Scream of the Demon Lover (1970)

Scream of the Demon Lover (Il castello dalle porte di fuoco) was also released under various other titles including Killers of the Castle of Blood. It’s a 1970 Spanish-Italian co-production directed by José Luis Merino.

It’s a gothic horror movie set presumably in the late 19th century but with so many anachronistic elements that it would probably have been better to have given it a contemporary setting.

Of course all movies with period settings are riddled with anachronisms, it’s just a bit more noticeable in this film.

The heroine Ivanna Rakowsky (Erna Schurer) is a 1970s independent ambitious career woman totally out of place in the period setting. She’s a biochemist and she’s applied for a job working for the mysterious baron Janos Dalmar (Carlos Quiney).

A number of young women from the village have been brutally murdered and the villagers are quite keen on the idea of burning the castle to the ground with the wicked baron in it. They have no evidence that the baron really is wicked, but burning the castle to the ground would certainly make them feel better.

Baron Janos is clearly a bit strange. He’s irritable, unstable and obsessive. Ivanna is not at all sure she approves of him. On the other hand he’s a young, handsome rich nobleman and she obviously thinks he’s a bit of a dish.

Janos is a mad scientist but in Ivanna’s romantic imagination he’s a dedicated scientific visionary whose genius has been misunderstood. As you might expect this makes him even more desirable in her eyes.

There are two other women living in the castle - the baron’s former mistress Olga (Cristiana Galloni) and a cute sexy maid named Cristiana (Agostina Belli). They’re both madly in love with the baron.

So we have a crazy wildly unstable baron living in a castle with three women who are crazed with lust for him, and insanely jealous of each other. That should produce interesting results.

There’s a whole wing of the castle that is closed off, allegedly because it’s falling apart and is therefore dangerous. Of course we know that there dark secrets hidden in the forbidden part of the castle, and we know that the heroine is going to explore that part of the castle even though she’s been warned not to.

There certainly are secrets here. The baron tells Ivanna a story about the nature of his scientific research and the reason for his interest in the possibilities of regenerating dead tissue but that story is not strictly true, although it’s not entirely a lie either.

There are some obvious borrowings from Jane Eyre but to say more on that subject would be to risk spoilers. There are also some interesting red herrings - Ivanna thinks she’s found out the secret that Janos is hiding but she’s on the wrong track.

There is a strong gothic horror plot here but (like Jane Eyre) this is also a gothic romance. Ivanna and Janos are falling in love but there are huge obstacles to be overcome. Their love may or may not be doomed, depending largely on how determined they are to confront the very real horrors concealed in the castle. The love story is at least as important as the horror story.

This was a very low-budget film but director Merino wasn’t going to allow that to cramp his style. He throws in every gothic visual trapping he can think of.

And it works, and it has to be said that he does it with a certain style and the movie does have some very nice gothic imagery. The baron’s initial entrance, accompanied by his two gigantic savage hounds, is very cool. We get lots of shots of pretty young women wandering through gloomy corridors in their nighties, carrying candelabras. Not terribly original but I don’t think any gothic horror fan is going to complain about the inclusion of such scenes. They always work.

There really isn’t anything at all wildly original in this movie, either visually or in the script, but it’s all put together with energy and flair. There’s some nudity and there are very real hints of strange sexual kinks. And there are some effectively creepy moments.

The acting performances are all perfectly competent.

This is a well executed gothic horror/gothic romance movie and it’s highly recommended.

Scream of the Demon Lover is included in Severin’s Danza Macabra boxed set. The transfer is very good given that the original 16mm negative was in poor shape. The highlight of the extras is a typically informative and perceptive visual essay by Stephen Thrower.

Colt 38 Special Squad (1976)

Colt 38 Special Squad was the last movie directed by Massimo Dallamano before his death in a car accident in 1976. It belongs to the poliziotteschi genre, as does his earlier Super Bitch.

