Zombie Lake (1980), by Jean Rollin

Yes, even Jess Franco had his limits on cheapness. But when Franco steps out you call in Jean Rollin to bring you the zombie goods.

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Oasis of the Zombies (1982), by Jess Franco

Jess Franco's zombie movie, a pseudo-remake that he made twice. "I think I...found myself."

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The Fast Set (1957), by Pierre Foucaud

The war between progress and tradition is the conflict of our age--if we survive our current period of history, people will look back at today as the center of an era defined by a profound and violent difference between left- and right-wing politics. I suspect that by the time this is all over--if it ever ends--we will be left with a world less fundamentally grounded on the old 18th Century idea of liberalism vs. conservatism than what we're used to. At the very least, the definitions of those institutions will be dramatically shifted, or at least, shifted to different sets of issues. And, while this could be construed as wishful thinking, I suspect that conservatism, at least in the United States, is ultimately on its last legs; the recent indications of intensifying conservatism in the form of the increasing activity of white supremacist movements and the like are symbols of conservative inability to reconcile the general right-wing identity with the way the country is going, even in this post-Obama world of ours, which will lead to a burnout followed by a generally progressive (i.e. not necessarily leftist) attitude amongst the populace-at-large. That's my interpretation, at least.

But let's not talk about the present state of ideological conflict (seriously; keep it out of the comments). Today we're talking about the 1950s. Pierre Foucaud's The Fast Set is a lot of things, including a romance and a striptease documentary; but it's also about the difference between the old ways and the new, the libertine and the reserved. Only the French could produce a sexploitation movie that so convincingly touches on real issues.

Sophie is the daughter of a wealthy Lyons family, who disapprove of her boyfriend Jack and her desire to follow him and her dreams of being an artist to Paris. Thanks to her cool mom, Sophie is able to join Jack in Paris, but the fast life she discovers is nothing she's prepared for. Sure, Sophie is used to rebellion back in Lyons, but she wasn't prepared for the world of stripteases, nude modeling, and prototypical free love. She has to dodge the attentions of her jealous rival Rita, and in her quest to win Jack over entirely, she becomes a bohemian. Eventually, the stage calls to her. Out in the parlor, the audience awaits their striptease...

First of all, it needs to be said that this movie is, for nearly all modern audiences, going to seem extremely mild. I don't know how much of that is deliberate, but let's just say those of us who have seen Human Centipede 2 are going to find Sophie's dad's offense at her leaving dinner without being properly excused a little silly. In the beginning, I do believe that Sophie's actions are meant to be seen as rebellious (they also include the abominable crime of eating sweets instead of dinner), but they are not quite on par with taking off your clothes all sexy-like for a crowd of strangers. She is meant to start out naive so she can make her lovely quest towards true libertinism. I do always enjoy stories like this, of young people finding their inner freedoms, even as I get older and more cynical. Movies like this, as milquetoasty as they can be, help me feel less crusty around the edges.

The conservatism, on the other hand, does feel real. Even today we have to contend with old ladies who think that wearing shorts is slutty; and I think all of us have heard at least one middle-aged dude who is refuted on a point for just this once, whose immediate response is to bluster, "I GUESS I'M JUST ALWAYS WRONG THEN." The times, they are a-not changing. I would have laughed if Sophie's dad had a t-shirt that said, "J'ai accheté cet fusil à pompe parce qu'un jour un garçon va sortir avec ma fille"--and not because those shirts are ever anything but fucking sexist and dumb. At least this movie is...generally not racist? Some of the striptease acts are likely to offend people (there's one involving a hashish-smoking sheikh called "Impressions of the Orient"), but it's still usually pretty mild.

The stripteases themselves are presented, as I alluded before, in a pseudo-documentary fashion. This movie illustrates superbly the transition between old-world burlesque and the exotic dancing of today. Initially, we see that these acts are tamer than what we're accustomed, with one of them never even showing the nipples of the woman in question. Then, several of the acts we see actually follow vague storylines. By the time that we see our strippers are a pair of male Laurel & Hardy impressionists, whose deliberately unerotic striptease is received humorously by the audience, we know that we're looking at an animal which is today extinct in the wild. If you put two ugly guys out on stage at a strip club and had them start taking their clothes off, they'd be lynched. Now, I don't say that to disparage the modern exotic dancing industry--just perhaps their audience. It's just interesting to see such an "artsy" take on what we unjustly view today as a lowdown sort of thing, and more interesting to think about how our society may have gotten that way. Have we become more liberal with our sexuality, in our treatment of women, or less? Has the art gone away on its own, or did we push it out? And what can we do for the stripping and exotic dancing which does still hold the artistic spirit?

The movie does get some details of realism wrong. For example, no one is ever turned on during a nude modeling. Not the models, not the artists. I haven't even participated in a nude modeling art session (you can tell because I don't know what they're properly called), and I know that they're uncomfortable as fuck. Not because of the nudity, but because art is pain, and also, studios are cold. When one of the artists remarked on the attractiveness of his nude model I was completely taken out of the movie. ZERO STARS.

To return to the themes in a serious sense for a moment: this movie is about the Big City turning a privileged girl into a rebel, but it's also about a country girl taming a city man. Tradition gets a little victory at the end, which may have been a scene tacked on for the sake of censors and pearl-clutchers. It's interesting to see the movie try to be fair, in a way which is pretty harmless at that. The whole movie is pretty harmless, again due to the oft-stated mildness.

On the trash side, we get such wonders as the tiniest car ever (seriously, EVER) and an extremely casual delivery of the line, "She could kill herself!" There's also an awesome jazz soundtrack which will probably get stuck in your head. If you like seeing interesting '50s politics, and you also like seeing people take their clothes off comedically, you need to speed up--so you can catch up with The Fast Set.

