Afterman, The (1985)

... aka: After Man

... aka: Mundo Nefando (The World of Horror)

... aka: Sex 1999

Directed by:

Rob Van Eyck

I've seen my share of post nuke trash flicks (one of my favorite exploitation subgenres), but this one from Belgium is certainly something special. And by special, I mean gloriously perverted! Long after a nuclear war, a bearded man (Jacques Verbist) who's been living in an underground shelter for his entire life has finally run out of options. He's alone, running low on supplies and soon going have to leave his sanctuary and venture out into a changed world whether he likes it or not. He's so desperate for food, he's reduced to eating a maggot off of his dead mother's frozen corpse, which is being housed inside a walk-in freezer. And since he's also desperate for sex and his mother's body is just kind of lying there, well, you probably get a good idea of what else he's been up to. When the computer systems start going haywire after warning him to evacuate, he finally opens the doors and heads out.

It's a harsh, cold climate outside with brown, polluted water. The man spots a half dozen men off in the distance and runs to greet them. However, his happiness at finding other survivors is short lived when the leader headbutts him, knees him in the crotch, bends him over, pulls down his pants and rapes him while the others hold him down and jerk off (!!) As if that isn't bad enough, he has to follow that up with a raw sewer rat for dinner.

The man ventures on and ends up at a run-down building which houses an indoor pool. Inside are two women who are surprising well-kept considering the whole world being destroyed thing. After a lesbian sex scene lasting for five minutes, one of the women finally gets off after drowning the other one. Seeing how that chicks clearly isn't worth messing around with, the man continues on his quest.

His next stop is a farm run by a big, sadistic bald man (Nick Van Suyt, star of Lucker the Necrophagous) and his wife. They keep a female captive (Franka Ravet) locked inside an outside cage covered in chicken wire who's fed scraps and used for labor and sexual purposes. The man is captured when he attempts to steal eggs, thrown into the cage and is basically treated the same way the woman is. He's forced to use his bare hands to pick up manure, is beaten with a stick and gets tied to a tiller like a cow and whipped. The man finally has enough, clubs the farmer over the head and escapes. The slave girl follows. At first, the man tries to chase her off and refuses to share food with her, but after she proves herself by saving him from a quicksand bog, he has a change of heart. Soon the two are fucking on the forest floor, snuggling by the campfire, foraging for nuts, laughing and becoming a normal loving couple.

Of course, being a legit couple in this post-apocalyptic hellscape full of murderous degenerates reduced to their basest of needs for sex and sustenance isn't the easiest thing to pull off. Flesh is a hot commodity, in more ways than one, it turns out. While squatting in an abandoned greenhouse for the night, some cannibalistic thugs beat up the man and kidnap the girl. She finds herself tied up and kept prisoner, where she and some other ladies are plumped up with porridge until they're ready to butcher and serve. The man finds them, rescues his girl and unties the others. One of the feral femmes then rips the eyeballs out of her captor's head with her bare hands!

After getting chased through the woods by some more punks, our destitute duo find themselves being taken in by a sect of monks in a gated monastery. There, they bathe, beautify and bone, in that order. Next thing the man knows, he's being forced to give one of the men-of-the-cloth a blow job (!!) and is forced to take communion by sipping wine, getting down on his knees and kissing the ass of a male torso statue by the homosexual monks. Even worse, their cemetery is quickly filling because the monks are also ripping out the hearts of those they're offering shelter to as human sacrifices. To what? Who knows! The last bit has our couple "saved" by a rich woman (Dora Raskin), who takes them back to her castle, seduces the man with a little footsie fun at the dinner table while her Asian servant plays piano wearing a mesh top and nearly drives the female half of the couple to suicide.

While this shapeless film is little more than a series of vignettes featuring our leads wandering around trying to survive one dangerous encounter after another, this is kind of compelling almost in spite of itself. And it's actually refreshing to see a director who appears well aware of his budgetary restraints and tries to find no-cost ways around them. Most of this is shot outside or in available abandoned buildings and the entire film is nearly dialogue-free so that the amateur cast isn't quite as obvious. To help make up for the nonexistent production values and lack of special effects, he crams in as much sex / nudity and violence / gore (including someone impaled on spikes and a pitchfork through the neck) as possible. While that doesn't make this Mad Max, it does keep the film bleak, sleazy and entertaining; perhaps even deceptively low-concept.

Many years after the fact, the director made a pair of sequels: Afterman 2 (2005), which speculates what would happen if Osama Bin Laden took over Europe (!!) and Afterman III: The Global Warming Disaster (2013). This and many of the director's other films were covered in the documentary Forgotten Scares: An In-Depth Look at Flemish Horror Cinema (2013), which also features an interview with Van Eyck. This title was never given a U. S. video release but was released on VHS in other countries like the Netherlands and Japan. A 25th Anniversary Edition is now available on DVD.

★★1/2

La plus longue nuit du diable (1971)

... aka: Au service du diable (In the Service of the Devil)
... aka: Castle of Death
... aka: Devil's Longest Night, The
... aka: Devil's Nightmare, The
... aka: Devil Walks at Midnight, The
... aka: La nuit des pétrifiés (Night of the Petrified)
... aka: La terrificante notte del demonio (The Terrifying Night of the Devil)
... aka: Nightmare of Terror
... aka: Succubus
... aka: Vampire Playgirls

Directed by:
Jean Brismée

Berlin, 1945. As a bombing of the city is commencing, a Nazi general's wife dies giving birth. Once he learns that the newborn is a girl, he sends the servants out of the room and then stabs it to death. As it turns out, the general is among a long line of Von Rhoneberg's, who believe their family is cursed due to a descendant selling his soul to the devil. More specifically, they believe the eldest female in each generation are cursed to be a succubus, a servant of Satan described by one character as "demons that adopt feminine appearance in order to seduce men and lead them to perdition." Cut to the present day and the Nazi general is living as Baron Von Rhoneberg (Jean Servais) in a giant castle out in the middle of nowhere with maid / cook Martha and creepy butler Hans (Maurice De Groote). A female journalist who attempts to snap photos without permission is found dead on the castle grounds. It appears she saw something so frightening that she was literally scared to death. The locals believe this signals the return of the succubus to the castle.

