Shadows Out of Time

"Novel. n. A short story, padded." -- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

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I have to admit that when I first saw the trailer for The Valdemar Legacy: The Forbidden Shadow (2010, directed by José Luis Alemán) last year, it had me rabid to see the movie. Paul Naschy's last film has The Great Cthulhu in it? You couldn't design a movie more tailored to my baser horror appetites. It's too bad the movie couldn't possibly live up to that expectation, and this movie doesn't. Little did I know that it's absolutely essential to see the first film to have any hope of following along (particularly if you're watching without subtitles, as I was, and if your Spanish is functional at best, which mine is). Really, they're one movie split into two, though you can make an argument that each of them has a na7rrative unto themselves. These were two movies I wanted to target for the challenge and the internet obliged me.

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Cognitive Whiplash

At about the 16 minute mark of The Hunchback of the Morgue (1973, directed by Jose Aguirre and written again by Paul Naschy's screenwriting alter ego, Jacinto Molina), there's a scene transition of such passing strangeness that it hurt my head. Setting the scene: Gotho the Hunchback is tending to his dying friend, the tubercular Ilse, in the garden at the hospital where he works. He's deeply in love with her, and he's promised to give her flowers every day during the last extremity of her illness. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, the scene shifts to the local women's prison where one of the inmates is enthusiastically flogging her cellmate, who seems to be totally into it. This is a film of non-sequiturs.

After Ilse dies, Gotho comes across two medical students bickering over her gold cross. This so infuriates him that he dismembers them both with an ax. A little later, we meet Gotho's kindly mentor, who turns out to be a mad scientist. I guess the logic here is that where there's a hunchback, mad science cannot be far away, and Dr. Orla (Alberto Dalbés) does not disappoint as a mad labs proprietor.

This is a film that is basically in three acts. In the first act, we get the love story of Gotho and Ilse. In the second, we get Gotho's rage and grief as he flees from the law. In the third, we get a Frankensteinian denouement that shades into the purview of Lovecraftiana. Dr. Orlo, it seems, is building a shoggoth. The movie follows all of this down the rabbit hole with nary a hesitation. Hell, it revels in its own absurdity. Of all the Naschy films I've watched for the blogathon, this is the most singularly deranged. It's also the only one where the filmmakers seem to have exercised some structural planning for the overall design of the film (though it breaks down from scene to scene).

The tonal shifts from scene to scene are jarring. The movie is good at evoking pathos, which it ladles on with a heavy hand. All the better to contrast the various horrors that interrupt the passion of Gotho. This movie is creative with its gore. It's not content to merely chop up corpses and living people with an ax. That's for the bourgeois slasher film audience. No, this film has acid baths and all-devouring creatures. It doesn't spare the ax, either. This has more "what the fuck?" moments than any film I can recall. Perhaps the biggest "what the fuck?" moment doesn't even involve any gore: when Rosanna Yanni's character comes on to Gotho, we're provided with one of the weirdest vanity scenes ever in a career of vanity projects. Though this scene vies with the scene where the filmmakers have set a bunch of live rats on fire for sheer weirdness.

And still, he gets the ladies.

As an aside: The scene with the rats kind of sours me on the movie, actually, for the same reason that the animal cruelty in some Eye-talian films bothers me. Plus, I've had rats for pets; they are curious, intelligent, and affectionate pets and, for me, watching them harmed is a bit like watching a dog or a cat harmed.

Some thoughts on some of the film's other elements:

• The score for this movie is pretty good. I haven't been impressed with the scores on Naschy's other movies, but this one reminds me a little bit of Maurice Jarre's score for Eyes Without a Face. The carnivalesque liet motif that runs through it is a nice contrast with the film's horrors.


• The locations/sets for the subterranean scenes provide the movie with a LOT of texture, as do the hospital settings. The location shooting is unusually fine.


• Naschy throws himself into the part as Gotho, but it seems to me that he's too good-looking for the role. The fright wig he wears doesn't help things. Gotho could have used a more grotesque make-up design. Though, on second thought, maybe more make-up would have hindered Naschy's performances. While I like Naschy and I think he's a perfectly fine actor, I somehow doubt that he could match Charles Laughton or Anthony Hopkins as hunchbacks go. He's just not in that league.


• The print I watched seemed to have inconsistent elements, with the town scenes showing significantly more damage than the interiors.


• The film takes a chance when it shows Gotho mutilating the body of one of his tormentors early in the film. This tends to undermine the audience's sympathy for Gotho.

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In any event, this seems like a good summary of what a Paul Naschy film usually is. There are moments of poetry and long stretches of schlock. There's a total commitment to even the most absurd ideas. And there's a sense that the filmmakers are kids at heart, making the kinds of monster showdowns they wanted to see at the matinee. That gets to be infectious after a while.

And so, the Paul Naschy blogathon comes to an end. Many, many thanks to The Vicar of VHS over at Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Movies for inviting me to participate. This has been a blast.

