Archive for the ‘The Horror!?’ Category


Die Blaue Hand

August 12th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a.: The Blue Hand / Creature With the Blue Hand / The Bloody Dead
Year: 1967    Runtime: 84′  Director: Alfred Vohrer
Writer: Herbert Reinecker  Cinematography: Ernst W. Kalinke   Music: Martin Böttcher
Cast: Klaus Kinski, Harald Leipnitz, Carl Lange, Diana Körner, Siegfried Schürenberg, Albert Bessler
(This write-up concerns the original German cut of the movie, and not that abomination some cruel American producer created out of it and random horrible inserts later on.)

Dave Emerson (Klaus Kinski), descendant of a formerly rich family, is sentenced to a nice little holiday in the establishment of local shady psychiatrist (so untrustworthy he’s even wearing a monocle, for Cthulhu’s sake! in the 60s!) Dr. Mangrove (Carl Lange) for killing the family gardener.

Nobody cares much that Dave has insisted on his innocence in the murder throughout the trial, or that the evidence against him is pretty circumstantial, least of all his “loving” mother Lady Emerson (Ilse Steppat).

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Asesinos De Otros Mundos

August 5th, 2011 | article by | 2 Comments »
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Year: 1971    Runtime: 87′  Director: Rubén Galindo
Writers: Rubén Galindo, Ramón Obón  Cinematography: Raúl Martínez Solares   Music: Chucho Zarzosa
Cast: El Santo, Juan Gallardo, Sasha Montenegro, Carlos Agosti, Marco Antonio Campos, Carlos Suárez

A horrible monstrosity that looks a lot like a bunch of people crawling around under a tarp kills important leaders of Mexico’s industry. It’s so very very sad. The tarpster serves a certain Malkosh (Carlos Agosti) who uses his awesome ability to appear on a television in police chief O’Connor’s (Marco Antonio Campos) meeting room to try and blackmail Mexico into paying him a lot of money, or else, more “important” people will die.

Fortunately, the police has a not-so-secret weapon: El Santo (El Santo!), the idol of the masses, greatest man on Earth, Blue Demon’s secret nemesis (etc.) is on the case before you can even cry out in excitement. One might doubt the great man’s technique – getting himself overrun by Malkosh’s car after he has already gotten rid of the bad guy’s henchmen, and then caught – but his results are great.

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Contagion

July 29th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1987    Runtime: 91′  Director: Karl Zwicky
Writer: Ken Methold  Cinematography: John Stokes   Music: Frank Strangio
Cast: John Doyle, Nicola Bartlett, Ray Barrett, Nathalie Gaffney, Pamela Hawkesford

Real estate agent Mark (John Doyle) is driving through the Australian bush when he sees a woman being kidnapped by your typical rape-hungry backwoods person. The following rather timid rescue attempt doesn’t work out too well for Mark, for the backwoods guy isn’t alone. A few minutes later, Mark finds himself stretched over his own car’s hood and raped by a guy who dresses up in a mouse mask for the occasion.

Afterwards (we don’t get to see the rape), the backwoodsies (that’s the technical term, I think) take Mark and the girl to their camp. In a surprising twist of fate, Mark manages to escape after a time and even stumbles into killing one of his tormentors. Next thing he knows, Mark finds himself – still in the bush – breaking down in front of an aggressively blasé woman named Cleo (Nathalie Gaffney). Unimpressed by the backwoods rapist threat, Cleo takes Mark to a mansion where she lives with another girl called Helen (Pamela Hawkesford) and an older guy with an upperclass accent and Hugh Hefner’s dress sense (that is, none) called Rupert (Ray Barrett).

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Krysar

July 22nd, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a. The Pied Piper of Hamelin
Year: 1986    Runtime: 53′  Director: Jiri Barta
Writer: Kamil Pixa  Cinematography: Vladimir Malik, Ivan Vit   Music: Michael Kocab

The people living in the medieval town of Hamelin are full of perverse industriousness, greed in all of its forms, and narrow-minded cruelty. It’s probably not an accident that the town is hit by a plague of rats who seem hell-bent on taking away the only things the people of Hamelin love – food, money and jewels. There seems to be no way to stop the hairy plague once it has begun, so it looks as if it will be only a question of time until Hamelin’s inhabitants will either all go mad (or rather even more mad than they already were in the beginning) or will have to leave their once prosperous town.

