Horny House of Horror (ファッション·ヘル（ス) Fasshon heru(su)) is a 2010 Japanese horror parody film directed and written by Jun Tsugita (Mutant Girls Squad). Director Yoshihiro Nishimura (Helldriver; Tokyo Gore Police; Zombie TV) assisted with the gory set pieces.

Tsugita created the film as a fan of western exploitation films and had a desire to make a parody of the film Motel Hell. In Japan, the film is called Fashion Hell with an extra letter S. By adding the extra H the title becomes “Fashion health” which is a Japanese term for a kind of brothel.

Plot teaser:

In Japan, Nakazu (Yuya Ishikawa) is about to get married to a woman who insists on keeping up with his daily events through a cellphone. His baseball fan friends Toshida (Wani Kansai) and Uno (Toushi Yanagi) feel that Nakazu needs one last thrill before tying the knot as they stumble upon the Shogun Massage Parlour after a night of playing baseball. Toshida and Uno insist on entering the brothel with Nakazu who has never paid for sex before.

The three are presented with the sight of three female buttocks that are displayed through holes in a wall to give them a tease of what is on offer. Each of the three men separate into rooms with their selected ladies of the night, Nagisa (Saori Hara), Nonoko (Asami) and Kaori (Mint Suzuki). The trio of men are unaware of the brothel’s mission to sexually torture customers…

Reviews:

“Featuring far more sexually graphic content than many of its predecessors, Horny House of Horrors is a surprisingly effective comedy. The characters are naturally two-dimensional but warm enough, while the violent set pieces are gross and funny, executed with panache by none other than Yoshihiro Nishimura himself.” Brutal as Hell

“Vagina dentata is the yarn’s main means of attack, but samurai swords and phallic food games provide plenty of ketchup. Male thesps chew the scenery with comic shamelessness, while wild-eyed Asami is sassy and ferocious; Saori Hara gives her thesping more effort than the pic deserves, emerging with dignity (if not nipples) intact. Script provides a loopy excuse to get to Nishimura’s setpieces, so Tsugita’s helming feels rushed.”

“The concept is stupid but, because it’s mostly limited to one set, controllable, meaning technical aspects such as cinematography and makeup are quite good (although action choreography is not) … If it had pushed the sex or the gore quotients a little more it might have worked better. For this sort of thing, the film should have had more “ewwww” moments to balance the silliness.” Digital Retribution

“The movie suffers from a cheap budget and lack of any real script. If a film is to sport the comedic moniker, it might as well be at least somewhat funny, right? It ended up more on the campy, lame end that without the dick cutting moments would be entirely pointless … Its pretty basic Asian horror with props that are too cheap to really feel like you’ve accomplished something by watching this.” HorrorNews.net

Wikipedia | IMDb

Count Dracula’s Great Love (originally El gran amor del conde Drácula) is a 1973 Spanish film directed by Javier Aguirre. The film is also known as Cemetery Girls (American reissue title), Dracula’s Great Love (American promotional title), Dracula’s Virgin Lovers (UK and Canadian theatrical title) and The Great Love of Count Dracula (International English title). The titular vampire is played by Spain’s most famous horror star, Paul Naschy, the stage name of Jacinto Molina, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Aguirre and Alberto S. Insúa.

Through the thick forest fog we witness a coach losing a wheel on Borgo Pass (one of the few nods to Bram Stoker‘s novel) and the five extravagantly-costumed travellers setting off on foot to find shelter for the evening. A local sanitarium is deemed suitable and they are granted a hearty welcome by the owner, Dr. Wendell Marlow (Naschy). The doctor is actually none other than Count Dracula, though it’s of no particular consequence that he goes by this name as this is pretty much the only connection to either the novel or any film with the character. The Count is desperate to resurrect his deceased daughter but can only do so with the blood of a willing virgin bride. One by one, his female guests meet grisly (not to mention breast-baring) ends until the one virgin, Karen (Haydée Politoff, of Queens of Blood) remains but an unlikely pang of moral conscience leads to a surprise conclusion.

Rural Madrid is not a particularly convincing Transylvania but the gothic stylings of Paul Naschy’s attempt to nail the role of the Count are incredibly heady, from the foggy exteriors to the lushly-decorated crumbling castle. Javier Aguirre was something of a stranger to horror films and it shows – the unnecessarily twisty plot reads more like the rules to a complicated card game, leaving cinema’s most notorious vampire with his wings clipped and, well, rather toothless. To make up for this, we are treated to a greatest hits of nudity and romping, with dashes of claret in a self-aware attempt to fulfil its horror film remit.

The quartet of bodiced lovelies is completed by Rosanna Yanni (Naschy’s Hunchback of the Morgue), Mirta Miller (Umberto Lenzi’s Eyeball) and Ingrid Garbo (Murder Mansion), though their ability to act is slightly surplus to requirements, indeed even Naschy is something of a by-stander, with no enemy as such, the characters plod around somewhat aimlessly until they fall into bed with the next man/woman. The sappy Count, when not moping around is beaten up by two far more vicious-looking vampires, their glowing, cat-like eyes a nice touch but not enough to stir huge interest.

Buy on DVD with Vampire Hookers from Amazon.com

Many of the crew on the film had worked on 1972′s violent Western, Cut-Throats 9, including the composer of the score, Carmelo Bernaola, a workman-like but reliable and long-time collaborator of Naschy. The nudity in the film is strong for the time, pushing the bare skin barrier far harder than Hammer did, aided by the film’s numerous different cuts, different territories being treated to differing strengths of bosom screen time – this also accounts for the myriad of different titles.

Although Naschy was most well-known for his werewolf character Waldemar Daninsky, he was also famous for playing most of the movie world’s most famous monsters, from hunchbacks to The Mummy, to warlocks to Fu Manchu – yet here, as Dracula, he seems a little lost, playing the required suave role perhaps for the sake of it and completely lacking the more monster-like passion he was known for. Without the trusty director of his classic films, Leon Klimovsky, Count Dracula’s Great Love is fun as 70′s Euro-sleaze but a disappointment as a cohesive narrative. Ironically, the film was sometimes shown theatrically on a double-bill with Klimovsky’s The Vampires’ Night Orgy.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

 Buy Paul Naschy: Memoirs of a Wolfman from Amazon.com

Dracula Exotica (also known as Love at First Gulp) is a 1980 adult vampire horror film directed by Shaun Costello [as Warren Evans]. It stars Jamie Gillis, Samantha Fox, Vanessa Del Rio and Eric Edwards.

Review:

Shaun Costello and Ken Schwartz followed their successful collaboration on Fiona on Fire, easily the best porn adaptation of Otto Preminger’s classic noir Laura (territory Costello had frequented before with his low budget Fire in Francesca), with this glossy mix of horror, humour and hardcore sex. Unfortunately, they also had a falling out over this one, director Costello claiming that writer/producer Schwartz had merely managed to squander most of the movie’s sizeable budget. Even if it were so, this barely reflects on the film’s uniformly high production values, beautifully complemented by its superstar cast and terrific script that – for copyright reasons ? – virtually creates a whole new background for the Prince of Darkness, renamed Leopold Michael Georgi Dracula (though still from Transylvania) and portrayed with tremendous screen presence by adult film veteran Jamie Gillis in a career performance to rival the one he gave in Radley Metzger’s Opening of Misty Beethoven.

The story begins in the Carpathian country side in 1590 with the idle nobleman dividing his time between drunken orgies (involving the likes of Marlene Willoughby, Christine De Schaffer, Marc Valentine and the ubiquitous Ron Jeremy) and lusting for chaste, unattainable gamekeeper’s daughter Surka (Samantha Fox in a fetching auburn wig) whom he cannot marry because she is beneath him. Therefore she’s confined to a nunnery instead. One night, overcome with passion, he drags her from her bed chambers and violates the terrified young virgin in front of his inebriated underlings. Rather than take the life of the man she loves, even in spite of what he has wrought, Surka kills herself with her rapist’s knife. Finding her lifeless body, the inconsolable Count pulls the dagger from her fatal wound and plunges it into his own chest, thereby giving birth to… the Curse of Dracula !

Nearly four centuries later, the Count rises from his tomb, awakened by the desires of a pair of vampire twins (Denise and Diana Sloan, at least one of whom is remarkably limber as the girl’s pretzel-like contortions attest), ordering his faithful servant Renfrew (Gordon Duvall) to douse the women with holy water as he has to leave for America to join a tourist he has noticed taking the tour of his castle and who looks exactly like his dearly departed Surka. Unbeknown to him, Sally (also played by Fox) is actually a spy working for the CIA, uncovering unsavory international wheelings and dealings for her hilariously self-important employer who goes by the code name “Big Bird” (an unexpected comic turn by the ever reliable Eric Edwards). Fox, looking mighty fine by the way, does one of the funniest sex scenes ever as she dresses up as a precocious little girl to extract important information from a corrupt Albanian official, indelibly played by her regular screen partner and sometime boyfriend Bobby Astyr. Suspected of espionage, Dracula’s immediately put under government surveillance.

Sailing into New York harbour, he has already recruited the estimable talents of Vita Valdez (who else but voluptuous vixen Vanessa Del Rio?), a devious drug smuggler pressed into secretarial duty by the cunning Count who memorably queries about her typing expertise as he goes down on her! As can be expected, Vanessa singlehandedly ups the raunch factor with a frenzied group grope, draining such formidable stallions as Ron Hudd, Dave Ruby (the Al Bundy of porn) and Ashley Moore from their vital fluids. A slab session with necrophiliac morgue assistant Herschel Savage brings her back to life, just in time to divert nosy inspector Blick (essayed by Al Levitsky in bumbling, Clouseau-like fashion) from Drac’s trail. Not so with Sally who finds herself drawn to the man she has to investigate, leading her to realizse that she is indeed his long lost lover’s reincarnation. In an ending pretty much lifted ad verbatim (with a nice twist pertaining to the “nature of the beast”) from Stan Dragoti’s highly enjoyable Love at First Bite, true love overcomes such obstacles as several murderous instances and a 400 year age difference!

Costello, by now settling into his latter day “Warren Evans” guise, proves his sophistication as a filmmaker with a number of stunningly composed shots, the most impressive of which may be the perfect between the legs shot of a self-pleasuring Fox working a candle in and out of her nether regions in front of a large mirror reflecting Dracula’s ghostly apparition. He never allows his visual flair to get in the way of good old-fashioned storytelling skills though, working through a convoluted plot at nearly breakneck speed, tossing off genuinely funny gags left and right while still finding time for the requisite number of well-done carnal encounters. In addition to those already mentioned, Gillis and Fox give evidence of special chemistry in their climactic union with not even the Count’s copious facial pop shot diminishing the scene’s swooningly romantic flavour.

Dries Vermeulen, Horrorpedia [with thanks to Thomas Eikrem's ridiculously exclusive Filmrage]

Shaun Costello recalls Dracula Exotica:

In the Spring of 1978 I got a call from Roy Seretsky, who had an office in New York’s Film Center Building where I also had space for years. I knew Roy only slightly, and he knew me mostly by reputation. He also knew of my association with Dibi (Robert ‘Dibi’ DiBernardo) and the Gambino crime family. I was considered a protected guy, which meant I was untouchable, a status I reveled in. Dibi, in deference to my friendship with the late John Liggio, had kept the status of “connected” from our relationship. Instead I was considered a “friend” of the family, and friends were protected, without the reciprocity that would be demanded of a “connected” guy, or an “associate”.  An ideal situation.

A year before, I had met Roy during the shooting of ‘Fiona on Fire’, a movie I was reluctant to direct. Fiona was written and produced by Ken Schwartz, who owned a film editing facility a few floors above my office in the Film Center. Schwartz was an affable man who I had gotten to know through renting his editing rooms to do post production on Waterpower, a movie I had produced a year earlier.  Ken couldn’t get over Waterpower – how well he thought it turned out, and how absurdly kinky it was. He mentioned to me more that once that, if he ever got the opportunity to produce a film of his own, I would be the only director he would consider. I had been directing adult films for six years, and had always written and produced my own projects, a situation that I was not anxious to change. Working with long-time collaborator, cameraman Bill Markle, I had always written and produced everything myself.  But Ken was relentless, and suddenly the opportunity presented itself. He had written a script based on Otto Preminger’s 1944 classic “Laura” and, through Roy Seretsky, had come up with the money to produce it. The idea of working with someone else’s material was unappealing to me, and I declined Ken’s offer. But sometimes a situation can dictate a change in direction. A film I was planning had been cancelled by its backers, who were restructuring and temporarily out of business, and I found myself unemployed. This, combined with Ken’s relentless pursuit and offers of a hefty director’s fee changed my position.

