El espectro del terror (1973)

... aka: Deviazione (Deviation)
... aka: Ghost of Terror
... aka: Specter of Terror, The

Directed by:
J.M. (José María) Elorrieta

Imagine this. You're walking down the street when you hear menacing footsteps trailing behind you. The footsteps get faster and faster and faster to the point where you have to run away from whoever it is that's chasing you. You then fumble around with your keys as the footsteps rush toward you getting louder with each step. Eventually you get your door open, get inside your apartment and close the door. What do you do then? If you answered strip down to your panties and lie down in bed casually reading a magazine, you'd end up on a slab in the morgue right next to the bimbo from the opening sequence. Our next potential victim is a stewardess named Maria Preston (Maria “Pechy” / Perschy), who thankfully has a little more common sense than our friend up above. As soon as she gets to the airport parking garage, notices her car won't start and spots a strange, ugly man staring her down, she high tails it the hell out of there. Maria's busybody roommate Elena O'Hara (“May Oliver” / Maritza Oliveras) isn't much of a shoulder to cry on as she's always so busy with work and guys (especially guys... seemingly any guy), so Maria finds herself going to see a psychiatrist to try to get over her terrifying ordeal.

As Maria and shrink Dr. Palacios (Sancho Gracia) start getting more “friendly” (hey, isn't that against the rules or something?), Maria begins to suspect she's being stalked by the strange-looking man she saw earlier, who she likens to an “espectro.” That turns out to be an apt name considering he disappears without a trace soon after she has an encounter with him. Either the man truly does exist or Maria has created him in her mind because she's going crazy. After the man breaks into her apartment and tries to paw at her while she's sleeping, she's found hysterical by the night watchman and hospitalized for a spell. But it's soon made clear the psycho does indeed exist so why they decided to work that angle for a whopping 20 minutes is anyone's guess. When the nutter in question, Charly Reed (Aramis Ney), isn't stalking and murdering women, he's working at a dyer at an industrial laundry company.

Charly is haunted by voices and war trauma flashbacks (he's a Nam vet), sexually harasses one of his female coworkers, sneaks out with his camera to photograph legs, burns himself with lit cigarettes, makes out with and then twists the heads off of dolls and does other odd things. He goes to a nightclub and meets go-go dancer and single mom Nicole (Betsabé Ruiz), who's willing to go home with him so long as he pays her. When he gets her back to his rented farmhouse he makes her dance for him and, in lieu of sex, strangles her to death with a scarf and then dissolves her body in acid. At a bar, one of Charly's jerk co-workers brings up a war crime he was accused of committing (killing a woman... shocker!) and mocks him in front of two girls, so he ends up smashing his face into the bathroom mirror.

While in town, Maria conveniently spots her stalker out and about moving a large chest with his latest victim's body inside. She follows him home and waits for him to leave before sneaking in to look for evidence. There, she finds ripped up photos of herself, dolls hanging from nooses and the hand of a corpse sticking out of the acid bath. Before she can get out of there, Charly shows up and locks her in a room while he goes back out to finish up some dirty work. He first goes after the shrink because he's been working with a police inspector (played by Paul Naschy film regular Víctor Alcázar). After running him over, he locates her roommate and strangles her to death with the telephone cord in a phone booth. He then returns home to deal with Maria...

Sometimes you'll run across a movie that, while not really very good, has one major redeeming factor good enough to help it skate by. This has that in actor Ney, who really throws himself into his part and is genuinely creepy as the killer. His intense performance is nicely accentuated by cinematographer Pablo Ripoll and the lighting designer, who shoot him in the most unflattering ways possible to constantly make him look like a hideous, intimidating, greasy train wreck. Their efforts somewhat go in vain though due to the mundane fashion in how the character is written. Making him a war vet has been done to death and already had been done to death even as early as 1973. Constantly adding in various wartime sounds (gunfire, bombs dropping, explosions, etc.) to illustrate that he's a war vet has been done to death. Playing gentle lullaby-style piano music after he does horrible things has been done to death. Since they're not given much personality and the actors cannot play them in the same go-for-broke manner as Ney can, the other characters come off even flatter.

Considering how generic this one is, it's not too surprising that it never saw the light of day here in America, nor in many other countries. It did play theaters in Italy (under the title Deviazione), Mexico and Spain but I could find no evidence it was ever legitimately released to home video anywhere. The only cut that's currently available (via bootleggers) is a censored 73 minute version taken from a TV broadcast, which has all of the nudity removed and some pretty raggedy cuts throughout. Director / writer Elorietta also made FEAST OF SATAN (1971), which is even worse than this one, and The Curse of the Vampyr (1972), which I'm now going to be in no hurry to watch.

