Il mostro dell'opera (1964) [f/1961]

... aka: Il vampiro dell'opera (The Vampire of the Opera)

... aka: L'orgie des vampires (The Vampire Orgy)

... aka: Monster of the Opera, The

Directed by:

Renato Polselli

Though predated a few years by I VAMPIRI (1957), the international hit BLACK SUNDAY (1960), itself prompted into existence by recent period-set, costume horror successes from UK's Hammer, is usually given credit for kick starting the gothic horror revival in Italy. Soon after, dozens of similar films were produced there over the next five or so years, many quite beautifully and atmospherically shot in black-and-white, though some were in color (and no less beautifully or atmospherically shot when in the hands of someone like Mario Bava). While most of these suffered from pacing, story and dialogue issues, often due to the horrendous dubbing they received and hack-job re-edits, others suffered more because they barely received much of a release at all. 

Case in point is The Monster of the Opera. This was shot all the way back in 1961 but not released until three years later. It never even made it over here to the U.S., nor to any other English-speaking country, and thus never received an English-friendly release until over half a century after the fact. That means the movie not only didn't play in theaters, but it also didn't turn up on late night TV nor in video rental shops and was never able to build up any kind of reputation whatsoever. I'm only aware of Italian and French theatrical releases and wasn't even able to find an old video release in either of those countries. Once you actually sit through the movie itself, it all starts making sense.

 

We're hit in the face with the film's true intentions right at the start, as a beautiful young woman in a see-through negligee (though wearing bra and panties - this was still the early 60s, after all!) is pursued through an abandoned theater and then outside by a vampire brandishing a HUGE pitchfork. That gives way to a bunch of voluptuous starlets stretching, gossiping, giggling and dancing around in their leotards. One gets the immediate impression that much more screen time is going to be dedicated to showcasing the charms of the female cast as it will be to the horror elements, and that's exactly what happens here. Something mildly refreshing starts taking shape after a few minutes, though. In a subgenre known for evil, duplicitous and / or depressive characters in dreary period settings, we're introduced to a bunch of bouncy and vibrant young folks who laugh, flirt, make jokes, play pranks and run around happily spouting witty dialogue in a modern day setting.

"Marc Maryan" / Marco Mariani (TOMB OF TORTURE) stars as aspiring theater director Sandro, who's filled with good spirits and enthusiasm after having purchased an old, run-down theater called Aquarius. OK, so the place is rumored to be haunted, former performers claim to have been trapped inside by "invisible walls," a handful of previous actresses who'd performed there vanished without a trace and were never seen again, psychics who tried to investigate were driven away by a "sinister presence" and the building's grumpy caretaker, Achille ("Albert Archet" / Alberto Archetti), tries in vain to steer him away from the purchase, but it's just too good of a deal to pass up! It's also the perfect place for Sandro to stage his new play, which has been rejected by all of the other theaters. Now he won't have to worry about any of that since he'll be calling all of the shots. Soon, the theater is overrun with high energy cast and crew; guys in skeleton costumes and girls in undies, babydoll nighties and short, short togas (part of the play seems to be set in Roman times).

Giulia (Barbara Hawards), the production's lead actress, and also Sandro's leading lady off stage, has a strange feeling she's been there before. She also has a strange feeling she's met Achille before. That's because both have been prominently featured in a recurring nightmare she's been having about a vampire. Said vampire, Stefano ("John McDouglas" / Giuseppe Addobbati), eventually shows up in the flesh (at the midway point!) and (nearly an hour into this 80-minute film) attempts to put the bite to dancer Rossana (Vittoria Prada) but she manages to get away, Who he really wants is Giulia, the reincarnation of Laura, a (married) lover from hundreds of years ago who betrayed him. 

One of the lone good ideas here is that lying in the vampire's coffin and closing the lid allows one to enter into the bloodsucker's fogbound hidden lair, which appears to be in some kind of alternate dimension. There, he keeps a half dozen vampire brides, who've all gone mad, chained to the walls.