So I took the job and hated every minute of it. Although I was allowed to hire Markle as the Director of Photography, that hire was my limit. Ken had written a complicated screenplay, with tricky dialogue that even experienced actors would have trouble with, and he expected porn performers, who had difficulty with the simplest scripts, to deal with it. It was impossible. Not only had Ken written the script, but he would also do the casting, so that actors I didn’t know, who had little experience, and even less talent would show up on the set to wrangle with dialogue they had no hope of delivering in any believable way. And, as the film’s director, I was supposed to sort all of this out – make it happen. It was hopeless. Bill Markle did a great job, as always, giving the movie a professional look, but the performance of most of the cast was laughable. At the end of every shooting day, after begging Ken to simplify the dialogue, I swore I’d never do anything like this again. Two or three times, during Fiona’s eight shooting days, Roy Seretsky would show up on the set, look around, and then quickly disappear. I had maybe one or two conversations with him, certainly nothing memorable. A year after we wrapped the set on Fiona, I was surprised to hear from him. 

Roy had one of the most unique jobs in show business. He scouted investment opportunities in theatrical and motion picture production for organized crime, particularly the Colombo family. He had put together financial packages for many Broadway and Off-Broadway shows. “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”, which had enjoyed a long and profitable Off-Broadway run, was wholly Colombo funded, the arrangements made by Roy. Their biggest success was twenty percent ownership of “Cats”, which made them a fortune. On the film side,  Roy was offered all or part of almost everything produced by Dino DeLaurentis. Roy had backers for a script that my old nemesis Ken Schwartz had written and wanted to direct, a comedy/sex version of Dracula. The budget was huge, maybe $150,000, which was more money than had ever been spent on what would still have to be considered a porno movie. The script was hilarious, but the backers were nervous. Roy asked me to meet with him, along with some of the Colombo people. My part in this meeting would be to act as consultant in order to advise them on the profitability of the project. 

The meeting was held at Lanza’s Restaurant, on First Avenue and Twelfth Street. Roy, myself, and two of the Colombo people would participate. My good friend and sponsor John Liggio, a ranking member in the Colombo family, had died of lung cancer a few years before, and I recognized one of the Colombos from the funeral.  He worked under John, and knew of our friendship, so the mood of the meeting was warm and friendly.  They laid their cards on the table and I advised them as best I could. Ken Schwartz, who wrote the script and was lobbying to direct it, wanted to cast Jack Wrangler, a notoriously gay porno actor, famous for his live-in relationship with singer Margaret Whiting, as Dracula.  Mafia members are born homophobes, and they were nervous about putting up the biggest budget ever spent on a heterosexual porno movie (Dracula) starring a notoriously gay actor (Jack Wrangler). Wrangler had told Schwartz that if he got the part his good friend, famous Broadway wardrobe designer, William Ivey Long, would do the costumes. A stage-struck Schwartz was smitten with the idea of Long’s participation and, although I had no idea how that would add to the project’s profitability, I continued to listen. I heard them out and told them what I thought. Ken’s script was hilarious, and had real possibilities if correctly handled. I had met Wrangler a few times and liked him. I told them that Jack might make a very campy and funny Dracula. When asked if I would cast him I told them that, with a budget this big, it could be risky. I suggested that if the decision were mine I would cast Jamie Gillis as the moody vampire.

On the Schwartz/directing issue I told them that he would probably be fine, but he should be closely watched. First time directors have a tendency to overshoot, and in 35MM that could lead to stock and lab overages that could be substantial. The meeting ended and we went our separate ways. I left the meeting hungry because the food at Lanza’s was awful. The place was kept open exclusively for meetings like this one, not for its cuisine. 

A few days later Roy called. He asked me if, as a favor (a big word with these guys), I would take the job of assistant director on the picture in order to keep an eye on Schwartz. I declined. Having an obvious spy in the crew would only serve to make the first time director nervous. Roy had his back-up offer ready. He said that if I would direct the movie for a flat fee he would hire Gillis to play the lead, and I would have final say on all casting. This would mean a month in the city, and I had been training for a major dressage competition in Rhinebeck in a few weeks, so this was not an appealing idea. Also, it seemed like Fiona redux, which was an awful thought. But I knew that, if I said no, the Colombos would pressure the Gambinos, and I would get a call from Dibi suggesting I do this for the good of all concerned. So I caved.

During pre-production it became obvious that the whole project was quickly becoming a mess, but there was one exception.  Ken Schwartz, who had been kicked upstairs as Producer, and was becoming strangely unstable, had hired a typist/PA on the production who caught my eye. He was a skinny, mousy guy with thick glasses, and a mid-western accent, who seemed to be an island of quietly assertive competence in the sea of chaos that this production was becoming. This was Mark Silverman, who would become my producer and friend for the duration of my tenure as a pornographer.

The shooting of Dracula Exotica took over three weeks. I had a script supervisor and even an assistant. There was a production manager named Bill Milling, who I loathed on sight, and the biggest crew I had ever seen, much less worked with. Ken Schwartz spent most of his time going over sketches with William Ivey Long, the famous Broadway wardrobe designer, who took the job because he thought his friend Jack Wrangler was going to play the lead.  Long quit after a week. The first night of pre-production, Milling and I got into it over something. As the shouting got louder, and the tension approached the red line, Mark Silverman, who was the lowest ranking production assistant in the crew and had the title “typist”, walked right over to the shouting parties and said, “Hey, do either of you two assholes want coffee?” I was in love. With one line Mark was able to diffuse the argument, and even get a few laughs. My kind of guy.

I was happy with the look of the dailies. If only Ken Schwartz could handle post-production, he’d have a huge hit on his hands. By the end of the first week of shooting Schwartz, who had been growing more unstable with each production day,  had a nervous breakdown. It seems that earlier in the day, William Ivey Long, the wardrobe designer, who was disappointed at the absence of Jack Wrangler, quit the project, and Ken flipped out. I was in a screening with Bill Markle and Robbie Lutrell, the special effects designer, when Mark Silverman burst in. “We have a big problem”, he said. “Ken has flipped out, and Bill Milling is running around like a lunatic, making phone calls and telling anyone who’ll listen that he’s taking over the picture”. I told Mark to get Roy Seretsky on the phone. I told him not to give details, but that he should get over here right away. Ken was sitting behind his desk mumbling something and had become completely dysfunctional. I guess that being responsible for this sized budget had gotten to him. Anyway, Roy showed up and straightened Milling out, and we kept shooting. Ken gradually recovered his ability to speak and by the end of shooting seemed normal, but wasn’t. The responsibility for the huge budget had gotten to him, and the loss of his famous wardrobe designer was the last straw. He never seemed to recover his original enthusiasm for the project.

Ultimately, Dracula Exotica was a real disappointment. The cast, particularly Jamie Gillis, Vanessa Del Rio, and Bobby Astyr were terrific. The sets were elaborate. The locations were lush and inventive. Ken’s script was funny. But the picture just never worked. Schwartz, who seemed to have lost all faith in the production, and in order to save a few shekels, hired Robby Lutrell, the special effects designer on the project, who had never edited anything in his life, to cut the picture. The dailies had great potential, but the finished picture was flat. Robby couldn’t cut sex, and he couldn’t cut comedy, a bad combination. Dracula Exotica could have been a breakthrough picture for all concerned but, because Ken cheaped out in post production, all that expensive footage, that took us all so many long shooting days to achieve, was wasted. If asked, I probably would have cut the film for nothing, and the result might have been quite different. But I wasn’t, and this time I swore, and stuck to it, never to work as a hired gun again.

I’m going to take a moment here to explain why adult movies with big budgets like Dracula Exotica were, from an investor’s point of view, pure folly. During the Seventies there were a finite number of first run adult movie houses in major cities, just as there were a finite number of second and third run (where the real profit was made) houses in the suburbs and rural areas. In 1978, the year I made Dracula Exotica, a Porn Feature made its reputation playing the big houses in NY and LA. This assured that picture of major play in the rest of the big cities. The biggest play date was the Pussycat Theater in NYC. The Pussycat played the biggest pictures, not because of their quality, but because of the familial connection of the backers. Since the Pussycat was owned and operated by New York’s Colombo crime family, it stood to reason that a Colombo funded picture would be first choice, guaranteeing a nice profit for its investors. A full page rave review, written by Al Goldstein, would appear in Screw the week of the opening, with quotes galore, available for the print ads and one-sheets. Goldstein was on the Colombo’s payroll, and did what he was told. If no Colombo funded picture was available then a Gambino funded picture would play the house, followed by a Bonanno funded picture, etc. The rule of thumb was that the first run houses in major cities made back the picture’s negative cost, and the second and third run houses in the hinterland made the profit. The same is true in television, where the network run makes back the production cost, and syndication makes the real profit.

The formula was:

Dollar one of profit was reached at 2.5 X negative cost.

So a movie like Dracula Exotica, which had a production cost of $150,000 and additional lab costs (internegative, and release prints) of $30,000 had a total negative cost of $180,000. This meant that it would not make dollar one of profit until it grossed $450,000. That’s a number that might take years to reach. The only reason that the budget was so big was to make Ken Schwartz feel good about himself. He convinced Roy Seretsky, who arranged the financing, that he could produce a “Breakthrough” movie that would make them all rich and Roy bought into Ken’s fantasy, a bad decision, from a purely business point of view.

When I was approached by Cal Young, that same year, to make a picture with Dom Cataldo’s money, I was careful about how I approached it. This was Cal’s first attempt at a “better” movie, and I liked both of these guys, and wanted them to do well. Also I had a piece of it.

So I designed the production to maximize profitability. I came up with a great title (Afternoon Delights), wrote a screenplay that revealed itself in vignettes (more bang for the buck), shot the movie in 16MM, specifically designed to be blown-up to a 35MM internegative, and limited the 35mm release print run to ten (you rarely needed more). Dom Cataldo was a highly ranked sub-boss in the Colombo family with gambling operations in Brooklyn and Queens, so opening Afternoon Delights at the Pussycat was assured. That would mean that the two pictures would have pretty much the same play dates throughout their runs.

Let’s compare them:

The Tale of the Take:

Dracula Exotica: “The Heavyweight Champ and disappointment to its backers”

Negative cost $180,000

Dollar one of profit reached at $450,000.

Gross revenues (as of ‘83) $550,000. (I know this number because Seretsky, who was pissed at Ken Schwartz, told me)

Profit: $100,000. or 56% of its negative cost.

Afternoon Delights: “The Lightweight Challenger, and little known cash cow”

Negative cost $60,000 (production cost $40,000… blow up and print run $20,000)

Dollar one of profit reached at $150,000.

Gross revenues (as of ‘83) $500,000.

Profit $350,000. or 580% of its negative cost.

Which investment would you rather have made? The moral to this story is that, back in 1978, as long as you were connected, spending more than $60,000 on an adult movie was pure folly. Other than freakishly profitable blockbusters like, Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door, and some others, most adult movies made the same money, provided they were ‘Family’ financed, and looked good.

The pictures I made for Reuben Sturman a few years later were made with video in mind somewhere down the road, so they had to appeal to a wider audience, namely couples. Sturman wanted a “look”, was willing to pay for it, and it was money well spent. He had the foresight to understand where the business was going. At this point the ‘Families’ were coming to the conclusion that there was more money in heroin than in porn, which was basically the end of them.

Read more of Shaun Costello’s fascinating insights into the 70s/80s US adult movie industry at http://shauncostello.com/

Image thanks: Critical Condition

Countess Dracula is a 1971 Hammer horror film based on the legends surrounding the “Blood Countess” Elizabeth Báthory. It is in many ways atypical of Hammer’s canon, attempting to broaden Hammer’s output from Dracula and Frankenstein sequels. The film was produced by Alexander Paal and directed by Peter Sasdy, Hungarian émigrés working in England. The original music score was composed by Harry Robertson.

