Flesh and the Fiends, The (1960)

... aka: Fiendish Ghouls, The

... aka: Mania

... aka: Psycho Killers

Directed by:

John Gilling

Unpleasant, extremely atmospheric and very well-acted retelling of the Burke and Hare "West Port Murders" serial killings, which took place in an eighteen month period between 1827 and 1828 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Outwardly-respectable doctor/ anatomy teacher Robert Knox (Peter Cushing) isn't content with only occasionally getting the corpses of executed criminals, so he secretly employs shady Irish grave-robbers Burke (George Rose) and Hare (Donald Pleasence), who go about murdering drunks, bums and prostitutes who frequent a local tavern to procure fresh corpses for their employer. Knox doesn't ask too many questions about where the bodies are actually coming from, nor does he seem to particularly care where they're coming from, but his assistant Dr. Geoffrey Mitchell (Dermot Walsh), who has just begun dating Knox's niece Martha (June Laverick), begins to voice suspicions that fall on deaf ears. John Cairney co-stars as a flunky med school student involved in a doomed romance with a brassy bar girl played by Billie Whitelaw (that evil nanny from The Omen, in an early role) and Renee Houston plays Hare's sour wife, who casually assists the men in the killings. Though the horror fan in me wants to single out Cushing and Pleasence's contributions to this film, it's futile to do so since everyone listed above does equally fine work here and it's really the entire ensemble that drives home this material.

Another of the films great strengths is its evocative period detail, with John Elphick's elaborate art direction, Monty Berman's sharply dark / inky photography and Laura Nightingale's costuming combining to create a seedy, grimy, impoverished environment; a believable breeding ground for casual killings for profit. The contrast between the elite few of the upper class and science community with the depressing living conditions of your everyday average Joe is well played, and the film raises issue to some interesting topics involving medical ethics and whom one might deem worthless or disposable within a given society.

The Burke and Hare incident would go on to inspire many books, stories and films over the years. The first known TV adaptation was a 1939 BBC production titled The Anatomist. Later episodes of the American TV shows Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone were also dedicated to the same subject. The first theatrical film to directly take on the real-incident was 1948's Crimes of Burke and Hare, starring Tod Slaughter. Unfortunately, the British Board of Censors rejected the film and forced the filmmakers to re-dub and remove all references to Burke and Hare before it would issue a release certificate. The film was then re-titled The Greed of William Hart in the UK and Horror Maniacs in the US. Following that were THE ANATOMIST in 1956 (part of the ITV Play of the Week TV series in the UK), The Horrors of Burke and Hare in 1972, The Doctor and the Devils (a virtual remake of Flesh and the Fiends) in 1985 and others. In addition, Burke and Hare inspired Robert Louis Stevenson's short story "The Body Snatcher," which itself would be filmed several times, most notably in 1945 by Robert Wise (which was produced by Val Lewton and starred Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi).

Copyright date for this film is 1959; though it wasn't released until 1960 (the U.S. theatrical title was Mania). It will be making its debut on my Top 10 list for 1960 at #9.

★★★

Ai sha (1981)