Until a stranger arrives in town. The man pulls out a pipe, and once he begins playing his instrument, the rats are compelled to follow him. He leads the animals onto the city walls from where they jump down into the surrounding moat to drown.

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Prikosnoveniye

July 8th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a. (The) Contact
Year: 1992    Runtime: 92′  Director: Albert S. Mkrtchyan
Writer: Andrei Goryunov  Cinematography: Boris Kocherev   Music: Leonid Desyatnikov
Cast: Aleksandr Zuyev, Maryana Polteva, Vsevolod Abdulov, Igor Pushkaryov, Aleksandra Kharitonova

Olga Nikolayevna kills her little son Kolya and then herself. Andrey (Aleksandr Zuyev), the most laid-back and friendly cop in Russia, gets on the case. His investigation leads the policeman to Olga’s lover. At first, the man – who has an undefeatable alibi – tries to warn Andrey off from any further enquiries, but when the cop persists and waves off any danger, the man explains that he knows well why Olga and Kolya died: Olga’s father had convinced her that the afterlife needed her, life on Earth being no good anyhow, and after a long time, she agreed. The most troubling part of that story is the fact that Olga’s father has been dead for twelve years. Supposedly, the father’s shrouded ghost had been visiting his daughter regularly for years.

Shortly after their talk, Andrey’s witness hangs himself.

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Detective Dee And The Mystery Of The Phantom Flame

June 30th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a. Di Renjie
Year: 2010    Runtime: 124′  Director: Tsui Hark
Writers: Chen Kuo-Fu, Chang Chia-Lu  Cinematography: Parkie Chan Chor-Keung, Chan Chi-Ying
Music: Peter Kam Pau-Tat   Cast: Andy Lau Tak-Wah, Li Bing-Bing, Tony Leung Ka-Fai, Deng Chao,
Carina Lau Ka-Ling, Richard Ng Yiu-Hon, Teddy Robin Kwan

China in the 7th Century, during the Tang Dynasty. To commemorate her crowning as the first (and, unfortunately, last) Empress of China, Wu Zetian (Carina Lau) has commissioned the building of an unpleasantly gigantic statue of the Buddha pretty much next to her palace grounds. Her rather dictatorial policies have left the Empress with a lot of enemies, so it doesn’t come as much of a surprise when trouble hits her construction project.

Two of the people responsible for the building of the Godzilla-large statue are killed. More surprising than the fact of their death is the way the men die – spontaneous combustion. The deaths may very well have been caused by the victims’ moving of some magical pieces of script hanging inside of the statue, but the Empress is only prone to superstition when it suits her, and stays sceptical. After her chief chaplain (as the not exactly trustworthy subtitles call him) visits her in form of a talking deer and mutters an imprecise prophecy, the Empress decides that the stars ask her to put the mystery into the hands of Judge Dee (Andy Lau).

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The Amazing Mr. X

June 10th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a. The Spiritualist
Year: 1948    Runtime: 78′  Director: Bernard Vorhaus
Writers: Muriel Roy Bolton, Ian McLellan Hunter, Crane Wilbur  Cinematography: John Alton
Music: Alexander Laszlo   Cast: Lynn Bari, Turhan Bey, Cathy O’Donnell, Richard Carlson, Paul Faber, Virginia Gregg

Stinking rich Christine Faber (Lynn Bari) has lost her beloved husband Paul (Donald Curtis) two years ago in the sort of car crash that can only be described with the adjective “fiery”. Though Chris has a new beloved in form of the horrifically boring and prosaic district attorney Martin Abbott (Richard “Wooden” Carlson), and a marriage proposal is in the air, she hasn’t really come to grips with Paul’s death. So it’s not that much of a surprise when Chris one night thinks she hears a voice that might very well be Paul’s – or might just be the sound of the waves hitting the beach close to her villa – calling out her name. On the beach, she doesn’t find Paul’s ghost, but rather a smarmy guy calling himself Alexis (Turhan Bey) who works on her with a highly practiced psychic spiel full of things no stranger could know about the woman.

