The Legend of Blood Castle (1973)

Erzsébet (or Elizabeth) Báthory has been the subject of quite a few horror movies. The infamous 16th century countess may well have been one of the most prolific serial killers in history. Or she may have been merely the innocent victim of a politically and religiously inspired conspiracy. Whatever the truth of the matter, she remains a legendary figure of evil. The Legend of Blood Castle (Ceremonia sangrienta) presents an unusual twist on her story.

It isn’t actually the story of the notorious blood countess herself, but of a descendant of hers a couple of centuries later. This descendant bears the same name as her ancestor. And she shares her ancestor’s morbid fear of growing old. She also has a more immediate cause for concern. Her husband is growing tired of her. If only there was a way she could regain his love, and avoid the horrors of ageing as well. Her sinister elderly maidservant suggests to her that there is indeed a way of doing both these things. The methods used by her ancestor worked, and they will work again.

The countess needs an accomplice if she is to obtain sufficient quantities of blood from beautiful young virgins. This accomplice is to be none other than her husband Karl.

Karl, as the lord of the extensive territories surrounding the castle, has been involved in an unusual criminal trial. The defendant (a doctor of medicine) is present in court, but he is dead. He is confined in his coffin, and accused of vampirism. It is claimed that a medallion he was wearing has strange occult powers, powers that will bring inevitable death. Karl is sceptical, and volunteers to wear the medallion himself. Soon after this the report spreads that he has died suddenly. The countess discharges her servants except for the elderly maidservant, but as they leave the castle one of the servants is certain she can see the deceased count watching from an upstairs window.

Young woman start to disappear mysteriously. Erzsébet has begun the process of trying to regain her lost youth, and her need for blood must be met.

There’s another subplot involving the local innkeeper’s daughter Marina. She has considerable ambitions, her principal ambition being nothing less than to snare the affections of the count. She makes use of a magical charm, and this combined with her considerable physical charms soon attracts the count’s attentions.

Spanish director Jorge Grau handles the interlocking subplots with considerable skill. This is fairly typical eurohorror, but it’s representative of the more conventional variety of eurohorror. There’s none of the extreme visual flamboyance of a Bava or an Argento, or the surrealism of a Rollin, or the jazz-fueled weirdness of a Jess Franco. In fact there’s a coherent linear plot. On the other hand it does have a certain air of decadence and depravity, and a suggestion of sexual kinkiness. And while Grau’s style isn’t spectacular his direction is more than competent. The cinematography is equally skilled.

It’s also fairly well acted. Ewa Aulin is adequate as Marina. Espartaco Santoni is very charismatic as Karl, and Lucia Bosé is weird and creepy but also a little pathetic as Erzsébet. Her performance is the key, and she carries it off with great success.

Grau doesn’t rely on buckets of blood, but there’s still a fair amount of blood that gets spilled in this film. The atmosphere is more important though, and it’s suitable gothic and highly effective.

Like many Spanish genre movies in the early 70s this one was made in both a “clothed” and a “nude” version. The DVD (from Mya Communications) gives us the clothed version, this being the best surviving print. The alternate scenes included from the “nude” version suggest that it was almost as tame as the clothed version. I’ve heard varying reports on the quality of DVDs from this company, but I have to say that this one was extremely good. Unfortunately it’s dubbed in English (Italian and Spanish soundtracks are provided as options but they lack English sub-titles). Both the sound and the picture quality are exceptionally good.

This is really a very fine example of eurohorror, well-made and with an intelligent and complex script that comes together very satisfactorily. While my personal preferences run to the more bizarre varieties of eurohorror I can still recommend this release very highly.

Dames Don’t Care (1954)

Dames Don’t Care was the third of the long and highly successful series of French movies based on the novels of British crime writer Peter Cheyney. They follow the adventures of his fast-talking, wise-cracking, two-fisted, womanising FBI agent, Lemmy Caution, on assignment in various European countries. They’ve very much inspired by the classic American crime B-movie, with a few film noir touches and a hint of international intrigue.

