The Curse of the Living Corpse (1964)

The Curse of the Living Corpse was Del Tenney’s second movie as a director, and was shot back-to-back with his best-known production, The Horror of Party Beach. The two movies are very different animals, with The Curse of the Living Corpse being a period gothic chiller in a style radically different from the joyously tongue-in-cheek camp of The Horror of Party Beach.

The two most surprising things about Del Tenney’s career as a film-maker are firstly, that he made so few films, and secondly that the ones he did make are so good. Corpse and Party Beach were both picked up by Fox and became major box-office hits. Fox were delighted with them, so it’s something of a mystery that his career as a director virtually ended at that point.

While The Horror of Party Beach is often mistakenly described as a so-bad-it’s-good movie it was in fact intended from the outset as an exercise in camp and as a fun spoof movie, and it succeeds brilliantly in what it sets out to do. The Curse of the Living Corpse is much more of a conventional gothic horror movie, and for a low-budget movie it’s quite impressive.

When the formidable patriarch of the Sinclair clan dies in 1892, he leaves a rather strange will. He had always been obsessed by the fear of being buried live, so the will specifies that his tomb must not be locked, that torches must be kept burning there, and that he should not even be placed in the tomb for at least five days, to make absolutely certain that he really is dead. And the will threatens that if these provisions are ignored, he will return from the grave to exact a terrible vengeance - each member of the family will meet the fate they most fear.

In fact the family are so relieved that he’s finally dead that they can’t wait to place him in his mausoleum. Their relief turns to horror when it appears that he has carried out his threat to return from the dead and is starting to carry out his plans to revenge himself.

The murders that inevitably follow are quite imaginatively staged. They’re also moderately gruesome for a movie made in 1962, especially when the eldest son meets his fate by having his handsome face completely destroyed. There are plenty of spooky scenes of a mysterious caped and masked figure. There are secret passage-ways, empty coffins, and just about everything you expect in a gothic horror film.

It has, as Tenney admits, a very stagey feel to it. His background was in the theatre, so that’s not surprising, but for a gothic horror movie this is no great disadvantage. In fact for a movie that is intentionally melodramatic it can even be an asset.

The acting is quite competent. Unusually for a low-budget drive-in movie Tenney rehearsed his actors for a couple of weeks before he started shooting, and the extra trouble this involved does pay off. It gives the movie less of the amateur hour feel that you generally associate with drive-in fodder. Roy Scheider made his film debut in this one, as the weak-willed alcoholic younger son of the family. And Candace Hilligloss (best-known from the superb Carnival of Souls made the same year) makes one of her very few film appearances.

The movie is visually fairly impressive, with some very well thought-out and well-executed scenes. The sets and costumes are also extremely good, giving the movie a professional and rather slick (and even at times quite classy) appearance.

This is not a movie in the same league as, for example, Bava’s Black Sunday. Tenney was aiming for the drive-in market, and his intention was to make a fun fast-paced movie with plenty of atmosphere and plenty of chills, but he was not trying to make Citizen Kane. You’re not expected to take it too seriously. It’s deliberately and consciously melodramatic, and that’s part of its charm. It’s light entertainment, but it’s done with quite a bit of flair. If you approach it with realistic expectations it’s all thoroughly enjoyable.

Dark Sky released this film in a double-movie set along with The Horror of Party Beach. Both movies look absolutely magnificent, and both include commentary tracks done by Tenney himself. It’s a great value DVD that I can’t recommend too highly for lovers of drive-in movies.

Shock Waves (1977)

Shock Waves, released in 1977, was the first and probably the best of several Nazi zombie movies that would appear sporadically during the late 70s and early 80s.

Like Jess Franco’s 1981 Oasis of the Zombies it was an attempt to do something a little bit different with the basic format of the zombie movie. The problem with zombies is that they’re inherently rather uninteresting. They just shuffle about and kill people, but because they just shuffle about it’s always difficult to take them entirely seriously. You really have to be pretty careless to get caught by a zombie. Shock Waves solves this problem fairly effectively.

The intro to the movie gives us the background. The Nazis were trying to develop the ultimate soldier, an unstoppable killing machine they felt no pain, no emotions, no fear. What they developed were in fact zombie soldiers, who were neither truly alive nor truly dead. The experiment proved (inevitably) to be a failure since mindless unstoppable killing machines tend to be as much of a threat to one’s own side as they are to the enemy!