To understand the poliziotteschi genre you have to understand that these were violent times in western Europe with widespread terrorist activity by groups such as the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy as well as organised crime due to the boom in the drug trade. There was an air of paranoia, and a certain sympathy for the idea that the police sometimes needed to be ruthless. There was of course at least some of the same paranoia in the United States in Britain, but the sheer extent of terrorist violence in Italy kicked the paranoia there into overdrive. The emergence of a genre of hard-edged ultra-violent crime films should have come as no great surprise (and crime movies in Britain and the U.S. were become more hard-edged at the same time with movies like Get Carter and Dirty Harry).

The poliziotteschi genre emerged at the end of the 60s, just a couple of years after the rise of the giallo. By this time the spaghetti western genre had fizzled out and gothic horror was in decline.

Colt 38 Special Squad gets off to a flying start. A police raid led by Inspector Vanni (Marcel Bozzuffi) turns into a full-scale gun battle. The brother of the gang leader is shot to death by Inspector Vanni. The gang leaders is known as the Black Angel, and he takes a terrible revenge.

Inspector Vanni now has a personal score to settle.

He’s been angling for the formation of an elite four-man squad of motorcycle-riding cops with special firearms training. Now he’s been given the go-ahead. The Special Squad are not exactly given carte blanche but they’re given to understand that they’ll be given some leeway in their methods. A certain degree of ruthlessness is expected of them.

They prove to be not just ruthless but undisciplined hot-heads who will be more trouble than they’re worth unless Vanni can lick them into shape. But they’re brave and they’re keen.

A stroke of luck may point Inspector Vanni in the direction of the Black Angel. A large shipment of dynamite has been stolen. One of the thieves is caught quite by accident, and he is linked to the Black Angel.

It doesn’t help much, but at least the police know that the Black Angel is planning something that requires a lot of dynamite.

The Black Angel holds a few aces that the police don’t know about and he is always a step ahead of them. He plans to hold the city to ransom.

This is a very violent movie with a very dark tone. Innocent people get killed. The body count is very high. The police cannot protect people. Inspector Vanni is a smart tough cop but he’s up against a criminal who is also very smart and has the advantage of not having to care about his methods. He’d cheerfully kill hundreds of people if it would further his plan. Vanni finds some leads but they don’t lead to quick results, time is against him and the most promising leads go nowhere.

Ivan Rassimov (who also starred in Dallamano’s Super Bitch) makes an effectively ice-cold villain. Marcel Bozzuffi gives some real substance to Inspector Vanni, a man driven to the brink of despair by his inability to catch the Black Angel.

Carole André is very good as Sandra, a pretty young nightclub owner who is mixed up in the Black Angel’s plans. She’s a nice girl but she’s naïve and she has a bad boy boyfriend and she gets much more involved than she wants to be.

There’s as much action as you could want. There are explosions, gun battles and car and motorcycle chases. Some of the violence is pretty gruesome, after dynamite has done its work.

Dallamano handles the action scenes with confidence. Dallamano really was one of the great Italian directors of his era and has never received quite as much recognition as he deserved.

Colt 38 Special Squad deals with terrorism but it doesn’t deal with specifically political crimes. Perhaps there was a feeling that it would be unwise to give the film anything that could be interpreted as a political slant.

This is a fine if rather grim action thriller. Highly recommended.

Arrow have released this movie in their Years of Lead poliziotteschi boxed set. The transfer is excellent. Those who care about extras may be disappointed that there are virtually none for this movie.

I’ve reviewed a couple of other movies in this genre - Revolver (1973) which is extremely good, the incredibly nihilistic Milano Calibro 9 (1972) and the superb Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man (1976).

A Dragonfly for Each Corpse (1975)

A Dragonfly for Each Corpse (Una libélula para cada muerto) is a 1975 Spanish giallo directed by León Klimovsky and starring Paul Naschy. As so often Naschy also contributed the screenplay, under his real name Jacinto Molina.