At first, Chris is still wavering between fascination and scepticism, but a horrible nightmare, or rather a vision full of barely disguised wedding anxiety (which seems perfectly natural when one is to wed Richard Carlson some time in the future), puts Chris over the edge, so she decides to visit Alexis in his “professional” capacity. A few tricks later, Chris is a regular customer of the psychic, a fact neither Martin nor her younger sister Janet (Cathy O’Donnell) are too happy with once they find out.

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A Whisper in the Dark

June 3rd, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a. Un sussurro nel buio
Year: 1976    Runtime: 103′  Director: Marcello Aliprandi
Writers: Marisa Teresa Rienzi, Nicolo Rienzi  Cinematography: Claudio Cirillo  Music: Pino Donaggio
Cast: Nathalie Delon, John Philip Law, Alessandro Poggi, Olga Bisera, Joseph Cotten, Lucretia Love

A rich Italian family lives the life of the rich and idle in their palatial mansion in the country. Things aren’t quite as perfect as they seem, though. It’s not just that family father Alex (John Phillip Law) is something of a jerk who cheats on his wife Camilla (Nathalie Delon) with a friend of hers who is staying as a house guest, or that the regularly visiting grandmother is a nasty old bint hiding her unpleasant interior behind impeccable manners, or that the family’s two daughters make eardrum-shattering screeching noises whenever they open their mouths, or that Camilla’s nerves are so on edge that she’s bound to become the sort of hysteric that only exists in the mind of Freudians and filmmakers one day. No, all that is minor trouble when compared to the family’s true problem.

Their little son Martino (Alessandro Poggi), you see, has an invisible friend called Luca on whom he seems to be more fixated than can be seen as healthy, but, quite unlike most invisible friends, Luca has a way of making his presence known physically. Luca moves objects around often enough to have Camilla and the nanny Francoise (Olga Bisera) believe the invisible child is more than just a figment of Martino’s imagination. What’s even more disturbing for Camilla is the fact that the name her son has given to his invisible playmate is the same she and Alex had given the stillborn boy they had before Martino, something the kid shouldn’t know about at all.

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Cat Girl

May 27th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1957    Runtime: 70′  Director: Alfred Shaughnessy
Writers: Lou Rusoff  Cinematography: Peter Hennessy
Cast: Barbara Shelley, Robert Ayres, Kay Callard, Ernest Milton, Jack May, Lily Kann, Paddy Webster

After nine years away, Leonora Johnson (Barbara Shelley) returns to her ancestral home on insistence of her uncle Edmund Brandt (Ernest Milton). Leonora has bad memories of the place and her uncle’s habit of making her life a decidedly cheerless one. Why, he even managed to torpedo her love to student of medicine Brian Marlowe (Robert “Bland” Ayres). Somehow, the end of her first big love had set Leonora on a path to a horrible taste in men (not that Brian’s exactly like winning the lottery, as we will see), and now she’s freshly married to Richard (Jack May), a semi-professional gold digger who is such a prick he even takes his not-so-secret lover Cathy (Paddy Webster) with them on the visit to Uncle.

As luck will have it, Leonora meets Brian again right before she arrives at her uncle’s. Brian is now a full-grown psychiatrist (though, as it will later turn out, a crap one) and happily married to Dorothy (Kay Callard), which comes as a bit of a shock to Leonora who is quite obviously not at all over her love for the guy.

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The Alien Encounters

May 20th, 2011 | article by | 2 Comments »
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Year: 1979    Runtime: 92′  Director: James T. Flocker
Writers: James T. Flocker  Cinematography: Holger Kasper   Music: William Loose
Cast: Augie Tribach, Matthew Boston, Patricia Hunt, Phil Catalli, Bonnie Henry

Astronomer Alan Reed (Augie Tribach) is up in Alaska with his family, manning a telescope in the search for life in outer space. One day, Reed seems to be on the verge of a major breakthrough observing radio signals coming from Barnard’s Star, but he gets a bit distracted from that – as well as a potential UFO sighting – by the house his wife and little son are in going up in flames in a gas explosion.

