Screamtime (1986)

Directed by:

Michael Armstrong (uncredited)

"Al Beresford" (Stanley A. Long)

A trio of independent British shorts (each running less than 30 minutes apiece) were rounded up by someone in the U.S., who then shot silly linking segments and released it all as an anthology. Surprisingly enough, the end result isn't as bad as you might imagine. No one seems to know who shot the American footage, but the shorts were all made by Stanley A. Long, who was primarily known for making Brit sex comedies, including numerous entries in the "Adventures of..." series. According to Long, all three shorts had already played theatrically in the UK as support features prior to being included in this collection. Michael Armstrong (of MARK OF THE DEVIL fame) is sometimes listed as a co-director (perhaps he did the new framing footage?), though he's only credited for the script and casting in the credits. The film begins in New York City as Ed (Vincent Russo) and his buddy Bruce (Michael Gordon) steal three horror videos ("Killer Punch," "Scream House" and "Garden of Blood") from a shop, then head over to their friend Marie's (Marie Scinto) apartment to watch them. After Marie takes a customary shower (apparently she's got a date lined up for later in the evening), the three then settle down on the couch with some beer and chicken legs to check them out...

Story #1 centers around Jack Grimshaw (Robin Bailey), a friendly old man who loves entertaining children with his puppet shows. Unfortunately, his profession isn't quite paying the bills to his wife Lena's (Ann Lynn) satisfaction. She calls him a "born loser," thinks he's been neglecting the family for years, wants him to burn all of his puppets and plans to run off to Canada. Her son from a previous marriage, Damien (Jonathon Morris), is an obnoxious punk who hates his stepfather. One day after a performance, Damien decides to burn down Jack's puppet stand and throw some of his puppets into the ocean. Later that day he's mysteriously killed by someone brandishing a club. The same killer decides to whack Lena to death, and then does the same to a doctor who stops by. Have Jack's puppets come to life for revenge? This one has decent acting, is somewhat fun and has a rather predictable, though satisfactory, twist at the end. If the score sounds familiar, that's because it was stolen from Cronenberg's RABID (1977).

In our second tale, a young couple, Tony (Ian Saynor) and Susan (Yvonne Nicholson) Kingsley, move into an old fixer-upper, which was sold to them by his father. The two are kept up at night by sounds they attribute to mice, red water that fills the bathtub that they attribute to rust and flickering lights they attribute to bad wiring. Soon, strange things that can't be contributed to anything of this Earth begin happening. Susan begins seeing visions of a little boy on a bicycle, the corpse of a dead man in her bed, a young man painting and a man lurking around with a knife. Blood appears on a knife in the kitchen and on a banister. She arranges for psychic Miss Burns (Veronica Doran) to come over and evaluate the home, but she comes up with nothing, and informs Tony that his wife needs to see a shrink. Is the house actually haunted or has Susan gone bonkers? There's an excellent twist at the end. Amazingly, this segment was just recently remade as a feature-length film: Psychosis (2010).

And finally, teen dirt bike racer Gavin Martin (David Van Day, from the UK pop duo Dollar) is having financial problems and isn't making enough money at his current job at a menswear store. His mechanic brother Tim (Matthew Peters) spots an ad in a trade paper for a general handyman and gardener. Gavin decides to apply for the position and ends up at large home that was reputedly built as early as the 16th Century. His new employers; Mildred (Jean Anderson) and Emma (a scenery-chewing Dora Bryan) Hurley quickly fill Gavin in on the bizarre history of the place. Supposedly, a noblewoman named Lady Anne made a contract with some evil fairies to give them the souls of her discarded lovers. When Gavin, Tim and Tim's co-workers Frank (Gary Linley) decide to break in an rob the home, they end up coming across fairies (basically shown as specks of light), killer garden gnomes, ghosts and Lady Anne (Kim Thomson) herself. It's somewhat original, I guess, and one sequence copies Piper Laurie's demise in Carrie.

Things return to our trio in New York, as what they've seen in the horror videos come back to kill them. It was originally released in on VHS by Lightning Video. The DVD (which is a video transfer) is from Event Media UK.