Some purists consider the giallo to be a purely Italian genre but there are a number of Spanish films which tick all the right boxes and it’s hard to see how they can be considered to be anything but giallos (or gialli if you prefer).

I’ve always enjoyed Paul Naschy’s performances but I probably have been guilty of thinking of him as a somewhat limited actor. In this film he plays a hardbitten police detective which is an interesting change of pace for him.

While this is a Spanish film it is set in Milan. Spanish film-makers found that the Spanish censors would let them get away with a bit more if they avoided Spanish settings, and thereby avoided the implication that crime and immorality were rife in Spain. And there’s plenty of crime and immorality in this movie.

A serial killer is at work and his targets appear to be chosen because they fit into the popular conception of the social deviant or social misfit categories. The first three victims are a rapist, a drug addict and a prostitute.

The killer leaves an ornamental plastic dragonfly at the scene of each killing.

Inspector Paolo Scaporella (Paul Naschy) is assigned to the case, despite having apparently messed up his previous case. He needs a result this time. The killer keeps sending him messages, assuming that Paolo will approve of his plans for cleaning up the city. Paolo is not a great fan of social deviants but he likes murderers even less.

Paolo is very hardboiled and he’s quite prepared to get rough when interrogating a suspect. On the other hand he’s not a bitter loner. He is happily married, to Silvana (Erika Blanc), and he’s a loving husband. He’s a bit of a rough diamond but really he’s a pretty good guy and as the story unfolds we grow to like him quite a bit.

The body count continues to mount and every time a witness is about to give Paolo some vital piece of evidence the witness gets killed first.

The killings are not the spectacular visual set-pieces you get in many giallos but they’re fairly bloody. The killer favours two weapons - an axe and an umbrella concealing a sword blade. And yes, the killer wears black gloves.

Being a cop Paolo is already familiar with the seedy side of Milan but in this case he encounters a few kinks he didn’t know about, such as the guy who likes to have sex with girls in coffins.

The dragonfly had been used by the ancient Chaldeans to identify social misfits. This is perhaps a clue, or perhaps a red herring.

Naschy clearly understood the mechanics of the genre and his script gives us everything we could want in a giallo, with lots of twists and red herrings and misleading clues.

There’s an atmosphere of sleaze and decadence which is nicely balanced by the affectionate relationship between Paolo and his wife. A giallo can make one cynical about our species so it’s nice to be reminded that some husbands love their wives and are faithful to them and some wives love their husbands and are faithful to them. The very good chemistry between Naschy and Erika Blanc helps.

There’s enough blood to satisfy those who like that sort of thing and enough sleaze to keep sleaze fans reasonably happy.

Director León Klimovsky doesn’t have a huge reputation among eurocult fans but he made some decent horror films with Vengeance of the Zombies (1973, with Naschy) being particularly good. I quite liked The Vampires’ Night Orgy (1973) and Werewolf vs Vampire Woman (1971) although I suspect I’ll enjoy them more if and when I get to see them decently restored and uncut.

As was customary at the time many scenes in A Dragonfly for Each Corpse were shot twice, in clothed versions for the Spanish market and nude versions for the international market. Shout! Factory’s Blu-Ray offers us the racier international version. This is a moderately sleazy movie and the sleaze factor is essential considering the nature of the murderer’s motivations. The Blu-Ray release looks great.

I’ve reviewed quite a few Paul Naschy movies, including the extremely interesting gothic horror/giallo hybrid Panic Beats (1983) and the wonderful set-in-Japan werewolf flick The Beast and the Magic Sword (1983).

A Dragonfly for Each Corpse is a good solid giallo and Naschy’s charisma is enough to earn it a highly recommended rating.

A Black Veil for Lisa (1968)

A Black Veil for Lisa is a 1968 Italian-German co-production directed by Massimo Dallamano and Dallamano’s name in the credits was more than sufficient to make me want to see this one.

