Pose Reviews A Movie. #5: REC (2007)

Holy crap it's awesome.

Sorry to be so blunt. But it had to be said.

Yep, this Spanish-made, self-soil-inducing throrror (read: thriller/horror) is a veritable cinematic gem for the scare-hungry, and by far one of the most terrifying at-home movie-watching experiences I've ever had.

Ever.

REC (whether you've decided to pronounce it phoenetically as "wreck" or acronymically as "arr-ee-see") is a welcome rebel to the horror genre. It doesn't rely solely on "cheap scares," where music or sound effects are played REALLY loud to accentuate a scary face or grabby hand, nor does it take the gorey route, measuring its scare-factor in litres of fake blood. Nope, REC takes the high-road--it uses a poorly lit, incredibly creepy environment, coupled with inspired costume and makeup choices that grab hold of your nerves and yank them relentlessly for 78 terrifying minutes.

But don't let the phrase "poorly lit" throw you--the lighting is actually one of the greatest aspects of the film. Without giving too much away, REC is a film about the tenants of an apartment complex who are sealed inside their walls by authorities to prevent the outbreak of a disease that is making some of the building's residents behave...well, "oddly."

The film is also a member of the "found footage" genre that started with The Blair Witch Project (1999) and continues today with movies like Cloverfield, which means that standard cinematic conventions like contrived lighting or underlying music can't be used without undermining the film's entire effect.

This is why the lighting in REC is so impressive.

The lighting serves to contain the action, mirroring the film's overall theme of containment. While the residents of the Spanish apartment complex are held captive inside their building, the viewer's attention is held captive by the camera's lighting.

In other words, the lighting in REC makes only certain elements of a scene visible, which not only adds to the suspense, but also mimics the feeling of containment possessed by the characters in the film. And because the whole movie is made to look like amateur video footage, the confined lighting fits right in.

You get the feeling of "Oh man, I can only see the one spot where the light is pointing--what's going to come out of the dark?!" instead of "What the hell, I can't see a thing--who shot this movie?!"

The bottom line is, the lighting doesn't make the film difficult to watch--it only enhances it.

(And also, you'll probably have to see it in order to understand what I'm talking about.)

But it's definitely, DEFINITELY worth seeing.

The only concern I have is for people who have seen the North American remake, Quarantine. I watched REC again with a friend who had seen the Hollywood do-over first, and he said that REC was more well-made, but not as scary for someone who has watched Quarantine. In essence, Quarantine is a carbon-copy of REC, just without subtitles. So I worry that if you've watched the remake, you might not be as enamoured with REC as someone who hasn't watched it.

But even then, you might just enjoy the experience of watching a horror film done right. I know I did!

Look for REC in the Horror: Euro section, or on Andrew's Staff Picks shelf.

Ryan Watches a Motion Picture #3: Sauna (2008)

I couldn't turn this one down: a ghost horror film set in the 1500s.

Looks like the Swedes and the Russians have ended a 25 year war and are now collaborating on the mapping of new borders. Things are tense between factions and its terribly important that nothing goes wrong. Naturally, something occulty goes down.

All in all, I'm fairly sold on the film for packing a cool dark age atmosphere of damp, mid-winter forestry and mud, great set design and costuming, and morally ambiguous war-weary characters. But sadly, about two thirds of the way through, Sauna starts to overdo it with the haunting stuff, and would have benefited by playing it much more low-key and infrequent. The creepiness it does well to evoke eventually loses much of its power, and it gets caught up in outdoing itself with its spookiness and minor plot twists to the point where some stuff happens that really doesn't make much sense, and you're left a bit lost as the stakes get higher.

So: A pretty unique European dark age spin on the kind of thing usually done on the Asian ghost horror scene.

Mike The Boss - Films of 2010 - Film the Fourth: Sauna

(Erik prepares to do battle with an evil sauna!)

