content in The Exorcist. This is an exploitation movie, but it has a serious purpose as well and I think it gets its message across rather well. It’s also rather more tightly plotted than most of Franco’s films. In fact it may well be one of his best films. An absolute must for fans of eurotrash/eurohorror.

Serial Mom (1994)

Beverly Sutphin has a loving husband, two wonderful children, and a beautiful house in suburbia. She’s a devoted wife and mother and an enthusiastic homemaker. She’s like a walking advertisement for both Motherhood and the American Dream. Except for one small detail. Beverly Sutphin happens to be a serial killer. She’s the Serial Mom in John Waters’ delightfully twisted 1994 movie Serial Mom. It’s not that Beverly is one of those awful psycho killers. She’s just very protective of her family. And she only kills people who really have it coming to them. I mean if you go around stealing people’s parking spaces, you have to expect that people will get annoyed. We’ve all been so angry we could have killed someone in that situation, the only difference is that Beverly actually does it.

Kathleen Turner is perfect as Beverly. Imagine Carol Brady suddenly turning into an axe murderer and you have a fair idea of what Turner’s performance is like. Sam Waterston displays a surprising flair for comedy as Beverly’s perpetually startled dentist husband. Waters regulars Ricki Lake (as Beverly’s boyfriend-starved daughter Misty), Patty Hearst and Mink Stole provide good support. Matthew Lillard manages to be both wholesome and slightly creepy as the horror movie-obsessed son. Serial Mom gives John Waters the opportunity for some fairly savage satire at the expense of suburbia, the media, the justice system and our obsession with killers as celebrities, but it’s all done with surprising warmth and light-heartedness. Which, combined with some rather graphic violence, just makes it all the more disturbing. It’s also very funny and thoroughly enjoyable.