I had assumed that it was going to be a giallo or a proto-giallo but despite the presence of a black-gloved killer assigning this movie to a particular genre is rather tricky.

The setting is Hamburg.

John Mills plays Inspector Franz Bulov (different sources offer different spellings of his surname) is a senior Interpol narcotics investigator. He’s working on a very big case involving a major drug racket but key witnesses keep getting murdered. The drug gang is always one step ahead of him.

It has of course occurred to Bulov that information is being leaked to the drug gang but it seems unlikely. There just doesn’t seem to be any way it could be happening.

He has other things to worry about, such as his marriage. His wife Lisa (Luciana Paluzzi) is much younger, glamorous and has an interesting past. Maybe she’s playing around behind Bulov’s back or maybe he’s just insanely jealous and possessive, and (being a cop) overly suspicious.

Yet another possible informant is murdered. This time the killer leaves behind a clue. It’s very little to go on, but Bulov believes it just might be enough.

The audience already knows the identity of the black-gloved killer. It is Max Lindt (Robert Hoffmann).

There’s a hardboiled crime plot here that suggests that we may be dealing with the poliziotteschi rather than the giallo genre but eventually we realise that the organised crime plot is not really the movie’s main focus.

It’s the personality and motivations of Inspector Franz Bulov that are at the centre of this film. His actions drive the plot.

John Mills was actually a very good casting choice. Anyone who has delved deeply into his filmography knows that he could play very dark roles, he could do moral ambiguity, he could be gritty and he could play emotionally disturbed or obsessed individuals. This role is in fact right up his alley.

Luciana Paluzzi adds glamour and does well in keeping us guessing about Lisa.

Robert Hoffmann is nicely cold and menacing, with just a suggestion that Max has his own weak points.

All three main characters are ambiguous and conflicted in their motivations. There’s erotic obsession and jealousy and a desire to escape from the traps into which their obsessions have driven them. Curiously, considering the crime background, these people are not at all interested in money or power. It’s all sex.

It’s important to bear in mind that neither the poliziotteschi nor the giallo genre really existed in 1968 in anything like a fully developed form. Dallamano would presumably have seen this film simply as a crime thriller. In 1968 any crime thriller was going to be influenced to some degree by Hitchcock, and in this case it’s the Hitchcock films with strong erotic overtones such as Strangers On a Train, Vertigo and Marnie that would have had a major influence (especially Strangers On a Train and Vertigo). Given that this was an Italian-German co-production it’s reasonable to assume that the German krimis had an influence as well. It does have a bit of a krimi feel, and although it’s very stylish it lacks the visual flamboyance of the full-blown Italian giallo.

A Black Veil for Lisa begins as a straightforward police procedural. It begins to change as Bulov becomes less the detective and more an active participant in events, and an active driver of events.

It’s an engrossing movie with more emotional depth than you might expect. It’s the emotional depth that keeps things interesting since the plot isn’t overly startling.

Don’t worry too much about trying to fit it into a genre or subgenre - A Black Veil for Lisa is an above-average crime thriller and it’s highly recommended.

The 88 Films Blu-Ray offers a fine transfer with some worthwhile extras.

I’ve reviewed several of Massimo Dallamano’s movies - The Secret of Dorian Gray (1970), Super Bitch (1973) and Venus in Furs (Le malizie di Venere, 1969). I’d recommend them all very highly.

Sliver (1993)

Sliver is a 1993 erotic thriller directed by Phillip Noyce and scripted by Joe Eszterhas from a novel by Ira Levin. Sharon Stone, at that time just about the hottest property in Hollywood, stars.

Carly Norris (Sharon Stone) is a book editor who has just moved into a luxury high-rise New York apartment building, known as the Sliver Building. She finds out that the girl who had the apartment before her, a girl named Naomi, jumped to her death from the window. Carly isn’t too disturbed by this, even when people keep telling her that she bears an uncanny resemblance to Naomi. Eventually Carly will discover that there have been three slightly mysterious deaths in this building.