In 17th Century Hungary, Countess Elisabeth Nádasdy (Ingrid Pitt) and her bed companion and steward, Captain Dobi (Nigel Green), are snubbed in a will at the expense of the young and the too old to benefit. The Countess takes it rather better than Dobi as she has recently discovered the secret to ever-lasting youth, a quick bath in the blood of murdered young girls. Alas, the fridge is empty of such commodities and the effect is disappointingly short-lasting, so she keeps her hold on Dobi whilst enlisting him to furnish her with the required local young ladies. Her rejuvenated young self takes advantage yet further of the situation and embarks on a sexual affair with simpering Lieutenant Toth (Sandor Elès), the son of a famous general who is eager to similarly make his mark.

To stay in her youthful state, it begins to require ever more victims and the trail or bloodless corpses is beginning to arouse suspicion. To throw locals off the scent, she assumes the identity of her daughter, Ilona (Lesley-Anne Down) who has been absent for some time, squirreled away by her mother in a hut in the forest, lest anyone find it odd that they are surprisingly similar age –  but not before the resident of the castle library, Fabio (Maurice Denham), begins to suspect something dodgy is afoot, not least when he nearly stumbles upon an unfortunate meeting between local busty prostitute, Ziza (Andrea Lawrence), Toth and the Countess, an encounter which Ziza doesn’t fare well in.

Upon finding that actually only virgins prolong the youthful appearance, yet more attacks take place but it’s all too much for Fabio who realises he must inform Toth – alas, too slow and he meets his end at the hands of Dobi who has been blackmailed into protecting the Countess any way he can. A slightly hurried marriage is arranged between Toth and Elisabeth but lo’! Ilona makes a surprise appearance. The congregation can only stand aghast as Elisabeth’s ageing/marrying/slaying dilemma begins to unravel before them.

A particularly strange entry into Hammer’s canon, at a time when their star was still shining brightly. Playing rather more like a historical yarn (more-so than the likes of Rasputin) than a horror film, let alone a vampire film, there is much to admire here but it’s ultimately a disappointing, unsatisfying experience. Director, Sasdy, proved himself to be a director of some style in Hammer’s own Hands of the Ripper from the same year but Countess Dracula suffers from being overly ponderous, seemingly unable to decide on historical accuracy, breasts or geysers of blood – eventually it panics but too late for a discernible resolution.

Those expecting fangs, fog and fluttering bats will certainly be disappointed – this concentrates on the Countess’ plight, as she sees it, giving all the characters a decent fist of stating their moral standpoint but it becomes unnecessarily wordy and redundant relatively early. It’s difficult to root for the Countess, killing and preening; Dobi shows real promise as a character but is reduced to a stooge; Toth is a sap of the highest order and needs a good telling off leaving only a librarian and a prostitute as characters of real interest.

Though an exotic vision and alluring mysterious both on-screen and in ‘real life’, only the truly brave of heart would call Ingrid Pitt a great actress, though she is served well by good ageing effects courtesy of Tom Smith, who worked on several Hammer films and onto the likes of The Shining and Return of the Jedi. Indeed, Pitt herself was a replacement for Diana Rigg who ultimately declined the role. Elès (Evil of Frankenstein) presumably makes the cut due to being Hungarian, whilst Green (The Masque of the Red Death) shows real promise but was sadly cut down at the age of only 47 the following year. Denham essentially channels Merlin and Lesley Anne-Down ultimately has very little to do – far more interesting is ravishing Andrea Lawrence, who hopped, skipped and jumped from On the Buses to I’m Not Feeling Myself Tonight to Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell.

The rather unconvincing mountains of Eastern Europe are, of course, Pinewood Studios, but the interiors are perhaps the film’s greatest achievement, a feast for the eyes of a believable castle and various castes of life that exist in and around – it’s a real shame that the fascinating world they live in is still somehow bland, despite gory murders and sumptuous sets. Though there is,naturally, a reasonable amount of nudity, the murders are relatively few on-screen though there are some juicy moments involving a hair-pin and a nicely judged scene of Elisabeth bathing which is more wistful than gratuitous.

Harry Robertson’s (here as Harry Robinson) score plays well alongside the relative drama on-screen, a mix of studious  orchestral sweeps and the use of a Hungarian cymbalom (same ball-park as a harpsichord) to add some flavours of the unknown environment. The dialogue is largely forgettable, aside from some ‘common slut from the whorehouse’ chat and Ziza uttering a barely credible ‘juicy pair’ line but there is something about the film which lingers in the memory and, though not especially a success, a mark of Hammer’s bravery that this appeared when it did.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Poster art by Tom Chantrell

The Lifetaker is a 1975 British psychological horror film directed by Michael Papas and starring Terence Morgan, Lea Dregorn, and soon-to-be Blue Peter presenter Peter Duncan.

Plot teaser:

A deceived husband (Terence Morgan) engages his wife (Lea Dregorn) and her young lover (Peter Duncan) in a series of deadly games…

The Lifetaker had its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where it was both lauded and criticized for its controversial themes of sex and violence and the corruption of youth. According to Papas, the film was scheduled to be released across the UK, but the managing director of EMI distribution cancelled the release after viewing the completed film due to its controversial themes.

Peter Duncan joined Blue Peter in 1980, and shortly afterwards it was revealed in a tabloid newspaper that Duncan had appeared nude in the The Lifetaker. The BBC refuted that he was ever a porn star in The Times. Whilst he does appear naked, the film is certainly not porn.

Reviews:

A stylish and erotically charged tale of obsession…. not only the quintessence of the kind of film they don’t make anymore, but is also radically unlike the kind of film they made even then.” Julian Upton (editor), Offbeat: British Cinema’s Curiosities, Obscurities and Forgotten Gems (Buy at Amazon.co.uk, an essential read!)

“Excellent Roeg-esque UK thriller… this dark, exotic morality piece is stylishly mounted is capably acted and has a suitably unflinching finale.”  Giallo Goblin

IMDb | Michael Papas website | Tom Chantrell poster artist

WH

‘They shared the pleasures of the flesh and the horrors of the grave!’

Vampyres – also released as Daughters of Dracula; Vampyres, Daughters of Dracula; Vampyres: Daughters of Darkness; Satan’s Daughters and Blood Hunger – is a 1974 British erotic vampire horror film directed by José Ramón Larraz. The film’s delightfully discordant score was by James Kenelm Clarke who directed Exposé aka House on Straw Hill a year later.

A novelisation was belatedly published in 2001 by Tim Greaves via FAB Press.

Though initially heavily censored in the UK, an uncut Blu-ray was released in the USA on 30 March 2010 by Blue Underground, including a commentary by director José Ramón Larraz and producer Brian Smedley-Aston, interviews with stars Marianne Morris and Anulka, the international trailer, and the U.S. trailer.

Plot teaser:

Two beautiful undead women roam the English countryside, luring unsuspecting men to their estate for orgies of sex and blood. But when an innocent young couple stumble into the vampires’ lair, they find themselves sucked into an unforgettable vortex of savage lust and forbidden desires…

Reviews:

‘ … quite decent, achieving some good shock moments and showing a taste for the sombre visual…’ Films Illustrated, 1974

‘A non-too-original idea loses through poor acting and the film that emerges is a stock sex-horror exploitation vehicle that gets better direction than it deserves’. Alan Frank, The Horror Film Handbook (Batsford, 1982)

‘… the film is essential viewing for the serious aficionado of British screen terror. Even as the decades pass, it remains one of the most haunting and atmospheric pieces ever committed to celluloid. Few films of such limited funding can claim to be the subject of continued celebration so long after their lensing.” Tim Greaves, Ten Years of Terror (FAB Press, 2001)

Buy Vampyres uncut on Blue Underground Blu-ray from Amazon.com

Cast:

• Marianne Morris … Fran
• Anulka Dziubinska … Miriam
• Murray Brown … Ted
• Brian Deacon … John
• Sally Faulkner … Harriet
• Michael Byrne … Playboy
• Karl Lanchbury … Rupert
• Margaret Heald … Receptionist
• Gerald Case … Estate Agent
• Bessie Love … American Lady
• Elliott Sullivan … American Man

Filming locations:

Oakley Court; Denham churchyard

Wikipedia | IMDb

Scars of Dracula – also known as The Scars of Dracula on promotional material – is a 1970 British horror film directed by Roy Ward Baker for Hammer Film Productions.

It stars Christopher Lee as Count Dracula, along with Dennis Waterman, Jenny Hanley, Christopher Matthews, Patrick Troughton, and Michael Gwynn. Although disparaged by some critics, the film does restore a few elements of Bram Stoker’s original character: the Count is introduced as an “icily charming host;” he has command over nature; and he is seen scaling the walls of his castle. It also gives Lee more to do and say than any other Hammer Dracula film except its first, 1958’s Dracula.

The film opens with a resurrection scene set shortly after the climax of Taste the Blood of Dracula, but is set in Dracula’s Transylvanian homeland rather than England, as that film was. British film group EMI took over distribution of the film in the UK and after Warner Brothers refused to distribute it in the US it was handled by a small company American Continental. It was also the first of several Hammer films to get an ‘R’ rating.

Deep in the Count’s lair, a vampire bat drizzles blood from its fakely-fanged mouth onto the ashes of the deceased vampire, giving Christopher another opportunity to do not-so-very-much but retain top billing. Skip forward an unspecified period of time and local villagers are frantic that yet another of their number has died in horrible circumstances at the hand (and mouth) of the resurrected Dracula. The timid and constantly at the rear priest gives his blessing to an assembly of the men-folk who set off armed with burning torches to his castle, leaving their wives in the sanctuary of the church. After a spot of ‘knock-knock’ with castle serf, Klove (Patrick Troughton, a former Doctor Who and also in The Omen), entry is gained and the building is left to burn. However, on returning to the church they find their loved ones have been messily savaged and killed by vampire bats.

Having enjoyed the pleasures of the burgomasters’ daughter, libertine Paul Carlson (Christopher Matthews, Scream and Scream Again, See No Evil aka Blind Terror)  flees her father (an ‘enthused’ Bob Todd of Benny Hill fame) and the Kleinenberg authorities by jumping into a nearby coach which, though driver-less, heads off at great speed. He is deposited near Count Dracula’s mountaintop castle. Initially he is welcomed by the Count and a beautiful woman named Tania (Anouska Hempel) who later reveals herself to be a prisoner of Dracula as his mistress.

Paul later has a liaison with Tania who concludes their lovemaking by trying to bite his neck. Dracula enters and, casually throwing off Paul’s efforts to stop him, savagely stabs Tania to death with a dagger for betraying him – Dracula partakes of several weapons in the film, unusually. Klove, Dracula’s mortal but obedient servant, dismembers her body and dissolves the pieces in a bath of either holy water or acid. Trapped in a room high in the castle, Paul uses a sheet to climb down to a lower window but the line is withdrawn by Klove and he is trapped in a dark room with only door locked and a coffin at the centre of the room. Unfortunate.

Buy Scars of Dracula on DVD from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

In the sensible corner are Paul’s brother, Simon (Dennis Waterman, Fright and many a British TV programme) and his other half, Sarah (Jenny Hanley, also in The Flesh and Blood Show and who it’s impossible not to picture on her regular slot on kid’s TV show, Magpie) and they both set off to find the absent Paul. Repeatedly having the door shut in their face, they eventually find he’s loitering in the castle after landlord’s daughter can’t resist letting slip against her dad’s better advice, the always tremendous, Michael Ripper. This was Ripper’s 27th and final appearance in a Hammer film.

The Hammer Story by Marcus Hearn, Alan Barnes – Buy from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

At the castle, Dracula dispenses more of his hospitality wine and starts making a vampiric move on Sarah but hasn’t bargained on the oafish Klove taking a shine to her too. Refusing the relieve her of the crucifix around her neck to allow the Count to feast, he is brutally branded by a red-hot sword, an addition to the whip-marks he already sports.

With the priest we met earlier in tow (Michael Gwynn, Village of the Damned, What a Carve Up), Simon returns but the holy man soon meets his end, another to suffer at the teeth of the rampant bats. His is next betrayed by Klove and ends up in the same room his brother, we now find, met a particularly grisly end. Unable to finish the count as he slumbers in his coffin due to some dithering and some hypnotism, we move on to the final act, Simon realising the Count is somewhat quite inhuman and the surviving foursome reconvening on the Castle’s battlements. Klove is thrown to his death and just as Dracula takes aim with a handy metal spike, a storm is brewing…

Scars is the sixth of Hammer’s Dracula films (the fifth for Lee) and is derided in some quarters for the flimsy effects and notable lack of budget. What the film does have is lashings of gothic silliness – how forgiving you are of the capers, not least Bob Todd (also in Burke & Hare) essentially jumping up and down on a whoopee cushion for five minutes, is entirely down to you. The film has little in the way of traditional blood-sucking action but if you’re after bat brutality, you’ve come to the right place – the aftermath of the church attack is one of Hammer’s biggest ensemble slayings. The bats themselves are another matter entirely – if horror films up to this juncture had taught us anything, it was that the manufacture of believable fake bats was akin to turning blood into wine. Scars is perhaps not an all-time low… but it’s close.