From a strictly visual standpoint, this is decent. There's good-looking black-and-white photography, a wonderful shooting location inside the old theater, nice art direction, lighting and use of shadow and fog, and some surprisingly good camerawork. The premise holds promise, the general atmosphere is quite good and things start out fun, but that fun soon gives way to tedium. Things move at a snail's pace, the plot is virtually nonexistent, the vampire is treated almost as an afterthought and most of the time is spent alternating between showing the girls running around shrieking and doing either their choreographed dances or impromptu frantic ones. While cleaning up, the cast randomly break into the Charleston and this hilariously even has the cast forced into a dance-for-your-life situation to ward off the evil at the end, as if this didn't already have too many filler dance scenes! The large cast also ensures that no one is really given much of a personality.

In addition to being a leg and undies fest, this puts a lot of focus on PG lesbianism, with the girls longingly staring into each other's eyes, caressing each other's shoulders, rubbing each other's legs, embracing, getting right in each other's faces as if they're about to kiss and, after a few are turned into vamps, nibbling on each other's necks. "Don't you feel that a friendship between two women is pure?" one dancer tells another as she seductively runs her fingers through her friend's hair. Instead of acting horrified, several of the girls act like they're in ecstasy when they're "speared" with the pitchfork, which is used to pin people down, not kill them. Subtle this is not. These bits may also explain why this was barely released. That, and the fact it's all pretty nonsensical and boring.

Most of the names in the cast list have been Anglicized, so it's difficult to know the true identity of most of these folks, though many appear to have been real-life dancers. Lead Barbara Hawards (most likely a pseudonym; she's called "Barbara Howard" on the posters) is very lovely so it's a shame this may have been her only film. Lost in the sea of other dancers is Milena Vukotic (playing "Carlotta"), the only one of the ladies who went on to much of an acting career. A trained dancer / ballerina herself, Vukotic would later act for the likes of Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel and Andrei Tarkovsky and win most of Italy's top acting awards.

The director, who also co-wrote the script with Ernesto Gastaldi, had previously made THE VAMPIRE AND THE BALLERINA (1960), another entry in the 1960s Italian black-and-white Gothic cycle (also a much better film than this one), and would go on to work on some sleazier 70s genre films (usually utilizing the alias "Ralph Brown") like DELIRIUM (1972), MANIA (1974) and EROTIC GAMES OF A RESPECTABLE FAMILY (1975).

Discounting a French DVD release under the title L'orgie des vampires, which featured an English sub option but cobbled together a print from two different sources, the first English-friendly version was released by Sinister Cinema in 2020. That was followed by its inclusion in the 2023 Severin box set "Danza Macabra Volume One," which also included the forgettable THE SEVENTH GRAVE (1965), the mediocre SCREAM OF THE DEMON LOVER (1970) and, the most enjoyable of the lot by a fair margin, the minor cult classic Lady Frankenstein (1971).

★1/2

Tell-Tale Heart, The (1953) [short]

... aka: Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, The

Directed by:

J.B. Williams

It's time to crack open the "Short Sharp Shocks" Blu-ray collection from BFI and take a peek inside. This first set (there are two collections) contains nine short subjects over two discs, which date anywhere from 1949 all the way up to 1980. My plan here is to head down these discs and review all of these shorts in the order in which they appear. I'm not going to be reviewing them here like bam-bam-bam in succession over the next few weeks but will instead squeeze them in periodically and do my usual reviews in between. Of course, the shorts still have to meet my guidelines for this blog, meaning they have to be horror enough for yours truly (many in the collection aren't horror by anyone's standard) and they have to be made or released between 1950 and 1990 or else I will not be reviewing them. That scratches the first two shorts from Disc 1, both from 1949, off my list but I'll talk about them briefly.

Lock Your Door and The Reformation of St. Jules, which fall just short of 15 minutes apiece, are both from director Anthony Gilkison and were shot at the same time on the same simple sets. These are nothing more than an old man in a room (usually sitting down) looking into the camera and telling us these stories. Nothing is visualized. The true appeal here is actually the old man: Algernon Blackwood, a great-named, prolific British writer who specialized in ghost and paranormal tales. Reformation and Lock are two of his own short stories. Blackwood isn't very well known here in the U.S. (I assume he is the UK, though), so it's cool to get a little sample of his work. This is also one of the only filmed documents of the writer, who passed away just two years after filming these; not much of a surprise considering he looks ancient here and was around 80 years old.

