La sorella di Ursula (1978)

... aka: Curse of Ursula
... aka: Die Todesbucht (The Bay of Death)

... aka: La muerte tiene ojos (Death Has Eyes)

... aka: Sister of Ursula, The

Directed by:
Enzo Milioni

Dagmar (Stefania D'Amario) and her extremely fucked-up younger sister Ursula (Barbara Magnolfi) have just inherited a ton of money and decide to take a holiday at a resort hotel in Italy. While Dagmar plans for a nice, peaceful stay in the picturesque town, and possibly even a little romance while they're there, Ursula behaves like a miserable, hateful bitch the entire time and constantly complains about wanting to leave, claiming that "Terrible things are going to happen!" And she would be correct, as a sadistic serial killer starts running amuck killing nude women in a very perverse way. But we'll get to that here in a second. First, a little history on our sibling protagonists. Their mother was a famous actress who put them in a boarding school when they were little girls and never saw them again. Their father was a musician who commited suicide. Both girls inherited a lot of money, and Ursula ended up inheriting much more, like some serious mental problems. She's also cursed with ESP abilities, which makes it difficult for her to interact with anyone because she always knows their true intentions ahead of time... and with the crew she encounters at this hotel, that's definitely not a good thing. Either way, Ursula is picking up some bad vibes and barely wants to leave her bed.

Hotel owner / drug trafficker Roberto Delleri (Vanni Materassi) is having an affair on his wife Vanessa (Anna Zinneman) with cabaret singer Stella Shining (Yvonne Harlow), who in turn is having an affair with heroin junkie Filippo Andrei (Marc Porel). Both Roberto and Filippo seem interested in Dagmar, while Vanessa demands a divorce (and her share of the profitable hotel) from her husband because she's also been unfaithful and has fallen in love with Jenny (Antinisca Nemour). Stella tries to call off her affair with Filippo, but he starts stalking her. All the while, Ursula carries on hysterically about various things (including thinking her father is still alive) and the mystery killer continues their rampage; first killing a few extras (including a prostitute and a pair of horny runaway teenagers) before moving on to our principal characters. So what technique does the killer use in dispatching victims? Well, by raping them to death with a giant wooden dildo! Hey, I already told you it was perverted.

If nothing else, this silly film delivers big time on the sleaze. It's filled with graphic sex scenes (which actually cross into hardcore territory on at least one occasion), full frontal nudity from both genders and lots of bloody, below-the-belt aftermath shots of what the killer has done to his / her victims. It also benefits from being shot in Amalfi, Italy, an incredibly beautiful location with lots of large homes dotted along the cliffsides and sparkling waters of the Mediterranean Sea. The cinematography and art direction are both good, and they even throw in a couple of cabaret numbers for good measure. So while this may not be a great film, or even a good one, it provides the trashy goods for fans of this stuff, plus has the production values to back it all up.

It's also interesting to see two actresses who were usually lost in minor roles in popular Euro horror flicks getting to play major parts here. Magnolfi's best-known part was playing Jessica Harper's bitchy roommate Olga in Argento's SUSPIRIA (1977). There she had just a couple of scenes, but in this one she gets to emote a lot and is the only female in the cast without a major nude scene. D'Amario is probably best known for playing flesheater fodder in Fulci's Zombi 2 (1979) and Lenzi's Nightmare City (1980). She had little to do in those films but die, but here she's the primary focus. She also picks up Magnolfi's slack by appearing fully nude no no less than four times (including a solo scene pleasuring herself with a gold necklace). Porel, who had also acted for Fulci (1977's The Psychic) and starred in Mario Bava's final film The Venus of Ille (1978), doesn't make much of an impression in this one, plus the big revelation of his character doesn't really make sense.

Never released to American theaters or on VHS (though IMDb lists this as having gotten an X rating), this finally received a DVD release in 2009 through Severin. In 2021, a Blu-ray was released by the German company Elea Media.

★★1/2

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.

★