The film proper opens with a woman found adrift in an open boat. She tells her story in a flashback. On a pleasure cruise in a rather unsafe boat manned by a fairly incompetent crew and a bad-tempered captain (cult movie legend John Carradine) they encounter strange atmospheric disturbances, odd and inexplicable currents and finally a mysterious ghost ship. In attempting to avoid this ship they run aground. Luckily (well actually unluckily as it turns out) there’s a nearby island.

The island has one living inhabitant, but quite a few non-living ones. The living one is an elderly Nazi officer (Peter Cushing). He had been in command of a special detachment of zombie soldiers modified for submarine duties. They would be ideal submarine crews (apart from their unfortunate habits mentioned earlier) since they could actually live underwater, so the submarine could remain submerged permanently. As the war was ending they set off in old freighter and ended up on a deserted island, where Cushing has lived ever since in a huge abandoned hotel. He’s not really particularly evil, and he warns our shipwrecked mariners to take a small boat he has concealed in a cove and to leave the island as quickly as they possibly can. Due to various dramas within the group they fail to heed the urgency of his warning, and find themselves hunted by the zombie sailors.

It has a very low budget feel, and the acting is mostly pretty dire, with the notable exceptions of the always reliable Carradine and Cushing. Cushing in fact is extremely good, playing the kind of ambiguous role in which he always excelled.

The initial appearance of the zombies from beneath the waters is wonderfully creepy and it’s pretty scary as well. The makeup effects are reasonably effective. It’s a movie that doesn’t require very much in the way of special effects, which is just as well since I’m certain the budget wouldn’t have allowed for such things anyway. It’s also a little unusual among zombie movies in not relying at all on gore. The general creepiness of the concept and the situation of the shipwrecked group - trapped on an island infested with zombies who were as much at home under the water as on land - were sufficient in themselves to provide the necessary terror.

It’s not by any means a perfect movie. It’s a bit clunky in places, and the cinematography is fairly basic. Despite some weaknesses it succeeds as an original and interesting variation on the zombie movie, and it’s most definitely worth seeking out.

The Region 4 DVD is absolutely awful. The picture quality is terrible. It’s grainy and muddy and in the night sequences it’s difficult to see anything at all. This is a movie that deserves better treatment.

Night Monster (1942)

I’d been told that Night Monster was the best of the five movies in the recent Universal Horror: Classic Movie Archive boxed set. All I can say is that if this is the best of them I shudder to think what the rest are like.

Kurt Ingston (Ralph Morgan) is a fabulously rich recluse. He’s become a recluse since undergoing a disastrous course of medical treatment for a serious illness. He’s been left a helpless twisted wreck of a man, confined permanently to a wheelchair.

The doctors who treated him are a little surprised to receive an invitation to his house (which is of course secluded and gothic). But their doubts are overruled by their greed for funding for their research, Mr Ingstrom being a generous contributor to the cause of advancing medical science. Also present in the house is the young and beautiful Dr Harper, a psychiatrist summoned by Ingstrom’s sister. The sister has become half convinced that she is going insane, after witnessing strange events. There’s also an Indian yogi, who is employed by Mr Ingstrom. He gives a demonstration of his powers. that allow him to dematerialise and rematerialise objects by the force of his will.

The doctors start to get themselves murdered, and in fact there have been a couple of other recent murders in the area as well, one of them being yet another medical practitioner.

It’s basically an old dark house movie with a few twists. The ideas are very good, and the potential is there But the the 40s Universal just didn’t care. Horror movies were reliable money-makers but were regarded by the studio with contempt, and the contempt shows all too clearly. The script by Clarence Upson Young is embarrassingly inept. It’s obvious who the victims will be, and it’s equally obvious who the perpetrator is. There is zero suspense.

The only actors to demonstrate even a glimmer of interest or ability are Bela Lugosi and Lionel Atwill, and both are relegated to insignificant minor roles.

The production values are reasonably good and technically it’s moderately impressive. Universal were a major studio and were still capable of making even their most despised B-movies look pretty good. There’s an extravagant but fairly effective use of fog.

Director Ford Beebe had done serials and was able to give the movie a certain sense of urgency. Nothing interesting happens, but at least it happens quickly. Mercifully there’s not too much in the way of comic relief. The big problem is the dismal script, and Beebe lacked the finesse to add the atmosphere and the tension that the writer had failed to include.

Universal have done a more than acceptable job with the DVD release. The movie looks and sounds extremely good.