Sauna (2008) (dir: Annila Antti-Jussi)

Hmmm. I has watched plenty of Eurohorror in my time and I am used to them not explaining much of what is going on but I have a feeling I may have really been missing something in this tale from the late 1500s. A war between Russia and Finland-Sweden is over and the border is being marked out by a team of Russians and Finns. They stumble across a village in the centre of a swamp. Everyone is old and there is only one kid there. Secrets abound, the least of which is a creepy old sauna in the swamp outside the village. Here is a hint: if you stumble across a bunch of creepy people, in the middle of a creepy swamp and they happen to have a rundown old building that they use as a sauna, DON'T GO INTO IT. Again, I suspect there is something sort of folkloric thing going on that I did not get so I didn't really understand the film all that much but it is atmospheric, has some good frights and a pretty disturbing ending (if what I thought happened really did happen) so don't let my confusion dissuade you from watching the movie.

VOYAGE THROUGH THE STACKS

CASE NUMBER #0013

TITLE: The Sinful Nuns of St. Valentine
TAGLINE: N/A
DESCRIPTION: Lucita has been locked away in a convent by her family in order to keep her away from her lover, Esteban. The pair make plans to elope, but Esteban is accused of heresy before Lucita can escape. Hiding in the convent, Esteban discovers the horrifying depravity of the convent's abbess, Sister Incarnation. Can Esteban rescue his love from this madhouse before the inquisitor discovers what is going on and has everyone executed? [IMDB]
DIRECTOR: Sergio Greico
YEAR: 1974
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: Italy
RUNTIME: 93 min
SUBTITLED/DUBBED: Subtitled
IMDB PAGE
ROTTENTOMATOES
REVIEW:

Let me begin by expressing humility enough to recognize that some movies really don’t need reviews: 1970s soft-cores especially rent with nary a reservation. That said, after watching this self-proclaimed sleaze epic, this “nunsploitation” film of the highest order, I find myself with a pressing need to make the following exclamations (forgive the excessive caps!):

1) OH MY GOD IT’S A SOFT-CORE WITH MORE PLOT THAN MOST 1970S EUROHORRORS.

A wonderfully mood-setting pursuit on horse, and subsequent sword fight, set up this film about a dashing Romeo, Esteban Albornos, and his Juliet, Lucita Fuentes. Esteban, accused of heresy, dogged by the Inquisition, holes up to nurse his wounds in the convent Lucita has been sentenced to by her parents, in their effort to keep these two lovebirds apart. (They didn't do a very good job of it, huh?) The presence of the Inquisition is made worse by the sinful nature of the women in this convent -- Lucita's cellmate, Josefa, who learns of Lucita's affair and uses blackmail to have her wicked way with the poor novice; and Mother Incarnation, who has a sadistic streak and her own wanton designs. Fortunately for Lucita, someone offs Josefa early on. Not so fortunately for Lucita, she's fingered as the culprit, and ultimately confesses to protect Esteban. Too bad people are burned for that kind of thing -- and with the debauched nature of just about the whole convent revealed in turn, the Inquisition seals up the whole nunnery inside their estate, while Esteban struggles to free his beloved from their clutches.

Do you see? Do you see how that actually makes sense? That sound you hear is weeping. Mine.

2) OH MY GOD IT’S A SOFT-CORE WITH BETTER ACTING THAN MOST EUROHORRORS.

All right, that's not saying much -- I know. But when I started feeling strange tingly feelings about Jenny Tamburi's plight as Lucita, and for reasons other than her bare-breasted, breathless state, I knew I was witnessing a strange cinematic feat in action. Esteban, too, played by Paolo Malco, seems perfectly able to be expressive, and when forced to play a dark role with Mother Incarnation takes altogether grimly to the task. Even secondary characters are well drawn out here, with the poor novitiate flogged by Mother Incarnation making you sorry for her as much as her predicament is intended to titillate. And yes, Bruna Beani is given no subtlety to her character, Josefa, with even the darkly arched eyebrows casting an evil pallour over her, but when the Grand Inquisitor realizes Lucita's punishment must be death by burning, his speech to this end is a chilling performance; and when the groundskeeper cycles through a wide range of emotional responses -- wanting Esteban out, not wanting him to leave until it's safe -- the transitions are all perfectly sensible to his performance. Even the evil Mother Incarnation plays out her deceit extraordinarily well, favoured by some subtle camerawork to demonstrate how she's clued into Esteban and Lucita's affair.

