Satánico Pandemonium (1975)

Satánico Pandemonium is another slice of Mexican nunsploitation from the 70s brought to us by the good people at Mondo Macabro. It’s not as over-the-top as the marvellous Alucarda. In fact it’s surprisingly restrained and subtle in execution. There is gore, but it’s used sparingly and therefore it actually has an impact when it is used (if only a few other film-makers would learn this simple lesson). A young nun with a reputation for extreme piousness encounters a naked man in the woods. He turns out to be Lucifer, and he sets out to tempt her. His temptations include the pleasures of the flesh, but they also include power – he offers to secure for her the position of Mother Superior. She battles the temptations, but not very successfully, and soon finds herself caught up in events that are running out of control. The movie was helmed by veteran Mexican director Gilberto Martínez Solares, with a screenplay by his son Adolfo Martínez Solares. An interview with the latter is included as an extra, and he has some fascinating snippets of information about the filming, such as the fact that many of the nuns were actually played by prostitutes from a notorious brothel. Satánico Pandemonium is one of those movies that combines exploitation with some political critiques of society in general and the Church in particular, and it combines the two quite effectively. The actual meaning of the movie remains ambiguous, but I can’t say any more for fear of giving away spoilers. While it isn’t quite in the same class as Alucarda it’s still a great little piece of trash cinema and it’s lots of fun. It hardly needs to be added that Mondo Macabro have done another sensational job, the movie looks terrific, and there are some very worthwhile extras.

Purani Mandir (1984)

Purani Mandir, released in 1984, has been my first glimpse into the world of Bollywood horror. It was apparently one of the most successful of all Indian horror movies. I don’t think there’s any point in trying to judge this as a conventional horror movie. It just has to be taken on its own terms. It doesn’t play by the rules of western horror movies. At a point in the movie where an evil unstoppable demon is rampaging about killing everyone in sight and the hero and heroine are chained up about to be sacrificed to the goddess Kali – it’s time to bring on the dancing girls! In fact it’s time for a big-production song-and-dance number. This is Bollywood, and a horror movie includes lots of elements that western audiences don’t really expect to find in a horror movie. There’s the singing and dancing. There’s an extended comic sub-plot, which is really only funny if you’re familiar with the Indian movies that it’s sending up. There’s a very involved romantic sub-plot. If you can accept these things, and if you can put up with the first half of the movie which can be heavy going, then there are considerable pleasures in store for you.

The plot involves an evil demon which was beheaded by the Raja of Bijapur. The demon placed a curse on the raja’s family – all the female members of the family would die in childbirth. Two hundred years later, in the present day, the daughter of the current raja has fallen in love. Her father, knowing of the curse, tries to prevent her from marrying her young man. The lovers, accompanied by a friend who just happens to be a martial arts expert, set out for the ancient palace of the rajas of Bijapur, to find a way to lift the curse. Along the way they encounter an incompetent bandit, a mysterious wild girl who lives in a lake, some crazed villagers, and find several opportunities for song-and-dance numbers. As the movie progresses, it becomes more and more insane. Insane in a good way. The second half of this film is non-stop weirdness, mayhem, over-the-top gothic imagery, terror, madness, and song. Ajay Agarwal is a frightening and effective monster, while Arti Gupta as Suman is a likeable and suitably beautiful heroine. The movie tries to be sexy, but censorship in India is strict. So there’s a shower scene in the movie, but for reasons of decency the heroine wears her bathing costume while she’s showering. It all adds to the fun and madness.

The Mondo Macabro Bollywood Horror DVD release includes this movie and Bandh Darwaza and includes (as always with Mondo Macabro) some great extras. Both movies look reasonably good (despite Mondo Macabro’s apologies for the dubious state of the surviving prints of these films). I loved this movie.

Female Vampire (1973)

The Countess Irina Karlstein in Jess Franco’s 1973 film Female Vampire is indeed a vampire, but she doesn’t suck blood from her victims. You could say she sucks sexual energy from them. I’ll leave it to your imagination to figure out how she does this. 

Even for an early 70s Jess Franco movie Female Vampire has an astonishing amount of sex and nudity. Having said this, given the movie’s premise none of the sex or nudity is actually gratuitous. The Countess Irina really is a slave to her hungers, to the extent that really there isn’t any more to her than those hungers. There’s a scene, a rather chilling and very effective scene, in which the Countess continues to take her pleasure from one of her victims after he is clearly dead. That scene conveys her essential emptiness and her loneliness remarkably well, as does her somewhat compulsive self-pleasuring.

Lina Romay’s performance has been criticised but I personally think it’s perfect.