...also this movie probably features the last-ever use of the word "Set" in that context, at least until The Rebel Set came along in 1959. And speaking of The Rebel Set, we'll get into mid-century MST3K fodder again in just a little bit.

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Revenge in the House of Usher (1982), by Jess Franco

The film that introduced me to Howard Vernon, and probably also Jess Franco. I should say here there's no use telling me I have the wrong title card on this one--it's a European horror movie so of course there are a million other titles. At least my copy doesn't go by Zombi 5.

In an ancient castle, Dr. Usher (played by Howard Vernon) directs his servants Morpho and Matthias to begin transfusing blood from a living girl into his comatose daughter Melissa. This appears to revive her, but her vitality does not last long and she soon returns to lifelessness. Shortly thereafter, Usher is visited by his former student Alan Hacker (apparently spelled Harker in the script and original dubbing), whom he initially greets with distrust and a lack of recognition, collapsing in a fit which is soon remedied by the local medecin Dr. Seward. Upon awakening, Usher tells Hacker he is a murderer, and has a story to tell him the next day. Shortly thereafter Hacker discovers a dungeon full of women, who tell Hacker that Usher drains their blood--he also discovers an imprisoned Matthias, and is confronted by a strange vampiric woman, before running across Usher in the middle of a blood transfusion. In trying to escape, Hacker trips, and passes out. The next morning, Usher's maid assures Hacker that what he saw last night was just a symptom of "mountain fever," which he believes despite being a med student. However, Usher proceeds to tell him that what he saw did happen, and reveals the whole of what is happening here in the House of Usher. Melissa is suffering from an ailment that must be cured by blood transfusions, as we've already seen. Usher shows us the process by which he acquired the victims of these transfusions, via lengthy stock footage plundered from The Awful Dr. Orlof. He also explains that his sins have tied him to his castle, and when the castle crumbles, so will he, and vice versa. Usher finally meets his end at the hands of the vampire-lady from earlier, who is actually the ghoul of his dead wife. Hacker barely escapes as the House falls in on itself.

For a movie as straightforward as Revenge in the House of Usher, that was one of the hardest plot synopses I've written in a while. There's somehow a lot that happens, with nothing happening at the same time--things make sense, and yet never follow each other. I may be the only person in the world to say this, but this was a perfect introduction to Franco's body of work. It's a strange thing to say, given that Revenge in the House of Usher is actually very unlike the rest of Franco's films; it was a good introduction in that it was amusing enough for me to want to see more. Indeed, Revenge does so much tremendously wrong that it's hard not to laugh at it relatively frequently.

Characters behave really strangely in this movie. For example, when the actresses who play Usher's transfusion victims read "moan in pain" in the script, they portray it as "moan sexually." Given that this is Jess Franco we're talking about, I don't think that's accidental. It's weird, too, that these girls usually only "scream" when the blood starts leaving their bodies, not when the needle is inserted. As far as I know, the needle part is the painful bit of having your blood drawn. It's strange that the moans of the victims are loud enough to attract Hacker to their cell at night, but he doesn't hear them at all during the day. Then again, Hacker is kind of an idiot.

Everyone is kind of an idiot in this. It takes about two or three sentences more than is necessary for people to comprehend basic things. Sometimes, people will just straight up forget things that characters have previously told them, and they'll rediscover it much later as if they were learning it for the first time. For example, Hacker is still shocked by Usher turning out to be a lunatic after his "mountain fever" dream of ladies being bled to death, which in itself follows Usher confessing to murder! Most of Franco's movies are almost absurdly dream-like--this movie even gives itself an open ending as to whether or not Usher's claims were true--but this never comes across as anything else besides utter cheapness. I sometimes question whether this movie had a script, at least in its English version. Oftentimes it is very obvious what's being done for padding, namely the repeated points and the fact that characters just loaf around. Dr. Usher will tell Morpho to go do something, and he'll have to tell him several times just to get him moving. Also, when Melissa revives for the first time, Morpho stands over whispering, "Melissa...you're alive...", over and over, for several minutes. Franco's other movies frequently share this love of padding, but this goes on so long that it loops around to become funny again--even in context to his other films.

And then there is Howard Vernon.

I've seen enough movies with Vernon in them now, and I've tracked down interviews with him, to be reasonably convinced that he usually dubs his own lines in his movies. I've never been able to find out which languages he spoke, but it's not unlikely for a European actor to speak Spanish, French, English, and possibly German all reasonably well. Vernon's dubs become notably more...dramatic as his career marched on, and his performance here as Dr. Usher is no exception. Vernon is simultaneously amazing and horrible in this. His physical performance is great...he still has a lot of the charm that made him suitably creepy as Dr. Orlof twenty years prior. But his lines are--I honestly can't describe them. He makes a lot of weird gibbering old man noises, and moans the words out with a blend of fury and senility. A lot of it is the script. It's hard for anyone to deliver lines like, "Dr. Smegma and the ghost of Theodore Crejin Maliciamain [?] are after me," and "They're damned, all of them...a plague on both their houses," but Vernon pulls it off beyond his parameters. It's a strange blend of earnestness, unintentional camp, confusion, and fatigue. Every moment that Dr. Usher is onscreen makes it worth it.

Vernon's performance helps cement the fact that this is Franco at his least artsiest, at least from what I've seen. Sure, there's still plenty of zoom lens abuse, and characters staring wistfully into the sky, but there's too much bad dubbing for us to care. Franco then jumps onto his old practice of welding himself to a respected (or semi-respected) literary source. Yes, this is yet another Franco movie where he insists on making a bunch of Dracula references. Dr. Seward...Alan Harker...the enormous, foreboding castle where an evil ageless presence rots away. I've seen probably a dozen-plus Franco movies now and more than half of them shamelessly rip off Dracula, even in incidental and unusual ways. It's so weird that his big chance at directing Dracula, as 1970's Count Dracula with Herbert Lom and Christopher Lee, not only failed at cleansing the story from his system (even twelve years later), but also failed at being a satisfying adaptation of Stoker's story--even if it is one of the most accurate. That film's accuracy may be one of the reasons why it flopped so bad for me. But that's another story for another day.