Lemmy’s tough guy persona and his fondness for the ladies are exaggerated to cartoonish levels, and quite deliberately so. There’s a very definite and very strong tongue-in-cheek quality to these movies. Eddie Constantine’s most famous performance as Lemmy Caution was to come in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, a very different kind of movie. But the character is still the same.

The very glamorous Dominique Wilms (who appears in several of these movies) makes a delightfully over-the-top femme fatale. She’s clearly enjoying herself, and she and Eddie Constanine have just the right sort of cynical hardbitten chemistry. There’s non-stop action, and a plot that is so convoluted that to be honest I don’t have the remotest idea what was actually going on. It really doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t detract from the fun. These were obviously low-budget movies and there’s not a great deal of technical sophistication on show here, although there’s quite a bit of fairly effective night photography. And of course, being 1954, there are some very cool American convertibles (FBI agents obviously took their cars with them when their duties took them to Europe).

Writer-director Bernard Borderie isn’t taking any of this seriously, and nor should we. Long before James Bond and the various spy spoof movies of the 60s the French were already poking affectionate fun at this type of film.

Eddie Constantine became a major star in Europe as a result of the Lemmy Caution movies and made many other similar films as well. He never did achieve any real recognition in his home country (he was born in the US). These types of tongue-in-cheek spy/crime thrillers didn’t really become successful in Britain and the US until the 60s, so Lemmy Caution was perhaps ahead of his time!

This is a world of smoky night-clubs, jazz, fast cars, dangerous women and intricate and outlandish criminal plots where everybody is double-crossing everybody else. It’s all highly entertaining, and a treat for anyone who’s a fan of crime B-movies.

The Lemmy Caution movies (and indeed most of Eddie Constantine’s movies) are not available on commercial DVD releases, so you’ll have to do some searching to find any of these movies. That’s sadly the case with so many very entertaining eurocrime/eurospy titles.

The Swamp of the Ravens (1974)

The Swamp of the Ravens (El pantano de los cuervos) is one of those movies that appears to have the necessary ingredients for a decent horror film, but somehow it just doesn’t happen.

This 1974 Spanish-Ecuadorian co-production is another variation on the mad scientist theme. Dr Frosta (like many another mad scientist before him) is investigating the borderline between life and death. He’s working on what happens to the DNA at this point. This is a horror movie, so the science is of course extremely vague! His private laboratory is a shack in the middle of a swamp, although he also works at a major research facility.

He collects corpses, some of them not actually quite dead at the time, for his experiments. The failed experiments are dumped into the swamp. His colleague at the research facility is somewhat suspicious of his activities, and she becomes more suspicious when it appears that certain drugs are going missing.

The police are also suspicious, as quite a few people have gone missing as well. One of them is the girlfriend of an American, so the possibilities of an international incident have undoubtedly encouraged the police to be a little more zealous than usual in investigating her disappearance. It appears that her ex-boyfriend was a brilliant but unstable scientist, the same brilliant but unstable scientist who has the laboratory deep in the swamps.

There should be plenty of classic horror movie atmosphere here, with swamps infested by huge numbers of buzzards (there’s not a raven to be seen in the whole film, but The Swamp of the Ravens is a much cooler and more Poe-like title than The Swamp of the Buzzards). An there are some very grisly scenes. But somehow it just falls flat. The shots of circling buzzards are effective the first few times, but they get used over and over again until you find yourself never ever wanting to see another buzzard again so long as you live. The direction is too uninspired, the acting is too wooden, the pacing is too slow, and it fails to deliver either real thrills or any real camp appeal. It’s just dull.

It is however decidedly twisted in at least one respect. Our insane scientist finds that he loves his girlfriend much more when she’s dead than when she was alive. We’re talking major necrophilia themes here.

It also boasts extreme musical weirdness, with one of the most excruciatingly awful songs you’ll ever hear in a movie. Even by 1970s standards the music is bizarre.

This is the other half of the Something Weird double-bill that also includes The Thirsty Dead. Sadly the print of The Swamp of the Ravens is in very poor condition. It’s very muddy, very dull, and the colours bleed all over the place or disappear altogether.