Carly immediately attracts the attention of the two sleaziest men in New York City, a writer named Jack Landsford (Tom Berenger) and a young guy named Zeke Hawkins (William Baldwin).

What the audience knows and Carly doesn’t know is that she is being watched. Someone has set up an extraordinarily sophisticated and elaborate surveillance system in the building and is watching everyone’s every move on a huge bank of monitors.

This is obviously going to be a movie about voyeurism but there are several layers of voyeurism going on. Some unknown person has bought Carly a telescope. Carly enjoys using it to spy on people in a neighbouring building. She likes to watch people having sex. Carly is both an object of voyeurism and a bit of a voyeur herself.

As in the previous movie written by Eszterhas, Basic Instinct (which of course also starred Sharon Stone), there are both men and women in this story who enjoy playing dangerous erotic games. Like Catherine in Basic Instinct Carly is excited by such games.

Carly slowly comes to realise that there are things she doesn’t know which she needs to know. She still doesn’t think she’s in any real danger. She likes to think that she’s a woman who is always in control. Maybe this time she isn’t in control.

Sliver was savaged by critics and failed to set the box office alight. As so often happens most people therefore approach this movie assuming that it is going to be a bad movie. I prefer to avoid such assumptions. Some of my all-time favourite movies were hated by both critics and the public.

In the early 90s Joe Eszterhas was the most successful most highly paid screenwriter in Hollywood. He was paid a record salary for writing Basic Instinct and the film was a mammoth hit. And that’s about the time that critics turned against him. After that the knives were out for him.

It’s easy to see why. Eszterhas wrote movies that made people uncomfortable. People want reassurance from movies. Even when they watch scary movies or horror movies they want to be reassured that their prejudices and their straightforward conventional way of understanding the world are correct. They don’t mind being disturbed for a while but when they reach the ending they like to feel that it confirms that the world works the way they thought it worked. They don’t want to be too challenged. And while critics will tolerate some artiness they like the artiness to be of the sort with which they’re familiar.

Basic Instinct was a bit unsettling. If Eszterhas seemed to stumble after that they would go for the jugular. Which they did, with both Sliver and Showgirls (a movie I love unreservedly).

So what exactly went wrong with Sliver? The answer to that is that’s nothing very much wrong with this movie. The plot is rather neat, with some decent misdirection and multiple twists. The audience knows a lot more of what is going on than Carly does. That’s always a sound recipe for suspense. The audience knows quite a bit, but not everything. There are vital things we don’t know. That provides the mystery. This is good old-fashioned classic film-making and it’s well executed.

The acting is fine. William Baldwin and Tom Berenger are very creepy but they’re not supposed to be warm loveable characters. Sharon Stone is excellent, a sympathetic heroine who is just prickly enough to be interesting and to avoid being bland or simpering. The secret to Carly is that she grossly overestimates her ability to stay in control and she underestimates her own vulnerability. She just isn’t cut out to play the games that she becomes involved in. Stone has no difficulty persuading us to care about Carly.

The Sliver Building itself becomes a character in the film. It gradually becomes more menacing, the sort of building in which bad things could happen. The room with all the monitors is the kind of thing that a crazed obsessive would create and it’s certainly disturbing.

Noyce doesn’t try to be too clever. He has an effective script, a good setting and a great lead actress so he doesn’t want to distract us with too much visual trickery. Maybe a De Palma would have been a better choice as director but Noyce does OK.

Lots of people hate the ending. If you want everything tied up neatly with a pretty bow you might be disappointed. I thought it worked.

Most of the hate directed at this movie (and the amount of hate it attracted and still attracts is astonishing) seems to be directed against Eszterhas. He liked to be provocative and he wasn’t interested in spoon-feeding his audience. It’s also possible that some people were upset by the moral ambiguity of the heroine. This is a movie that doesn’t simply take the line that voyeurism is bad. It accepts the uncomfortable fact that voyeurism is very seductive, and that women can be seduced by it as well. Like Basic Instinct this film is not afraid to admit that female sexuality has its dark side.