First Principles

I mentioned a couple of posts back that the first Paul Naschy film I ever saw was Frankenstein's Bloody Terror (1968, directed by Enrique Eguiluz), a film that is more properly named "The Mark of the Wolfman" (as a literal translation of its Spanish title would read). Frankenstein doesn't figure into it at all. Mind you, this IS a monsterific rally film, but "Frankenstein" exists only in the title and in a tacked on prologue from distributor Sam Sherman, who owed his exhibitors a Frankenstein movie. It's a total rip-off, true, but it's a pretty shameless one. I have a certain amount of affection for it. For that matter, I have a considerable amount of affection for the movie itself. I was hesitant to revisit it after all this time, but it holds up remarkably well. Better than remarkably well, actually, because the last time I saw it was on a crap VHS tape recorded in SLP to save tape by the cheapskate fly-by-night outfit that was putting it out at the time. That version was chopped and cropped and was otherwise mutilated. The version I watched for this review was gorgeous. I can well believe that this film looked FAN-tastic on its original 70mm release.

Of course, the film was a first for Naschy, too, in more ways than one. It was his first werewolf picture, and his first portrayal of his signature character, the doomed lycanthrope, Waldemar Daninsky. It was his first film as a screenwriter. The film itself was written with Lon Chaney, Jr. in mind. Chaney was almost certainly WAY too old for the part and declined, leaving it for Naschy. This is serendipitous for the audience, too, because even if Chaney had agreed, there's no way he could have matched the unbridled physicality of Naschy's performance. Naschy, if you'll pardon the expression, was off the leash in this movie.

The story here finds a pair of wandering gypsies taking refuge in the old Wolfstein castle, where, searching the crypts for loot, they find a skeleton with a silver crucifix through its heart. Not being fools, they swipe it. Unfortunately for them, it releases the last Wolfstein from death and he arises as a werewolf to terrorize the countryside. In the hunt for the werewolf, nice guy Waldemar saves his friend, Rudolph's, life, but in the process gets bitten by the werewolf, acquiring the curse of lycanthropy in the bargain. His friends, Rudolph and the comely Countess Janice, enlist the aid of a distant psychiatrist and his partner, who both turn out to be vampires. The movie climaxes with Waldemar, in full-on fang and fur frenzy, taking out the vampires to save his friends. The movie's a lot more complicated than this synopsis would suggest, and I'm sure that the print I watched was still missing some footage, but this film seems a lot less random than some of Naschy's other films. I wonder how much of this can be attributed to Naschy as opposed to director Enrique Eguiluz.

One thing is for sure, though: This is an attractive movie. It's a movie that makes me wonder how much better Horror Rises from the Tomb or Vengeance of the Zombies might have been with more adventurous directors at the helm. The look of this movie is striking, and even lacking the nudity and gore of the later films in the Daninsky cycle, this still generates a marvelous ambiance of menace. The filmmakers make good use of the locations, which are richly decorated by the prop department, and they cover for any deficiencies with a striking use of colored lighting. The whole thing plays as if Terence Fisher and Mario Bava had had their genes spliced and their mutant progeny had turned its attention on the Universal-style monster rally. Some scenes in this film look to be taken straight from paintings by Basil Gogos.

Even given the movie's reliance on werewolf action--a given in any Naschy werewolf picture--there's an otherness to this movie that eludes most of Naschy's other films and turns the "blender" quality of its construction into a kind of dream logic. Two examples. The first is this shot:

...in which there's an actual reliance on symbolism as Wandessa Mikhelov (Aurora de Alba) ensnares young Rudolph (Manuel Manzaneque). I sat up when this shot came on screen, because it wasn't something I was looking for. Naschy's films have a tendency toward utilitarianism, so this is an unexpected and delightful boon. The second example is more complicated: At the end of the film, Dr. Janos Mikhelov (Julián Ugarte), our vampire, abducts our heroine with a wave of his cape. The cut between the cape covering her and where they end up is worthy of the surrealists, and the chase through the ruined castle that follows looks more than a little bit like a refugee sequence from a Guy Maddin movie. It's a beautiful scene.

A recurring feature in Naschy movies--utterly gorgeous women--finds
an early flowering in La marca del Hombre-lobo

You can make an argument that La marca del Hombre-lobo is the beginning of Spanish horror filmmaking. In recent years, Spain has become one of the epicenters for the new millennium's horror renaissance, but it was building on a vigorous tradition. I think this period in Spanish horror reminds me a little of the Hong Kong New Wave in that respect, because immature idioms are sometimes explosions of creativity. There's a direct line of evolution--a quick evolution at that--between this movie and something like Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's Who Can Kill a Child? or even Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (with its dreamy evocation of Frankenstein's monster), and for that, we can all be thankful.

"Monsters to Be Pitied. Monsters to be Despised."