★★1/2

Vierges et vampires (1971)

... aka: Caged Vampires
... aka: Caged Virgins
... aka: Dungeon of Terror
... aka: Requiem for a Vampire
... aka: Requiem pour un vampire
... aka: Sex Vampires
... aka: Virgins and the Vampires

Directed by:
Jean Rollin

French director Jean Rollin achieved minor cult fame for a series of 'arty erotic horror' films he made in Europe from 1967 into the new millennium. I've not seen many of these, but I didn't particularly care for most of the ones I have, including the director's very first genre film THE RAPE OF THE VAMPIRE (1967), a jumbled mess that started as a short but was poorly bloated to feature length, and his best-circulated title ZOMBIE LAKE (1980), which is (deservedly) known as one of the worst zombie films ever produced. Requiem (one of the few Rollin films to be released theatrically in America [under the title Caged Virgins]) unfortunately does little to really change my opinion about him.

After a New Years party, Marie (Marie-Pierre Castel) and Michelle (Mireille Dargent), a pair of teenage, bisexual, pistol-packin' criminals dressed as clowns, and their male accomplice, try to evade another car during a gunfight. He suggests they turn down a dirt road before being shot and killed. The girls manage to get away, cover the car with gasoline and then set it on fire. They stop in a run-down home briefly to change into miniskirts and pigtails. One girl tempts a food truck worker with sex so she and her friend can get free french fries (?) before they head off to a graveyard to snuggle on top of a grave. When some men show up, one of the girls accidentally falls into an open grave and is almost buried alive. Some skulls and bats scare them away and they head out into the woods, eventually coming across a large, crumbling chateau. The girls locate a bed, get naked and start rubbing each other.

Upon further exploring the chateau, the girls discover skeletal monks, bloody hands protruding through the walls and a cult of aristrocratic bloodsuckers who plan on using the girls to carry on their race. Well, sort of. The sullen vampire leader (who doesn't leave the cemetery mausoleum) actually doesn't want to carry on the race, but the others do. There's one female helper (Louise Dhour) who plays the piano, can go out during the daytime and plots to use the girls to lure victims back to the chateau, as well as a female vampire (Dominique Toussaint) with plastic fangs and three thugish men who rape hairy-armpitted women chained up in a torture chamber. Rubber bats attached to victims can hypnotize them, and in one sequence a bat even attaches itself to a woman's vagina and drinks blood from there (!) The girls unsuccessfully try to escape three or four times and are eventually bitten, though it takes awhile for them to actually become vampires. Well actually, they never really do become vampires.

The film tries to establish some kind of rule about how one cannot be a vampire and a virgin simultaneously. Either way, Michelle (who takes to the vampires) and Marie (who doesn't) both seduce men wandering through the cemetery, though Marie quickly falls in love with her prey (Philippe Gasté) and doesn't want to kill him.

It's very slow-moving, thinly-plotted and often awkward, there's little dialogue and many long, unbroken takes of people walking around that last for minutes at a time. Almost nothing of note really happens during the first 40 minutes and the second half, the vampire portion, fails to provide much in the way of excitement, character insight or plot interest. Thanks to some simple red and green lighting effects, some lovely outdoor shooting locations and the occasional nice camera shot (the director does have a nice eye for framing shots and probably would have made a better still photographer than an actual filmmaker), some will undoubtedly refer to this as a work of art. Others will just see it as a flimsy, yawn-inducing, meandering excuse to feature naked, innocent-looking girls being chained up, whipped and abused. And in a way, both camps would be correct.

The DVD is from Redemption, which provides English audio or French audio with English subs options, as well as a few trailers and a stills gallery. The print quality is pretty mediocre.