The perception of the film’s ‘cheapness’ (the budget of around £200,000 was not that trifling and was the same as Taste the Blood of Dracula) can partly be attributed to the castle’s set, which, in fairness, is necessarily sparse due to the first scene’s fire attack. What is less helpful is the cinematography, which clearly shows the flimsy walls and rarely allows the viewer to suspend belief and accept it to be a genuine location. If anything, the film lacks the traditional fog which normally permeates Hammer fare, covering a multitude of sins.

It seems pointless to appraise Lee’s performance, the supporting cast should certainly stand up and be counted though. It seems incredible in retrospect that homely Jenny Hanley should star in one of Hammer’s first real forays into blood and boobs but she performs adequately and not a little alluring.

Far worse is Dennis Waterman, absolutely hopeless as a brave, romantic hero and is awfully Scrappy Doo at best – his appearance in Fright is a step up, thankfully. Roy Ward Baker has said in interviews he thought Waterman was badly miscast, his appearance being entirely down to the studio.

Equally, insipid Christopher Matthews could hardly be more annoying and it is left to the old hands – Ripper and Troughton to carry off the plaudits, pitching their performances as louche and barking as they need to be.

The film’s conclusion is one of the more inventive of Hammer’s – it’s the one with the lightning. Ward was already an old-hand and had come straight off the back of The Vampire Lovers and was ready to launch straight into Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde. James Bernard returns as the composer of the score, shifting the well-known ‘Drac-u-laaaa!’ motif to a new but still distinctive fanfare for the Count’s appearances. The film was released in some markets on a double feature with The Horror of Frankenstein, partly in a (failed) attempt to reinvent the Frankenstein strand as a hip and sexy venture.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Hammer Glamour by Marcus Hearn – Buy from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Buy The Hammer Vampire book from Amazon.co.uk

Cast:

• Christopher Lee as Count Dracula
• Dennis Waterman as Simon Carlson
• Jenny Hanley as Sarah Framsen
• Christopher Matthews as Paul Carlson
• Michael Gwynn as The Priest
• Michael Ripper as Landlord
• Patrick Troughton as Klove
• Anouska Hempel as Tania
• Wendy Hamilton as Julie
• Bob Todd as Burgomaster

Wikipedia | IMDb | Cinema photos courtesy of Ray Gazzard on Cinema Treasures

Wallestein il mostro – English: “Wallestein the Monster” – is an Italian fumetti adult comic character who appeared in five series of comics published by Edifumetto from 1972. For the first series, Edifumetto published nine issues; for the second series, nineteen issues in 1973; for the third series, fifteen issues in 1974; for the fourth series, eighty issues from 1975 to 1980; the fifth series (“Nuova Serie”) started in 1981. Over the years, the series has been designed by Cubbino, Romanini, Magnus (co-creator of Diabolik and Kriminal) and anonymous artists.

As with most Italian fumetti, the visuals feature abundant female nudity and gore. Between 1977 and 1980 the comic was also published in France by Elvifrance.

Wallestein is an horrible monster whom, having avenged the murder of the Count of Wallestein, adopts the Count’s identity by donning a rubber mask.

Image credits: Comic Vine | And Everything Else Too | Pinterest

The Beast (French: La Bête) is a 1975 French erotic fantasy horror film written, edited, and directed by Walerian Borowczyk. Although sometimes compared with Beauty and the Beast, there are no parallels in the plot except that it features the relationship between a beast and a woman.

The Beast began life as part of Walerian Borowczyk’s 1974 short story collection Immoral Tales, with the story The True Story of the Beast of Gévaudan being the third tale in the film. The segment played at the London Film Festival in 1973 as part of a ‘work in progress’ screening, and caused immediate outrage – how could a respected director like Borowczyk lower himself to such filth, critics asked, and his mainstream reputation would never recover from the blow dealt to it by this segment in particular and Immoral Tales in general.

By the time Immoral Tales was finally released, The True Story of the Beast of Gévaudan had been removed – not for censorship reasons, although it was certainly the most incendiary of the stories featured in the film, but because the finished film was considered too long (you can now see the complete cut on the Blu-ray of Immoral Tales to see for yourself – personally, I think the decision was a sound one) and because Borowczyk was interested in expanding the sequence into a full length feature. When the finished film, La Bête, finally emerged in 1975, it was a big hit across Europe, but did nothing to salvage Borowczyk’s dwindling reputation – it’s only in recent years that anyone outside the cult and erotic film fan circles have started to acknowledge the value of these films, and even now, you’ll find people who see movies such as this as creatively worthless. More fool them.

In the UK, the film was banned by the BBFC, even in a cut version, and a GLC-approved London release was threatened with prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act in 1978 ; this same version emerged later on VHS, which is when I first saw the film. Already a fan of Borowczyk’s work by this time, I was blown away by the movie, even though it was missing much of the controversial footage; it wasn’t until some years later, when I picked up a Dutch tape of the film in Amsterdam, that I would get to see what all the fuss was about. And yes, I could understand the shock and anger – La Bête is gleefully outrageous, crossing one of the last sexual taboos (albeit in a non-realistic manner) and having a graphic nature that went beyond the limits of most softcore. That this footage now came wrapped in a sumptuous, remarkably witty drama that wasn’t particularly sexy in its own right (by mid Seventies standards, at least) somehow made everything seem all the more shocking. Thankfully, times change, and so La Bête is now available, uncut.

This expanded version of the story is based around the house of the Marquis Pierre de l’Esperance (Guy Tréjan), an aristocrat down on his luck, who hopes to revive the family fortune by marrying his misfit son Mathurin (Pierre Benedetti) to Lucy Broadhurst (Lisbeth Hummel), the daughter of an old friend. Unfortunately, for her to inherit the estate, certain things need to be in place, according to the will of Philip Broadhurst. Firstly, it must take place within six months of his death, and the clock is tocking, with only 48 hours left; secondly, they must be married by Cardinal Joseph do Balo, the brother of Pierre’s uncle Duc Rammaendelo de Balo (Marcel Dalio). This throws up several problems. Rammaendelo disapproves of the marriage and has to be blackmailed into calling his brother, and the Cardinal refuses to have anything to do with the family as Mathurin has not been baptised. So as Lucy and her sour-faced aunt Virginia (Elisabeth Kaza) travel to the chateau, it is arranged for the local priest (Rolan Armontel) – a man who seems to have an unhealthy interest in choirboys – to come and carry out the baptism on the dim-witted son, who is far more interested in horse breeding than marriage. Inevitably, things start to go dreadfully wrong, as Pierre’s carefully laid plans start to fall apart.

All this is played out like an especially stylish version of a French farce, with its cast of eccentric characters and Pierre’s increasing desperation leading to subterfuge and panic as he refuses to accept that the marriage might be doomed not to take place. The film is surprisingly funny in the telling of this story – Borowczyk’s films, perhaps because of the sexual content, are rarely seem as comedic, but La Bête certainly is, often hilariously. This is despite being played with a straight face by most of the cast, and being shot with the director’s usual attention to detail, fetishisation of objects and long takes. Certainly, the film looks like a serious, straight-faced work, and every shot is remarkably well crafted and beautiful. The satire that is behind this straight face of course extends to religion – the pederast priest who comes to carry the baptism is a nicely on-the-ball dig at the priesthood, and also an interesting prediction of the scandals that would beset the Catholic church decades later.

Interestingly, this is a contemporary tale, which comes as a bit of a surprise – it’s only when we see Pierre’s horny daughter Clarisse (Pascale Rivault) clad in jeans and boots – in the few scenes where she isn’t banging the much put-upon servant Ifany (Hassane Fall), the constant interruption of their carnal activity being a running joke – that we realise that this film isn’t a period piece, so old-fashioned are the locations, the clothing and even the attitudes – arranged marriages in non-royal European families in the mid-Seventies?

For a supposed soft porn film, La Bête certainly takes its time in showing any sex. If we discount the startlingly graphic opening scenes of horse copulation – and unless you have very specialised tastes, it’s unlikely that you’ll find this footage especially erotic – then we are some 20 minutes into the film before we have any nudity, and the only sexual activity in the first hour involves Clarisse and Ifany in short bursts that are briefly explicit (we see a semi erect penis, for instance) but not exactly the stuff of soft porn. However, we are being lulled into a false sense of security.

When Lucy takes to her bed, her passions have been inflamed enough for her to spend the night masturbating, while dreaming about Romilda de l’Esperance (Sirpa Lane), who according to legend met a beast in the woods and shagged him to death. It’s this dream that makes use of the original Immoral Tales footage, as it is intercut with shots of Lucy, clad in a tantalising see-through night dress, rolls around on the bed, fingering herself, splashing water across her breasts and tearing off her clothes. These scenes alone are remarkably erotic – Lisbeth Hummel proves to be quite the sex kitten when given the chance, her exquisite body and brazen behaviour sure to turn on many a viewer. But it is the dream sequence that still has the power to startle.

This short story has Euro starlet Sirpa Lane (who went from high-end erotica like this and Roger Vadim’s Charlotte to rather more low rent cinema like Nazi Love Camp 27 and Papaya: Love Goddess of the Cannibals) being chased through the woods by the titular beast, a hairy bear-like creature with a dog-face and a growing erection. She loses her clothes along the way and is finally captured, whereupon the beast rapes her (though not before engaging in a spot of cunnilingus). However, once her passions are inflamed, she proves too much of a match for the Beast, and her sexual rapaciousness eventually causes him to expire as she masturbates, sucks and screws the poor creature into a deadly exhaustion.

This is astonishing stuff. Even if we leave aside the BBFC-baiting issue of a rape victim coming to enjoy her abuse – and I assume the censors realised that this hardly constituted realism and so was unlikely to encourage such beliefs – then we are left with scenes of a woman having vigorous sex with an animal, who continually ejaculates from his monster cock. Yes, it’s a man in a (surprisingly well-crafted) suit, not a real animal. But still, the mere implication is shocking enough – bestiality has not proved to be a subject that many respectable filmmakers have wanted to tackle – and the footage is so wonderfully outrageous and in such bad taste that it’s no wonder critics were appalled. Shot when hardcore porn was still a new thing for much of the world, you can imagine them wondering where the line might be drawn.

The film follows this dream sequence with an amusing and cynical coda that reveals just why this marriage was doomed to failure, though by this point I imagine the more delicate viewers would have long since stopped watching.

In many ways, La Bête feels like the archetypal Borowczyk film, despite the outrageous content of the Beast sequence. It’s the sort of film that would always confuse mainstream critics – a collision of high art and low taste, an unquestionably serious (if humorous) film that is masterfully crafted and yet which seems to be deliberately aiming at the lowest common denominator. How could anyone who drew a line in the sand between art and exploitation ever hope to understand a movie like this, so cheerfully crass and yet so obviously refined? It’s certainly the Borowczyk film I would suggest to someone exploring his (erotic) work for the first time, and it might well be his most popular film these days. I’m not sure it’s his best work, but it’s certainly his most unforgettable. And it’s also a film that rewards repeated viewing – the shock of the Beast scenes can be a bit overwhelming the first time round, but each time you watch it again, you’ll find some new little touches to entrance you. Those people who still think Boro pissed away his career with his erotic films should open their eyes and their minds – they’ll discover a filmmaker who found his niche, and made some of the most impressive, startling, exciting and challenging films of the 1970s in any genre.

This stunningly gorgeous new British Blu-ray edition includes Borowczyk’s 1975 animation Venus on the Half Shell, which is a nice complementary film, featuring as it does Bona Tibertelli de Pisis‘ paintings of men, women and snails; and an hour of silent behind the scenes footage from the making of the film, narrated by camera operator Noël Véry – fascinating stuff and a rare glimpse into Borowczyk’s intricate film making style.There’s also a short piece on the planned sequel Motherhood, which on paper sounds frankly ludicrous. But I would’ve trusted in Borowczyk’s ability to pull it off…

David Flint – this review first appeared on Strange Things Are Happening

Wikipedia | IMDb

‘It’s cleavage vs. cleavers and the result is delta delta deadly!’