...aka: Love Massacre Directed by: Patrick Tam I've never seen the point of always using white subtitles. Why can't they use yellow or neon green or some other color instead? Sure, white is fine for darkly shot films and sure, it might look less tacky than a more gaudy color, but for films like this one - which mostly takes place in the daytime and features characters constantly wearing white clothing and cropped shots with white pillows and white tableclothes constantly showing up at the bottom of the screen - using white subs is an extremely poor choice. On the plus side, this one's not hard to follow even when you miss some of the dialogue. It's your garden variety "psycho lover" flick; a subgenre of horror that features a protagonist dating, marrying and/or having sex with a seemingly normal person who turns out to be a psycho who then terrorizes them. Clint Eastwood's PLAY MISTY FOR ME (1971), about a radio being stalked by an unstable former listener/lover, is one of the earliest contemporary examples of this subgenre. Years later we'd have such box office hits as FATAL ATTRACTION (1987) and BASIC INSTINCT (1992), which then spearheaded a huge amount of direct-to-video or cable "erotic thrillers" with almost identical plotlines. LOVE MASSACRE is a fairly early example of this kind of film. It's a Hong Kong production that was filmed in the United States in 1981. There's no nudity or eroticism like in the later films, but there is a decent amount of violence if you can wade past the incredibly slow first hour. Emotionally disturbed college student Joy (Tina Lau) slashes her wrists when her boyfriend breaks up with her. She recovers from the attempted suicide, but suffers from bad headaches and fainting spells and seems to strongly disapprove of her friend Ivy (Brigitte Lin), who attends the same California college she does, dating her brother Chiu Chung (Kuo Chu Chang). Joy is killed in a car accident and Chiu Chung tells Ivy he needs to return to Hong Kong for an extended stay but will be back. While he's gone, Ivy learns some surprising things about her new boyfriend. For starters, he forgot to tell her that he's already married and has a child back in Taiwan. He also forgot to mention that he and his sister were institutionalized at one point and both suffer from a "hereditary" psycho disorder. Ivy reads in the Hong Kong paper than an unemployed engineer had killed his wife and then disappeared. Putting two and two together, she comes to the conclusion that Chiu Chung is the nutjob responsible. Unfortunately for her, he's already headed back to the U.S. to ask for her hand in marriage. Chiu Chung shows up, starts acting psycho and confesses he'd killed his family so he can be with her. Ivy flees and goes and visits her photographer friend Louie (Charlie Chin). Meanwhile, Chiu Chung decides to break into Ivy's dorm. When he discovers she's not there he decides to pass the time by grabbing a kitchen knife and slaughtering all of her housemates. He gathers them all up, ties and gags them, then begins killing them one by one. One is slashed to death in bed, another gets her head slammed in a door, a throat is slashed, a neck is snapped and a face gets stabbed through a pillow. I don't know if I got ahold of a cut version or this or not, but the camera seems to cut away each time the murders threaten to get too violent. You'll see the beginning of each kill, but then it quickly cuts away before it can get gory. The editing in these scenes is terrible. Ivy eventually shows up and encounters a blood-soaked Chiu Chung on the rooftop for the big finale. It's a seldom-seen film here in the States, but I definitely wouldn't go out of my way to acquire a copy of this one. The acting's mediocre, the premise is worn out and this thing takes forever to get going. In fact, the big dorm massacre doesn't take place until the last 20 minutes. The rest of the time is spent setting up the fact that the boyfriend is a psycho, which is something pretty evident early on in the film. The director and cameraman do at least try to be artistic at times, and occasionally manage to spice up this otherwise ordinary film, just not nearly often for this to be of much interest. The cast includes Patrick Kong Lung (who also co-produced the film) and Ann Hui (who'd go to an acclaimed career as an award-winning director). I also need to point out that the other websites I visited list this as being solely a drama, when it's most definitely a horror/thriller.

  ★★

Suffer, Little Children (1983)

Directed by:

Alan Briggs

Made by the students in writer/ producer Meg Shanks' Drama School, this no-budget, shot-on-video British production (which claims to be based on a true story!) is so inept that it's taken on new life as a minor camp classic in the UK. It was never released here in the United States (or probably anywhere else outside England for that matter), but thankfully we live in an age where previously impossible-to-find junk is now easy-to-find junk so we can all suffer, suffer, suffer little viewers through amateur home videos such as this! At Sullivans Children's Home, a school/home for orphans, a weird, mute little girl named Elizabeth (Nicola Diana) is left on the doorstep with a note from her mother saying she can no longer care for her. The school administrators; uptight, straight-laced Maurice (Colin Chamberlain) and blonde free spirit Jenny (Ginny Rose) welcome the girl with open arms despite the fact she seems like she'd be better off at a special needs school. Elizabeth turns out to be an evil Satanic moppet with telekinetic abilities who immediately gets to work raising a little hell. She slams a girl into a door, knocks a boy down the stairs, forces a girl to stab herself in the leg, moves furniture, turns two of the girls into her mindless slaves by making them have a nightmare about zombies and causes others to scream, fight, freak out and eventually kill.