In sum, this movie will make you a Franco fan and a Vernon fan if you aren't already. And here is where I reveal the ulterior motive of this review. I could not proceed further into Howard Vernon's career without this review under my belt, and now I can move on to the next logical step: the Vernon/Franco revenge thriller She Killed in Ecstasy. Aka: the movie where we get to see a 57-year-old Howard Vernon's junk.

Howard Vernon's junk.

So in further sum: heheheheheheheheh; stay tuned. 

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Book Club of Desolation #13: Frankenstein's Tower (1957), by Jean-Claude Carriere

OKAY AFTER THIS I PROMISE I WILL STOP TALKING ABOUT FRANKENSTEIN

I'd heard about Jean-Claude Carriere's Frankenstein series about ten years ago--before I was published a couple times by Black Coat Press, I read the entirety of their sister site, Cool French Comics, to stay up to date on all the remarkably neat characters dreamed up by the European pulp market. I learned of "Gouroull," Carriere's name for the Monster, and how Gouroull was much more violent than Shelley's depiction, or Universal's, or even Hammer's. Needless to say I was always fascinated by this, but English translations were only available as of last year! It's taken sixty years for Carriere's pulp series to reach our shores, and as of this writing, the reprints aren't even done yet! And while Frankenstein's Tower is not as fantastic or trashy a work as I hoped, it is still a book worthy of interest and a good hook for the start of a series.


Helen Coostle is a young woman traveling out to the Irish countryside town of Kanderley to holiday with her grandmother. She is a curious girl, but is nonetheless a Victorian lady, and thus is not that much of a femme fatale badass. While she is fascinated by the thrilling story's of Kanderley's old tower, which once belonged to Dr. Victor Frankenstein (now decades dead in the Arctic), her amusement turns to dread when an old vagabond takes her to the abandoned museum he lives in, revealing that one of the museum's lost exhibits was a glass casket containing the Monster of Frankenstein himself! Though she's assured that the Monster can't awaken as long as he's in the casket, he begins to haunt her nightmares, especially when she hears the sinister muttering of the word "Gouroull": the guttural sound which seems to be the name the Monster has taken for himself. Of course it isn't long before someone breaks into the museum and shatters Gouroull's coffin. Once more the Tower of Frankenstein has a resident, and it won't be long before Helen joins him...perhaps as permanent company...

Frankenstein's Tower is interesting because it shows to me that there is some parallel between trash cinema and "trash literature," for all that means: I would assume that a violent pulp series about the Frankenstein's Monster would be considered "lowbrow" enough to be considered such, even though how lowbrow it is is debatable. Frankenstein's Tower is arguably what I would think a pulp novel by Jess Franco or Jean Rollin would read like: sleazy, yes, but also patiently paced and "artsy" (read: light) in its scares, relying chiefly on atmosphere. And probably a little crazy, too. It is a full translation of Eurotrash onto the page, for all the good and bad that represents. For a lot of its length it's not particularly interesting, but when it heats up, it's worth it. Like the madman-in-the-police-station scene from The Awful Dr. Orlof, or EVERYTHING in SS Girls, the trashier elements help counterbalance the negative backflow of the High Brow. For example, there's a long sequence where Helen is kept in suspense over whether or not Gouroull is going to rape her. Sleazy and disturbing: yes. After this suspense is the book's ending, however, where the police decide to flood the tower with deadly snakes in an attempt to kill Gouroull--surprise, it fucking backfires and nearly gets Helen and everyone else killed.

It is a very quick read, and that's because it's written with a pulpy directness that I envy. The downside is that "pulp professional" has always reminded me too much of Ian Fleming: in case you didn't notice, I like my weird books eccentric and energetic, not dignified and...manly. Since the start of the pulp era, male pulp and paperback writers have toiled under the delusion that the masculinity of their writing will be increased if everything is portrayed as flatly and technically and dryly as possible. Normally this goes hand-in-hand with implicit and/or overt sexism which is why these books are repulsive to me. While he has a commercial staccato going for him prose-wise, Carriere avoids the sexism of his '50s highbrow peers, because Helen is a likable and believable protagonist. She spends a lot of the book as a damsel in distress, and being full of fear, but dude, it's the fucking Frankenstein's Monster. He tears people's arms off. I'd probably be screaming too.

To flesh out my cracks about highbrow stuff, though: the English edition comes with fore- and postwords written by Carriere. I don't really know what to make of 'em, to be honest. The man seems to take himself a bit too seriously, but he is one of the Great French Filmmakers apparently so maybe he has some entitlement to that. I feel like a super-artsy take on Frankenstein would be interesting, though this isn't it. It's interesting that he tries to do a thematic dissection of Frankenstein before launching into a book which is a straightforward thriller about the Monster, which doesn't really study the Monster in any depth.

But like I said, I'll probably check out the other books in the series. I've never seen the original French editions but these are good translations. They flow as naturally as any book written in English, and you could probably plow through one of these in a few hours. A fascinating read if you like pulps, European horror, and Frankenstein, with a few of the good old Weird Plot Decisions spliced in.

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Image Source: Amazon

Terminator II (1989), by Bruno Mattei

Where would we be without Bruno?