Am I impressed? Heck yes, I'm impressed. Remember, we're still talking about what is ostensibly an "epic sleaze" film, a "nunsploitation" piece of unmatched proportions. The mind boggles.

c) OH MY GOD REDEMPTION BRAND INTRODUCTIONS ACTUALLY GROW ON YOU, LIKE A FUNGUS OR A MOLD.

Yes, I was astonished to find that, as boring as I've found some of the mini-introductions used by Redemption Films for other pieces in their collection, I was actually fully endeared to this one. Was it something about the particular story arc so unsubtly played out in a '90s-era BDSM environment, with all the cheesy leathersploitation, fake blood, art-house writhing, and monotone narrative therein? Or did I just find myself growing fond of what these introductions do, collectively, for the audience and the films contained therein? I couldn't say for certain, but I'm very glad I wasn't bored.

As for the actual sexploitation in the film -- the core, I expect, of most people's interest in the film -- I have to say it was a lot tamer than I expected. Yes, plenty of female top nudity, and flogging, and torture. We also see the den of nun-tastic debauchery bedecked in all its fine young female plunder (the old ladies, thankful, we don't have to see). And these nuns are indeed champing at the bit for female flesh, while Esteban also gets good mileage in the film.

But overall? We still have the sad hanging of one nun, and enough other violence and gruesome imagery -- including a corpse dug up fresh from its grave -- that this piece, for all its appeals to "eurosleaze," maintains a balance between erotic delight and the other, often grave realities of life in the Inquisition. In short, while soft-core aficionados will be endeared by its effectively forwarded bounty of breasts, this piece is just as much worthwhile for anyone interested in euro-intrigue films, period. Seriously. I'd pick this over Night of the Hunted any day.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING AIDS: An appreciation for the female form, and a broad expectation set for soft-core Eurosleaze.

VOYAGE THROUGH THE STACKS

CASE NUMBER #00011

TITLE: The Reincarnation of Isabel
TAGLINE: N/A
DESCRIPTION: An ultra rare example of deluxe sleaze by one of Italy's grand masters of the satanic knee trembler. Packed full with whippings, impalings, torture, sadistic couplings, and a series of devil worshipping bunk ups. [RottenTomatoes]
DIRECTOR: Renato Polselli
YEAR: 1982
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: U.S.
RUNTIME: 95 min
SUBTITLED/DUBBED: N/A
IMDB PAGE

ROTTENTOMATOES
REVIEW:

Ladies and gentlemen, I am here to tell you that no amount of bared, buxom, female flesh can save some films. "Lies!" you may call out. "The Reincarnation of Isabel!" I'll call out in turn. And if you've seen this, you'll surely have to cede the point.

Part of what makes this film so horrible is that you can't pin down precisely what caused this piece of Eurosleaze to fail so badly. Certainly the cheap sets and props can be excused, and the uninspired lighting and bizarre cinematography -- these are par for the course with such films. But the tired plot holding more flashbacks and dream sequences than The Wicker Man remake, and being ten times as convoluted? The poor acting, made ten times worse by the role swapping so many of the actors did in the course of the piece? It is truly hard to imagine director Renato Polselli being pleased with the outcome of his work, but somehow I suspect he must have been.

After all, once you commit yourself to creating a low-grade knock-off of Mario Bava's Black Sunday, what sort of standards are you really holding the work to? So in The Reincarnation of Isabel we get a castle haunted by the presence of a woman burned as a witch hundreds of years in the past, and a contemporary-day guest at the latest housewarming party who looks a lot like the same witch. She's not the only one experiencing deja vu, though: Everyone at this happening shindig looks suspiciously like people from the flashbacks to Isabel's initial demise. Reincarnations? Mostly! But Count Dracula's also kicking about in the mix -- you know, for the hell of it. (One of the alternate titles is "The Horrible Orgies of Count Dracula," which would honestly serve just as well as a description of this film.)