While I can’t really recommend The Swamp of the Ravens, the DVD is still worth getting just for The Thirsty Dead.

The True Story of Eskimo Nell (1975)

After seeing Not Quite Hollywood I’m going through a phase of watching as many 1970s ozploitation movies as I can find. The True Story of Eskimo Nell was perhaps not a good place to start!

The biggest single problem with this film is trying to work out what on earth the makers’ intentions were. It was promoted as a sex comedy. In an ideal world a sex comedy would contain generous quantities of sex and would be funny as well. We don’t live in an ideal world but I think most of us would agree that such a movie should contain at least one of these ingredients. In fact this one contains very little sex, and I found very little to make me laugh.

It’s not that it’s a completely incompetent movie. It’s just a very confusing one. When the director claims that his two biggest influences in the making of the movie were Blazing Saddles and Midnight Cowboy you know you’re in trouble. They’re not exactly movies most people would normally associate in their minds. And when the director of a movie that is supposed to be a bawdy sex comedy is most proud of the homages to John Ford and D. W. Griffith that he included in said movie, you start to wonder what exactly he thought he was doing.

It’s based extremely loosely indeed on a notorious bawdy poem. The one-eyed Deadeye Dick (Max Gillies) has travelled the world following the gold rushes of the mid-19th century, and his travels at one time took him to the frozen wastes of Canada’s Yukon. There he met and fell in love with the legendary Eskimo Nell, the most famous and the most beautiful whore in all the world. He has dedicated his life to finding her again. Or at least that’s his story. LIke most of his stories, it probably contains little if any truth. At some point he has hooked up with a pal, Mexican Pete (Serge Lazaroff). Mexican Pete is a legend as well, a legendary performer in the bedroom. He’s almost a male version of Eskimo Nell.

Dick persuades Pete to join him in his quest. If Eskimo Nell is as beautiful as Dick claims, then Pete is certainly interested in getting to know her. If they don’t find her, they’re bound to find plenty of other women along the way.

Rather than playing the story as a sex comedy, though, director Richard Franklin plays it as a rather poignant tale of friendship and of the quest for true love. And perhaps of quests in general, since the quest really matters more than the object of the quest. This is not entirely a bad idea, but it’s combined very unsuccessfully with a good deal of rather unfunny schoolboy humour. Quests for true love don’t combine all that well with fart jokes, and contests to find the most successful obscene insults.

It probably doesn’t help that I’ve always found Max Gillies’ humour to be extremely feeble. Richard Franklin’s direction is muddled and hesitant (excusable faults in someone making their first feature film) and the script is all over the place. The various elements of the movie would be difficult enough (although perhaps not impossible) to combine successfully, even in the hands of more experienced film-makers. They’d have done much better either to have included lots more sex and a lot more energy, or to have dropped the sex altogether and just made it a kind of buddy film.

On the plus side, it’s visually very impressive for a very low-budget movie, and the silent-movie style D. W. Griffith homages work surprisingly well. The ending does achieve a real an unexpected poignancy. It’s just too much of a jumbled mish-mash, so I can’t really recommend this one at all. Even as an interesting failure it’s not quite interesting enough.

The Thirsty Dead (1973)

The Thirsty Dead is a 1973 US-Philippines co-production and it’s released on DVD by Something Weird, so what you naturally expect is a hefty dose of sex and sleaze. What you actually get is something quite different, and much stranger.

The alternative title, The Blood Cult of Shangri-La, is the clue. Yes, this is a remake of Lost Horizon. Well, a really really loose remake! Somewhere in the mountains of the Philippines is a lost civilisation of immortals. Their culture is dedicated to the worship of your and beauty. To obtain and maintain their immortality they need a constant supply of the blood of young and beautiful women. They kidnap women from bars and similar places. Their latest haul of four captive women includes an American stewardess and a dancer.