I think I've talked before about how my life hasn't exactly been...normal, as far as movies go. I hate self-exceptionalism and all who believe in it, but ever since my aunt and uncle showed me I Eat Your Skin at the tender age of ten, I have had an issue with prioritizing "good" movies over trash flicks. Off the top of my head, some of the classic movies I have not seen are: The Godfather, The Shawshank Redemption, Saturday Night Fever, GoldenEye, Mean Girls, Breakfast at Tiffany's, American Psycho, Superman III, and last but not least, Aliens. It's worth pointing out that I have seen Terminator and Terminator 2. And now, I have also seen Terminator II. Except Terminator II is not Italian trashmaster Bruno Mattei's attempt at sequelizing James Cameron's robot-action tour-de-force, though Cameron is certainly present here. No, today it is Cameron's Aliens that falls under the auspices of Bruno Mattei and Claudio "Troll 2" Fragasso. At some point in my life, I know I will become a non-loser and watch Aliens, but because of my experiences today, I will have the inverse view of most folks: to me, Aliens will be the pale shadow of Terminator II, the one I saw first. And I think there's a little validity in my point. After all, James Cameron is no Mattei, nor is he any Fragasso--he is too anchored, too straightforward. Let's let the maestro work.

In the not-too-distant future, at a point where Venice has sunk into the sea, a group of Marines is sent into an underground tunnel network/genetics lab. They are joined by one of the mercenaries employed by the owner of the lab, the astonishingly-named Tubular Corporation. Shortly after learning that something with that name exists in this universe, we find out these Marines are called "Megaforce"! After many wonderful lines of dialogue, they learn that the lab was wiped out by a not-Xenomorph created by Tubular to spread some sort of genetic virus that rewrites an organism like computer code. This is also confusingly tied to pollution, a theme that also appears in Rats: Night of Terror ("You mangy beasts! That's how the water gets...POLLUTED!") and Zombi 3. Of course, the Tubular mercenary is revealed to secretly be an evil android, which I know happens in at least one of the Alien movies. And, naturally, once he is revealed to be an android, he starts doing an Ahnold impression, right down to ripping part of his face off a la the eye-removal scene in the first Terminator. There is a happy ending to this one, for both not-Ripley, and the obligatory child-played-by-a-30-year-old.

The typical Mattei/Fragasso nuttiness is all present here. Even outside of casting moms as ten-year-olds, and all of the flimsy rip-offs of other films, and the presumably-stolen soundtrack, there is wave after wave of beautiful scripting that ties it all together. "Alright, you bunch of pussies," says Koster, one of the three women in this film. "I'm back, and I'm kicking ass!" This is the first thing she ever says to us in the movie, so we don't know what she's "back" from. Terminator II's script also echoes Hell of the Living Dead with a scene where people are dying/screaming for help, and everyone around them just sits around and stares at them grimly as they die. In fact, it's even worse than when it happens in Hell, because at least in that movie, the bystanders at least seemed concerned for the people being horribly killed by monsters. I may have mentioned how Zombi 3 seems to be a "lazy" movie--people move, talk, and live slowly, and don't really seem to enjoy putting effort into doing things like "keeping themselves and their friends alive." Perhaps it shows that Bruno himself was slowing down as he aged. Who knows? Who cares? It's entertaining!

I considered writing a big long paragraph about how the second half of it is dull. Guess what, the second half of every Mattei film is dull. It is an unfortunate truth. This is one is duller than the others, probably because it's a pretty chromatically dark film. And because I'm not above cheap shots, I suppose I can say that you'll like this movie if you're a fan of Man of Steel. Zing-o!

As a side-note/conclusion: this is the second bootleg Alien sequel I've seen. I have also watched the obnoxiously boring Alien 2: On Earth, a movie that's apparently received some acclaim recently, enough for it to get a snazzy Blu-Ray release. My copy is a bootleg pulling together two separate bootlegs to ensure the entire thing is in English. I'll probably only be able to get an HD version of Terminator II when all our brains are resurrected in a supercomputer in the future. That's okay. I'll take slime over substance any day, when Bruno is at the helm.

The Awful Doctor Orlof (1962), by Jess Franco

I have to admit, preemptively, that I am more apprehensive of reviewing The Awful Doctor Orlof than I was of reviewing Blood Feast. That's not a difference in respect--after all, H.G. Lewis is a veritable idol of mine, due to not merely directing Blood Feast but also writing the novel of Blood Feast. The Awful Doctor Orlof is, if you will, the European counterpart of Lewis' overwhelming genre-busting success, leaving nothing the same in its wake. It marks the commencement of Jesus "Jess" Franco's legendary horror career, wherein he produced fantastic revolutionary classics as well as an intense amount of shit. Franco is a director often described as relentless, in ways both good and bad. Doctor Orlof is, however, one of the true Franco classics. Christopher Lee in yellowface does not lurk herein, I can promise you.

The plot of Doctor Orlof is memorable if anything because it was duplicated dozens of times through Franco's corpus. Ultimately the story is a loose lift from Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face from three years prior--a movie that would see a variety of imitators and perhaps create interest in the old "Killing People to Steal Their 'Glands'" plot, which was included The Leech Woman and Atom Age Vampire just a year or two after Eyes, but had its origins in 1945's The Man in Half-Moon Street. Which, in turn, had its origins in good ol' Dorian Gray. What's interesting to me is that Eyes tells the story of a scientist who collects the body parts he does to restore his daughter's beauty after she is injured. Atom Age Vampire also had a scientist who killed to restore a loved one, this time his burned wife, while The Leech Woman killed people to restore her own good looks (influenced by age, not burning). With the Man in Half-Moon Street, the gland-harvester just wants to live forever. And a lot of this, along with Doctor Orlof, was probably mutated and shuffled around when they were doing the plot for The Abominable Dr. Phibes nearly a decade later.