I’ll go out on a limb here. Sliver has some flaws but overall it’s an intelligent provocative erotic thriller and I’m going to highly recommend it.

I believe that the older DVD release is the only uncut version available. Apparently the more recent Blu-Ray is a censored version, which is why I bought the DVD. And the DVD transfer is very good.

Death by Invitation (1971)

Death by Invitation, released in 1971, starts with a young girl on trial for witchcraft. So do countless horror movies but in this case it’s done in a particularly disturbing way with a real edge of terror and fanaticism. It gets the movie away to a very promising start.

Then we jump forward a few hundred years to the present day (or in this case the 1970s) and we encounter the same people (or at least the same actors) and we assume that they are destined to relive those events of the distant past.

A young woman named Lise (Shelby Leverington) has worked her way into the Vroot family.

Lise is of course the reincarnation of the young witch put to death centuries earlier. Or rather, she might be. The Vroots are the descendants of those who put her to death. You won’t be surprised to learn that Lise has vengeance on her mind.

Lise is a hippie chick who dabbles in the occult, which was common enough at the time. She definitely gives off a slightly spooky off-the-wall vibe.

Of course in a story such as this you have to ask yourself if these people really are in any way responsible for the wrongs done to Lise in the past. Are they in some way the same people, reincarnated? Are they merely the descendants of evil people? We may have serious doubts about whether Lise has the slightest justification for taking revenge on them. Lise clearly believes that they do have to accept responsibility for the wrongs of the past.

Of course Lise may simply be a totally crazy spaced-out hippie chick who takes her occult dabblings too seriously. Or she may really be a witch. The movie keeps this aspect nicely ambiguous, which means we’re never sure whether we should be on Lise’s side or not. That’s perhaps the film’s biggest strength.

Before killing Lise likes to tell her victims a story, a very strange story about an ancient tribe in which the women did the hunting and the men served the women. If the men stepped out of line they were killed. This story doesn’t really have anything to do with the plot of the movie but it’s actually a nice touch. It increases our uncertainties about Lise. Does she have some ancestral memories or some mystical link with women from primeval times, or is it just her own bizarre fantasy?

Peter Vroot (Aaron Phillips) is the head of the household in the present day and he’s a braggart and a bully and delights in intimidating the members of his family. Again we find ourselves with ambivalent feelings. He’s an unpleasant man and we know that bad things are going to happen to him and we’d like those bad things to be a thoroughly justified punishment for his evil in the distant past but we’re uncomfortable because there may be no justification at all for Lise’s vengeance.

Shelby Leverington didn’t have much of a film career but had a lengthy career as an actress in television. She’s quite good here - a bit spooky, a bit kooky, kinda sexy in a proto-goth way and rather scary. It’s a solid performance that leaves us uneasy, which is as it should be.

The performances of the other cast members are bad by conventional standards but they’re oddly effective in a movie that is aiming to be weird and off-kilter.

Peter Vroot’s prospective son-in-law (he’s engaged to one of the daughters of the family) spends the whole movie trying to seduce Lise and he’s ambiguous as well.

Writer-director Ken Friedman seems to have directed only two feature films, with a long gap between them. He had marginally more success as a screenwriter.

This is clearly a very low-budget movie. The pacing could have been tightened up a little. It’s easy to point out flaws in this movie but despite those flaws it works in its own idiosyncratic way. It does manage to be weird and unsettling and disorienting and those are things I like in movies. I found myself liking this film quite a bit. Highly recommended.