The stewardess turns out to bear an uncanny resemblance to a painting of an important high priestess, so the cultists decide she’s some kind of reincarnation of the priestess and therefore worthy to become one of the immortals. She’s not thrilled by this idea, since she’s going to have to drink the blood of her friends. And she’s seen what happens to the women whose blood is taken by the cultists. The dancer on the other hand would just love to join the cult, and doesn’t see blood drinking as a major problem if you get eternal youth and beauty in exchange.

Meanwhile one of the chief priests has become smitten with the stewardess. He agrees to save her and her friends, although this is going to put him very much in the bad books with the current high priestess. And she’s not a lady you want to upset.

There are a few moderately gruesome scenes, but this is not really a movie you can take seriously as a horror film. This is strictly an exercise in camp. I would assume it was intended as such, but with low-budget 1970s movies you can never be quite sure!

There’s absolutely no sex, no nudity, and no sleaze. But there’s lots of weirdness. And it’s about as camp as a movie can possibly be. The costumes are classics 70s kitsch. The sets are cheap and crude.

The acting is atrocious, but it’s classic bad movie atrocious acting. Jennifer Billingsley has one expression, which is stunned confusion, but she does it so well. And in every situation. Her performance is immensely entertaining if you’re a connoisseur of truly awful acting. John Considine is delightfully hammy as the priest Baru. Judith McConnell as the sex-crazed dancer and Fredricka Meyers as the annoyingly innocent and wide-eyed Ann deliver charmingly inept performances,

There’s not much to say about the technical side - it’s adequate for this kind of ultra-low budget drive-in fodder. The running time of less than 90 minutes ensures that you’re in no danger of becoming bored, and there’s so much kitschiness to keep you entertained along the way.

Something Weird’s DVD presentation is pretty reasonable considering the extreme obscurity of the movie, and it’s included as a double-feature along with the even more obscure 1974 horror flick Swamp of the Ravens (which I’ve yet to see).

This is a definite camp classic, and I need hardly add that I throughly enjoyed it.

Wake in Fright (1971)

Wake in Fright was the movie that really began the renaissance of the Australian film industry. Although it was an Australian-US co-production directed by a Canadian it remains the most powerful movie ever made in Australia.

Although it caused a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971 and had an enormous impact on a young American director who saw it there, a guy by the name of Matin Scorcese, and although it did extremely well overseas it was a commercial flop in Australia. Movies that shine an honest and unflinching light on the dark side of Australian society are never popular with Australian audiences. And this movie really is a journey into Australia’s heart of darkness.

Back in those days it was the practice for newly qualified teachers to be forced to lodge a bond with the Education Department. If they wanted to get their bond back they had to spend several years teaching in the bush, because no-one in their right mind would volunteer to teach in remote areas of rural Australia unless they were forced to. And young John Grant rally has drawn the short straw. He’s been assigned to a tiny one-teacher school in Tiboonda, a town that comprises a grand total of two buildings, a pub and a one-room school for the children of the local farmers. There is nothing for hundreds of miles around Tiboonda except absolute flatness and red dust.

The annual Christmas holiday gives Grant a chance to escape for six weeks to Sydney. But to get the plane to Sydney he must first catch the train to the nearest big town, Bundanyabba (a thinly disguised version of the remote real-life mining town of Broken Hill). He intends to spend one night in Bundanyabba (known affectionately to the locals as The Yabba), but it’s a night he’ll never forget. It’s not only a descent into Hell, it’s a journey into his own heart of darkness. He encounters the aggressive hospitality of the locals, and after many many beers he is drawn into a a two-up school, two-up being a bizarre peculiarly Australian gambling game. He loses all his money, but his nightmare has only just begun.

Men outnumber women three-to-one in Bundanyabba (as they do in Broken Hill) and the town does not possess a single brothel. In this unbelievably unhealthy male environment the only outlets available are booze, gambling and violence. Violence is used as a substitute for sex. John Grant’s evening culminates in an orgy of killing in a drunken night-time kangaroo hunt.