In short, The Reincarnation of Isabel is about the efforts of reincarnated attendants to a long-dead witch, Isabel, to sacrifice the hearts of virgins in order to reanimate her. (And they have to be virgins, in part because Count Dracula won't drink the sullied blood of women touched by semen. There's a classy touch for you!) Sounds straightforward enough, doesn't it?

In fact, this is so straightforward a premise I almost need to give Polselli credit for mucking it up to the extent that he has: Truly, it takes a strange talent to make something so simple so impossible to follow -- either by making the flashbacks extremely difficult to distinguish from contemporary-day action, or by neglecting peripheral details like justifications for everyone's actions in this piece.

Nonetheless, there is an audience for every film, so let me just stress that even for viewers who appreciate the female form, this is a frustrating piece, because most of the nudity isn't very functional, and the bizarre camerawork is often to the detriment of full enjoyment therein. The real audience of this film will thus be lovers of trash cinema -- the ones who recognize that a decent soundtrack is sometimes all it takes to make a film palatable. And The Reincarnation of Isabel has at least that much going for it.

I for one, however, don't see much use in a film like this for anything but ambience -- the way some lounges and dance clubs now project bad old movies with a lot of wild imagery onto the walls with the sound turned off. In the company of your own home, you needn't turn the sound off to produce the same effect: the imagery is wild, the nudity is rampant, and the plot might as well be non-existent. But at the very least, it's not boring. Horrible as this film is from any other stand-point, it at least has the "fun" factor held extremely high over such offerings as The Bloodsucker Leads the Dance. And yes, for this reason alone I intend to see it again some day. Will I still be ranting about how horrible it is? Most definitely. I think that might be part of the appeal.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING AIDS: A lot of booze, plenty of viewing partners, and a high tolerance for trash.

VOYAGE THROUGH THE STACKS

CASE NUMBER #0008

TITLE: Nude for Satan
TAGLINE: N/A
DESCRIPTION: Italian Gothic horror that tells the tale of a man who stops at a remote castle hoping to get medical help for an injured woman, only to find the inhabitants mirror the darker sides of the woman and himself. [IMDB]
DIRECTOR: Luigi Batzella
YEAR: 1974
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: Italy
RUNTIME: 82 min
SUBTITLED/DUBBED: Subtitled
IMDB PAGE
ROTTENTOMATOES
REVIEW:

Man, if I rated all films on their ability to live up to their titles, Nude for Satan would get a whopping A+++. Now, yes, it's true it takes a good twenty or so minutes for Satan to undress (quite literally!) female lead Susan Smith (Rita Calderoni) with his eyes, but once he does, boy, do the soft-core times roll!

By the end of the film, it hardly matters that there wasn't any clear flow of Susan to the dark side (apparently ever since the Fall, it doesn't matter how we ladies end up in the Devil's hands: the point is, we always do in the end! Lars von Trier must be fist-bumping Batzella in spirit right now). Nor does it matter that the male lead, Dr. William Benson (Stelio Candelli), ultimately saves both his and Susan's souls with... holy water? prayer? Nah -- fire, stupid! Because everyone knows fire is what the Devil fears! (Did I mention this solution is left out in the middle of this film's requisite castle, in a book open on a pedestal for just anyone to read?)

No matter how absurd the promiscuity, no matter how ridiculous the spiderweb scene (you've got to see it to believe it), at the end of the day, the film did what it set out to do: It got some hot chicks nude for Satan. A+++ on that score.

On a deeper score, however, I really wanted to like this film: After the abysmal staging in Night of the Hunted, the very intelligent, quiet atmosphere building in the first twenty minutes of Nude for Satan caught my eye. I was especially drawn to a scene where Dr. Benson, having entered the archetypal Italian horror castle in search of aid for a woman he found in a car accident, stumbles upon a room thick with decades-old cobwebs -- and beneath them, an old man lying supine on the floor, stabbed in the neck, who proceeds to laugh his rotten smile.