By this time (the movie came out in 1942) if Universal managed to produce a truly great horror movie (as they did with Son of Dracula) it was purely accidental and was not intended. Night Monster is for Universal, and Bela Lugosi, completists only. It highlights the wisdom of Lugosi’s decision in the 40s to abandon Universal in favour of Monogram. Monogram may have been a Poverty Row studio but their 1940s horror/thriller movies were more interesting than this creaky snoozefest and they were prepared to offer him much more interesting roles.

Stone (1974)

I’m still catching up on 1970s ozploitation movies. This time it’s Stone, a biker movie that built up a huge cult following in Australia.

A political assassination is witnessed by a member of an outlaw biker gang, The Grave Diggers. Well he sort of witnesses it - in fact he’s so out of it on drugs he doesn’t even remember it. But the assassin is taking no chances. He’s not sure which member of the gang was the witness, so he sets out to kill off the entire gang one by one (in very creative ways).

The police don’t get much co-operation from the bikers in trying to crack the case until they send in Stone. Stone is a long-haired cool guy hip young motorcycle-riding cop, although in fact he has a university degree and a very upper-class girlfriend. Stone’s job is to go undercover with The Grave Diggers. They’ve very unimpressed with the idea of having a cop joining their gang, even on a temporary basis, but when Stone saves one of the gang from a murder attempt by crossbow they reluctantly accept him.

Stone is a good cop, but he has a bit of an anti-authoritarian streak. Yes, he’s a bit of a maverick loner cop! He takes a bit of liking to the gang. He see them (and the film portrays them this way) as a genuine alternative society with its own moral rules and code of honour. This is going to cause him major problems, since his loyalty to the gang isn’t always going to be consistent with his equally strong belief in justice and the due process of the law. Especially when The Grave Diggers make it clear they intend to execute their own brand of justice.

It’s an ultra-low budget movie, but like so many Australian movies of its era (it was released in 1974) it’s quite spectacular, with some frighteningly dangerous stunts and some pretty impressive high-speed motorcycle scenes.

The plot includes some interesting ideas, and the ending (which I can’t say anything about since it’s really the whole point of the film) brings Stone’s divided loyalties and their consequences into sharp perspective. Unfortunately the plot includes some silly ideas as well, but its sheer energy more or less carries it through.

The acting is a real problem. Ken Shorter is OK as Stone. Writer-director Sandy Harbutt tries hard as Undertaker, the gang leader, but he doesn’t quite have the necessary charisma. Hugh Keays-Byrne gives one of his usual unintentionally campy performances - how this guy gets taken seriously as an actor in Australia is beyond me. Most of the gang members aren’t totally convincing, although VIncent Gil is very good as Dr Death (and having him as The Grave Diggers’ resident Satanist priest is an interesting touch that turns out much less embarrassingly than you might expect).

This is very much a guy movie. The women characters are there to provide the nudity that any 1970s exploitation movie required (although strangely for the 70s there’s actually as much male nudity as female). Rebecca Gilling must have appeared in just about very Australian movie of the 70s! And she must have taken her clothes off in every one of them. She’s a good actress but she’s wasted in this one. Sandy Harbutt clearly has zero interest in his female characters. It’s all about male bonding and loyalty and male codes of honour, which gets pretty tedious after a while.

At least it isn’t afflicted with the drug-addled hippie nonsense that made Easy Rider almost unwatchable.

There are some memorable scenes, such as The Grave Diggers’ funeral procession early in the film. It’s well-made, but whether you’re going to enjoy it or not depends on how much tolerance you have for such extremely male-oriented movies, and for the glamourisation of violent outsiders. It didn’t really appeal to me, but it’s still an interesting example of the sheer variety of ozploitation movies. It would make an interesting double feature with Mad Max - dealing with similar subject matter but taking a diametrically opposite approach.

Evil Face (1974)

Georges Franjus’ superb Eyes Without a Face started an entire sub-genre of horror movies - plastic surgery horrors. Evil Face (La mano che nutre la morte), a 1974 Italo-Turkish co-production, is a relatively typical example of the breed but with enough twists to make it worth a watch.

Klaus Kinski is Professor Nijinski, a brilliant surgeon carrying on the controversial work of his equally brilliant surgeon father-in-law. He has personal reason for his obsession with this field - his beautiful wife was horribly disfigured by fire in an accident. His aim is to restore her beauty. As is usual in this sub-genre, this can only be done at the expense of other beautiful young women whose faces must be sacrificed to provide the necessary tissue for the skin grafts. And many experiments are needed to perfect the process, so the professor must kidnap and murder a succession of young women.

