A Hora do Medo (1986)

... aka: Hour of Fear, The

... aka: Time of Fear

Directed by:

Francisco Cavalcanti

José Mojica Marins (uncredited)

Made when hardcore porn had all but completely taken over the Brazilian film industry, this sleazy low budget horror / slasher flick seems like an odd man out for its time, especially seeing how director Cavalcanti was a prolific porn filmmaker and many of the actors were carry-overs from sex films. So what possessed these folks to make a straight horror flick? Well, they actually didn't. It turns out this was originally filmed with explicit sex scenes and the current 71 minute version floating around is a different cut of the film. According to a number of Brazilian sources I consulted, horror legend José Mojica Marins was specifically brought on board to up the horror quotient by filming new bloody murder scenes, which then were used to replace the sex scenes for this special re-edit. And just like that you essentially have two different films to release: a sex film and a non-explicit horror film. Despite filming quite a bit of footage, Marins is listed only as a "supervisão" in the credits of the cut version. I was unable to locate the explicit version to do comparisons but supposedly it's around seven minutes longer. Although most websites also list Marins as a cast member, I didn't spot him anywhere in the film.

Considering who the director is, this unsurprisingly opens with some gratuitous nudity as a woman enjoying a bubble bath soon finds herself in a bloodbath when a pudgy, rosy-cheeked psycho with a very punchable face busts through the door and starts frantically stabbing her with a butcher knife, finally finishing the job by sticking the blade all the way through her neck. Immediately after, an older lady who heard the screaming and commotion from downstairs walks in. She seems oddly calm and composed by the blood-spattered crime scene, and not the least bit horrified. Well, boys will be boys, after all, and it's just her beloved son doing what he does best! Mama (Maria Edelgunde Plautz Wichering) then comforts her sobbing psycho offspring, Albert (Albert Karlinski), assuring him that they'll "find more women for you." The pair then wrap the body in a sheet and bury it in their backyard.

Soon after, Salvador (director Cavalcanti) shows up looking for his missing fiancée, Eliana (Ely Silva). She, of course, is the woman Albert has just killed. Salvador checks in with Eliana's older sister, Lourdes (Selma Petronilia), and discovers that his girlfriend, unbeknownst to him, had been working as a maid for Albert and his mother prior to vanishing. However, when questioned, the mother claims she has no clue who Eliana even is. Thinking his girl has run out on him, Salvador goes to drown his sorrows at a bar ("Women are all liars! Women are all fake!") until he sees a newspaper ad placed by the mother looking to hire a chauffeur. Salvador secures the job and uses that as a way to start snooping around the home.

The psycho mom gleefully listens to her son's various sexcapades through the walls and keeps her late husband's remains in a shallow grave in her backyard so she can dig up the skull and cradle it in her arms whenever she's in the mood. She also has a specially equipped umbrella that shoots poisonous darts out of the tip (!) that she uses it to kill a pimp (Darcy Silva), and then lures the hooker he was just slapping around back to their home to meet her son. Albert promptly drags the girl into the bedroom, starts having sex with her and then smothers her with a pillow after having a childhood flashback of a naked, tied up woman (Priscila [Presley]) being tortured by her lover, Marcelo (Walder Laurentis). It's later revealed that the woman in the flashbacks is his mother in her younger years while Marcelo is his father. After witnessing mom being beaten, having a lit cigar put out on her and getting her ass burned with a red hot iron, young Albert (Fabricio Cavalcanti, the director's son) shot his dad to death.

After setting up an unoriginal and silly, though at least coherent, premise, this turns into a fragmented mess. Albert has some woman over named Cassandra, whom he dubs a "Nymph of the Sacred Bath" (?!) He bathes, dresses, wines and dines her, and then slashes her to death with a broken wine glass. Meanwhile, Mama is seen in the backyard dragging wounded topless blonde Lisa (Regina Andrion) to their ever-growing graveyard. She buries the girl alive, but she manages to dig her way back out so the mother chops her up again, reaches inside her gaping back wound, rips out her heart and then squeezes it ("Stop breathing, whore!") until she finally falls over. Next up on the chopping block is an obnoxious woman they find getting beaten up by a bartender (Clery Cunha) for refusing to pay her tab. She's lured back to the home, where things come to a head when Salvador finally confronts them.

From a quality filmmaking standpoint, this thing is terrible across the board. The plot is weak, the photography and lighting are poor, the acting is bad, most of the score was stolen from THE HOWLING, the editing is awful and the camerawork is mostly static, with lots of long, boring takes used to pad out the time. There's one medium shot set-up looking into the killer's bedroom that's used over and over again, as if they left the camera sitting on a tripod in the same location for the entire day. Actually, that's probably exactly what happened since most of the sex action takes place there.

Even though this isn't good, I'll give it a little credit for one thing: Delivering what fans of sleazy slasher flicks really want to see. There's blood and there's nudity and there's plenty of both. While the gore (including an axe to the back and scissors stuck in a forehead) is OK-ish, the sheer amount of constant full-frontal male and female nudity is through the roof! Nearly everyone (aside from the mother, director / leading man and a few minor characters) gets naked, including the psycho-son, who hilariously spends his last ten screen minutes freaking out, trying to kill another woman and then fighting the hero all while sans clothing. There are also plenty of graphic female nude shots in here.

I could find no evidence that this film was officially released on home video anywhere in the world, even in Brazil. The VHS quality print currently floating around has been recorded off a Brazilian TV station. English fan subs are available. I wouldn't be too horribly surprised to see a better print of this turn up in a Coffin Joe box set one day.

