Horror (1963)

... aka: Blancheville Monster, The
... aka: Démoniac
... aka: Edgar Allan Poe: Horror
... aka: Edgar Allan Poe's Horror
... aka: Horror: The Blancheville Monster
... aka: Le manoir de la terreur (The Mansion of Terror)

Directed by:
"Martin Herbert" (Alberto De Martino)

A week before her 21st birthday, Emilie De Blancheville (“Joan Hills” / Ombretta Colli) returns to her family castle in England for the first time in many years, bringing along her best friend Alice Taylor (Irán Eory), who she met in college in America, and Alice's brother John (“Richard Davis” / Vanni Materassi). Since her father was burned to death in a fire while she was away, or so she's been told, Emilie's brother Rodéric (Gérard Tichy) has taken over and there have been a number of big changes made in the interim. For starters, all of the staff members Emilie remembers from her childhood are gone and they've all been replaced by a mysterious and shady new group of servants. The new housekeeper is Miss Eleonore (Helga Liné) who, despite being gorgeous and not the old crone usually seen in these films, is so solemn and sinister she manages to give Emilie a fright by just standing there, and new butler Alistair ("Frank Moran" / Paco Morán) isn't much better. The family physician, who'd treated the past three generations of the De Blancheville family has also been replaced by a newer / younger model in Doctor LaRouche (Leo Anchóriz).

During dinner, the visitors hear some strange noises that Rodéric tells them are dogs. Later that night, Alice wakes from her sleep to go on a midnight stroll, only to stumble upon some strange goings-on in the tower involving Eleonore, a syringe and a wailing, disfigured “monster.” Alice passes out, wakes in her bed and is told it was all in her imagination. Later, Rodéric gathers everyone together and finally spills the beans. The father wasn't actually killed in the fire; only severely disfigured and turned into a raving maniac in need of constant sedation. After Alice interrupted Eleonore giving him his treatment, he escaped into the woods and is now haunting the grounds. Carved on the headstone of the family tomb is a prophecy that states that the De Blancheville bloodline is set to end during this generation when the last female descendant reaches the age of 21. Now that her father is a grotesque madman, some believe he'd like to make the prophecy come true.

A search party is organized to scour the woods looking for the father but they can find no trace of him. That night, he pays a visit to Emilie, hypnotizes her and leads her outside to the family tomb and tries to temp her to crawl into her grave to experience “the sweetness of death.” Luckily for her, both the butler and the doctor saw her leave the castle and followed them there, which sends the father running off before he can complete his task. The next day, Emilie wakes up with a muddy nightgown feeling very peculiar, disoriented and with no idea what had happened the night before. She's not quite the same after that, starts having fainting spells and falls into a depression. Alice and her brother John (who's fallen in love with Emilie) attempt to find out just what's going on. Is her father really lurking around trying to fulfill the family prophecy? Is she being driven mad? Is she being slowly poisoned? Is someone making good use of Franz Anton Mesmer's book Hypnotism and Magnetism?

I consider myself a pretty patient person, but this dreary little mystery takes so long to really kick into gear it's going to make most people check out long before any of the better sequences even occur. Instead of the moody Gothic horror we all came to see, for a good hour we are treated to something more akin to a Gothic soap opera. It's talky, set bound and filled with the usual shady characters played by actors attempting to give off an ambiguously suspicious vibe. The numerous romantic entanglements get to be a bit much as well. Of course, Emilie and John have their thing but then we have the doctor falling in love with Alice who's already in love with Rodéric who already has a thing going on with Eleonore who's also got something going on with... Yeah, you get the picture.

Not that this doesn't have its moments. There's good, high contrast, shadow-filled black-and-white photography courtesy of Alejandro Ulloa, decent art direction, lots of candlelit strolls down dark corridors and all of the expected atmospheric Gothic accoutrements. At around the hour mark, there's a pretty good Corman-esque nightmare sequence shot on blank sets with lots of fog and use of superimposition. The last fifteen minutes are pretty solid, with all of the story threads getting adequately tied together. It helps that some of these later scenes take us outside the dreary castle to an amazing old crumbling church that looks identical to the main shooting location used in the first Blind Dead film. Hell, it may even be the same exact location. That place is far too cool not to show up in other horror films shot in Spain.

Shades of Edgar Allan Poe abound, as this pinches ideas from several of his stories, most obviously The Fall of the House of Usher, but also a little Premature Burial toward the end. Interestingly, Poe's name is nowhere in the film's actual credits but was used extensively in the advertising, with many posters placing his name right above the title.