Meanwhile, Mick Philips (Jon Hollanz), a pop star who grew up in the orphanage, pays a special visit, plans a charity concert and takes Jenny on a date to a punk club called "Cloud Busters" where a bunch of Boy George look-a-likes dance horribly to reggae music. As their romance blossoms, Elizabeth's army of pre-teen Satanists is growing. She has special ceremonies lit with candles and a strobe light, where her followers pound their fists in the air while screaming "Come, Devil, Come!" and little Liz shrieks in an EXORCIST-like possession voice. If that's not enough, just wait until the big finale where... drum roll, please... Jesus Christ himself (complete with his crown of thorns) makes a special guest appearance to ward off the evil by pointing his almighty finger at them, which results in a cheesy laser beam sound effect and the kids screaming even more than they already have been while apparently having the evil spirits driven from their bodies. Wow.

Watch as every filmmaking sin in the book is committed before your very eyes in a video that makes absolutely no sense, is full of continuity errors, flubbed lines, horrible editing cuts and issues with the lighting, camerawork, sound recording and every other possible technical aspect that goes into making a film. In many of the scenes, it seems like about ten characters are all talking at once, over top one another, and it's impossible to really make out what anyone is saying as a result. In other scenes, the music almost completely drowns out the dialogue, which might actually be a blessing. But on the plus side, they were smart enough to record a "Suffer, Little Children" theme song and it's hilarious! During the end credits, the movie also makes sure to acknowledge all the films (CARRIE, PSYCHO, HALLOWEEN, etc.) it was "inspired" by, as well as thanking the parents of the young actors for allowing their children to embarrass themselves in a cheap horror video.

.

Apparently it was released on VHS in 1985 by the UK label FGL (Films Galore, Ltd.), though I can find no scans of an actual box anywhere online to prove this.

★ SBIG

Superstition (1982)

...aka: House of Mary, The

...aka: Witch, The

Directed by:

James W. Roberson

Another unfortunate entry in the "could have been so much better" sweepstakes. Here we have the ground work for at least a passable haunted house flick. The budget seems to be decent. The cast seems to be decent. There is a high body count and plenty of gory, creative murder sequences. The locations and art direction are good. The director, best known as a cinematographer, has the expected good eye for scene composition and detail. The film itself has three different cinematographers credited, and they do a fine job giving this film a polished and atmospheric look. So what went wrong? For starters, while the director may have a nice visual sense, he has absolutely no idea how to work with actors, and elicits one bad performance after another from dependable actors and actresses who have been brilliant in other's hands. The score is pretty schizophrenic, fluctuating from a re-mixed version of the "Rocky Mountains" tune from THE SHINING (it's pretty much the same but with a few bell chimes added) to some annoying chanting a la THE OMEN and then on to some very light sounding track that would be more at home in some buddy cop movie.

However, the film's real unraveling happens in the screenplay department. The derivative storyline basically tries to mix the first two AMITYVILLE films (troubled family moves into a new haunted house) with the aforementioned OMEN (gory supernatural death scenes), but that's not the real problem here. What is the real problem is that a good deal of the dialogue is moronic and, even worse, the character actions are so consistently idiotic, pathetic and unrealistic you'll find yourself wondering how this project even managed to leave the script stage when three or four more rewrites were obviously needed. I can usually forgive one or two lapses in logic, but when a film is completely cluttered with such obvious stupidity, it's just plain lazy writing. So while some competent folks worked on this film, their efforts sadlly were in collective vain thanks to piss poor writing. All you end up watching is 90 minutes of stupid people doing stupid things. Well, 90 minutes of stupid people doing stupid things that looks more professional than it deserves to.

After a promising opening double-murder sequence of pranksters getting killed (one is decapitated and has his head blown to bits in a microwave and the other gets split in half by a window), very friendly clergyman David (James Houghton, giving a sincere and likable performance, considering) and reverend Henry (Stacy Keach, Sr.) start making preparations to move a reverend and his family into the cursed lakeside home. Yep, despite the fact many have died in this place and the murders have gone completely unsolved, they're not quite ready to bring in the bulldozers. Not yet. About ten more people need to needlessly die first, including a couple of children. And I didn't even mention creepy old caretaker Elvira (Jacquelyn Hyde), her hulking retarded/mute son (who cops seem to want to blame for the killings) or the lil girl ghosty dressed in white who pops up out of nowhere from time to time. Red flags! Red flags!