Now, in a realistic film, this would clearly be the point when any reasonable outsider venturing into the castle would decide "Dude, this shit's fucked up," and get the hell out in search of aid elsewhere. But this isn't a realistic film: for at least the first twenty minutes, it's definitively an atmosphere piece. So when the good doctor's too stunned to do more than accept the scene at face value and continue wandering through the castle, it doesn't feel at all like a cop-out to senselessness (as so much did in Night of the Hunted): Rather, you get the feeling this is an intentional move on the director's part to brace his audience for the surrealism to follow.

And the surreal certainly rears its head later on in the film, especially when Susan falls -- again, quite literally -- into Satan's spiderweb, and her screams, as a paper-mache spider inches toward her, rouse the doctor from his bedchamber. Whatever might be said about this scene -- its ridiculousness almost coming full circle into creepy -- it certainly is striking. And bizarre.

But by the close of the film, as all plot progression is abandoned to bare more wanton flesh, I was left wondering if the crew had just run out of time and money -- and if more of either could have guaranteed the quality of the film's thoughtful first twenty minutes extending through to the end. It's not that the cheap, prop dungeon serving as the penultimate setting was itself absurd (you make exceptions for these things the moment you've seen your first Ed Wood flick), but the Devil's playthings made it painfully obvious I was watching people act. It's a failing of the genre that you can't have even a slew of nude women act with the lewdness properly due a puppet of Satan, but still: Interpretive dance (or whatever the hell they were doing to symbolize their debasement)? Just didn't make the whole den of sin seem very sinful.

Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe the point of the film is to slip from a decent premise for sophisticated gothic horror to slapdash soft-core -- or maybe the first twenty minutes are the actual sore thumb in this whole endeavour, and I've got my criteria utterly backwards. Maybe most people don't care if there's a coherent framework for all this naked groping, and actually get impatient when the film tries to do more than what its title claims it will -- namely, to make the actresses nude for Satan!

In which case, I revert to my earlier verdict: A+++ for a film that lives up, quite squarely, to its title -- and nothing more.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING AIDS: A love of nude ladies and a taste for old movies that disintegrate into nonsense as you watch them.

VOYAGE THROUGH THE STACKS

CASE NUMBER #0007

TITLE: Night of the Hunted
TAGLINE: N/A
DESCRIPTION: Cult French sex-horror director Jean Rollin created this oddity in 1980. This one is a strange departure from his usual vampire-themed fare: In a strange future society, the residents of an apartment building suffer from collective amnesia and insanity, resulting in extreme sex and violence. [RottenTomatoes]
DIRECTOR: Jean Rollin
YEAR: 1980
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: France
RUNTIME: 95 min
SUBTITLED/DUBBED: Subtitled
IMDB PAGE
ROTTENTOMATOES
REVIEW:

Wow. I think I may have broken my personal record for losing all ability to suspend disbelief in a film. Thanks to the wonders of tracking, I can confidently say that at 4 minutes, 40 seconds, this film stopped being enjoyable, and instead became highly irritating. Yeah, yeah, the sex scene from 13 to 19 minutes pretty much sizes up the aims of this film -- to be a vehicle for sexual content. Even then, though, it's not hard to get the basics of logical storytelling down, so when directorial laziness emerges so early in the film, it's exceptionally easy to look a gift horse (however comely she may be!) in the mouth.

I'm referring of course to the opening scene, wherein our lead lady, Elizabeth (Brigitte Lahaie), runs frightened into a country road where she's picked up by a young man named Robert (Vincent Gardnere). Just as he shuts the driver's side door to the car, a beautiful, naked woman named Veronique (Dominique Journet) tears quite obviously into the range of his headlights. He looks ahead, and asks Elizabeth if there was anyone with her. Elizabeth says she was alone. Meanwhile, the naked woman is still kicking around in plain sight of the headlights. Nevertheless, the man in the car drives off.