★1/2

Za ryôjoku (1987)

... aka: ザ・凌辱

... aka: Beast-Man (Wolf)

... aka: Hunting Love

... aka: Rape and Torture

Directed by:

Shûji Kataoka

With titles in his arsenal like S&M Hunter, Subway Serial Rape and Female Prisoners: Brutal Treatment, it was only a matter of time until I took a gander at the filmography of this particular director. Working almost exclusively in the pink / erotica movie realm, Kataoka has amassed around sixty directorial credits stretching from the mid 80s until today, though he was much more prolific as a writer, having penned over a hundred scripts for both himself and other directors. It wasn't until I glanced over his filmography that I realized I'd already watched and reviewed a couple of films he was involved in, though not as primary director. He was an assistant director on HIGH NOON RIPPER (1984) and produced Hisayasu Satô's interesting MUSCLE (1989), for instance. Kataoka would win a number of Pink Film Awards for his work, including Best Director and Best Screenplay. Three of his film were even selected as the Best Film of their respective years.

While I can't speak about the quality of his other work, this one is, uh, pretty memorable. Technically, it's not up to much, but it did at least manage to shock me a few times, which isn't easy to do at this stage!

Teenager Eto (Hiromi Saotome) has had a rocky relationship with her twin sister over the years and even welcomes her absence when she goes on a vacation. That all changes when she receives a phone call from a police officer informing her that her sister is dead. Feeling guilty, Eto travels to the small mountain village her sister was visiting when she died to investigate matters. Upon arrival, she learns that her sister wasn't just killed, she was ripped to shreds and mostly consumed by a wolf. Now only miscellaneous parts and skeletal remains are left of her. During an autopsy it's uncovered that she has semen inside of her from either sex or a rape, though the semen is from a non-human source. Eto offers to pay the policeman to organize a posse of hunters to track down the wolf. He tells her he'll think about it, though he - nor anyone else in the area - has any intention of actually helping her out.

While at her hotel, Eto is surprised when the drunken Dr. Nozawa (Shirô Shimomoto), the local coroner, shows up unannounced. He barges in, informs her that he's the only person in the area on her side and then proves that by attempting to rape her (!) She manages to stop him by biting his tongue and he then calms down long enough to tell her that the villagers won't help because they believe the sister went into the woods willingly looking to have sex with the wolf and got herself killed in the process. The next day, the policeman clues Eto in that Dr. Nozawa, who apparently did something bad enough to lose his license and job in the city, cannot be trusted himself. Determined to avenge her sister's death, Eto whips out a bunch of guns and knives, throws on combat boots, dog tags, a tank top, a headband and camo shorts and heads out into the woods to hunt down the wolf herself.

Caught in a rain storm, Eto seeks refuge in a (she thinks) abandoned hut, which turns out to be occupied by a creepy old woman. The woman eats a live snake, makes Eto strip out of her wet clothes, complements her "juicy body" and then tells her about the wolf attack-plagued history of the area, which we then get to see in two separate flashbacks.

Forty years earlier, a young woman (Kyôko Hashimoto, a pink film regular who also had a small role in EVIL DEAD TRAP) arrived there from Tokyo to buy some goods and instead got gang raped by the landlord's spoiled son (Bunmei Tobayama) and his friend. Afterward, they dragged her deep into the forest, tied her to a tree and left her for dead ("You could have died in the bombing as well. It's all the same!"). A lumberjack eventually stumbled upon her and (of course!) attempted to rape her, but a wolf in shining armor showed up just in the nick of time. After killing the man and indulging in a little romantic moonlight gut-munching, woman and wolf fell for each other and became lovers.

Twenty years later, the now middle-aged landlord's son has his own teenage daughter, who has met and fallen in love with a city boy and brought him home to meet the family. The boy just so happens to be the offspring of the woman and the wolf and he's actually there looking for revenge. After transforming into a (terrible looking!) werewolf that looks more like a Bigfoot, he bites out the father's throat, rips off the daughter's clothes, rapes her and then kills her. Revenge complete! Returning back to present day, the story comes full circle when the wolfman finally shows up at the shack and the old woman reveals her true identity.

Running just 55 minutes, this is packed with more T&A and sex than most feature length exploitation films, and it manages to be more graphic than the vast majority of others despite Japan's ban on showing full frontal nudity. There are numerous lengthy and, quite frankly, pretty boring sex and rape scenes here, but what separates this from the pack are the participants in some of these scenes. First, this boasts not one, but two, werewolf rape scenes. Yep, a fully transformed werewolf gets it on with several human actresses here and, not surprisingly, the were-man likes it rough! This also shows a nice close-up of a furry werewolf erection, which is hilarious considering Japanese censors would have blurred this had it been a human penis.

The most shocking thing here (yes, even more shocking than werewolf rape and werewolf boners), are multiple bestiality scenes featuring several of the actresses and the regular "wolf", which is actually played by a husky. One of the actresses lets the dog "make out" with her (licking all over her mouth), which is gross enough as is, but this goes even further with a long close-up shot of the dog actually mounting her, which has been pixelated out by the censors. Now I'm not sure if this really shows the dog humping the actress or if the censors merely objected to the thrusting motion of the dog, but this is still pretty surprising even if it is simulated. What's perhaps worse than that, and does not appear to be fake, is the dog sticking its snout in a bent-over woman's crotch and licking away, probably trying to clean off whatever tasty substance they coated the woman's backside with.

Aside from that, most of the performances are poor (the actress playing the old woman in the shack does the best job), the plot is minimal and predictable and the make-up effects are weak. The director had clearly seen An American Werewolf in London, THE HOWLING and The Company of Wolves, because he rips off scenes from all three of those. 

The one and only release that I'm aware of was a late 80s Japanese VHS on the Golden More label, though this has leaked online and fan-made English subtitles are now available. Seeing how this has yet to receive enough votes to even register a rating on either Letterboxd or IMDb (which only requires five votes), it appears that almost no one has watched this crazy ass film.

★★