Since vampirism does tend to be a metaphor for various types of sexual anxiety and sexual fears the premise of the movie does make perfect sense. What makes Jess Franco both outrageous and interesting as a film–maker is that he’s prepared to push this idea of sexual vampirism much further than any other film-maker would dare. It certainly goes close to being pornographic, but (whatever the failings of his later films) in the early 70 Franco really did go closer than anyone else to achieving a fusion of art an pornography.

 The DVD includes footage from the much tamer version prepared for US release. This version replaces the sexual vampirism with plain old traditional blood-sucking vampirism, and judging by these scenes the non-sexual version is inferior in every way.

  Female Vampire is in fact the best of the half-dozen Franco films I’ve seen so far, and it’s one of the more interesting and atmospheric vampire movies around. It has the typical Jess Franco surreal touches and lack of interest in conventional linear narrative, and they work extremely well. I admit that I’m biased because I’m very much a Franco-phile, but I definitely recommend this movie.

Night Creatures (AKA Captain Clegg, 1962)

Night Creatures (AKA Captain Clegg) is one of those movies that could never get made today. This 1962 Hammer production is 100% B-movie. It’s a story of pirates and smuggling set in the late 18th century, with a hint of the supernatural in the form of a troop of ghostly horsemen who haunt the marshes near the village of Dymchurch, and with a cast headed by Peter Cushing and Oliver Reed. These days pirate movies have to be bloated $100 million blockbusters, loaded to the gunwales with CGI. Hammer Films had more sense, and made a perfectly entertaining little movie on a modest budget. The good people of Dymchurch are smugglers on an extensive scale, providing fine imported wines and brandies to much of southern England without the bother of annoying customs duties. Their parson (played by Peter Cushing) seems a respectable enough clergyman sat first glance, but looks can be deceiving. Dymchurch’s other claim to fame is that it is the burial place of the notorious pirate Captain Clegg, hanged 16 years earlier. It just so happens that the naval officer who has now, very inconveniently, shown up to investigate reports of smuggling had spent many years hunting down the infamous Cleg, so he has something of a personal interest in the goings-on in Dymchurch. He also has a secret weapon, in the person of a former member of Clegg’s crew with an uncanny ability to sniff out (quite literally) hidden caches of contraband wine. This man, a mulatto, had been left to die on a deserted island but had survived. You’ll probably see most of the plot twists coming a mile away, but that’s part of the fun. And the special effects, simple as they are, work surprisingly well. The acting is delightfully over-the-top, and Peter Cushing is in fine form. Good harmless fun.

Kiss of the Vampire (1963)

After the huge success of the first Hammer Dracula movie it was, surprisingly, eight years before Christopher Lee played the role again. Hammer were unwilling to cast anyone else in the role, but vampires were good business and they were equally unwilling to forego making vampire movies. So instead they made a couple of quite interesting vampire films without Dracula – Brides of Dracula in 1960 and Kiss of the Vampire in 1963. Kiss of the Vampire was also the first Hammer film to be helmed by Australian director Don Sharp, who went on to make the excellent Rasputin: The Mad Monk for them in 1966. The plot of Kiss of the Vampire is a stock-standard horror movie plot. A young couple are motoring through the countryside (in about 1900 judging from their car) when they run out of petrol. They find an inn, the locals are (naturally) very secretive and seem a little afraid, and they get invited to a party at the home of a wealthy doctor. They receive a warning to take care at the party, the warning coming from a mysterious middle-aged drunk who appears to have some private sorrow of his own (and the spectacularly effective opening sequence at a funeral has given us a fairly good idea what that sorrow might be). They of course ignore the warning, and get themselves into all manner of strife at this unusual social gathering. Fortunately it has other things going for it besides the plot. It’s possibly production designer Bernard Robinson’s finest moment. The vampires in this film do not live in gloomy, cobweb-infested gothic ruins – they live in a house that is all colour and light and brightness, filled with bizarre objets d’art. It’s both gorgeous and magnificently decadent, which is appropriate since these vampires are also both beautiful and decadent. I want to live in their house! These are not quite your standard Hammer vampires. They are able, some of the time at least, to walk in the open during the hours of daylight. Dr Ravna and his family (yes, this is a vampire who is also a family man) appear to be a normal, happy family. Appearances are of course deceptive, and it soon becomes apparent that this is not a normal family at all. There’s a tendency in vampire movies for vampirism to be something that happens to you through carelessness or bad luck, but in Kiss of the Vampire it’s explicitly linked to deviant behaviour. You get in with a bad crowd, and you’ve taken the first step on the road to becoming a vampire. It’s certainly not the only movie (or even the only Hammer movie) to connect vampirism with sexuality, but it is unusual in suggesting that the sexual deviance comes first and that it’s the factor that exposes you to the risk. It’s a somewhat unpleasant idea but it does add some interest to the film.