A young couple staying the night in the professor’s gothic castle will provide his latest victims - the husband to be murdered quickly while the wife will provide material for the latest experiment. The plan miscarries, partly due to the interference of a woman who is convinced (quite correctly) that the doctor has murdered her sister. She and her friend have talked their way into staying at the castle as well.

There are some reasonably good plot twists which I’m not going to give away.

The 19th century setting and the castle provide a suitably Frankenstein-like mad scientist atmosphere. The direction and the cinematography are competent. The production values are fairly impressive fir what was obviously a low-budget movie, and the mad scientist laboratory has some nice steampunkesque touches.

The acting is generally adequate, and Klaus Kinski is, as you’d expect, a very convincing insane scientist. He overacts rather less than you’d anticipate.

There are some fairly gory surgical scenes, and the disfigured wife with her strange doll is rather disturbing.

Yilmaz Duru and Sergio Garrone are co-credited as directors. They don’t have the visual brilliance or the visionary qualities to make a great eurohorror movie from the material at their disposal but they’ve still managed to make a fairly entertaining film.

The woman investigating the disappearance of her sister has a friend with her, the friend’s sole function in the movie apparently being to allow the inclusion of the lesbian sex scene without which no eurohorror movie would be complete. But that’s the wonderful world of eurohorror!

MYA Communications have attracted a certain amount of flak for some of their releases, including this one. It does have the look of being taken from a VHS source, and there’s a distinct lack of extras. On the other hand if this is so it was certainly a very good VHS source, and the picture quality is more than acceptable. It’s not the kind of pristine transfer you might get from Blue Underground, but MYA Communications are putting out some very obscure, hard-to-find and rather interesting titles and I’m happy to support any company that will make these previously unobtainable European cult movies available to cult movie fans in reasonably good DVD editions.

It’s not one of Kinski’s greatest performances and it’s not a forgotten masterpiece, but for eurohorror fans it should provide good solid entertainment.

The Stud (1978)

Sometimes, when life is getting too much for you with lots of stupid dramas, there’s only one thing that will really cheer you up. And that’s a really classic trashy movie. If said movie happens to star Joan Collins, even better. The Stud is a movie tailor-made for these situations.

Oliver Tobias is the stud of the title, Tony Blake. He was a waiter, a poor working-class kid with big ambitions, a pretty face and a hot body. He attracted the attention of the fabulously wealthy Fontaine Khaled (Joan Collins), or rather his hot body attracted her attention. So she set him up as manager of a night-club, although his main duties are to satisfy her sexual appetites. He’s constantly on call in case she has a sexual emergency that requires immediate servicing. And this happens to Fontaine quite frequently.

Tony’s services are also available to other women, and they’re in high demand. He’s a busy boy, even if he spends most of his life in bed! Tony’s friends are gigolos as well, but Tony’s problem is that he thinks he’s more than that. Unfortunately he isn’t smart enough to be more than an amusing sex toy for wealthy women, and he also isn’t smart enough to realise that that’s the only use women have for him.

Tony’s big problems start when Fontaine has a sexual emergency in the elevator of her apartment building. She’s turned on by the fact that the security camera is filming their encounter, but perhaps she should have been a little more careful about making sure the resulting video tape wouldn’t be found by anyone inconvenient. Like her husband. Or her husband’s daughter, who already dislikes her. And Tony finds his life starting to spiral out of control when Fontaine decides she should share her toy boy with her friends, like Vanessa. Vanessa is very keen to try Tony out. And while Vanessa amuses herself with Tony Fontaine can screw Vanessa’s husband, which she’s been wanting to do for a while. So Fontaine arranges a little holiday for them all in Paris - shopping, drugs and lots of sex. She didn’t need to ask Tony if it was OK with him - she does own him after all. This little trip will have momentous consequences for both Fontaine and Tony.

Tony has been playing some dangerous games of his own, pursuing Fontaine’s step-daughter. He thinks he’s in love. He’s certainly in love with her money and her social position, but whether Tony is actually capable of loving a woman for herself is debatable. If it sounds like it’s all going to end messily, it is.

These are the beautiful people of the 70s. Their lives consist of night-clubbing, shopping, and sex. After which they go to another night-club, shop some more, and have lots more sex. It’s 1978, London is a smorgasbord of night-clubs and sex, and no-one imagines that this lifestyle can’t go on forever.