Sorority House Massacre II - also known as Sorority House Massacre 2: Nighty Nightmare – is a 1990 slasher horror film by Jim Wynorski (Chopping Mall; Not of This Earth; Piranhaconda) from a screenplay by Mark Thomas McGee, James B. Rogers and Bob Sheridan. It stars Scream Queens Melissa Ann Moore and Gail Harris (credited as Robyn Harris), plus Dana Bentley, Mike Elliot, Stacia Zhivago, Barbii and Bridget Carney. Beyond the title, it bears no relation to the 1986 film Sorority House Massacre.

Hard to Die followed the same year. It featured many of the same cast and a similar story line to Sorority House Massacre II.

Plot teaser:

Five women, Linda (Gail Harris), Jessica (Melissa Moore), Kimberly (Stacia Zhivago), Suzanne (Barbii) and Janey (Dana Bentley) buy the old Hokstedter place for their sorority house They get it cheap because of the bloody incidents from five years before committed by Hokstedter. They decide to stay in it for the night so they can meet the movers in the morning, despite the electricity and the phones not working. Janey tells the group of the murders years before (depicted with clips from The Slumber Party Massacre), putting the group on edge.

As it turns to night, a storm rolls in and the girls are creeped out by they neighbour Orville Ketchum (Peter Spellos, also in Freddy’s Dead) who recalls the night of the murders, and how Hokstedter was defeated. He gives them the keys to the basement before returning home. The girls decide to explore the basement, and find Hokstedter’s tools and also a ouija board Meanwhile, Lt. Mike Block (Jürgen Baum) and Sgt. Phyliss Shawlee (Toni Naples) set out in the storm to get to the Hokstedter house after they receive a disturbance call from the house, and also suspect Orville had something to do with the murders, although Mike was unable to pin anything on him at the time. After taking showers, the group decide to use the ouija board to contact Hokstedter…

Buy the Massace Collection on DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Reviews:

“Just about every female in the cast disrobes, with some of it being more gratuitous than the intentionally over-the-top shower scene in Slumber. There’s a wonderful bit where they all run out in the rain in their underwear (no one wears actual clothes after the first 20 minutes or so) and stand around getting soaked while they argue their next move, allowing them to have see through nighties for the rest of the picture. Needless to say, the movie was directed by Jim Wynorski.” Horror Movie a Day

“Yes, it is pretty bad, an exercise in sloppy film-making from beginning to end (in one scene you can see the shadow of the squeezy bottle someone is crouching and holding ready to squirt blood up the walls!); there is an absolutely pointless sub-plot involving two cops who only seem to be there so we get a protracted pole-dancing scene (er, that’s not with the cops, BTW);

and to cap it all those flashbacks to Slumber Party Massacre, where Wynorski has the audacity to invent some spurious legend which has nothing to do with that film. However, there was a certain tongue-in-cheek campiness which made it just about watchable for me.” Hysteria Lives!

Buy The Slasher Movie Book by J.A. Kerswell from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

“Stock footage of lightening informs us that a storm is brewing and so naturally the girls change into nighties and grab a Ouija board. Hilarious hijinks and horrible hook murders ensue. It’s often said that a cult movie mustn’t be in on the joke to be any good and here’s proof that theory is full of hot air.” Kindertrauma

Buy Crab Monsters, Cave Men and Candy Stripe Nurses book from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Choice dialogue:

“Well, what did you expect? Buckingham Palace!”

“This place would give Boris Karloff the creeps.”

“Oh my God! Our clothes are upstairs.”

Wikipedia | IMDb

‘Pretty Young Ladies Make the Perfect Plant Food!’

Please Don’t Eat My Mother – also released as Glump; Hungry Pets and Sex Pot Swingers – is a 1973 sexploitation comedy horror film produced and directed by Carl J. Monson (Legacy of Blood; A Scream in the Streets) from a screenplay by Eric Norden for Harry Novak‘s Boxoffice International Pictures. It stars Buck Kartalian (Octaman; Legacy of Blood; Monster Squad), Lyn Lundgren (Strait-Jacket), Art Hedberg, Alice Friedland (The Psycho Lover) and porn star Rene Bond (The Adult Version of Jekyll & Hide; Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love!; A Name for Evil).

The film is an adult-orientated softcore remake of Roger Corman’s The Little Shop of Horrors. According to Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic Video Guide, the film was still playing at drive-ins as late as 1982.

Plot teaser:

A shy and timid man who lives with his mother buys a plant he thinks talked to him. His loneliness is very apparent in the way he tries to turn the plant into a friend. Well, the plant is carnivorous and can talk with a woman’s sexy voice. Henry, the protagonist, now has two joys in life. One is being a voyeur (he is much too shy to actually talk to a girl) and the other is his new plant friend. Soon he discovers the plant likes bugs (and then frogs and dogs and cats but he draws the line at elephants). Eventually the plant wants to try a delicious woman, like in the pictures Henry has hanging in his room.

One day, Henry’s mother breaks into his room thinking to confront him with a woman and all she can find are Henry and the plant. But soon the plant eats her and discovers that women are really tasty. When detective O’Columbus shows up, the plant discovers she does not like eating men, just women…

Buy The Harry Novak Collection on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Reviews:

“Clearly not for everyone, Please Don’t Eat My Mother is an acid-gobbling piece of no-fi sexploitation junk that stands out both for the shabbiness of its monster and for its oddly affecting protagonist, a teeth-gnashing, chronically masturbating man-child fleshed out into a living, breathing hunk of sweaty desperation by Buck Kartalian, one of exploitation’s most sadly unsung character actors. Boner-seekers will be out of luck, since the sex scenes are ineptly staged and boring to watch, but the sniveling characters, eye-scorching sets and inept creature construction are just too bizarre to miss.” Movies About Girls

“It tries to be a number of different types of movie and essentially fails on all counts. When it’s trying to be a comedy it suffers by not actually being very funny. When it’s trying to be a horror film it suffers because it’s not scary in the slightest. And when it’s trying to be a porno it doesn’t actually show the stuff you’d expect to see in a porno, and it keeps cutting to an imbecile acting like a pervert so anyone looking for that sort of thing will be disappointed too (I’d imagine).” That Was a Bit Mental

Buy Please Don’t Eat My Mother on Something Weird DVD from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Special Features:

• Trailers for this, plus “Hungry Pets,” “Booby Trap,” “Exotic Dreams of Casanova,” “Indian Raid Indian Made,” “Pigkeeper’s Daughter,” “Street of a Thousand Pleasures,” “Substitution”
• Radio-Spot Rarities
• Gallery of Harry Novak Exploitation Art
• Two Archival Short Subjects: “Please Don’t Eat My Mother!” star Buck Kartalian in the Harry Novak short “The Voyeur,” “Rene Bond Bound”
• Something Weird Video raids Harry Novak’s Film Vault

Choice dialogue:

“Oh frog me, Henry, frog me!”

Cast:

• Buck Kartalian as Henry Fudd
• Lyn Lundgren as Clarice Fudd
• Art Hedberg
• Rene Bond as Harry’s wife
• Alice Friedland as Call girl
• Adam Blair
• Flora Weisel
• Ric Lutze as Harry
• Carl Monson (uncredited) as Officer O’Columbus
• Zach Moye

Buy Please Don’t Eat My Mother poster (main image at top) from Amazon.co.uk

Wikipedia | IMDb

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English Gothic: a century of horror cinema is a film reference book book written by Jonathan Rigby first published in 2000 and expanded to include more recent films and TV productions and reprinted in 2006.

The British horror film is almost as old as cinema itself. English Gothic traces the rise and fall of the genre from its 19th-century beginnings to the present day. Jonathan Rigby examines 100 crucial movies, taking in the lost films of the silent era, the Karloff and Lugosi chillers of the 1930s, the lurid classics from Hammer’s house of horror, and the explicit shockers of the 1970s. The story concludes with more recent films, such as Hellraiser and Shaun of the Dead. Filled with film posters, stills, and behind-the-scenes shots, this entertaining study sheds new light on British cinema’s most successful, and misunderstood, export.

Chapters

Foreward by filmmaker Richard Gordon

Part One – British Horror in Embryo

Part Two – First Flood (1954-1959)

Part Three – Treading Water (1960 – 1964)

Part Four – New Wave (1965 – 1969)

Part Five  – Market Saturation (1970 – 1975)

Part Six – British Horror in Retreat

Afterword by David McGillivray (House of Whipcord; House of Mortal Sin; Satan’s Slave)

“English Gothic succeeds in providing an informed and in-depth overview of horror on British screens over the last hundred years, reflecting the important, yet often overlooked part the genre has played in the country’s cinematic output.” Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies

Jonathan Rigby

Reviews:

“Even before I had paged myself to its conclusion, English Gothic impressed me as an instant classic, a true textbook, one to stand on equal terms alongside the seminal likes of Ivan Butler’s Horror in the Cinema, Carlos Clarens’ An Illustrated History of the Horror Film, Denis Gifford’s A Pictorial History of Horror Movies, and David Pirie’s A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema 1946-1972″ Movie Morlocks

“The lack of a name index is a disadvantage and the onus is on the reference reader to access the book by film title, however this is not a major obstacle and the volume is, without doubt one of the most indispensable guides to this genre of British movie-making.” Stride Magazine

Buy English Gothic book from Amazon.co.uk

WH

Red Nights (French: Les Nuits rouges du Bourreau de Jade) is a 2010 French-Hong Kong film directed by Julien Carbon and Laurent Courtiaud and starring Frédérique Bel, Carrie Ng and Jack Kao. It is an erotic horror thriller. The filmmakers refer to it as a Hong Kong giallo with mystery, murders, fetishism and women.

Plot teaser:

During the reign of the first emperor of China, an ingenious torturer concocted an elixir that paralyzed its victim’s limbs, while increasing the sensitivity of their nerve endings tenfold. Kept in a jade skull, the elixir could provoke sensations in infinite variations everything from erotic caresses to appalling lacerations. Haunted by the desire to experience the extreme sensations caused by the elixir, the executioner kills himself with his own poison, intensifying his death experience. His pursuers never found the skull, which had been concealed within a large imperial seal. But the curse of the jade skull, responsible for its creator’s death, will endure within the seal, bringing misfortune to all of those who possess it. Until today …

Buy Red Nights on DVD from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Reviews:

‘Red Nights is a decent erotic torture-porn type of thriller with some good acting, an excellent music score by French composers Seppuku Paradigm (who apparently are responsible for the scores to Eden Log and Martyrs), an original story (rare these days) and some amazing photography. The film combines elements of the Italian Giallo, German Krimi films and European espionage thrillers to create something that is both unique and quite exotic.’ Blueprint

“I can see Red Nights being a film that I come back to in a few years and then appreciate a lot more. Though the story left me wanting, there is no denying the excellent filmmaking on display here.” The Horror Section

“Stylish and beautiful it may be but it’s just a shame that nobody involved decided to just embrace the weirdness of the central concept (something I won’t spoil by mentioning here). The movie therefore becomes a wild and strange beast that stands there after having a haircut and being forced into a nice suit. It’s restricted and polished when it yearns to break free and bite people.” Flickfeast

Wikipedia | IMDb

WH

Paul Naschy (born Jacinto Molina Álvarez, September 6, 1934 – November 30, 2009) was a Spanish movie actor, screenwriter, and director working primarily in horror films. His portrayals of numerous classic horror figures—the Wolfman, Frankenstein’s Monster, Count Dracula, the Hunchback, and the Mummy – have earned him recognition as the Spanish Lon Chaney.

His signature role was that of the werewolf, Waldemar Daninsky, whom he played a staggering twelve times. He had one of the most recognizable faces in Spanish horror film, though his long filmography reveals Naschy also starred in dozens of action films, historical dramas, crime movies, TV shows and documentaries.. In addition to acting, Naschy also wrote the screenplays for most of his films and directed a number of them as well. King Juan Carlos I presented Naschy with Spain’s Gold Medal Award for Fine Arts in 2001 in honour of his work, the Spanish equivalent of being knighted.