Now, even if I were to entertain the belief that Robert somehow didn't see this woman (and I find a naked woman lit up by headlights pretty hard to discount), I'd also have to entertain the belief that this woman, desperate to reconnect with Elizabeth and showing no reaction whatsoever to the man with her, would stop so randomly short of the car and just hang out by a tree, going no closer, though the distance clearly pains her. That's when irritation begins: It would have been so incredibly easy to shoot this scene in a more realistic sequence -- Robert and Elizabeth driving off, Elizabeth claiming she was alone, and finally, the forgotten woman running out of the woods too late, the car already a blip on the horizon.

This sadly is less a slight omission than an omen for things to come: Soon after, we're to believe that a doctor and his assistant were able to shift from a foot pursuit to a country road vehicle in time to tail Elizabeth's escape vehicle all night without being spotted (a hard thing to do on empty roads -- but again, Robert just missed a naked woman right in front of him, so maybe he's just that ignorant!). Soon after, we're supposed to believe that a building filled with patients suffering the same recurring memory loss would be left utterly unattended, with said patients free to wander at night, despite regular incidents of murder, brutality, and of course rape. Which we could, in the paradigm of a horror film, had we any cogent reason to believe the doctor and assistant had ulterior motives for trapping all these victims in the same building together... but if they did, why on earth would that same doctor, along with four guards, shoot so indiscriminately when Elizabeth and Veronique again attempt escape, after taking such great pains the first time to return them in one piece? Furthermore, how do they manage to miss at such close range, when the ridiculous ending of this film is contingent upon the doctor being a sharpshooter at upwards of 50 yards? And let's not forget that all of this is taking place in Paris -- so where on earth did Elizabeth and Veronique escape from the first time, when Elizabeth was first found at least six hours from the city?

As excuses for excess nudity, sex, and violence go, this is one of the flimsiest plot progressions I've ever seen. Oh, and I haven't even mentioned how Robert is absurdly able to discover Elizabeth's exact location from the absolute vaguest of details, or how a superficial wound to another girl's eyes somehow ends in death, or how, when Robert arrives to rescue Elizabeth, he bewilderingly pauses to dance with another patient in front of the building (and therefore, in clear view of any guards monitoring the building). Also, how the doctor and assistant quite randomly give up on their search for a cure just in time to dedicate the last twenty minutes to less than methodically murdering the remaining patients, all in varying stages of memory loss.

Are there any redeeming elements of this film? I'm sure some might argue that so much lovely bare flesh, carelessly utilized as it is, is always its own reward. Maybe so, but there's exposing skin and there's eroticizing the human body, and I'm not convinced the latter is achieved here. This film is also billed as horror, with an admonishment about not watching if you can't handle gore, but there's precious little blood spilled, either, making the film thus far 0.5/2. However, I will give Night of the Hunted credit for its underlying premise -- brutalized as it was in execution for the sake of more skin-shots. Yes, a good film about mass memory loss could be created with the same basic plot points as this one, if revisited by more skilled hands -- so if Night of the Hunted accomplishes anything, it's to stoke my desire to watch a better director make just such an attempt. But that's really the only good I see in this film -- and even then, I have to admit that just about anything would be an improvement upon director Jean Rollin's attempt. So take that slight praise as you will.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING AIDS: Friends willing to help mock the film, and maybe a porn magazine or two to off-set its paper-thin excuses for female nudity and sexual content. How these two aids mesh with one another is... up to you.

VOYAGE THROUGH THE STACKS

CASE NUMBER #0004

TITLE: Devil's Nightmare
TAGLINE: N/A
DESCRIPTION: A group of tourists, each representing one of the seven deadly sins, spends a terror-filled evening in a castle previously owned by a man who made a pact with Satan. Throw in '70s Euro-beauty Erika Blanc as a homicidal succubus, and you have a rather captivating piece of vintage gothic Belgian/Italian horror-sleaze.
DIRECTOR: Jean Brismee
YEAR: 1974
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: Belgium/Italy
RUNTIME: 95 min
SUBTITLED/DUBBED: Dubbed
IMDB PAGE
ROTTENTOMATOES
REVIEW:

Other reviews of this film (the positive ones, at least) would have you believe this is, without a doubt, a "bad movie," but so bad it's actually great fun to watch. I was tempted to frame my review the same way, until it occurred to me that the rhetoric of that last statement is entirely self-serving: It's a cop-out way of saying I really enjoyed something despite its schlocky heritage, and to save face when others -- especially those unfamiliar with the common tropes and gimmicks of that same heritage -- find nothing redeeming about this piece at all.