Anyway. Having not seen most of the films I just referenced, I will instead elucidate that The Awful Doctor Orlof is a relatively straightforward story about a man, named, natch, Dr. Orlof, who goes around killing women to take their skin so he can restore his comatose daughter's face. Actually, the person who does the killing is his blind, mute, deformed ex-convict butler Morpho. If that's not fucking pulp I have no idea what it is. Except this is also a Gothic story, principally so. The city whose streets Orlof and Morpho prowl recall German Expressionism and there are spooky mansions, fancy evening clothes, and a dearth of daytime scenes. Pulp influences return when we see that Orlof largely picks up his women at sexy nightclubs, a feature of basically every other movie Franco ever made. Whatever the influence, atmosphere is everywhere. Simply put, every frame of this movie is interesting just because it is genuinely creepy. Franco, when he did his thing well, was a master of trapping us in the world he created. Orlof fulfills every desire for old-style "innocent" movies that still have a scummy sublayer to them.


Adding to this atmosphere is the ever-charismatic presence of Howard Vernon. I don't know why I'm such a big Vernon fan--actually, never mind. Go and watch Revenge in the House of Usher and see his performance in that. Make sure you have the English dubs, wherein I'm positive Vernon voices himself (his English voice and his natural voice from interviews are too similar to be an impersonator). In that one, he's being hilarious, but he still also delivers his lines fantastically, with gravitas. By the time he shows up as a cranky mayor in Zombie Lake, you'll be sold. And then he turns up in Ogroff... Think Lugosi in his movies from before the drugs got too bad, or Vincent Price but sleazier and less silly (though no less gentlemanly). Vernon was born to play villains precisely like Orlof, and Franco made a great choice in casting him.

Next, there is a plethora of great moments all throughout the film. My favorite trash films always have one moment that they boil down to, though not always (and sometimes the moment is the entire movie). This movie's big moment is probably the scene with the Crazy Guy who wants his name in the paper. Six or seven watches and I still don't really know what he's talking about but I get enough of the gist of it to proceed with the movie. But only just so. I want to know if you have the same reaction. There are certainly other big moments, probably involving some of the decisions regarding accents in the dubbing, but this one takes the cake.

Finally, Orlof obtains some meta-coolness by the legacy it leaves behind--the extremely overcomplicated legacy. You see, Orlof has a great many sequels, and the names of its characters are reused frequently. There are at least five movies with name of Orloff (spelled with two f's after this first movie) in the title that I can think of off the top of my head, and one of them, The Orgies of Dr. Orloff, doesn't even have a character named Dr. Orloff in it (though the main character is played by Howard Vernon). However, characters by the name of Orloff show up in Franco's films The Diabolical Dr. Z, Female Vampire, and Jack the Ripper (with the last of which revealing, in a literally unbelievable sense, that Jack the Ripper was Dr. Orloff), though admittedly the movies that did feature Orloff's name in the title probably weren't depicting the same character. Regarding other names of Franco's, then: if there is an imperiled wife/daughter/sister/mother who the main character wants to protect or heal from an injury, they are probably named Melissa, just like Orlof's daughter in this movie. Morpho also shows up, at least in name, in The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein and Revenge in the House of Usher in basically the same role. Actually, in House of Usher, he was playing the exact same role, because I refuse to believe that Howard Vernon's evil scientist character is actually named Usher. He is clearly Dr. Orlof, probably the same as the one from this movie, and I say this because a lot of the substance of House of Usher is stock footage from Dr. Orlof. Morpho is shown to have aided "Usher" as a younger man and, because young!Morpho is stock footage, he has the same scenes as Morpho from Orlof. Morpho is just one less name we have to change to make House of Usher the closest thing this first Orloff movie has to a bona fide sequel.

House of Usher amusingly complicates the situation further for reasons involving the Zombi series ("series"), which I'll explain in a later article, because that is a huge mess unto itself that drags in Planet of the Apes and Friday the 13th. In that time I'll probably talk a bit more extensively about The Awful Dr. Orlof's cinematic roots, for it digs in deep both in a cinematic and literary sense. What's interesting is that as per Antonio Lazaro-Reboll, in his book Spanish Horror Film, Franco insisted that in the '50s, he wrote a series of pulp novels featuring Orlof, as well as basically every other mad scientist he created, under the name "David Khune" or "Khume," whom he credits as the writer and/or director in a lot of his films. I only wish these books were real. They aren't. Unless someone can prove me and everyone else wrong. Or at least, provide a reasonable and entertaining forgery. 

And at last (can you tell I like movie history?), I feel like there has to be some sort of connection between Doctor Orlof and the other adjectival doctor film of 1962, The Horrible Dr. Hichcock. Provided, this is based on the fact that as a kid I always got these movies confused with one another (because yes, I'd heard of them by 11), but riddle me this: Hichcock was released just a month after Orlof. Certainly the film had been made by then, but maybe there was a title switch at the last second that wasn't recorded. The production details behind a movie like The Horrible Dr. Hichcock were never going to be the subject of a tell-tale book, after all--anything was possible. Maybe there was the hope for a double-feature with Orlof, if not a full-on cash-in. Dr. Hichcock proved to be popular enough to have a sort-of sequel, 1963's The Ghost, as well as an in-name-only sequel, 1964's Autopsy of a Criminal, also released as The Killer of Dr. Hichcock (L'assassino del Dott. Hichcock). At the very least, it's an interesting coincidence that a movie possibly retitled to cash in on Doctor Orlof also ended up inheriting that film's curse as far as sequels went.

The Awful Dr. Orlof is both fun to watch and a lesser-known piece of cinematic history. That makes it a classic in my book. If you ever need a new page for your own--your book, that is--give it a try.