The movie lacks the familiar names associated with Hammer horror but it doesn’t really suffer as a result, and all the players give decent performances. It’s available on DVD as part of Universal’s Hammer Horror Franchise Collection, eight movies on two double-sided discs with no extras, but at a very reasonable price, and it looks terrific. I don’t regard Kiss of the Vampire as one of the great Hammer movies but it’s definitely interesting and slightly out of the ordinary and it is definitely entertaining.

Blood Sabbath (1972)

The title and the extraordinarily lurid cover of Blood Sabbath might lead you to believe you’re in for a rather sleazy slice of satansploitation. Actually, it’s not really that type of movie at all. What it is in fact is a very strange brew indeed. It’s partly a fairy tale love story, about a Vietnam veteran named David who falls in love with a water nymph. Water nymphs don’t have souls, so although she loves him they can’t be together as long as he has a soul. He decides that love is something that is worth giving up your soul for. It’s also a movie about witchcraft. A village in Mexico (which is where the movie takes place) has made an agreement with a local coven of witches; each year they will give up a child to the witches and in return the witches will guarantee a good harvest. The witches also have the power to take a person’s soul, and since David doesn’t want his soul he is happy to come to an agreement with them. This sounds like familiar horror movie territory, but again Blood Sabbath defies expectations. The horror content of this movie is minimal. It’s much closer in feel to a couple of British movies made at about the same time, The Wicker Man and the criminally underrated Eye of the Devil, in that it attempts to deal seriously with paganism as an alternative religion. It’s actually more sympathetic to the pagans than either of the British films however. Extremely surprising indeed for a 1972 American horror movie. I suspect that the reason Blood Sabbath is such an odd movie is that it was, very unusually for that time, directed by a woman. Like Stephanie Rothman’s 1971 The Velvet Vampire it’s very different from horror movies of that time directed by men. There is a positively astonishing amount of nudity in Blood Sabbath, but it’s done in a very matter-of-fact and casual manner, in marked contrast to the way nudity is handled in, for example, Hammer movies at that time, where it’s done as if it’s something naughty and furtive. The witches in Blood Sabbath run around the woods naked because they’re witches. That’s what witches do (at least that’s what most people in 1972 would have imagined that real witches do. There’s a scene where the witches try to seduce the village priest, and it becomes very clear that the conflict between the church and the witches in this movie is all about sex, and more specifically it’s all about female sexuality. The nudity is not only justifiable, it’s essential to the film. It’s also significant that these women are shown very clearly to be completely in charge of their own sexuality, and that they are never depicted as sexual victims. In its own way it’s a rather subversive little flick!

It has to be admitted that it does have some problems. Tony Geary is very bland as David, and Susan Damante isn’t much better as the nymph Yyalah. The mix of genres is sometimes a little uneasy, and the pacing drags a bit early on. And the transfer on the Region 4 DVD release is very poor. On the plus side Dyanne Thorne (yes, the notorious Ilsa herself) is great fun as the queen of the witches. And it’s an offbeat and original movie, and I think it’s worth giving it a chance.

La Belle Captive (1983)

Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet is best-known in film-making circles as the man who wrote the screenplay for the brilliant Last Year at Marienbad. He has also directed a number of films himself, including La Belle Captive. Released in 1983, it was based on his own novel of the same name, which was in turn inspired by the paintings of the Belgian surrealist René Magritte. If all of that leads you to expect a puzzling and rather cryptic movie then you’re spot on. Walter is some kind of detective, or perhaps secret agent is closer to the mark, working for the enigmatic leather-clad motorcycle-riding Sara Zeitgeist. While on an assignment he meets a beautiful but mysterious woman, Marie-Ange, in a bar. Later on that night he finds Marie-Ange lying on the roadway, handcuffed and covered in blood. Seeking assistance at a nearby house, he encounters a group of somewhat sinister, very creepy and obviously powerful and wealthy men, who seem to be under the impression that he is offering to sell this young woman to them. 

Things get more baffling still when he later finds out that the young lady has been dead for several years; after possibly spending the night with her (or was it a dream?) he wakes to find what appear to be bite marks on his neck. He is also being followed by a man claiming to be a police inspector. From this point on things become more confusing still, with the whole movie being possibly no more than a succession of dream images.

 The obvious movie with which to compare La Belle Captive is Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. If you hated Kubrick’s final film, and if you despised David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and you can’t stand Jean Rollin’s movies, then don’t go anywhere near this one. If on the other hand you enjoy cinematic puzzles and a hefty dose of the surreal and the disturbingly erotic then La Belle Captive will be right up your alley. I loved it.

The DVD includes no extras, apart from a theatrical trailer, which is a pity since it’s the sort of movie that would probably benefit from some background information. You certainly need at least a vague familiarity with Magritte’s paintings, images from which recur throughout the film.