Death by Invitation was released on a double-header DVD by Vinegar Syndrome, paired with the odd but entertaining The Dungeon of Harrow (1962). They came up with a brilliant idea for the audio commentary - get a bunch of clowns who know nothing about the movie and nothing about the genre and let them indulge in cheap adolescent snark. But in spite of the awful commentary this is a pretty good release by Vinegar Syndrome - two very obscure oddball movies both of which are worth seeing.

Futureworld (1976)

Westworld had been a major hit in 1973 but the 1976 sequel Futureworld is a less ambitious affair. Rather than being a major studio production Futureworld is an AIP picture and when you see Peter Fonda (at best a second-tier star) getting top billing you know you’re dealing with a fairly low-rent production.

Westworld had been written and directed by Michael Crichton but he was not involved in this sequel.

Westworld is of course a “technology gets out of control and becomes a menace” movie and it also belongs to the evil robot/malevolent computer science fiction sub-genre. It’s also a disaster movie, of sorts.

The idea behind both Westworld and Futureworld is that some corporation has built the ultimate resort, Delos. Guests can live out their wildest fantasies. Those fantasies usually involve sex and violence. Guests can play at being gunslingers shooting lots of people, mediæval knights hacking people up, etc. They can also have sex with very hot very willing sex robots. There are hot female sexbots for male guests and hot male sexbots for female guests. It’s the sex and violence elements that make these movies so very 1970s.

Delos comprises a number of fantasy theme parks for adults. There’s Mediæval World and Roman World, and there’s also a kind of futuristic hippie world which seems to offer extended drug trips. There’s also Futureworld.

In the first film things went badly wrong in one of the theme parks, Westworld. Instead of the bad guy gunslinger robots submitting to getting blown away by the guests the robots started blowing away the guests instead. The subsequent butchery and mass murder damaged the reputation of Delos, as you would expect.

Those problems have all been solved now. Delos is now totally safe. Nothing can go wrong.

Two of the guests who will be sampling the fun of playing at being astronauts in Futureworld are reporters. Tracy Ballard (Blythe Danner) is a TV reporter. She just wants a gee-whizz story. For a reporter she is remarkably trusting and lacking in curiosity. Chuck Browning (Peter Fonda) is a different matter. He’s a sleazy hard-nosed scandal-monger and he smells a story here. He got a tip-off that all was not well in Delos.

And he makes a discovery that is just a little disturbing.

Chuck keeps poking his nose in where it’s not wanted in Delos. He knows there’s something not right about the place. The audience already has a pretty fair idea what’s going on in Delos.

This movie has a lot of problems. Obviously there was no point in just remaking Westworld. Whatever is amiss in Delos this time has to be something different. Unfortunately what’s going on isn’t particularly startling or original.

The pacing is rather slow and when the action scenes finally kick in they’re not terribly impressive. Clearly the budget was rather limited. There wasn’t the money for spectacular action set-pieces. That’s not necessarily a major problem. Prior to Star Wars science fiction films did not rely entirely on spectacular action set-pieces and special effects.

The production design is OK.

But Futureworld just falls a bit flat.

Don’t get too excited about Yul Brynner’s name in the credits. He gets about fifteen seconds of screen time. His star quality is sadly missed.

Peter Fonda isn’t terrible but he lacks the charisma to carry a movie on personality alone. Blythe Danner is OK. Arthur Hill was always good playing characters who are smooth, charming and just ever so slightly sinister.

In the 1970s technology running amok was all fun stuff, the sort of thing that might happen in a distant dystopian future. Since we now live in a dystopian future, a world in which we are being replaced by machines and being trained to do what AIs tell us to do, it has a lot more impact today. We now have a lot more experience of the misuse of technology. The robots in both Westworld and Futureworld are as a consequence creepier today than they were in the 70s.

Sadly Futureworld doesn’t really grapple with the implications of the technological future with which it deals. It is content to offer us a disappointingly conventional story.

Futureworld just doesn’t have enough to offer in terms of either ideas or action. Its a major disappointment.

The Blu-Ray offers a nice transfer with no extras whatsoever.