Horror Safari (1982), by Alan Birkinshaw

I was introduced to this movie under the title of Invaders of the Lost Gold. I have no idea why the marketers of this movie felt like they had to rip off Harrison Ford to succeed, but this movie being a Raiders bootleg is just icing on the cake. This is movie is a veritable trash hall of fame--nearly everyone in it has been in something magnificent. Edmund Purdom from Pieces! Laura Gemser from Women's Prison Massacre! Woody Strode from The Outing! Plus it's directed by Alan Birkinshaw, the creator of Killer's Moon, one of the most entertainingly sleazy Clockwork Orange ripoffs of all time (never thought I'd say that). And it is the final film of Harold Sakata, who as we all know played the villainous Big Buddha from 1966's Dimension Five--oh, and he was also a villain in some forgettable piece of trivia called Goldfinger. It has good vibes from all corners of cinema, and while it is slow at times it stands up to the legacies it basks in.

At the end of World War II some Japanese soldiers hid some caskets of gold in the Philippines. Naturally, once the '80s roll around, there are some people who want to get that gold, including Edmund Purdom, but also Stuart Whitman, from basically every TV show ever, who Joe Don Bakers his way through the movie in a spectacular way. Joined by the other stars they travel into the snake-infested jungles, which, by the way, also house a tribe of Amazon cannibals. Okay, they're not near the Amazon, but c'mon. Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals had been out for five years before this, and it would be all too easy to channel that once Laura Gemser signed on. That means this movie is a war movie, a jungle survival movie, a crime thriller, a seedy romance, and an Amazon cannibal flick. Therefore it will be occasionally snooty and largely tedious. Fortunately, it is a movie where if you zone out, you will benefit from zoning back in. Typically you will see some stuff that is hilarious even with context, like people pouring beer on their eyes, or prolonged closeups of what may be the filthiest ship captain in existence. (Not even Jell-O wrestlers get that dirty.) The dialogue, too, sometimes reaches Bruno Mattei levels of inanity. You will never forget Edmund Purdom's whopper unleashed during a shady business deal with a Japanese man: "Now let's skip this Oriental tea party, and get down to some hard drinking!" Edmund Purdom then shoots that man in the chest.

You may wonder how far this movie goes into its various genres. Let me tell you, the soap opera stuff, the thriller stuff, and the adventure stuff all goes over well. However, as far as cannibal flicks go, there is a tremendous amount of buildup followed by a baffling letdown. It is actually pretty funny how tiny a role they end up playing past the movie's first half. Rest assured, however, this movie may well contain some real animal violence. Wait, that's a horrible thing. Jesus. Anyway, a snake may get shot in this movie and it is some awful shit, but then again it appears to be the same snake stock footage from Manos: The Hands of Fate, which originated with Disney. Meaning it probably was not shot. Still, in these movies it would be par for the course, and the deeper I dig into the darkest reaches of Internet exploitation records and IMDB's lowest rated pages, the more terrified I am of seeing that sort of cruelty when I find a dearth of content warnings (having walked blind into horse cock and live amputation surgery without warning). This has a 2.4, making it one of the worst movies of 1982, even beating out the disturbingly similar Oasis of the Zombies, which shares an equally schlocky treasure hunt plot and is generally hated even by the most tolerant of Jess Franco fans. Except for me.

Moving to the movie's story, the grittiness of this movie is perhaps best compared to the unforgiving conditions of B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It reaches absurd levels of cruelty, with snake poisonings, crocodile devourings, and cannibal spearings, and there's no shortage of paranoid arguments. I think someone cheats on someone's wife at some point. This is complimented by the devastated film, covered in stripes and flaws that would give Leonard Kirtman or Nathan Schiff a heart attack. That makes it cozy for people like us. Sure, there are tons of shots that are irritatingly dark, but once gets used to those things in this business. Among other production details that the filmmakers lavished upon us, with us getting little say in the matter, is the "Oriental" music that plays throughout most of the thing. Luckily it is very similar to the unbelievable themes of a similar type used horrifically in Psyched by the 4D Witch. This is the most stereotypical music I can think of, which may be forgiven in that it was apparently shot in Hong Kong. But it's initial release was in Turkey...see why I love the trash cosmos? All of this needlessly convoluted shit clearly has a story behind it. That history makes it seem like it was a battle to get this out--that the people behind it stuck with it, to gain whatever profit they could, just so they could do it all over again with something equally cheap. Trash's vicious cycle.

Speaking of the people behind it, one of the writers was Dick Randall, the producer of such films as Pieces (as well as Pod People, also made by Juan Piquer Simon), Emanuelle, Queen of the Desert (starring Laura Gemser, who else), and Death Dimension (another Harold Sakata villain vehicle). That explains the unholy allegiance forged here that really does improve the film if you are familiar with some of the old friends of trash divers. However, each of these actors have fame for a reason, and so they are capable of delivering an entertaining enough piece for people who haven't met them yet. If you have a strong stomach, use this as a launch point into their careers. Don't expect a masterpiece but if you have the right expectations, it will do good things for you.

SS Girls (1977), by Bruno Mattei

Recently, as Adam Mudman's A-List has come up on around thirty posts, I've gone back and reflected on what I've presented these last few months, and in doing so, I've tried to think of ways to make this blog relatable while also fulfilling my eternal mission of relaying the alien qualities of the movies I tend to highlight. After all, weirdness obtains greatness primarily in the context of normalcy, as insufferable as that context can be. In essence, I need to compare more of these movies to movies you're likely to have ever seen, like The Great Escape and Salon Kitty. Okay, there's a smaller chance you've seen Salon Kitty, which is unfortunate given that SS Girls (or Private House of the SS, I guess) is basically a remake of that. Except it's made by Bruno Mattei, he of Women's Prison Massacre and Hell of the Living Dead, and so this is like The Great Escape if there were prostitutes, blood-drinking, and Gabriele Carrara.