Following these is a 20-minute short that I actually can cover here because it's from 1953. It's yet another version of Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, a story so often adapted that this isn't even the only one from its year... there are three others! The most famous of these by far is the 8-minute-long animated version narrated by James Mason and directed by Ted Parmelee, which was nominated for an Academy Award (category: Best Short Subject, Cartoons) and was also selected for preservation by the National Film Registry in 2001. This particular version was long ago forgotten until it found its way into this set.

The story itself features an unknown narrator but this one opts to name him: He's Edgar Allan Poe and he's played here by Stanley Baker. Unlike the Blackwood pieces, which are like grandpa telling his grandkids a scary story in a brightly-lit living room, there's a POV change-up here and an attempt to provide a claustrophobic, gloomy atmosphere more befitting the tale. However, this is still little more than a dramatized reading of the Poe story, told verbatim. At least it can never be accused of not being faithful to the source material!

Set in a dark, dreary, grimy and slightly expressionistic looking room, this has a very theatrical and overwrought Baker dressed in mid 19th century period clothing as he addresses the camera and tries to convince us he's perfectly sane recounting the killing and dismemberment of an old man whose malformed, blue "vulture" eye drove him to murder. Music and some sound effects (ticking clock, a loud beating heart [a crucial element of the story]) have been added for dramatic effect and there are also occasional cutaways to things like the moon in an overcast night sky, wind blowing curtains, a steaming kettle, a clock, etc. to help with editing the monologue snippets together. There's nothing really wrong with any of this, it's just not very inspiring.

The story behind how this finally found its way onto DVD is perhaps more interesting than the short itself. Thought missing for half a century, this was found in the attic of a home in Scotland. It had been purchased at a junk shop in Brighton in 1984 by a nurse and film collector, who then filed it away and thought nothing of it. It wouldn't be until 2018 when he was doing some cleaning that he discovered the film. He planned to sell it on eBay for £5 but found out researching the title that historians had been looking for it for years and the rest is history. Once in the hands of BFI, it was restored, archived and digitized. (See Daily Mail and The Independent articles for more details.)

Despite being just a man in a room telling a story, this was amusingly given a "Horrific" rating by the London Country Council and forbidden to those under 16. Imagine if they could take a look into the future to see what 16 year old's are watching nowadays. 😄

Death Was a Passenger (1959) and PORTRAIT OF A MATADOR (1958), both from director Theodore Zichy, follow on disc one.

★★

Libido (1965)

... aka: Libido Terror

Directed by:

"Julian Barry Storff" (Ernesto Gastaldi and Vittorio Salerno)

Made just one year after Mario Bava's seminal Blood and Black Lace (1964), this modestly scaled b/w psychological thriller with few location changes and a very small cast is now typically considered one of the earliest giallo films, though I personally don't think it really qualifies as such. This has far more in common with suspense films like Diabolique and, perhaps most especially, early 60s Italian Gothic chillers than it does later gialli. There's (thankfully) no police investigation going on, rampaging psycho killer attacking naked Euro starlets, elaborately-staged gory death scenes or excessive attempts at visual style present in this one, though the links between it and what would come later are still quite obvious.

This low budget production surprised even its makers by becoming an international success, which prompted many of the key players to venture into other twist-laden murder mysteries and police procedurals. Though not credited on the film itself (or on IMDb or other websites for that matter), the producers were Luciano Martino and Mino Loy, who'd go on to make dozens of later giallo films, many of which were directed by the former's brother, Sergio Martino, who worked as the production manager here under the alias "Serge Martin." Co-director Gastaldi would go on to an incredibly prolific career, seemingly writing or co-writing every other Italian genre script over the next two decades. He'd not only write most of the Martino films, but also worked with Mario Bava, Riccardo Freda, Umberto Lenzi, Antonio Margheriti and others. So, if only by association, I can see why this usually gets thrown on giallo lists despite really not being one itself.