But the truth is, I don't think this is a bad film. Quite the opposite: I found Devil's Nightmare to be exceptionally enjoyable on a surface level, as romping-good Euro-horror; and on a deeper level, I also found it to be a smart film -- that crucial difference between good films and truly good "bad" films. After all, with most bad films enjoyment is derived from unintended responses, such as when viewers laugh at something that's supposed to be scary or serious; or when more irony exists for the viewer than was originally laid out in the script. But if a film more routinely has you feeling the thrill of foreknowledge at times of its own choosing, and if there are indeed surprises of a gruesome or anticipatory nature embedded in the actual narrative, then it doesn't matter if the film hails from a time of flimsy plot premises and well-worn genre devices: It has done what it set out to do, and should be lauded for that success.

Certainly, there are missteps in this film (among which, a brief intrusion of sleazy soft-core reigns supreme), but what I found more striking was just how much actually works as part of a coherent whole. The film opens with a scene in Berlin, 1945, where the Baron-father of a newborn daughter takes the girl's life in her cradle. Is this just a case of aristocratic misogyny run amok? There's room for the viewer to wonder as the opening credits roll -- but soon enough a more tragic motive appears: the Baron's family has a curse affixed to the eldest daughter of any descendant, and if let live she will become a succubus to Satan himself. The Baron relates this story to a reporter years later, from his centuries-old castle home, and after the reporter dies of fright from what she witnesses on the property, seven tourists find themselves stranded in the region, in need of lodgings for the night. They aren't the only ones, however, and the addition of the stunning red-head Erika Blanc sets the whole evening's dark affairs in motion.

You can see, then, the tired tropes at play: the dark family secret, the foray of wide-eyed outsiders to a troubled European castle, the beautiful, enigmatic female lead, the foregrounding of the supernatural. But there are immediate, arresting differences, too. For one, the tourists' characters are drawn in more subtle strokes than one might expect -- so much so that a later thesis on the seven mortal sins is not readily apparent, while in hindsight a young priest's chess game with demon-pieces makes perfect sense as foreshadow. And the dialogue, though plagued by often distractingly bad dubbing, is itself measured and lively, with plot-progressing lines pleasingly interspersed among asides that build character tension in an organic fashion.

But the surprises don't just lie with engaging dialogue or distinct characters: The very turns in the film also hold their own, pleasing weight. The first time Blanc reveals her true face to viewers, the early special effects characterizing this transformation are nothing to scoff at; and there's something eerily reminiscent of The Pit and the Pendulum in the way implements of torture do her bidding in the castle's dark underbelly.

Yes, there are moments when the horror slips into comic artifice, such as when Blanc pulls at her cross-scalded face in anguish before the prideful young priest, but in the end director Jean Brismee surely, knowingly plays one final feat of strength by revealing his Satan as something quite true to Bergman's Seventh Seal (the sharp-boned figure of actor Daniel Emilfork certainly helping in this regard) and completes his piece with a next-day reverie of hauntingly ambiguous proportions. Are the souls who dared spend a night in the succubus' haunt truly saved, or did the penultimate deal with the devil last little longer than the blood upon which it was writ?

A film with character depth, sufficiently engaging dialogue, true moments of intentional irony and fright, and an ending both enigmatic and rich in reference to its predecessors surely cannot be called a bad film. Devil's Nightmare has all the absurdity of its stylistic archetypes against it, and it groans at times under the burden of the genre's expectations, but the piece is nonetheless well-orchestrated -- and a pleasure I hope to have occasion to watch again.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING AIDS: A dark night, a cold room, and much love for the best of bad euro-horror.