Brilliant and shining Gabriele Carrara! He is the star of this film, as he plays enthusiastic Nazi fanatic Hans Schellenberg. The line in the sand is drawn at him--there's no point in making comparisons from here on it. By merit of its star, SS Girls transcends any sort of expectations one can have for a World War II film.

It's 1945, and the Wehrmacht has been invaded by a buncha lousy Hitler-haters. The SS employs Hans Schellenberg to rip the truth out of five officers suspected of a plot to betray the Fuhrer, and so with the aid of Frau Inge and Professor Jurgen, Schellenberg acquires a group of prostitutes who are swiftly conditioned for any sort of sex, unnatural or otherwise, and likewise honed to physical perfection. Schellenberg then invites the officers to a proper Third Reich orgy, where people do all sorts of things that I'm sure the Nazis really did at their orgies, like lick wine off of people. As this occurs, Herr Schellenberg climaxes while playing the organ, and caresses nipples creepily but never does the deed himself. The plot succeeds and the officers, in throes of passion, confess to hating Hitler. They are put on trial by Schellenberg dressed in a Nazi Pope uniform, and promptly disposed of. Movies over, right? Of course not! We haven't yet gotten to see the next batch of officers Schellenberg and his girls are given to work on, including a blood-drinking guy and a Japanese Nazi with a Swastika drawn in permanent marker on his dishcloth headband. So it goes.

Claudio Fragasso wrote this, and so basically it's the same type of dialogue you'll see in Troll 2. Despite the subject matter, it surprisingly doesn't have someone exclaim, "They're eating her! And then they're going to eat me!" But instead, we do get gems like a quip by General von Kluger, the eyepatch-Nazi: "I may only have one eye but I've seen the orders and it's a fact...we're abouta get more pussy than we can handle." If you've seen any Italian movie from the '70s or '80s you will hear the same voice cast/accents, and it will be like coming home. No one is a European, and no one is as excited as Gabriele Carrara's dub actor, who, judging from the flawlessness of the performance, may well have been Carrara himself.

It truly is Carrara who makes the entire thing dodge any description but "operatic." I'm sorry, I know that's a pretentious thing to say, but this is the kind of acting I feel I need fancy glasses to watch. Perhaps Schellenberg himself says it best when he says, "It's almost like a play...that's it...a play." This line is followed immediately by his snarfing down a mouthful of roast chicken, clearly representative of the scenery. Either Carrara was a secret acting genius whose great talent allowed him to produce such a confusing performance (he only appeared elsewhere in Mattei's Women's Camp 119 and a Mondo flick called Mutant Sexual Behaviour), or he believed this was how Nazis really acted, and he believed in realism so much he was willing to die for it. The man does basically kill himself throwing his body and voice into the level of camp to which he stoops. I've never seen anything even fucking close to it.

Fortunately, it is generally comparable to other Nazisploitation movies, at least on the surface. There's the sex aspect, and gross sex at that. Schellenberg's girls learn to screw German shepherds and circus freaks in scenes that will make you cringe, then laugh your heart out. It's not Joe D'Amato at the wheel, so everything's softcore and none of the ghastly stuff is real. But at the edges of this seemingly normal abnormal sexuality is something greater. A normal Nazisploitation film wouldn't include a scene of a Little Person SS Officer lip-syncing to the Headless Horseman's laugh in the 1949 Disney Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Nor would it feature a scene in which a Nazi Pope shrieks "Am I funny, huh? Am I funny, huh?!" at a crowd of confused onlookers. So even if you have entered the deep levels of Nazisploitation and that has become your norm, this is even farther away. Farewell, Great Escape, I guess.

SS Girls is marred by one of the traditional faults of Nazisploitation, which is tedium. After the first and second batches of traitorous Third Reich Benedict Arnolds are done away with, we're left with a long half-hour in which the brothel reacts to news of Hitler's death. Not much of interest happens here, but that's okay. As long as we have that first hour, all will be well. The world will keep being a better place.

I was introduced to this movie about six months ago, but it feels like I've known it for lifetimes. The images strung together that make this movie are so random and wild that they always come out of nowhere, even when I know they're on their way. It's so relieving that this is emblematic of most of Mattei's movies, even some of his crasser and grosser ones.

And here, I started by saying that I wanted to take about being relatable. I chose a poor movie for the job, given that it's best measured in degrees of inverse relatability. Basically: take everything you know about a World War II movie. Then, translate your understanding of those movies into an equivalent amount of confusion and unfamiliarity. From there do everything you can to accept that anti-comprehension. Once you do accept it--you'll be free to laugh endlessly.

I can't say I'll be able to promise grounding and stability the next time around. My tastes have become too distorted for that. But again, if you can turn yourself inside out, you will find a great bliss. Bruno Mattei will guide you down this Stygian river more smoothly than anyone else, so if you can stand a lot of boobs, a lot of dubs, and a lot of tasteless exploitation, spend an evening with this one.

The Witches' Mountain (1972), by Raul Artigot

As you may have noticed, I use the word "trippy" to refer to a lot of the movies I talk about on here. Today's movie is essentially perfect for getting deep into the head of that adjective. This movie is nothing less than a waking nightmare, a dream in the dark. It has haunted me since I was a kid, and even to this day, I don't know if I've explored all of its mysteries, and I don't know if these mysteries exist beyond my head. But let's find out, when we travel together to The Witches' Mountain.