★★

Aimilia, i diestrammeni (1974)

... aka: Aimilia, the Psychopath
... aka: Bloody Emily
... aka: Emily the Pervert
... aka: Emily, the Psychopath

Directed by:
Pavlos Parashakis

Conservative middle-aged music teacher, wealthy widow and philanthropist Aimilia (Gisela Dali) is giving lessons to a few orphan children when three older folks arrive at her home. They're there because they want money to keep an institute open and to suggest she sell one of her many estates to help them with funding. Against Aimilia's wishes, one of her guests sees an armed man breaking into a home next door and immediately calls the cops. The burglar, Nikos (Dimitri Aronis), happens to already be well acquainted with the homeowner but he's there to collect money owed to his boss. After getting him to confess he has the money and getting him to open his safe, there's a fight and Nikos shoots both the guy and his girlfriend dead. Just then, the police arrive and Nikos flees into the night. He manages to duck into another home to hide out... Aimilia's home. He then overhears her and her guests having a conversation with one of the cops.

After the guests and cop leave, Nikos decides to hide out there until the police finish scouring the neighborhood. To kill time, he spies on Aimilia and watches as the woman he had seen all buttoned up doing the repressed, uptight act is living a dual life. Aimilia strips off her dress, showers and then changes her appearance, throwing on a sexy, short dress, heavy makeup and a blonde wig. She then leaves (giving Nikos a brief chance to use her phone to call his boss to tell him what's up), goes to a seedy area of town, picks up a guy and brings him home. After calling him a “male hooker” and slapping him in the face, he slaps her back and then the two jump into bed. She whips out a knife hidden under a pillow and then stabs the guy to death in a murderous frenzy that also puts the camera guy into a frenzy because it's impossible to see anything. Uh oh, Nikos has wandered into the home of schizo. Frequent flashbacks show that as a child Aimilia saw her hooker mother (also played by Dali in a black wig) get stabbed to death by one of her male acquaintances.

Aimilia soon run across the intruder and unsuccessfully attempts to kill him but, before you know it, she's crying on his sympathetic shoulder. Well, maybe she's not such a bad lady after all (other than the occasionally liking to stab horny men to death bit). Nikos manages to get home the following morning in one piece and learns from his girlfriend Kaiti (Lyn Fotopoulou) that his boss has been apprehended by the authorities. She begs him to run away with her but he has other things he needs to take care of first. Kaiti's mother Helen (Jenny Stefanakou) is heavily embroiled in the criminal lifestyle herself. Her husband and son are both in jail and she wants the money to hire lawyers to help get them out. She also warns Nikos that if he tries to do something foolish like split with all the money (which he hid behind some books at psycho woman's home) before delivering her cut then there will be hell to pay.

Nikos runs into many problems trying to retrieve the cash. For starters, Aimilia found it and hid it some place else. Second, Aimilia is an unpredictable, unreliable psycho so who knows what'll happen if he goes back. Third, police already have their eye on Aimilia and have posted guard outside her home. Four, his girlfriend's backstabbing mother cuts a deal with thug Joseph (“George Pliver” / Giorgos Plivouris) to split the cash 50/50 and cut Nikos out of the deal (by killing him). Kaiti overhears them making plans and pleads with Joseph to leave them alone, but he says he only will if she'll sleep with him. After they have sex, he instead goes right over to Nikos' and attempts to shoot him.

While out trying to find another victim, Aimilia stumbles across Mr. Paris (Manos Destounis), one of the guys who was begging for money earlier. Mr. Paris was also acquainted with her mother, who used him, teased him and mocked him. After she gets him home, he confesses to being the man who murdered her mother but is still willing to have sex if she'll have him. I'm sure you can guess what happens to Mr. Paris. Nikos is dragged into the police station and put in a lineup but Aimilia refuses to identify him as the shooter. It all leads to “tragic” consequences for pretty much all concerned after Aimilia clubs Joseph over the head with a candlestick and then puts on her seductress charms for Nikos when he finally shows up to get the money.

I only had the chance to view an old VHS release of this one, which is in pretty awful condition and also appears to have been cut at certain points to reduce nudity. That said, I don't believe the current running time of 95 minutes as given by IMDb. The cut I watched ran 77 minutes and the story didn't appear to be missing any key plot points plus the only abrupt soundtrack jumps occurred during sex scenes. Even so, this is a rather poorly made film. The camerawork is bad, the acting is bad, the story is all over the place, some cheap kaleidoscopic effects pass for style and there are loads of zooms in and zooms out used in place of proper editing cuts. I also found myself only really interested in what Aimilia was up to (at least at first) and not the dull crime stuff with Nikos and his lowlife friends or the dull scenes with the cops poking their noses around.

As far as Greek remedies for psycho-sexual problems are concerned, I'm not sure what's worse: The nut cured of his impotency by finally being given the chance to anally rape a woman in HOSTAGES OF LUST (1973) or a frigid female's murderous psychosis being cured by finally getting laid properly as in this film. Sheesh. Despite being from two different directors, both this and Hostages are filled with tinted flashbacks explaining how someone was turned psycho by the antics of a heartless female sexual tease. That's right, ladies. Always put up or shut up or else you'll end up with blood on your hands!

★1/2