Giancarlo Giannini makes his film debut (billed as "John Charlie Johns") as the dour Christian Carro, who's on the verge of inheriting a remote seaside castle after his father's passing. He travels to the castle along with his wife, Helene (Dominique Boschero), family lawyer Paul Benoit ("Alan Collins" / Luciano Pigozzi) and Paul's much-younger wife, Brigitte (Mara Maryl, who was married to Gastaldi and also receives a story credit here), for a protracted stay to take inventory of the castle's belongings and get everything in order.

Paul has been tasked with executing the will to the letter, per the father's instructions. Said instructions include not allowing Christian much say in what goes on until he reaches his 25th birthday in 3 months and completing some restoration work on the castle tower despite Christian's insistence on it just being a big waste of money. After all, he merely wants to sell everything and wipe his hands of the place and all of the bad childhood memories associated with it. Christian's late father, whose large portrait adorns one of the walls, was something of a sexual sadist who may or may not have murdered some of his lovers in a mirror-filled kink room, and Christian may or may not have witnessed one of those murders.

The neurotic, chain smoking, mentally unstable Christian now fears he may have also inherited his father's penchant for sadistic sex. In addition to that, there's the looming question about just how the father died, or even if he died. Supposedly, he committed suicide by jumping off a cliff, but there were no witnesses to his death and a corpse was never found. This leaves Christian wondering whether or not he's losing his mind when strange, seemingly otherworldly things start occurring in the castle. His late father's rocking chair rocks all by itself, his favorite skull pipe is found smoking and a haunting music box melody, one that makes him recall a particularly troubling event from his childhood, is heard. He also sees a figure that resembles his father lurking the grounds.

Is this a haunting? Is Christian going insane? Or, in the vein of the aforementioned Diabolique, is there some kind of conspiracy afoot? It's established from the get-go that the two male leads strongly dislike one another. Due to a stipulation in the will, Christian has to be of sound mind (and alive, of course!) to collect his inheritance or else it falls into Paul's hands, which opens the door for some greed-fueled gaslighting. After catching his wife and Paul having some private conversations, Christian suspects she may also be involved. As for Helene and Christian's marriage, it's a strange, cold and apparently sexless union that finds the two of them sleeping in separate bedrooms at night and not showing the love, affection and care that a young, healthy married couple would normally exhibit.

In a nice reversal on formula, the film's most intriguing character turns out to be the second female lead, who possesses all of the characteristics of someone who's going to be written (and killed) off in no short order but proves to be more essential to the plot than it first appears. A bubbly blonde Monroe-esque airhead, Brigitte spends most of her screen time trying to seduce the men and cavorting around in short dresses, lingerie and, best of all, a skimpy little bikini with cat face cups for the top! However cute she may be, she also strongly resembles the same woman Christian has visions of his father murdering and her mere presence seems to be exacerbating Christian's descent into madness, which may or may not be the intended effect. Having this sometimes silly character around also helps get us through the sluggish first half otherwise dealing with three serious, solemn and depressive-acting characters.

Despite taking place in present day, the Gothic trappings are laid on as thick and heavy as any other period-set Italian Gothic from this time, with its large, darkly-lit castle setting and the usual thunder claps, howling winds, footsteps in the dark, creaking floorboards, candle-lit strolls, sudden lightning flashes illuminating the dark, muddy footprints found along corridors, etc. The proceedings are competently, crisply photographed by Romolo Garroni, though the direction is not very visually imaginative. This takes awhile to reveal its modest pleasures, too. While the first hour is strictly average, the twist-filled finale is highly enjoyable and boosts the score up a notch.

I could find no evidence that Libido was ever given a U.S. theatrical release. If there was, it was a minor one, though there was an English language dub prepped at some point. Some sources claim this was given a small release in the UK in 1967, though I couldn't verify that either. I also couldn't find a single legitimate home video release here in the States prior to the Severin Blu-ray, which was released just last year. Severin's release comes with English and Italian audio tracks (the latter with optional English subs) as well as a lengthy interview with Gastaldi.

★★1/2