★★

Thrill Killer (1965)

... aka: Follow That Skirt

Directed by:
Richard W. Bomont

Herschell Gordon Lewis began his film career making silly, harmless nudie movies before hitting upon another profitable idea - the gore film. The result was Blood Feast (1963), which (despite being awful) raked in a ton of money at drive-ins and had audiences clamoring for more gross-out flicks. Many of Lewis' films (both the nudies and his earlier gore films) were produced by a man named David A. Friedman, who also worked in other capacities (he has credits for writing and sound) on these. Though I originally had this film incorrectly credited to Lewis and Friedman because it is similar in many ways to films both were involved in around this same time, it's recently been pointed out to me that neither had a hand in the creation of this one (thanks to Casey for pointing this out!). Unlike the Lewis / Friedman films of the early 60s, which were either gore OR nudie films, this one went a step further by blending the bloodshed with the gratuitous nudity; something the initial "gore trilogy" didn't do, though Lewis would eventually mix sex 'n' violence in later films like THE GORE GORE GIRLS (1972). Either way, this title doesn't appear to have been finished. It runs just under half-an-hour and there is no sound. There were probably plans of dubbing it all in later but, as is, there's a non-stop lounge music soundtrack that isn't very appropriate for the material plus some highly ridiculous and schizophrenic narration told from the point of view of the killer.

Opening with brief flashes of the killings we're about to see, plus some news headlines ("Thrill Killer!"), we meet a suit-and-sunglasses-wearing voyeuristic psycho named Dale (Dale West), who gets off on stalking and murdering attractive large-breasted women. Red-head Helen Rogers picks up her dry-cleaning, Dale sneaks a peak at her address from the receipt slip and then decides to pay poor Helen a visit. After she changes out of her clothes, she's stabbed to death. Next up is a nameless brunette, who sunbathes and is strangled after stripping down to her granny panties and changing bras. After her is a blonde. The narrator adds: "This is Betty Watson, model. She will change her clothes and lay in the sun as she's always done. Only today she will have company; a man who hates woman. Because he wants to be one himself." Yes, she does change clothes. Three different times. Finally, she gets stabbed to death in her bathtub.

Dale then returns home, where we learn he's a catty schizophrenic cross-dresser who kills women because he's jealous of how pretty they are ("Now I'll show them they're not the only ones with beauty!"). He puts on make-up, panties, a bra, stockings, a dress, a wig and wraps his head in a scarf and gets ready to head out ("There, who can tell the difference? Now I'll leave and show the world!"). As he opens the door, a cop is there waiting for him. The end. While there's the germ of a fun movie here, nudity from three decent-looking ladies and a couple of amusing moments, it's not nearly as much fun as it sounds and somehow manages to seriously drag at just 30 minutes. I couldn't imagine how grueling it would be as a full-length feature!

It's available as one of four short subjects on Something Weird's compilation DVD The Weird World of Weird. One of the other shorts is a hilariously awful 60s sitcom pilot called Rosie, which features a talking dog entering the lives of a Leave It to Beaver-style family. So why didn't it catch on? Probably because "Rosie" is played by a human (Phil Leeds) dressed in a dog costume and the costume looks like... a horrifying werewolf! Seeing a man in a shaggy suit looking through peep holes and crawling around on all fours is actually pretty damn creepy, so it's a shame this one didn't catch on. We also get a look at The Weird World of Weird, a pilot for series exploring psychic phenomena, astrology, witchcraft and the occult. It's hosted by Ralph Story and featuring special appearances by Linda Kaye Henning, Pamela Mason, Terry Moore, Criswell, Ann Francis, author Jean Rejaunier, Tige Andrews and Anton LaVey. The DVD concludes with twenty-minutes worth of footage from The Smut Peddler, a film which gained some notoriety for its trailer but is missing in its entirety.

And no, that above isn't an official poster. I just threw it together because there are no promotional materials for this one. I've read claims that the film played in only one theater in San Francisco before being stuck on a shelf somewhere. The credits also add a bit of confusion. The opening title card calls it Follow That Skirt but the closing credits call it Thrill Killer. Since Follow That Skirt reminds me too much of the Sesame Street Movie Follow That Bird, I decided to go ahead and used the other option.