Early on, someone states: "What about the violent history this place is supposed to have had?" Wait a minute... "supposed to have had?" Before the new family even enters through the front doors, David and the reverend are sitting in an office discussing dismembered teen corpses found in the house with a detective (Albert Salmi). And then a cop mysteriously drowns in the lake. And then the reverend himself is killed during renovations when a circular blade comes off the saw, miraculously flies across a room, hits him in the chest and then continues to saw away until it goes through his body. This being a blade that's not even attached to the saw anymore. Even stranger is that this obviously supernatural event is in full view of David and about a half dozen construction workers, who do nothing except gasp in horror. Oh well, I guess things will suddenly just change once the family gets here!

.

So recovering alcoholic dad (Larry Pennell), mom (Lynn Carlin, who was excellent in DEATHDREAM but seems completely lost here) and their three kids (teen daughters Heidi Bohay and Maylo McCaslin and young son Bobby Jacoby) lay the welcome matt and then it's time for more of the same. While they're still unpacking, a repairman is hung by cables in what appears to be an elevator shaft (?!) inside the home. No one even seems to notice and no one ever shows up looking for the poor feller. Both the son and the youngest of the daughters, as well as David, come into contact with the girl ghost, but no one really makes a big deal about it. I guess if you're moving into a haunted house where people are getting brutally killed right and left, it's best not to question the presence of spirit kids that may have something to do with it. Even so, when one of the daughters emerges from the lake with a severed hand clamped to her ankle, you'd figure it would be a good time to find another place to live. Nope, not yet. First wait first until your little son disappears... and then mom starts getting tossed around in the kitchen by some hooded figure with demon claws... and someone's hammering a stake into your bitchy daughter's forehead. That's the best time to try to leave. You know, when everyone's already dead or in the process of being killed. That's the best time. "Shut your BITCHY mouth!"

"Gee, what a stink!" / "That's rotting flesh!"

"Your decisions are so right. Your will is soooo strong."

Toward the end, there's a lengthy flashback to a late 17th Century witch drowning, which uses a hilarious deep possession voice-over for the sorceress as she vows to get her revenge. "You and all your generations will damn your birth! Anyone who ventures near this plaaaaaaaaace!" Yep, that's what she says. I rewound it five times to make sure I was hearing it correctly. So the drowning happened in the lake... by the house... that the family has moved into. So that's why it's cursed. Obtaining this particular knowledge is enough for David to finally realize the family needs to get out of the house (corpses piling up obviously wasn't a good enough indicator) and he decides to stop being such a passive nimrod and heads there carrying a couple of cans of gasoline. Sadly, the film doesn't even give us an adequate fiery finale, and finally just gets pulled into the lake... kicking and screaming all the way to the bottom.

★1/2

La fille de Dracula (1972)

... aka: Daughter of Dracula

... aka: Dracula's Daughter
... aka: Eine Jungfrau in den Krallen von Vampiren
... aka: Filha de Dracula, A

Directed by:

Jesus Franco

A narrator tells us about how Castle Karlstein is rumored to have been the former home of Count Dracula. Then a woman takes off her top, walks around sipping wine and gets into a bath, where a female vampire attacks her. Afterward, Luisa (Britt Nichols) shows up just in time to have one last conversation with her elderly mother before she passes away. The dying woman tells her daughter that’s she the last descendant of the Karlstein family, then gives her a key to a tower in the family castle, tells her to prepare to see horrible things and then lets her know some of her descendants were vampires. Luisa goes to the tower and finds two coffins inside. The lid blows off one of them and a still-living Count Dracula (Howard Vernon) is inside, shows his fangs and puts the bite to his distant relative. Next thing Luisa knows, she’s attacking strippers and seducing her lonely cousin Karine (Anne Libert) after they reminisce about gouging out a bird’s eye with a needle (!) as children. The ladies go at it during a long lesbian scene while Karine’s father Count Max Karlstein (Daniel White, who also helped compose the score) tickles the ivories and the camera zooms in on parts of the piano, thighs, hands and *a-hem* other parts of the ladies.