Jacinto Molina Álvarez was born on September 6th 1934 to an artistic family – his father, Enrique, was a renowned fur and leather craftsman, his grandfather, Emilio, a celebrated sculptor of religious iconography. His family members’ success in their respective fields allowed Jacinto a relatively comfortable upbringing. The tranquillity of his childhood in Madrid was dramatically punctuated by the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, an event, along with the rise of the dictator General Franco, staining his view of the world and inevitably influencing his later career. Despite his young age, Molina’s mind was etched with images of spiralling aircraft, a disembodied soldier staggering for a few brief seconds before collapsing in a twitching heap, rows of executed traitors, as well as the tales from his father who served on the frontline.

As the Civil War gave way to the Second World War, further horrors revealed themselves, not least the German school Molina attended, bedecked with Nazi paraphernalia and a mourning assembly when news of Hitler’s death filtered through. At home, comics occupied his mind with more fantastical thoughts, though his uncle’s gory tales of sights he’d witnessed at local bull fights continued to draw Molina back to the death and the brutality of both life and death.

Cinema soon became a big attraction, initially the weekly serials which demanded you return to learn the resolution of the cliffhanger – particular favourites were The Drums of Fu Manchu and Mysterious Dr Satan. The real revelation was a screening of a reissued Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, Lon Chaney Jr’s portrayal of the doomed Larry Talbot changing Molina’s life forever. When asked by his mother what he wanted to be when he grew up, Jacinto replied, “a werewolf”. After briefly befriending the ‘spree killer’, José María Jarabo Pérez Morris, a man with such a muscular neck his eventual execution by garrotting took over twenty minutes, Molina’s first obsession away from cinema was weightlifting, another passion which stayed with him throughout his life.

By his twenties, Molina concentrated on both weightlifting and acting, the first presenting him with almost immediate success, decorating him with an array of titles and accolades, the latter proving significantly more difficult to break into. Molina had an uncredited bit part in the classic 1961 Biblical epic King of Kings and a few other films of that period, and the experience drew him further into film-making.

While appearing as an extra in an episode of the American TV show I Spy that was being filmed in Spain in 1966, Naschy met horror icon Boris Karloff on the set, a thrill he never forgot. Karloff, in poor health, having difficulty walking and suffering with cold, broke down in tears one day, the frustration and pain just too much. The sight of his hero displaying emotion in this way, despite his history of terrorising and killing on the Big Screen was also to have a profound effect on Molina’s future acting career.

Tired of waiting for success to find him, in 1968 Molina penned the screenplay to what would eventually become the film The Mark of the Wolfman (La Marca del Hombre Lobo) a film following the Polish Count, Waldemar Daninsky, who, afflicted with lycanthropy, battles both other werewolves and vampires in a bells and whistles fest of the gory and the Gothic. The screenplay was picked up by German producers who, when finding their first choice for the role of Daninsky, Lon Chaney Jr, was far too ill with throat cancer to take the part at the age of 62, offered it to Molina. Though not his intention, Molina gratefully accepted but was required by the financiers of the film to adopt a more Teutonic-sounding name. Thus Paul Naschy was born, ‘Paul’ after the then Pope, Paul VI, ‘Naschy’ after the Hungarian weightlifter, Imre Nagy. A Spanish name would simply have been too uncommercial for worldwide distribution – at the time, Spain was churning out endless dismal ‘comedies’ and little else, apart from providing many of the settings for Italian-made Westerns.

The success of the film was enough to allow Naschy the comfort of continuing to develop his own projects – regrettably, a swift return outing for Daninsky in Las Noches del Homo Lobo, is now considered a lost film, though it was only two years later when his most famous creation was to reappear, in both 1970’s Dracula Versus Frankenstein (Los Monstruos dos Terror) and 1971’s The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman (La Noche de Walpurgis). Over the course of the twelve films Naschy made featuring Waldemar Daninsky there is little narrative connection, the wolfman existing essentially only as a recognisable and well-loved monster, the tenuous links between films either ham-fistedly managed or non-existent.

Naschy’s ‘straightforward’ horror career was punctuated by many notable films outside of the cobweb-strewn fang-baring type. 1971 saw him star in the Tito Carpi-penned giallo Seven Murders for Scotland Yard, as well as perhaps Spain’s most famous entry into the cycle of usually resolutely Italian thrillers, The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll (1973), though purists may argue convincingly for the same year’s A Dragonfly for Each Corpse.

Also of note around this period are Naschy’s turns as the warlock Alaric De Marnac in Horror Rises from the Tomb (El Espanto Surge de la Tumba, 1973), the eyebrow-raising Vengeance of the Zombies (1973), the role of the priest in the Spanish Exorcist take-off, Exorcismo (1975), the witchfinder of his directorial debut, Inquisition (1976),  and the effective, gloomy apocalyptic vision of The People Who Own the Dark (1976).

Buy Horror Rises from the Tomb on DVD from Amazon.com

Despite, this, it was his more direct horror films which continued to make him such a star, especially in his home country where he had affectionately come to be known as  “El Hombre Lobo”. Many of his most successful films were directed by the Argentine, León Klimovsky, who forever yearned to make blockbusting mainstream films but had to settle for a career making horror, exploitation and schlocky westerns – he needn’t have worried, his films are rarely anything less than excellent entertainment.

Having now played all the major monster roles, including The Mummy in Vengeance of the Mummy (La Veganza de la Momia (1971), Count Dracula in 1973’s Count Dracula’s Great Love, the hunchback in the terrific The Hunchback of the Morgue (1973) and an attempt to do all of them at once in 1987’s Howl of the Devil, by the mid-80’s he was spreading himself a little too thinly and making several curious decisions.

1983’s Beast and the Magic Sword (La Bestia y la Espada Mágica) was just one of several projects Naschy produced either in Japan or with Japanese involvement. They proved surprisingly popular in Japan but less so back in Europe – Naschy’s eagerness to please the Asian market with films of Samurai and warriors simply proving impossible to satiate both markets’ demands and tastes. Even more upsetting was 1982’s Spanish-made Buenas Noches, Señor Monstruo (Goodnight Mr Monster), which, although made for children, upset horror fans with its musical japes involving the classic monsters Naschy had done so much to revive in the post-Universal wastelands.

On June 20, 1984, Naschy’s father, Enrique Molina, died of a heart attack while fishing alone on the shores of a lake. Some boys playing in the woods discovered his body, too late to revive him. The unexpected sudden loss of his father (with whom he had always been very close), coinciding with the bankruptcy of his production company, plunged Naschy into a lengthy period of depression, only returning to filmmaking in 1987 with his cult classic El Aullido del Diablo. Naschy’s son Sergio starred in the film, along with famed horror icons Howard Vernon and Caroline Munro (the film was very poorly distributed unfortunately, and is still not available on DVD).

There is a chapter about Paul Naschy in Fear Without Frontiers
Buy from Amazon.com| Amazon.co.uk

Brief film roles followed in the late 80’s and early 90’s but it was a return to weightlifting which occupied his time; despite his advancing years, he was still in enviable shape and was still both entering and winning many competitive events. Sadly, he suffered a near-fatal heart attack himself on Aug. 27, 1991, triggered by weightlifting in a local gym. He was hospitalised for more than a week, then had major heart surgery performed on September 5th. A rumour circulated throughout horror film fandom that Naschy had died, since he disappeared from the film scene for a while after his operation. He had to later contact a number of fanzine publishers in various countries to inform them that he was still very much alive – he also appeared at film festivals and conventions such as Eurofest in 1994.

This virtual rebirth revitalised both the actor and his audience but his efforts lacked the imagination and vitality of his earlier roles and they were largely critical and commercial disasters. Even in this relatively short time, the Spanish film industry had become, in his words, “corrupt” and his efforts were on miniscule budgets and Naschy’s attempts to invest his own money into them left him on the verge of bankruptcy (his Japanese-based production company, Aconito Films, had already gone bust a decade earlier).

 Buy Paul Naschy: Memoirs of a Wolfman from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

After penning his autobiography, Memoirs of a Wolfman, in 1997 and further filmic misfires, he fled to Hollywood in what would be a distinctly lacklustre final hurrah working for directors who certainly revered Naschy but had no vehicle suitable for him; both Brian Yuzna’s Rottweiler (2004) and Fred Olen Ray’s straight-to-video Tomb of the Werewolf, were a poor reflection of an actor who once could have claimed to be one of the biggest horror stars in the world. Fortunately, he managed to make one final classic, 2004’s Rojo Sangre, directed by the unrelated Christian Molina.

Naschy died of pancreatic cancer on November 30, 2009 in Madrid, aged seventy-five. Although he ended his life in poor financial straits, Naschy always received a tremendous outpouring of love from his many fans and died knowing he would always be regarded as a major horror film icon.

Naschy was married only once, on October 24, 1969, to a woman named Elvira Primavera, the daughter of an Italian diplomat living in Spain. They were still happily married 40 years later at the time of his death. He was survived by his widow Elvira and his two sons, Bruno and Sergio Molina.

Naschy’s legacy is one which reflects his passion and understanding of horror film. His evil characters often have a very human side, a sympathetic and anguished counterpoint to the fury and violence of the monster. His best work often had magnificently evocative Gothic backdrops and, equally regularly, voluptuous, disrobed ladies, eager to fall at Naschy’s feet.

He can be credited with perpetuating the popularity of characters largely already abandoned by Hollywood, if his later choices were sometimes a little wayward, it wasn’t for lack of enthusiasm. Perhaps more often forgotten is that Naschy at his best could be a superb actor, the most athletic of wolfmen, a believable romantic lead and a hypnotically-eyed icon. In 2010 a documentary about Naschy called The Man Who Saw Frankenstein Cry was released.

Selected Filmography:

A much truncated overview of his huge output. Collecting Naschy films can be a frustrating task, the numerous re-titlings almost inevitably leading to duplicate purchases.

1968 Mark of the Wolfman (La Marca del Hombre Lobo) aka Hell’s Creatures/Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror –  the first outing for Waldemar Daninsky

1968 Night of the Wolfman (Las noches del Hombre Lobo) – now lost

1970 Dracula Versus Frankenstein aka Assignment Terror - Daninsky again

1971 The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman aka Shadow of the Werewolf – Daninsky

1971 Seven Murders for Scotland Yard 

1972 Fury of the Wolfman – Daninsky

1972 Dr. Jekyll vs. the Werewolf (Doctor Jekyll y el Hombre Lobo) – both Daninsky and Mr Hyde

1973 The Man With the Severed Head (Las Ratas No Duermen de Noche)

1973 Curse of the Devil (El Retorno de Walpurgis) – Daninsky

1973 Hunchback of the Morgue (El Jorobado de la Morgue)

1973 Count Dracula’s Great Love (El Gran Amor del Conde Drácula) aka Cemetery Tramps

1973 Horror Rises From the Tomb (El Espanto Surge de la Tumba) – a first outing for Alaric de Marnac, based on Gilles de Rais

1973 Vengeance of the Zombies 

1973 Bracula, the Terror of the Living Dead (La Orgía de los Muertos) aka The Hanging Woman

1973 The Mummy’s Revenge (La Venganza de la Momia)

1973 The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll (Los Ojos Azules de la Muñeca Rota) aka House of Psychotic Women

1974 A Dragonfly for Each Corpse (Una Libélula Para Cada Muerto)

1974 Devil’s Possessed (El Mariscal del Infierno) – a second outing for the Knight of Marnac under his more familiar Gilles de Rais moniker

1975 The Werewolf and the Yeti (La Maldición de la Bestia) aka Night of the Howling Beast. Daninsky. Possibly his best recognised title due to it falling foul of the DPP and becoming labelled as a video nasty. It’s actually one of Naschy’s dullest during his prime period

1975 Exorcism (Exorcismo)

1975 Los Pasajeros – Rarely seen, it is based on the urban myth of snuff films

1976 Inquisition (Inquisición)

1976 The People Who Own the Dark (Último Deseo)

1978 El Huerto del Francés – much overlooked but highly lauded serial killer film

1980 Human Beasts (El Carnaval de las Bestias) aka The Beasts’ Carnival – his first Spanish/Japanese co-production

1981 Night of the Werewolf (El Retorno del Hombre-Lobo) aka Return of the Wolfman – Daninsky

1982 Buenas noches, Señor Monstruo (Goodnight, Mr Monster)

1983 Panic Beats (Latidos de Pánico) aka Cries of Terror - a final outing for Alaric de Marnac

1983 The Beast and the Magic Sword (La Bestia y la Espada Mágica) – Daninsky

1987 Howl of the Devil (El Aullido del Diablo)

1989 Shadows of Blood – more serial killer action

1989 Aquí Huele a Muerto – abysmal Dracula spoof which was inexplicably a Spanish box office hit

1993 The Night of the Executioner (La Noche del Ejecutor)

1996 Hambre Mortal (Mortal Hunger)

1996 Lycantropus: The Moonlight Murders (Licántropo: El Asesino de la Luna llena) – Daninsky

2001 School Killer (The Vigilante)

2004 Tomb of the Werewolf  – Daninsky’s final appearance

2004 Countess Dracula’s Orgy of Blood

2004 Rottweiler

2004 Rojo Sangre

2010 La Herencia Valdema (The Valdemar Legacy)

2010 The Valdemar Legacy II: The Forbidden Shadow (La Herencia Valdemar II: La Sombra Prohibida)

2010 Empusa 

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

French poster

The Nude Vampire – French title: La vampire nue – is a 1969 film (released May 1970) directed by Jean Rollin. It stars Christine François,Olivier Rollin, Maurice Lemaitre, Bernard Musson, Jean Aron, Ursule Pauly, Catherine Castel, Marie-Pierre Castel and Michel Delahaye.