With his family dead, Reed crawls into a bottle until the sudden realization hits him that the last signals he got from Barnard’s Star seem to have contained an actual voice saying something in an alien language (note: the audience never gets to hear it that way). Reed stops drinking at once and turns into one of those holy crusaders roaming the American highways in search of the Truth, researching alien encounters, ghost sightings and so on everywhere.

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Born to Fight

May 13th, 2011 | article by | 1 Comment »
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a.k.a. Nato per combattere
Year: 1989    Runtime: 94′   Director: Bruno Mattei
Writers: Claudio Fragasso  Cinematography: Riccardo Grassetti   Music: Al Festa
Cast: Brent Huff, Mary Stavin, Werner Pochath, John Van Dreelen, Romano Puppo

TV reporter Maryline Kane (Mary Stavin) walks into a bar in Vietnam to hire war hero Sam Wood (Brent Huff) to relive his escape from a Vietnamese prison camp for the camera. At first, Brent isn’t too happy with the idea, but once Maryline has offered him enough money, he decides to take her up on her offer. After a nice little boat trip, Maryline, her two-men camera crew and Sam just happen to witness the execution of an American prisoner escaping from a camp full of prisoners of war. Turns out Maryline knows all about the war prisoner problem in the area, and actually wants Sam’s help in rescuing her father, General Weber (John Van Dreelen), from the prison camp, but thought that whole interview business and going to the place unarmed would make Sam more willing to help. Or dead. Or something.

Anyway, given Sam’s unarmed and unwilling status, the couple (and you know they’ll be one in this sort of movie, because they never agree about anything and hate each other’s guts) has to flee first. There’s also some stuff about Romano Puppo playing another guy who is supposed to buy the general’s way to freedom, but would prefer Kurt (Werner Pochath), the boss of the prison camp who will also turn out to be Sam’s arch enemy, to kill the guy so they can share the money. Which makes as much sense as Maryline hiring Sam to free her father without telling Sam about it, I guess. Plus, further complications because Sam doesn’t like Weber. Let’s just say that shooting and exploding huts – many of the latter without a good reason to explode – will result.

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The Abominable Snowman

May 6th, 2011 | article by | 1 Comment »
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Year: 1957    Runtime: 86′   Director: Val Guest
Writers: Nigel Kneale  Cinematography: Arthur Grant   Music: Humphrey Searle
Cast: Peter Cushing, Forrest Tucker, Maureen Connell, Richard Wattis, Arnold Marlé, Robert Brown, Michael Brill

Botanist Dr. John Rollason (Peter Cushing), his wife and colleague Helen Rollason (Maureen Connell), and his friend and colleague Peter Fox (Richard Wattis) are spending time in a monastery in the Himalayas to catalogue the local plant life. That the whole botanical business isn’t the only reason for Rollason’s stay becomes clear when another small expedition, led by the very American Tom Friend (Forrest Tucker), arrives.

John has been hiding from his wife that he’s been in contact with Friend to help him in an expedition to the least explored parts of the mountain to find one of John’s hobby horses there – the Yeti. Helen is less than amused by her husband keeping this dangerous climbing trip a secret from her until there’s no way to keep it secret anymore, especially because the last large scale climbing John took part in nearly killed him and caused him to swear off mountaineering completely. It doesn’t help John’s case that Helen doesn’t believe in the Yeti at all.