The cast is fairly decent in this one and there are a number of lovely actresses on hand. Former beauty queen Eory (who was born Elvira Teresa Eory Sidi and took her stage name from her country of birth) and Colli, a frequent presence in peplum and sci-fi films for a number of years before becoming a singer and eventually a politician, are nothing to sneeze at. Hell, Colli even does the late night corridor shuffle at one point clad in a sheer nightgown that doesn't leave much to the imagination. However, it's the presence of a completely buttoned-up Liné (in her first genre role) that garners the most attention. Like Barbara Steele, this woman was absolutely perfect for these kind of films so it's no wonder she landed many other similar roles throughout her career. She's pretty much matched in the sinister department by Anchóriz in what was sadly his only horror role. How this man never got cast as Satan at least once in his career is beyond me.

Though a cut English-dubbed version was distributed by AIP for TV showings, this took forever to get a home video release here in America. That wouldn't occur until a rather shoddy print (the same dubbed AIP-TV cut) popped up on numerous cheap sets distributed by Alpha and Mill Creek in the mid 2000s. There are differences between the various releases but only minor ones, including a different opening sequence depending on which version you see. The British theatrical cut (which has the alternate opening not seen in the U.S. version) was made available on DVD by Retromedia in 2013, which was the best-quality version of the film up to that point. In France, they got a sepia-tinted VHS release in the 80s under the title Démoniac (Delta Video) and, in 2015, a widescreen remastered DVD under the title Le manoir de la terreur. Unfortunately, the latter doesn't come with an English option but the Retromedia release was just fine by my standards.

★★

Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973)

... aka: Graveyard Tramps

Directed by:
Denis Sanders

A man with no previous history of heart trouble is found dead of a heart attack in his hotel room. Cause of death? Well, according to the coroner something like "extreme sexual exhaustion," or, in layman's terms, he's been screwed to death. And thus begins a series of strange events in a small California town called Peckham that will soon have a large body count attached to its name. Neil Agar (William Smith), a government agent with the U.S. Department of Security, shows up to investigate the death of the first victim (another government employee) and teams up with both local law enforcement officer Captain Peters (the always great Cliff Osmond, previous seen in the women-in-prison favorite Sweet Sugar) and meek, reserved lab archivist Julie Zorn (Victoria Vetri aka 1968 Playboy Playmate of the Year "Angela Dorian," in her final film role) to get to the bottom of things. As more dead bodies turn up, clues eventually lead them back to the Brandt Research Facility, where mysterious, shade-wearing beauty Dr. Susan Harris (an incredibly enticing Anitra Ford) is up to some rather bizarre experiments.

This is a great example of a well-executed drive-in movie. It certainly doesn't qualify as a so-bad-it's-good film like some have stated simply because it's technically well-made and completely self-aware of what it is. The makers are certainly in on the joke and just decide to run with it; injecting humor whenever possibly without compromising the flow of the plot. I laughed a lot watching this and much of the dialogue is intentionally tongue-in-cheek and goofy. However, the primary objective here is sexploitation and this doesn't skimp on that either with the sultry, slinky and gorgeous Ford (a former showcase model on The Price Is Right), the voluptuous Vetri and nearly every other female in the cast losing their clothes at one point or another. Bee Girls pretty much nails its goal of being a silly, fun T&A spoof of horror and science fiction films and, surprisingly enough, even many "serious" critics like Roger Ebert and Leonard Maltin have sung its praises over the years.

The bee girls themselves aren't really monsters in the traditional sense like, say, The Wasp Woman from the classic Corman film, so don't go in expecting it. Instead, these lethal ladies just wear sunglasses when they're about to kill because their eyeballs turn black. We never really get to see any of them in the act of killing one of their victims either, but we do get to see a hilarious and awesome conversion sequence toward the end that involves spreading a nude woman with some sticky white substance, putting her in a radioactive chamber, covering her with bees and then shooting her with a laser beam.

I also have to defend this movie on several other fronts, in particular frequent digs at the acting and cinematography. The performances are actually not at all awful like some out there will say. If you want awful, watch one of today's low budget movies and you'll quickly realize the people in this one are like Oscar contenders by comparison. I thought each of the leads did a good enough job with what they had to work with. Secondly, the film is also not as dark and poorly shot as some state. My guess is that they've watched the public domain print of the film and not the legit DVD version from MGM (part of their "Midnite Movies" line). The late Gary Graver shot the movie and did a competent job of it. I also loved the music score from Charles Bernstein, which is delightfully bizarre and perfect for the material.

The supporting cast includes lots of exploitation movie vets like Ben Hammer, Cliff Emmich, Beverly Powers and Ray Dennis Steckler and Ted V. Mikels alum Herb Robins. Some of the "worker bees" are played by sex film stars Rene Bond, Sharon Kelly (later hardcore actress Colleen Brennan) and Kathy Hilton. Writer Nicholas Meyer would receive a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination just a few years later for The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976) and went on to a fairly successful career as a director starting with Time After Time (1979).

★★★