VOYAGE THROUGH THE STACKS

For some blisteringly foolhardy reason, I took on the challenge of watching Gen X videos in the order they're listed in the stacks. In the coming months I'll try to post the fruit of these exploits as close to daily as I can (yes, the store hours will inevitably be far more reliable than these posts: Check out our holiday schedule the next time you're by!). If even one of these listings guides you to brave a new, strange title on your next visit, I'll consider my work done!

CASE NUMBER #00001

TITLE: The Bloodsucker Leads the Dance
TAGLINE: N/A
DESCRIPTION: Gothic lesbians prowl the corridors of a miserable little castle somewhere in Italy and fall prey to a deranged count, resplendent with canine gnashers, a fairly ghastly complexion and the personality of Pol Pot. This is Italian gothic with the added bonus of some bizarre breast gropings amongst the kitchen staff and other dubious sexual shenanigans.
DIRECTOR: Alfredo Rizzo
YEAR: 1975
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: Italy
RUNTIME: 89 min
SUBTITLED/DUBBED: Dubbed
IMDB PAGE
ROTTENTOMATOES
REVIEW:

There is a point to every film made -- not always a laudable point, and certainly not always a good point, but a point nonetheless. Sometimes, when you know what the director's aim was supposed to be, it's easier to ignore the failings of the film in other capacities. At other times, it's not immediately apparent what the director was shooting for -- and then you have to wait the movie out, if you have the patience, until the pieces fall into place.

The Bloodsucker Leads the Dance is tragically one of the latter films: Not only are there no bloodsuckers, and precious little in the way of dancing, but even the production company's blurb for the film, relating how "gothic lesbians ... fall prey to a deranged count, resplendent with canine gnashers, a fairly ghastly complexion and the personality of Pol Pot" sorely misrepresents the culprit or crimes that take place in the course of the film (as if drastic rewrites or post-production plot changes weren't fully addressed in the marketing department).

And before viewers can even set themselves to the task of deciding what director Alfredo Rizzo's aims were, they have to endure a bizarre introduction to the film: a cheesy Bravo UK soft-core experience, care of the Redemption Films brand. For all the bared breasts and dripping blood, it's rather tedious -- and worse, an awful intro to the film itself. All Redemption Films start with some variation on this introduction, though, so just zip through it if you can.

When you do, the film opens with a straightforward premise: a count inviting an acting troupe of women and their emasculated manager to join him for the weekend at his castle. Within the first 24 hours of their stay, numerous excuses for female soft-core nudity emerge -- lesbians frolicking in their bed-chamber, another woman warming to the count's affections, the odd woman out making merry with one of the count's servants, two kitchen assistants exploring each other's breasts in recounting the tale of their lesbian guests. In fact, if this film were to be believed, the act of intercourse involves little more than the fondling of breasts -- just one of the cute consequences of erotic films skirting censorship in their day.

But the real tragedy emerges alongside the first death, a brutal affair involving one of the women in the troupe. Immediately, the lack of grief or even interest in this grotesque occurrence among the other women wears at the thin semblance of the film's plot, and from there a meagre fare of suspense and subsequent deaths leads to a wooden, drawn-out penultimate scene where suddenly it clicks for the viewer: The whole thrust of the plot was just an excuse for as much bared flesh as possible.

This is a sad realization, because -- much like the soft-core content itself -- The Bloodsucker... is exceptionally top-heavy with erotic scenes, so this epiphany about the leaden acting and stiff, flimsy plot that dominate the latter half of the film comes too late for viewers to forget about the plot in its entirety and focus on the main event.

Truly, if the film had even ended with another wanton display of female flesh, it would have succeeded in its aim. As it is, Rizzo's effort ultimately yields a lightweight soft-core scenario with a laborious plot tacked on for the second half. There are better, more efficient vehicles for buxom broads: The Bloodsucker Leads the Dance is a sad waste of healthy flesh, and not worth watching past the last done-up blouse.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING AIDS: A love of breasts and bad acting -- there's plenty of both to go around!