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Paganini Horror

April 28th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1989    Runtime: 80′   Director: Luigi Cozzi
Writers: Luigi Cozzi, Daria Nicolodi, Raimondo Del Balzo  Cinematography: Franco Lecca
Music: Vince Tempera   Cast: Jasmine Maimone, Maria Cristina Mastrangeli, Daria Nicolodi,
Donald Pleasence, Pascal Persiano, Pietro Genuardi

The career of 80s synth rock monstrosity/siren Kate (Jasmine Maimone) seems to come to its natural end. At least if you ask her producer Lavinia (Maria Cristina Mastrangeli), who has turned into quite a bitch from suffering through hours and hours of Kate’s “music” during the years, and so really doesn’t mind telling her charge how much she sucks. To make a long story short – Kate really needs a hit, and she needs it soon. Fortunately, her drummer Daniel (Pascal Persiano) knows a simple solution to his friend’s complicated problem, and buys a lost, never published and never publically performed song of possible devil dealer Paganini from a certain Mister Pickett (Donald Pleasance). The song, obviously being called “Paganini Horror”, just happens to be a really crappy 80s synth rock of the sort Lavinia deems a surefire hit.

Now Kate and her partners in crime just need to make a video (“just like Michael Jackson’s fantastic Thriller“). For that, they hire famous horror director Mark Singer (Pietro Genuardi), who works alone, just like Wolverine. But where to shoot? Oh, right, in a derelict house in Venice that once belonged to Paganini where he supposedly made his pact with the devil and made violin strings from his girlfriend’s guts. It’s going to be quite a cost-efficient shoot – apart from Singer, Kate and her three co-musicians and Lavinia, there’s only the house’s owner, Sylvia Hackett (Daria Nicolodi), on set. Soon enough, the mandatory horrible things (and I don’t just mean Kate’s music) start happening.

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357 Magnum

April 22nd, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1979    Runtime: 88′   Director: Rubén Galindo
Writers: Rubén Galindo, Carlos Valdemar  Cinematography: Miguel Araña
Music: Manuel Esperón, Pedro Galindo   Cast: Mario Almada, Fernando Almada,
Ursula Prats, Roger Cudney, Carlos León, Jeanette Mass

(Don’t be like an IMDB reviewer and confuse this with any of the other movies of this or a slightly different name!)

The members of the improbably named “Brigade 357 Magnum” of the police are disturbing the work of a syndicate of weapons and drugs dealers only known as The Organization with a half successful raid on an arms deal with a Communist revolutionary group from a Central American country (whose boss, as we’ll later see, goes for classic Castro chic). The Organization is not pleased at all, so the whole gang – boss, favourite moll and all – stuff themselves into two cars and shoot Tony Murillo, the leading cop of the operation, his wife and his little daughter.

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Evil Face

April 8th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a.: The Hand That Feeds the Dead / La mano che nutre la morte
Year: 1974    Runtime: 90′   Director: Sergio Garrone
Writer: Sergio Garrone  Cinematography: Emore Galeassi  Music: Stefano Liberati, Elio Maestosi
Cast: Marzia Damon, Klaus Kinski, Erol Tas, Katia Christine, Stella Calderoni, Ayhan Isik

(Not to be confused with Le Amanti Del Monstro aka Lover of the Monster made in the same year, by the same director, with mostly the same cast, shared footage and even shared character names; don’t ask, it’s the Italian exploitation industry at the absurd height of its power, so everything’s possible).

Ye Olden Days. Mad scientist Professor Nijinski (Klaus Kinski) has quite an interesting household. His wife Tanja (Katia Christine) is the daughter of his former mentor Ivan Rassimov (yes, exactly like the actor), and has been disfigured in a fire that killed her dad. Normal medicine can’t help Tanja get her old skin back, but fortunately, daddy was a pioneer in skin transplantation, alas a rather primitive kind that for some inexplicable reason not only takes skin but also all of a donor’s blood to work. Fortunately for Tanja, her husband does not have too many scruples, and his assistant, a lame, slightly hunchbacked mute named Vanja (the great Turkish bad guy actor Erol Tas) does have even less. Vanja’s enthusiasm for the work might have something to do with him and Tanja having an affair behind Nijinski’s back - that is, when Tanja isn’t just torturing Vanja’s ears with a tuning fork. Anyway, with two strong mad men on her side, there are always enough young women to go around to build a new skin for her.

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