Inspector Ptuschko (Alberto Dalbés) shows up to investigate the rising body count of naked women in the area. The Karlstein family secretary, Cyril Jefferson (played by the director) uses silly phrases like “blood-drinking, darkness-despising birds” and is an expert on things of the supernatural, but nobody believes him when he tells them what's going on. Ana Kramer (Yelena Samarina), who runs the local bar and pay-by-the-hour hotel, is married but secretly having an affair with Max. Charlie (Fernando Bilbao), a nosy reporter, is snooping around and doing his own private investigating. Sorry if you’re wanting more vampire action because the film spends more time with the above people than it does with the vampires.

As the vampire count, Vernon unfortunately doesn't get to do anything interesting. Hell, he doesn't even get to leave his coffin since he gets special deliveries made to his tomb from Luisa, who drops a topless barmaid into his coffin for him to feast on. The ending features a stake driven through a forehead instead of a heart. Said ending is also a pathetic, suspense-free non-event (kind of like the rest of this film) where characters just casually stroll into the tomb and kill them and that’s it. I couldn't even see one of Franco’s most staunch supporters defending this dull trash, but I’m sure some of them do. You’d be hard pressed to find a less interesting vampire movie out there. Neither the story line nor the characters generate any interest whatsoever, and the scant horror scenes fail to deliver in atmosphere, chills or bloody good fun. Though it’s fairly well-photographed and utilizes a few nice locations (especially the excellent castle setting, with a long garden full of statues and Autumnal colors leading up to it), there’s not much actual visual style present, unless you count zooming in to crotches or random shots of a beach as being high style.

By conventional standards, the nudity quotient is high, with two fairly long lesbian scenes and two nude victims. However, by Franco early 70s standards it’s actually quite low. I just watched Franco’s THE DEMONS right before this one and, while it’s also not very good, it at least offered loads of nudity, some blood and attempted a period setting and story line. If you absolutely have to watch one of these, chose that one instead. Nichols, who has a very contemporary, almost "supermodel" look about her, is very nice to look at, but it's a shame she happened to stumble upon Franco during this stage of his career.

The title screen on the version I watched (from Bertucci Film Entertainment) was Eine Jungfrau in den Krallen von Vampiren ("A Virgin in the Claws of Vampires"). It has some of the worst English subtitles I’ve seen, which are small, flat and extremely difficult to read. Lina Romay makes her first appearance of many in a Franco film. She’s in the second scene for about 15 seconds and has no dialogue.

★

Las Vegas Blood Bath (1989)

Directed by:
David Schwartz

It doesn't get much worse than this. Businessman Sam Butler (Ari Levin) is in Sacramento on business and decides to go back to his Vegas home early to surprise his wife Ruth (Elizabeth Anderson). Instead, he's the one surprised when he finds out she's screwing a policeman. Sam picks up a gun, shoots them both (offscreen), decapitates his wife (also offscreen) and then mumbles "All women are alike. They just don't deserve to live!" before hitting the Las Vegas Strip in search of "whores" to murder. He picks up a hooker, takes her behind a dumpster, rips off her top, stabs her through the chin and then rips her leg off with his car. He takes his wife's head into a bar, where he shoots the bartender. He then shoots off a guy's middle finger while he flips him off and smashes another guy's head in with a shovel. And for an encore he stalks a bunch of big-haired female oil wrestlers in bikinis giving a baby shower for their pregnant friend, who, according to her friends, actually is a whore. The women are all members of "B.L.O.W." (!), the "Beautiful Ladies of Wrestling" and they even have their own TV show.

Sam barges in, makes one of the girls tie the other ones up with rope and duct tape and then kills them off one by one. The pregnant one is taken upstairs first, has her breasts pulled out and then has her stomach sliced open. Sam then pulls her baby out and throws it against the wall. Another of the girls is dragged upstairs and drilled through the forehead. Others are shot, killed with a hammer and have their arm yanked off. A Jehovah's Witness stops by to get decapitated when the killer karate kicks a door, and finally a policeman pops in for the big surprise ending.

It's stupid, nearly plotless, was shot with a consumer grade camcorder (from all indications no attention was paid to picture, lighting or sound), has some of the worst amateur acting you'll ever see, awful one-liners and is full of cheap gore effects, a few of which admittedly aren't bad for a homemade production such as this. Most of the cast members act like they're not the least bit interested in being in the film and don't even bother trying to show emotion even as they're being attacked and killed. I've seen a few claim this is (or should be) a cult classic, but some people will say that about anything that's cheap and moronic. The biggest laugh I actually got out of the whole thing was during a Vegas street scene when an old woman walking by smiles and waves at the camera.