Plot teaser:

Wealthy and decadent industrialist Georges Radamante rules over a strange secret suicide cult and wants to achieve immortality by figuring out a way to share the biochemistry of a young mute orphaned vampire woman. Complications ensue when Radamante’s son Pierre finds out what’s going on and falls for the comely lass…

The Nude Vampire was Jean Rollin’s first collaboration with cinematographer Jean-Jacques Renon and his first film in colour.

Buy The Nude Vampire on Blu-ray from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Reviews:

“The film comes across with the emotionally intense illogic of a dream, intellectually nonsensical but meaningful on an instinctive plane. No means a total triumph, dialogue is stilted, and the story lags in several places. Still, there is enough suggestive menace and outrageous imagery to make up for this shortcoming, and the touches of science fiction and kink point dramatically to the dreams of surrender and destruction that Rollins had up his sleeves.” Sex Gore Mutants

“Though the pacing of The Nude Vampire is still recognizably Rollin-esque, this film may prove easier for newcomers to swallow as its story veers from one oddball element to the next. Leopardskin fabrics, party masks, and lots of teasing partial skin shots set this one firmly in 1970, and as a mod French art film gone berserk, it’s plenty of fun.” Mondo Digital

“There are a lot of signs of what is yet to come from director Jean Rollin and yet this early effort is also appealing because it is not as filled with the usual Jean Rollin clichés. Ultimately The Nude Vampire is a solid early effort from director Jean Rollin with its many memorable images and fascinating take on immortality.” 10,000 Bullets

“Jio Berk designed the fabulous costumes and the visual style was drawn from pulp comics and old paperback covers. La vampire nue is one of Rollin’s most enjoyable films and a great leap forward, technically, from Le viol du vampire. It also remains remarkably true to its original conception of a film around the idea of mystery, of enigma. Even the ending, when an explanation is given for all the mysterious events, is successfully undercut.” Cathal Tohill, Pete Tombs, Immoral Tales: Sex & Horror Cinema in Europe 1956 – 1984

Buy Psychedelic Sex Vampires: Jean Rollin Cinema book from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

“The film’s visual highlights include shots of night-lit streets which evoke the paintings of Paul Delvaux, or tableaux ala Max Ernst (a strong influence on Rollin) often using spotlights to achieve vivid contrasts and shadowy outlines, as well as back lighting to make women’s transluscent. The picture is most fascinating if seen as an intensely fetishistic but luscious play of textures punctuated by beautifully stylised, extravagantly romantic comic-strip compositions chronicling the obsessions of a guiltily Catholic voyeur, wallowing in a sense of perversion and sin.” Phil Hardy (editor), The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Horror

Jean Rollin on Horrorpedia: Fascination | The Grapes of Death | Lips of Blood | The Living Dead Girl | Night of the Hunted | The Nude Vampire | The Rape of the Vampire | The Shiver of the Vampires | Virgin Among the Living Dead | Zombies Lake

Wikipedia | IMDb

It’s hardly surprising that the most notorious, indefensible, loathsome and reprehensible movies ever made are those that exploring nasty Nazi sex and violence fantasies. Even the most liberal of critics seem reluctant to defend these goose-stepping abominations, and they sit at the top of that sorry list known as the Video Nasties.

In fact, the pulp fiction and cinema industry had been exploiting the Nazi nightmare since the war ended. Cheesy B-movies like Hitler’s Madman, They Saved Hitler’s Brain; She Demons and The Flesh Eaters exploited the idea that mad Nazi scientists were up to mischief in remote South American jungles and on desert islands, attempting to revive the fortunes of the Third Reich by somehow resurrecting Adolf Hitler or his marching minions. These movies played on knowledge of the very real mad scientist experiments of Joseph Mengele, which reached levels of atrocity that no fictional mad doctor could hope to match.

The theme ran through to the end of the 1960s with films like Search for the Evil One, and was still potent enough to turn up late into the 1970s – The Boys from Brazil had Mengele and a Jewish Nazi hunter racing to track down clones of Hitler and influence them to their way of thinking before they reached adulthood – the question perhaps being was Hitler a result of nature or nurture – while an episode of The New Avengers TV series saw Peter Cushing (also involved with Nazi zombies in Shock Waves) being forced to bring a preserved Hitler back to life on a remote Scottish island!

However, the grubbiest Naziploitation boom began when the 1960s saw the loosening of censorship rules.

Unable to show much actual sex, mid Sixties adult films would fill the gaps with violence, often S&M tinged. Showing a disregard for any sense of taste or decency, it was clearly only going to be a matter of time before some enterprising producer realised the – ahem – ‘erotic’ potential of the Nazi concentration camp. That man was Bob Cresse, and his film was the notorious Love Camp 7, a worryingly personal movie.

Directed by Lee Frost, the film sets the ground rules for the flood of titles which came almost a decade later. It tells the story of two American female spies who are sent to a Nazi ‘love camp’ in order to help another informant escape. This they do, but only after an hour of unrelenting torture and abuse. Women are depicted as being sexually abused, whipped, strapped to unspeakable devices and generally treated badly throughout the movie.

Cresse played the Commandant himself with a barely disguised gloating glee. He was, to a large extent, living out his own sado-masochistic fantasies in the nasty narrative, and stories abound about how he would insist on take after take of the torture scenes, until the suffering on screen was seemingly matched in reality by the actress.

After this pioneering effort, the genre was suspiciously quiet until 1973. It was then that sleaze producer David Friedman decided that the time was right to revive the dubious concept. He went to Canada and produced Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS under the pseudonym Herman Traegar, a name that remained shrouded in mystery until Friedman finally owned up a couple of decades later. Why the false name? Perhaps some things were just too sleazy for even ‘The Mighty Monarch of the Exploitation Film World’ to admit to.

And Ilsa is very sleazy. The title role was taken by busty nightclub performer Dyanne Thorne, who attacked the part with relish. She’s a cold, heartless sadist who is first seen castrating a male prisoner who is of no further sexual use. During the rest of the film, she tortures women, takes part in appalling experiments, and has sex with the only male inmate (American, of course) who can satisfy her.

Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS is a breathtakingly tasteless affair, yet it does have a (warped) sense of humour. Much of the action is so OTT, it teeters the film into the realms of ‘camp’, and it’s this which saves the film. Two sequels followed, though neither had Nazi themed story lines, instead having Ilsa as entirely separate characters in each.

While Ilsa was shaking the drive-ins, the art house theatres were rocking to The Night Porter, in which Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling indulged in assorted sexual antics that stopped short of the atrocities performed by Ilsa, yet still dwelled indulgently in uniform fetishism and Nazi decadence. The film was another box office success, and suddenly, the Italians – never slow to spot a trend – began to sit up and pay attention. Or stand to attention, perhaps?

The floodgates were opened in 1976 by Salon Kitty, which managed to combine the sleaze of Ilsa with the artiness of The Night Porter. The masterpiece of Nazi sleaze cinema, Tinto Brass’ twisted epic switches from making serious political points about the impotence of fascism (often with heavy handed political symbolism) to lip-smacking scenes of sexual perversion with alarming ease. It also established another great Nazi sexploitation plot-line: Salon Kitty is a brothel with an ulterior motive. SS officers use hidden microphones to listen out for any soldiers who might be less committed to the Third Reich cause than they should be.

The same year saw Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo, one of the most notorious films ever made. Based on De Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, Pasolini transposed the story to Fascist Italy, and the parade of atrocities committed by the ‘libertines’ – all fascist big wigs – would become as significant a factor in several Naziploitation films as the uniforms, the prison camps and the soft porn.

The popularity of Salon Kitty ensured it would be followed by a frenzy of titles, mostly emerging from Italy and France. Best known of these in Britain is SS Experiment Camp, which was one of the original ‘video nasties’, thanks in no small part to Go Video’s enthusiastic advertising campaign. The enterprising label took full page adverts in the top video magazines, showing the film’s cover – a topless girl, crucified upside-down. Some magazines found the image offensive, so Go supplied a version that had the breasts covered by a bra… this version was, apparently, considered perfectly acceptable.

After all that, Sergio Garrone’s film is quite ordinary, more softcore melodrama than anything… but there is at least one stand-out moment. The evil camp Commandant is devoid of testicles, and so decides to take those belonging to the one nice-guy guard who, in the great tradition of the ‘good Nazi’, hates what is going on. This is done via some gruesome medical stock footage. Our hero is then seen having sex with his girlfriend, at first blissfully unaware that anything is amiss. Once the awful truth emerges, however, he rushes into the Commandant’s office and screams the immortal line, “You bastard, what have you done with my balls?”…

As for the rest of the movies: all have moments of outrageous bad taste, but are mainly dull, with mind-numbing footage of partisans and battle-field stock footage padding out the moments between softcore groping and limp flagellation. Garrone returned to the genre in the somewhat sleazier SS Camp 5 – Women’s Hell, which saw Sirpa Lane – more used to arthouse Euro sleaze like La Bete and Charlotte – subjected to assorted indignities in a concentration camp. Without the ‘camp’ (no pun intended) aspect of SS Experiment Camp, it proved even less fun to watch.

The Beast In Heat is noteworthy as one of the rarest video nasties, but is also one of the dullest Naziploitation movies out there because the tasteless footage was appended to an already existing war movie. Thus, we have to endure seemingly endless footage of partisans fighting off their German oppressors interspersed with occasional torture scenes that would be repulsive if they weren’t so amateurish.

The infamous scene where Sal Boris (also in the aforementioned Salon Kitty), the titular beast who is the result of fiendish experiments overseen by the Ilsa-like camp commandant, bites off a woman’s pubic hair is fairly outrageous, but it’s a brief moment of bad taste respite from the general tedium. The attention to detail in the film is perhaps summed up by the clumsy on-screen title – Horrifing (sic) Experiments of the SS, Last Days. [Read Daz Lawrence's review on Horrorpedia]

Hack director Luigi Batzella – using the pseudonym Ivan Kathansky (or Katansky, depending on how much attention the credits producer was paying) – also made Kaput Lager: Gli ultimi giorni delle SS, released on video in the UK as The Desert Tigers (amusingly, The Dessert Tigers on a Dutch video sleeve mispelling). This was an even more ham-fisted effort, with exploitative prison camp footage grafted onto the end of a dull war movie starring Richard Harrison.

The Deported Women of the SS Special Section has a certain gritty authenticity to it that makes it stand out from the other films, but is otherwise rather average. It’s one of the more downbeat Naziploitation movies, despite the best efforts of director Rino Di Silvestro (Werewolf Woman) to crank up the sleaze factor, but its saving grace is the presence of Euro cult favourite John Steiner (Shock), who refuses to take it at all seriously and instead delivers a fantastic, eye-rolling, ranting and raving performance. It’s worth seeing the film for this alone, as he flits from obsessing over an inmate he’s known in the pre-war years and buggering his faithful servant Doberman.