It's the perfect time for a tour bus to get lost after hitting a dead end; forcing the group to seek refuge at the Von Rhoneberg castle during a storm. Among the stranded are gluttonous bus driver Max Ducarte (Christian Maillet), whose appetite for food and drink seems to know no end, elderly, grumpy and wrathful chronic complainer Mr. Mason (Lucien Raimbourg) and handsome Alvin Sorel (Jacques Monseau), a seminarian who takes great pride in his calling, his celibacy and his chess playing abilities. There's beautiful but sloth-like blonde Regine (Shirley Corrigan) and her lustful, bisexual friend Corinne (Ivana Novak), who considers "collecting" married men a hobby. Rounding out the group is unhappily married couple Nancy (Colette Emanuelle) and Howard (Lorenzo Terzon) Foster. She's wealthy yet envious of all of the beautiful young women, while he's with her only to satisfy his own greed and has a wandering eye that doesn't mind wandering even while his old lady's watching.

All of the guests / victims represent the seven deadly sins (a decade and a half before Se7en got praised for a similar "creative" set-up), though there's enough overlap in some of the characters / sins to put into question just who is what. I've seen different theories and different labels assigned to characters. For instance, Nancy isn't just envious, she's also greedy and angry. And Corinne could be viewed as lustful or envious of married couples, hence why she "especially" goes after men who are taken. However, I think what I have as designations are what was originally intended, going by the bits of dialogue and nonverbal cues we're given.

Ducarte as gluttony, Mason as wrath, Regine as sloth and Alvin as pride are obvious and seldom disputed, but there are a lot of disagreements about the Corinne, Howard and Nancy characters. However, Corinne spends nearly all of her time seducing or having sex (lust), seemingly every other shot of Nancy is her glaring at the younger women, prompting her husband to tell her to stop being so jealous (envy) and Howard is only with Nancy because of her wealth ("My money is all that interests you!") which would put him right in the greed category.

After everyone meets the Baron, gets a grand tour of the castle to learn of its blood-soaked history, are shown to their rooms and begin to settle down to have dinner, yet another guest arrives: a sultry redhead named Lisa Muller (Erika Blanc). The mysterious late visitor is, of course, the oft-mentioned succubus / family curse and proceeds to creep around corridors later that night and murder each of the "sinners" one by one. Her human guise is of a slinky temptress in flesh-baring attire but once her true demonic form emerges she's given a simple but effective slathering of gray grease paint with a few black accents. However, the make-up isn't what sells this creature, it's the actress herself. Not just a pretty face, Blanc is a far more skilled performer than usually given credit for and throws herself into this role, giving a wonderfully expressive, Lon Chaney-esque performance that's highly memorable.

Some of the usual debits that plague similar films are here, including poor dubbing / dialogue and a midsection that drags, but the many pluses help to compensate. There's good Gothic mood thanks to both the setting (the castle has both a scientist's lab where the Baron practices alchemy and a torture chamber in the attic) and the very atmospheric score by Alessandro Alessandroni (with vocals from his wife, Giulia De Mutiis). Some of the murder sequences are fun, including drowning in gold dust and death by guillotine and spiked sarcophagus. And the ending is rather interesting as this explains the true origin of the succubus and goes down a "make a deal with the devil" route that's somewhat unexpected, plus makes great use of unusual-looking character actor Daniel Emilfork in a surprise role. All that combined with Blanc's work makes for an above average film of this type.

This has been one of the major workhorses of Euro-cult cinema for nearly half a century now and, I'd venture to guess, also one of the gateway drugs that's gotten many a viewer into Italian horror in the first place. It was first released in the U.S. as The Devil's Nightmare in 1972, then was re-issued to theaters a second time as Vampire Playgirls in 1980. It popped up on home video countless times both under the first title and a host of other ones like Castle of Death and Succubus. It has been released numerous times on DVD and a halfway decent print was a fixture in many of those low cost multi-movie packs distributed by companies like Brentwood. In other words, this is one of the most readily available and viewed Italian genre films of its era.

There are notable differences between the version with the title screen Devil's Nightmare (the original U.S. VHS release) and the French version with the title screen La terrificante notte del demonio ("The Terrifying Night of the Devil") that's most commonly distributed on DVD nowadays. The Devil's Nightmare print has the opening scenes tinted blue instead of sepia, most of a lesbian scene removed and a few other snips, but it also has more thorough credits. It lists three additional cast members during the opening credits plus has full end credits over shots of the burning bus, while the otherwise more complete French version just ends with a title card saying "Fine."

The Redemption (UK) release has a completely pointless intro featuring British actress Eileen Daly and a couple of blood-soaked topless blondes who fight over a human heart in front of Cannibal Holocaust stills (!?) that you're best off fast-forwarding past. A Blu-ray is slated for release the middle of next month (March 2019) by Mondo Macabro. In edition to all of the different versions of the film, there was also a tie-in novelization by co-writer Patrice Rhomm titled Au service du diable ("In the Service of the Devil"), which is also one of two French-release titles for the film itself. There was also an ultra low budget (10,000 dollar) "remake" in 2012 that no one seems to have watched. 

★★★