Kenneth Cook’s original novel was superb, but the movie is even better. In fact it’s considerably better than the book, adding all kinds of subtle nuances. The movie emphasises the intellectual arrogance of John Grant, a man who considers himself to be superior to these barbarians with whom he has to mix. It also highlights his colossal lack of self-awareness (nicely emphasised by the lighting which whatever the source always seem to be shining directly into Grant’s eyes). In the book he seems to be merely a victim of the barbarism of the outback, but in the film it is his own self-pity, arrogance and lack of insight that leads him on from one horror to another.

The movie was shot largely on location in Broken Hill. Director Ted Kotcheff explains that he had no difficulty understanding that kind of environment because it’s so similar to the remote parts of Canada, with a culture constructed entirely of alcohol, violence and contempt for women.

Gary Bond is extremely good as John Grant. Donald Pleasence is absolutely magnificent as Doc Tydon, Bundanyabba’s sleazy alcoholic town doctor who has committed a kind of mind suicide by embracing the life of The Yabba. Jack Thompson in his first film role is impressive as a mindlessly violent drunken roo-shooter. The standout performance though comes from Chips Rafferty in his final movie role, as the apparently kind but actually sinister police sergeant who derives enormous pleasure from seeing the destruction of the clever big-city intellectual. It’s one of the most terrifying portrayals of anti-intellectualism you’ll ever see. Rafferty had been one of the big stars in the old Australian film industry back in the 1930s and 1940s.

Kotcheff saw the violence inherent in the story as being the only form of human contact allowed in this ultra-macho environment. It’s a kind of homoerotic male bonding pushed to extraordinarily unhealthy extremes by the extent to which the inhabitants of The Yabba will go to deny its existence, and by the breath-taking alcohol consumption that accompanies it.

The kangaroo hunt makes for very disturbing view although Kotcheff emphasises that it wasn’t staged for the movie. It was simply footage of an actual kangaroo hunt, the sort of thing that happens every night in places like this.

The entire movie makes for disturbing viewing. At the time of its release Australian audiences interpreted it as a savage attack on Australian culture, but that’s a complete misunderstanding of the film. It’s a movie about any environment in any country where women are excluded and where drunkenness and violence are celebrated as evidence of masculinity. I don’t believe you need to be Australian or to know anything about Australia in order to appreciate the frightening power and horror of this extraordinary film.

The newly (and superbly) restored Region 4 DVD includes a host of extras. One can only hope that this movie gets a world-wide DVD release as well.

Not Quite Hollywood (2008)

Not Quite Hollywood is a fascinating documentary on the weird and wonderful movies of the ozploitation boom of the 70s and 80s.

For those whose ideas of Australian movies are based on dreadfully earnest and dull films like My Brilliant Career, or tedious period dramas, this will come as a revelation. There was a time when Australian movies were actually fun! Raunchy sex comedies, kung fu movies, gothic horrors, slasher movies, gothic westerns, outrageously tasteless comedies that would have made John Waters blanch, science fiction road movies - there was hardly a genre of exploitation movie that Australian movie-makers didn’t attempt. Generally made on very low budgets but looking much more expensive than they actually were, and with stunts that were every bit as dangerous as they looked. Three stuntmen were killed during the making of one Australian movie in the 70s.

The Australian genre movie-makers of that era weren’t just mavericks. They were totally batshit crazy. It’s little wonder that Quentin Tarantino is such a fan of these ozploitation flicks.

Many of these movies are now difficult to find on DVD, even in Australia. The Australian film industry today likes to think of itself as being in the business of making Serious Artistic Statements and they would dearly love to forget these disreputable films. But the big difference between the terribly serious (or seriously terrible) Australian movies of today and the sleazy ozploitation films of the 70s is that the ozploitation movies made money. Lots of it. They didn’t make a huge amount of money in Australia, but they cleaned up overseas. And being made on very low budgets, they were very very profitable. It was the Roger Corman approach to film-making, and it worked as well here in the Antipodes as it had worked for Corman back in the glory days of the drive-ins.

The poster for the documentary sums up these films pretty well - boobs, pubes and kung fu. They were trashy, they were sleazy, they were violent, and they were highly entertaining. I’m personally proud that we here in Australia were capable of making truly world-class trash cinema.

What we really need now are some decent ozploitation DVD boxed sets.