Oliver Tobias does a good job as Tony, although he doesn’t really need to do much more than pout a bit and look hot. Sue Lloyd is amusing as Fontaine’s lecherous friend Vanessa, The supporting cast seem to have been chosen more for their willingness to take their clothes off than for their acting abilities, and that turns out to be an asset. The last thing a film like this needs is people trying to do serious acting.

And of course there’s Joan Collins. After her Hollywood career hadn’t really taken off she’d returned to England, and by the 70s she was pursuing a varied and interesting if not overly distinguished career, high-lighted by some wonderfully camp performances in some wonderfully camp horror movies. She was certainly a busy actress, but The Stud marks the beginning of her classical uber-bitch period when she really found her niche. And it helped her to transform her, at last, into a major box-office star. She’s in top form. Her great asset has always been that she has no illusions about being a great actress, but put her in something really trashy and set her loose and she knows exactly what to do. This movie gives her the chance to be both bitch and sex-bomb, and she performs both roles admirably, shedding her clothes at every possible opportunity.

This is absolutely top-notch high-gloss trash, and demonstrates that Britain could make great movie trash as well as anyone else could. The swimming pool orgy scene is as excessive as anyone could possibly desire. And you get disco music. A must-see for anyone who adores Joan Collins as I do. I loved every sleazy minute of it.

The Fifth Cord (1971)

The Fifth Cord (Giornata nera per l'ariete) is an interesting entry in the 1971s Italian giallo cycle, depending even more heavily on style than most films of this type. And style it certainly has in abundance.

The plot has the usual rather bizarre twists and turns you expect in this genre. Franco Nero is Andrea Bild, a journalist who has crawled inside a bottle after a marriage break-up. He’s still somewhat obsessed with his ex-wife, and he’s involved in a moderately destructive relationship with a woman named Lu. His excessive jealousies are clearly going to destroy that relationship, while his drinking combined with his natural tendencies towards being a trouble-maker mean that his job is usually hanging by a thread.

His life becomes more complicated when a young man is brutally bashed after attending a party, at which Andrea was one of the guests, and apparently the last person to see the victim before the bashing. But his life is going to get a lot more complicated. A wealthy doctor’s wife is murdered, and Andrea knew the wife slightly while the doctor is a major shareholder in the paper he works for. More murders follow, one of the victims being his editor with whom he’d quarreled violently. There always seems to be some link to Andrea. And he never has an alibi.

The police are naturally intrigued by the fact that Andrea has a connection with all the murder victims. Andrea is naturally anxious to solve this puzzling case both to clear his own name and because it’s obviously going to make a good story.

The movie has most of the classic giallo elements, including the black gloved killer. The sexual dimension isn’t as obvious as in most giallos. There is a sexual dimension, but most of the killings are not obvious sex killings. The script is workmanlike, although the connections between the various characters aren’t really delineated as clearly as one would like.

Franco Nero gives a typically understated but solid performance as Andrea. Rosella Falk is outstanding in a fairly minor role as the doctor’s wife, Wolfgang Preiss is the police inspector, the kind of role he specialised in and always did extremely well. Pamela Tiffin as Andrea’s girlfriend is impressive.

The real star of the movie though is cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. He’d worked with Bernardo Bertolucci and he’d photographed The Bird with the Crystal Plumage for Dario Argento, and he’s since gone on to pick up three cinematography Oscars. He and director Luigi Bazzoni give this movie a very film noir visual feel. Storaro does shadows better than anyone else I can think of, with the possible exception of master film noir cinematographers John Alton and Nick Musuraca. Ad they had the advantage of working in black-and-white - I don’t think anyone has used shadows more effectively and more moodily in colour than Stararo does in this film.

The sets are also superb - Bazzoni makes tremendous use of modernist architecture and interior design to give the movie both style and mood.

While the plot is nothing special, this is a movie worth seeing just for its technical mastery and its breath-taking visuals. In that respect I think it even outdoes Argento at his best. Every visual element is there for a reason, and works perfectly, but the movie never seems gimmicky. Strangely enough, for a giallo, the most impressive visuals aren’t reserved for the murders (apart from the murder of the doctor’s wife which is a stunning set-piece). Bazzoni and Storaro use disturbing images to build mood and tension rather than for spectacular individual scenes of action or violence. The entire movie works as a single visual entity.

So what could have been a routine giallo is executed with so much flair that it becomes a must-see.

Blue Underground’s DVD release includes only one significant extra, a 16-minute featurette in which Franco Nero and Vittorio Storaro discuss both the movie and their careers. But the transfer is superb, and that’s what matters with a movie such as this.