The Gestapo’s Last Orgy also uses the ‘camp commandant obsessed with a prisoner’ plot, and becomes a curious hybrid of The Night Porter, Salon Kitty and the Nazi atrocity film. It’s a classier production that most examples of the genre, at least visually – a fait amount of money was obviously lavished here. This, the stylish direction and decent performances goes to make the atrocities seem all the more unsavoury – There are moments of such astonishing repulsiveness that you can barely credit them being in such a handsome film – the throwing of a menstruating woman to a pack of dogs, the burning alive of a woman during the cannibal orgy and the dipping of another woman in a pit of lime. The female cast are naked for much of the film and of course there are numerous sexual assault scenes. It’s so shamelessly horrible that you have to admire its audacity, especially as none of it seems to be pandering to the audience – this isn’t soft porn by any stretch of the imagination, and it seems designed to repulse. In the end, the film is perhaps best seen as a prime example of 1970s Italian excess, where restraint was for wussies. It’s from the same mindset that brought us films as diverse as Cannibal Holocaust and Suspiria, the notion that too much is never enough and that everything should be shown. It’s not on the same level as those two films, of course, but it is strangely admirable within its own perimeters.

Less ambiguous was the particularly unpleasant Women’s Camp 119, directed by Bruno Mattei (Hell of the Living Dead; Rats – Night of Terror). This unpleasant film seems designed to leave a bad taste in the mouth, even managing to work actual concentration camp footage into the credits sequence (an all-time low in filmmaking?). Yet it doesn’t have the style, the audacity, or the intelligence to get away with its parade of grim atrocities. (Read Stephen Thrower’s review on Horrorpedia)

As well as the films exploiting concentration camp atrocities, there were also a number of less brutal films exploiting the uniform fetish. SS Girls was another blatant imitation of Salon Kitty and The Night Porter while The Red Nights of the Gestapo was a fairly sumptuous affair that tended to concentrate on the decadence of the SS top brass. Elsa – Fraulein SS, on the other hand, was cheap and deliciously tacky, and despite the title similarity to Ilsa She Wolf of the SS (coincidence I’m sure!), was more of a T&A romp than a parade of atrocities, following the Salon Kitty theme of prostitutes being used to spy on Nazi officers who might be slipping in their love for the Third Reich. Many of the same cast and crew returned in Special Train for Hitler and Helga, She Wolf of Spilberg, which utilised the same sets and much the same plot.

Erwin C.Dietrich’s Frauleins in Uniform is a softcore movie that is notable for the strange normalising of the Nazis. While it briefly deals with the horrors of war, it does so from the point of view of the German army recruits – female German army recruits – and while there are hints at a totalitarian state, much of the film is surprisingly uncritical of the Nazi war machine. There’s little in the way of dramatic threat (though one deserter is caught and told “we have ways of making you talk”!), but the constant stream of bare flesh and dialogue like “cleanliness is next to Naziness” ensure that it passes by quite painlessly.

Meanwhile, American porno producers were dabbling in the concept with Prisoner in Paradise and Hitler’s Harlots. But for whatever reasons, the theme didn’t catch on in the adult movie theatres. In Hong Kong, film-makers replaced Nazis with Japanese invaders and unleashed the likes of Concentration Camp for Girls and Bamboo House of Dolls, the latter of which was used as an example of the worst excesses of cinema by British BBFC censor James Ferman during lectures about censorship. This sub-genre eventually led to the notoriously nasty Men Behind the Sun series.

By 1978, the Nazi sexploitation genre was all but dead. Perhaps the moral outrage and censorship problems which greeted such films proved to be too much trouble for producers only interested in profit. Who knows? Whatever the reason, there hasn’t been a single significant addition to the cycle since, making it one of cinema’s most short-lived genres. The only films to dabble in the genre now are zero budget affairs aimed squarely at the cult horror audience.

Keith Crocker’s Blitzkreig: Escape from Stalag 69 (2008) attempts to channel the spirit of the Italian films, but despite star Tatyana Kot spending the whole film naked, either gunning down Nazis or (more frequently) being tortured, plentiful nudity – male and female – throughout, two castrations, tongue pulling, eye stabbing, throat slitting and plenty more gory mayhem, all delivered with bargain basement FX, the film still manages to be the dullest Naziploitation film since The Beast in Heat. Why it needed to be 135 minutes long is anyone’s guess.

More interesting, but still unrealised beyond being a fake trailer in Grindhouse, is Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the SS, which has Sybil Danning taking on the Ilsa role and Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu. The trailer was, by far, the best thing about the whole Grindhouse project and hopefully Zombie will eventually get around the making the complete film.

It’s understandable that many people will be upset at the idea of Nazi fantasies. But I’ve never yet come across a genuine fascist amongst fans of this grubby sub-genre, and even the worst of the films doesn’t attempt to portray the Third Reich as being remotely admirable. If we can laugh at sit-coms like Allo Allo (okay, no-one should laugh at Allo Allo, but you know what I mean…), then surely we can be amused by these cheesy, high camp exercises in bad taste without feeling guilty about it? In fact, it’s probably our duty to do so, reminding ourselves that Nazis are little more than a bad joke in a good uniform…

Heinz Von Sticklegruber

Nazis on Horrorpedia: BloodRayne: The Third Reich | Cataclym aka The Nightmare Never Ends | Dead Snow: Red vs Dead | The Flesh Eaters | Frankenstein’s Army | Night of the Zombies | Night Train to Terror | Outpost: Rise of the Spetsnaz | She Demons | Women’s Camp 119

Il cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco ovvero: Dracula in Brianza, internationally released as Dracula in the Provinces; Bite Me, Count and Young Dracula, is a 1975 Italian horror-comedy film directed by Lucio Fulci (Zombie Flesh Eaters; The Beyond; The New York Ripper). Several writers contributed to what is more sex comedy than outright horror; Pupi Avati (Macabre), Mario Amendola, Bruno Corbucci (Django), Enzo Jannacci and Giuseppe Viola.

Il Cavaliere Costante Nicosia (Lando Buzzanca) is the owner of Italy’s most successful toothpaste company and enjoys all the trappings there-in, including a beautiful wife, Mariu (Sylva Koscina, Lisa and the Devil), from whom he inherited the firm, and a mistress, Liu (Christa Linder, 1980’s Alien Terror). Though he adopts a bullying management style, he holds very superstitious beliefs, regularly rubbing the hump of his hunchbacked assistant, Peppino (Antonio Allocca) for good luck and coercing his virgin housemaid to urinate over the remains of a broken mirror to cancel out the impending bad luck.

Events take an even more peculiar twist when on a business trip to Romania, he makes the acquaintance of Count Dragalescu (John Steiner, Shock; Tenebrae) who suggests a visit to his castle.

When Nicosia learns his meeting has been cancelled, he takes up the offer but after a sedate beginning, the weekend gets rather friskier, the Count preferring to dine in the nude alongside a bevy of similarly disrobed revellers.

A surfeit of booze leads to him passing out and, upon awakening, he finds himself in bed alongside the Count. Unclear what he has missed whilst out cold, he returns home but soon fears that the Count may have had his wicked way with him, leaving him ‘infected’ with homosexuality.

After visiting his doctor for advice, he finds sucking the blood of his mistress controls his urges but he craves to return to his previous life and visits both his Great Aunt (whose earlier curse he now takes very seriously) and the Magician of Noto (Ciccio Ingrassia, The Exorcist: Italian Style) in Sicily for help. The obviously phoney sage tells him the curse on him will be lifted only if he re-employs his brother-in-law.

Nicosia leaves, where it’s revealed to the viewers that the whole thing was a deliberate stunt organised by his in-laws into tricking Nicosia into giving his brother-in-law’s job back. Returning home far from being cured, he responds to his needy wife’s sexual advances by plunging his fang-like teeth into her bare bottom during foreplay.

Nicosia returns to his bullish habits, re-firing his brother-in-law and surrounding himself with prostitutes, to keep himself availed of blood.

This soon leads to even grander designs, essentially turning the toothpaste factory into a blood bank, into which all his employees must donate, willingly or otherwise. He is overjoyed when his wife arrives one day with his new-born son, which he takes to mean he is once again virile and heterosexual. However, when he peeks into the pram, he’s in for a surprise…

To put this into an even more perverse context, Fulci made this film straight after the ferocious violence of Four of the Apocalypse and Avati shortly before contributing his writing skills to Passolini’s Salo. Less surprising are the depths to which Italian comedy would stoop: most offendable groups are catered for. Fulci was no stranger to comedy, this film coming just three years after the better-known The Eroticist and in typical fashion fills the film with rather more than the traditional low-level laughs, with crude nods at Marxism (Nicosia literally sucking the blood of his employees) and an actually quite effective take on the familiar vampire film traits.

Ilona Staller (soon-to-be renamed Cicciolina, Italy’s princess of porn) appears in a small role, though there are no sightings of female names more readily associated with the genre, such as Edwige Fenech or Gloria Guida – the jaunty score comes courtesy of Bixio-Frizzi-Tempera. Not as knockabout or as crass as the plot or its contemporaries would suggest, this is indeed a curiosity for both vampire fans and followers of Fulci.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Ulula (“Howl”) is an Italian erotic horror comic book, known as fumetti, launched in October 1981 by Milan-based Edifumetto, with a print run that ran to 76 issues. Two 228 page special editions were issued in 1983 and the Ulula character also appeared in a fumetto named 40 Grandi. Some of the cover artwork was by celebrated comic artist Emanuele Taglietti.

The lurid stories in Ulula involve model Ulula Von Hagen who becomes a werewolf when the moon is full, having been given the blood of a wolf in a transfusion by her mad doctor uncle! she travels all over the globe having sexual adventures and fighting other monsters, like an Italian lupine version of Vampirella. Only her gay male friend Jo (later Joe) knows her dark secret…

Ulula stories were also issued in Spain, often using the same cover artwork, as part of the Hembras Peligrosas (“Dangerous Females”) comic book series.

Molto grazie to Comic Vine for images and to Fumetti Etruschi and HorrorCrime.com for some background info.

Related: Vampirella

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is a 2014 romantic horror comedy film written and directed by Spike Lee. With a budget of just $1,418,910, was the first of Lee’s films to be funded through Kickstarter. It stars Felicia Pearson, Elvis Nolasco, Zaraah Abrahams, Steven Hauck and Stephen Tyrone Williams.

The film was released on June 22, 2014 on American Black Film Festival as the closing film. The film is scheduled to be released in theaters and on VOD on February 13, 2015, by Gravitas Ventures.

Spike Lee said that film is about “Human beings who are addicted to blood. Funny, sexy and bloody. A new kind of love story (and not a remake of Blacula).”

Reviews:

” … Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is at once too much and yet somehow not enough. On the one hand, it’s exciting to see the always envelope-pushing Lee working without a studio- or distributor-imposed safety net (though he has typically enjoyed a high level of creative freedom even on his studio-backed projects). But while the film never lacks for ambition, it fails to satisfy emotionally or intellectually in the ways Lee intends. Both Williams and Abrahams give it their all, but never convince as an actual lovestruck couple in the way the great Duane Jones (Night of the Living Dead) and Marlene Clark did in Gunn’s film.” Scott Foundass, Variety

“The performances are intriguing, but they are at such a remove that there’s zero emotional connection with what’s up on screen. The “rules” of this film’s specific vampirism are intentionally hazy (are the victims dead? undead? aware of their fate?) and Dr Greene’s snap transformation into a wily bloodsucker without the benefit of a learning curve is curiously frustrating. As a horror picture, quite frankly, it’s a bit of a disaster.” Jordan Hoffman, The Guardian

“Whenever Lee ventures away from the outrageous particulars of the plot, “Da Sweet Blood of Jesus” transforms into a stylish means of exploring contemporary struggles in urban black America by depicting it as a ballet of navigating personal and practical conflicts alike: The marvellous credits sequence finds a dancer elegantly unfolding his body at the center of the Knicks’ courtroom, Battery Park City and elsewhere. A jazzy piano score by Bruce Hornsby routinely suggests a bigger picture than the specifics of the story.” Eric Kohn, Indiewire

“All over the place, inarticulate and gravely goofy at time, the fine line between laughing with Lee and laughing at Lee’s movie is certainly blurred. Ultimately, for all its semi-weighty spiritual and societal concerns, “Da Sweet Blood of Jesus” is an extremely difficult movie to take seriously and might be the closest we’ve seen to this director making a student film in public. Thematically, it’s also all too on the nose. Any allusions to addiction as part of society’s current ills are hamfisted (and delivered in overt, spelled-out monologue).” Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

Filming locations:

Martha’s Vineyard; New York City

Wikipedia | IMDb