★

Una gota de sangre para morir amando (1972)

... aka: Clockwork Terror
... aka: Dead Angel
... aka: Murder in a Blue World
... aka: To Love, Perhaps to Die

Directed by:
Eloy de la Iglesia

A truly oddball (and tough to categorize) little film, this revolves around both a serial killer ("an unknown killer of young people") and behavior modification experiments being conducted to help reduce criminal activity. It's set sometime in the future and the appropriate look and feel are achieved through bizarre set design and even more bizarre new broadcasts (where the announcer expounds on the virtues of "the perfect race") and commercials (including one for something called "Blue Drink;" "the natural product of nature!"), which are constantly playing on TV sets throughout the film. Even stranger are the amount of Stanley Kubrick film references on hand. During one bizarre sequence, four whip-wielding thugs dressed in black leather outfits and red helmets arrive at an ultra modern house and terrorize the family living there. They trash their furniture, make the husband bark like a dog, whip the wife and then drag both of them off to separate bedrooms to rape them. Yes, this is certainly copying the famous home invasion scene from A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971), but the director has absolutely no problem stating his sources. The couple have just sat down to watch Kubrick's film before they're attacked!

Elsewhere, well-scrubbed blonde Ana Vernia (Sue Lyon), who inherited much from her deceased parents and lives alone in a gated mansion guarded by dogs, has just won a special award for completing her "health officer" studies. Her friend, Dr. Victor Sender (Jean Sorel), a professor in clinical psychotherapy who'd no doubt like to be more than just friends with Ana, thinks she's smart enough to be a doctor. Ana however claims that she's not as much interested in the technical aspects of health care as she is the compassionate ones... which might explain why she's something of an accomplished serial killer! Because her victims are all good-looking young men between the ages of 17 and 25, the press and police have it all wrong that the killer responsible has "tendencies toward homosexuality." Because of their erroneous assumptions, Ana easily gets away with her 'caring nurse by day / murderess by night' routine. That is, until someone accidentally catches on to what she's doing.

Ana utilizes a wide variety of disguises to help lure men into her clutches, seduces them and then stabs them through the heart with a scalpel immediately after sex (and listening to their heartbeat). During one scene, she dresses up as an old woman and goes to a brothel, where she hires over-the-hill underwear model / gigolo Bruno (Charly Bravo) to accompany her home. In another scene, she dresses up as a lesbian in a short black wig and suit, goes to a gay bar and picks up a young guy (Alfredo Alba) who seems to be unsure of (or just fighting against) his sexual orientation. Meanwhile, David (Christopher Mitchum), one of the leather-clad thugs seen in the home invasion scene, has managed to turn all his juvenile delinquent friends against him. Desperate for money, he lucks out in discovering Ana disposing of one of her victims in the river. He sneaks over to her house, watches as she kills another man and then blackmails her to get money and a new motorcycle. Things come to a head at the lab, after David is severely beaten by his gang and is left at the mercy of Ana in the hospital where she works.

The connections to Kubrick extend beyond the droog-like juvenile delinquents and attempted shock treatment cures to criminal impulses (which amusingly backfire during the bloody conclusion), but to the presence of Sue Lyon, star of Kubrick's LOLITA (1962). There are many nods to that film, including a play on the famous sunglasses scene, as well as an actual copy of Vladimir Nabokov's book seen several times.

I'm not even sure what to make of all of this, or what the actual point (aside from those already established in Kubrick's ACO) is, but it's all very interesting to watch play out. de la Iglesia is one of those European directors you hear very little about here in America. He never achieved much notoriety here, and is pretty much only known for the good, though misleadingly-titled, CANNIBAL MAN (1971). However, tracking down copies of his other films has been worthwhile. A gay director, he'd often infuse his films with gay subtext (sometimes subtlely, sometimes more blatantly [as seen here]), and really brought a fresh perspective to many thrillers as a result. See also: THE GLASS CEILING (1971), NO ONE HEARD THE SCREAM (1973).

One of the major letdowns are our trio of lead actors. Lyon, Mitchum and Sorel all act like they don't even want to be here and give wooden, forgettable performances. The cast also includes Ramón Pons as a victim Ana picks up at an auction, Antonio del Real, David Carpenter (THE KILLER IS NOT ALONE) and Ramón Fernández Tejela as David's punk friends, Fernando Hilbeck and Eduardo Calvo.

★★1/2