A lot of reviews I've seen for this movie highlight this movie's intro, and for good reason. A woman, whom we later learn is named Carla, comes home to her apparent mansion somewhere deep in the Spanish countryside. She discovers weird things scattered around her house, including a wig stabbed in the lawn with a knife, and eventually a dead cat. The apparent culprit is a precocious child named Gerta. Gerta is a creepy child done right, because she is never properly explained, and because Carla seems to be in her power, spending most of this opening scene desperately trying to bargain with her. Gerta basically says that she must take Carla to an unspecified location, which makes Carla extremely uncomfortable. The scene ends with Carla seemingly killing Gerta and herself by setting a gas fire.

Except after the credits (flushed with a creepy choir singing in an incomprehensible language), Carla is alive! She wants to get back together with her photographer boyfriend Mario, but Mario (who resembles his video game name-sharer if he was a '70s era college hipster) calls up his editor to cancel his vacation so he can get away from her. His boss sends him to take pictures of a lake on top of a mysterious, virtually-uninhabited mountain, and he accepts this job. His abandonment of Carla is never explained, but maybe he knows she's wrapped up in something supernatural. On his drive to the mountain, Mario picks up a girl whom he photographs nude, the laid-back and flirtatious Delia, played by the ever-charismatic horror queen Patty Shepard. She agrees to travel with him, even when he hallucinates weird music. The ensuing journey with lead them to a Marty Feldman lookalike innkeeper, inexplicable photos, and, of course, the coven of witches that is hidden at the mountain's peak.

And the whole time, the attentive audience is creeped the fuck out. If you focus--and can survive long periods of literally nothing happening--you can get easily sucked into the setting of the mountain. The dense jungles, the winding roads. People who like road trips through the middle of nowhere like I do (having been a ghost-hunter in the American Midwest) will find themselves lost in the scenery of rustic Spain, and the quietness of the evil present in the story makes it believable. That is to say, I totally believe that there are mountains in the far reaches of continental Europe where one can find strange things just like those depicted in this film. At least, I like to believe in them.

I wholeheartedly believe that The Witches' Mountain should be viewed as an artistic classic. It's a movie that relies on clues--it never says anything outright. The ending is hard to make out because of the poor video quality, but it's tied earlier to the scenes of the barbarian-man the witches have chained up in a cave. On my third viewing I realized the witches are holding up these chains to Mario, basically saying he'll be the next to wear them. Well, in some myths involving witches, the coven is composed entirely of women, who keep a single man as a prisoner basically to breed more witches and keep the coven alive. So that's what these witches do. And it's never expressly stated, never allowed to leave the shadows. It's a movie that's incredibly relaxing, and so maybe your brain turns off and lets you miss things. But if you can get into its rhythm, it'll sing to you.

Nostalgia brought me back to this one. I first watched it back in middle school after my aunt and uncle introduced me to Mill Creek Entertainment's 50 Chilling Classics pack, which contained the 1964 zombie classic, I Eat Your Skin, which I consider to be my first trash movie. My brother and I thought it was boring and we were right. But I remembered how the boredom and slowness really did take on that bizarre dreamy feeling, with a certain '70s trippiness to it. Years later in college I wanted to get creeped out by a "bad" movie. And so when I came back to this one, I was pleasantly surprised that while it was still a rough watch due to the pacing, there was enough to pay attention to it that it gave you the impression the people behind it cared. Perhaps they didn't care enough to make it in-your-face-exciting, but they left behind something gentler. Something worthy of checking out.

I've driven myself nuts trying to find out anything else about this film, including which mountain exactly it was shot on. I would love to visit the locales from this movie, especially the barebones inn run by the deaf not-Feldman (actually European creep-star Victor Israel, of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Hell of the Living Dead) or Delia's spooky old house. After all, it is a film about the dark secrets of the countryside, and so location is everything. I did manage to find an interview with director Artigot, wherein he talks about his movies facing censorship in Spain. Horror films that were deemed contrary to the religious goals of the Franco regime--and since we're talking trash, I should specify Francisco Franco, rather Jess--were heavily cut, especially if they involved themes like witchcraft. Artigot apparently also faced sabotage against his picture alongside these cuts, which removed some presumably-now-lost scenes involving nudity intended for more progressive foreign audiences. Discovering this stuff gave me a new look into the European horror scene in a way that didn't involve the Argento/Franco/Fulci/Mattei/Fragasso/D'Amato/Lenzi web of unification that you tend to find everywhere if you can bother to do enough research. As crazy as some of these movies got, they were also bound to rules that washed away those of lesser stamina. Raul Artigot, and The Witches' Mountain, held on, if anything because of a bootleg that formed the U.S. release.

Because a lot of my love of the movie comes from this external stuff, it is indeed a hard movie to enjoy. These meta-details don't help the film stand any stronger, and I would totally understand anyone falling asleep during it. If you show patience, though, the weird will leak out, and it will be good.

One last thing, in regards to the quality of the video, which is universal in every release I've seen: it is pretty bad. Consequently, I am super curious about the apparent HD print shown off in this YouTube video. If anyone out there has any information on this print, please let me know! Especially if it's linked to an updated release! In the meantime, watch what version you can find. The darkness works to good effect with the eeriness--even if you have to squint now and then.

P.S. Cihangir Gaffari, who plays Mario, also appeared in what appears to be a sexploitation Western called Seytan kan kusturacak, which translators tell me comes out to mean Satan Will Vomit Blood! This movie was made in 1972, just a year before its director, T. Fikret Ucak, made the world-famous 3 dev adam, aka Turkish Spider-Man vs. Santo and Captain America. I can only assume that Satan Will Vomit Blood is amazing and that I must find it immediately. (Ucak made another Western called Azrailin bes atlisi, which translates to, hell yes, The Five Horsemen of the Grim Reaper. And bless the lords of awesome names, this one's on YouTube!)