To my knowledge, this was initially distributed solely in the Vegas area, but then it received an official VHS release from a small company called Burning Moon in 1997. Now it's a DVD fixture on budget packs released by Mill Creek/Pendulum Pictures. The run time is only 67 minutes.

NO STARS!

Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The (1953)

... aka: Dinosaur in New York

... aka: Monster from Beneath the Sea

... aka: Panic in New York

Directed by:

Eugène Lourié

A hydrogen bomb blast in the arctic has unleashed a giant, aquatic "prehistoric beast" (aka Rhedosaurus) and it's about to do some major damage! Swiss Scientist Tom Nesbitt (Paul Christian) is the only living human to actually encounter the monster while working on "Operation Experiment" in the arctic and ends up with a broken leg after it knocks him into a ravine. He's rushed back to a New York City hospital where doctors there label his recollections of the beast as "traumatic hallucinations." After reading about a sea monster sinking a ship in St. Pierre, Nova Scotia, Tom sneaks out of the hospital and seeks help from paleontologist Thurgood Elson (Cecil Kellaway), who initially doubts Tom's theory about the monster being able to survive for 100 millions in a block of ice before becoming unfrozen. Elson's assistant - scientist Lee Hunter (Paula Raymond) - decides to kick things into motion when she has Tom and one of the survivors of a boat attack both pick out pictures of the beast they saw. That, along with various other sightings and attacks, all leading down the East Coast headed toward the United States, is enough proof to get Elson to enlist other scientists and military men, the latter lead by army colonel Jack Evans (Kenneth Tobey) on a sea expedition to locate the dino. Their attempts prove futile and they're unable to stop the beast before it emerges in New York harbor and then goes on a rampage.

The dino tears apart a lighthouse, breaks up a shark vs. octopus fight (by eating both of them) and consumes a diving bell with one of the principal characters on board. But the really great stuff comes when he crashes into the Big Apple, starts stomping on everything, eats a policeman, picks up a car in its mouth and then drops it, buries people under a pile of rubble after crashing through a brick building and destroys a roller coaster, not to mention causing screaming people to stampede over a blind man! It's also revealed that the monster has toxic blood that can kill humans on contact. After the monster's first sweep, a newspaper headline says "180 known dead; 1500 injured. Damage estimated at 300,000,000." And then the stupid military, like they always do, have to come in and spoil all our fun by shooting a bazooka at it, trying to electrocute it and finally having marksman Lee Van Cleef shoot a radioactive isotope missile into its wound.

This is clearly one of the very best '50s monster flicks and obviously a big inspiration for the obscenely popular Japanese Godzilla series that started just one year later, as well as numerous other films made across the globe during the later part of the decade. The movie's chief drawing card, of course, are the spectacular Ray Harryhausen special effects, which are outstanding for their time and still hold up surprisingly well today. Hell, give me Ray's charming stop-motion monsters any day of the week over the cartoonish CGI of today. At least his fx have some personality to them.

On a meager budget of just 200,000 dollars, this went on to gross over 5 million, making it one of the biggest box office successes of its year. Director Lourié (who also co-scripted from a Ray Bradbury story) was a "jack of all trades" in the entertainment industry, serving as a production designer / art director on numerous features, and also dabbling in other production areas. He'd direct several other films; The Colossus of New York (1958), The Giant Behemoth (1959) and Gorgo (1961), all of which were about giant monsters or beings. Lead actor Christian (real name Paul Hubschmid) apparently became "the first Swiss film star" back in the late 1930s and had a very successful career in Germany, though he's virtually unknown here in America except for this film.

The cast also includes many familiar faces from 50s sci-fi/horror, including Donald Woods (13 Ghosts), Steve Brodie (Donovan's Brain), Ross Elliott (Tarantula), King Donovan (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) as a psychiatrist and an uncredited James Best, who'd go on to star in THE KILLER SHREWS (1959) and play "Rosco P. Coltrane" on The Dukes of Hazard. Merv Griffin provides the voice of a radio announcer and Vera Miles appears in the trailer but not in the actual film itself.

★★★1/2