Paul Naschy's third appearance as the werewolf, Waldemar Daninsky, shows up in Los monstruos del terror (1970, directed by Tulio Demicheli et al.), released under a raft of alternate titles. The version I watched for this post was titled Assignment Terror. Because Netflix categorically refuses to send me a friggin werewolf movie for the blogathon, I went looking for them online. I didn't expect a new, pristine DVD-quality version, and, what do you know? I didn't find one. Instead, I found a public domain print that shows significant fading and a lot of damage from cuts for television. Surprisingly, it leaves some of the gore intact (particularly a sequence where Naschy's character is revived by opening him up on an operating table and removing the silver bullet). I don't know if this is the best way to watch this film, but it's not a bad way to do it, either. It reminds me of watching these kinds of movies late at night on fly-by-night independent TV stations when I was a kid. There's a certain nostalgia value in this, but, frankly, the print was crap. After a half-hour, the nostalgia faded and I began wishing for a better print (according to the IMDB, this was filmed in 70mm!!!). And so it goes.

What we have here is a monster rally a la late Universal films like House of Dracula, crossed, improbably, with Plan 9 From Outer Space or Destroy All Monsters (take your pick). Aliens are re-animating the dead--particularly monsters--in a plot to take over the Earth. How, exactly, this is to work is never really clear, but after reading a book called "History of the Monsters," the aliens bring forth versions of Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, and, of course, Naschy's Wolfman. One of the alternate titles of this film is Dracula vs. Frankenstein, but don't be fooled. This is the Wolfman's show all the way. Hell, Frankenstein and Dracula never even share the screen. As an aside, the book mentions The Golem, too, but I presume that budget constraints left him at the idea stage. The resurrection of Dracula brought a smile to my face, because it closely follows the resurrection of the Count in House of Frankenstein, where his skeleton is found as a carnival exhibit, stake and all, but then it reinterprets the scene with a bunch of viscera. It's as if H. G. Lewis got a hold of the scene and ran with it.

The aliens in this film are led by Michael Rennie, in his last role. I feel bad for Rennie, given that he lived in the shadow of Klatuu for most of his career in films like The Power and Cyborg 2087 (a film with more than a passing resemblance to The Terminator). Here, he was at the end of his rope and looked it. His second in command is the resurrected Maleva Kernstein (Karin Dor), who has a name that sums up Naschy's approach to filmmaking. It's a mash-up of names that should be familiar to horror fans. Naschy is the screenwriter again, in his nom de plume of Jacinto Molina Alvarez.

I'm not going to go too far into the plot, because, frankly, the plot here makes no sense. This film was interrupted by financial woes during its production and one can definitely see the harm, because whole chunks of it seem like they come from a different movie all together. As an exercise, I'd love to arrange the reels of this film in a random order to see if it makes any difference. I don't know that it would, save that the castle has to blow up at the end. Naschy's screenplay is even more of a hodgepodge than usual. It somehow wanders to a heroic ending for Naschy's Wolfman, but by this point, Naschy has very much been a supporting player. The aliens are undone by the uncontrolled emotions in their monsters and thralls (and in humanity in general), while Naschy arranges once again to die at the hands of a loved one.

Frankly, mixing up the Universal Monsters with aliens was a bad idea. The movie further compounds the fault by totally depriving its monsters of any real characterizations (none of them really gets enough screen time to make an impression, save that Dracula is an incorrigible horn dog). And it gets the hat trick by providing genuinely awful monster make-up for everyone but Naschy. Even Naschy's get-up is a far cry from his best, and is probably the most specifically designed to resemble poor, doomed Larry Talbot in Universal's franchise of any portrayal he attempted. In all it's a pretty bad movie.

This one is mostly for completists only. Caveat emptor.

Best Served Cold

Much as I love Paul Naschy and his go-for-broke approach to horror filmmaking, there's always, always something in any given Paul Naschy movie that jolts me out of the movie. Usually, this means pausing the machine and doing something else for a bit until the mood returns, but sometimes, it involves fits of hysterical giggling. Naschy's first appearance as the Indian guru, Krisna, in Vengeance of the Zombies (1973) is just such a moment. I mean, Naschy appears later in the film as Satan in full Satanic regalia with horns and everything, and THAT moment is totally cool. It's equally ridiculous, but it's a horror movie, so what the hell? You expect those kinds of moments in a horror movie, and Naschy totally rocks the Satan drag. But the Indian brownface? Oh, Nelly! That takes some getting used to.

The Faces of Paul Naschy

And, yes, I know that I'm being totally unfair here. Naschy aspired to be a latter day Lon Chaney, and like Chaney, he plunges into these kinds of roles with gusto. I mean, if Chaney could get away with playing Mr. Wu and Alonzo the Armless and Phroso 'Dead-Legs', why the hell can't Naschy play a guru? If he wants to put a thousand faces on the screen, do all of them have to share Naschy's ethnic background? I mean, it's not any sillier than the werewolf get-up for which he's most famous. Comparing Chaney and Naschy is a mug's game, I guess, because there's an "otherness" in Chaney that's partly due to the strangeness of silent movies at this remove, while the rest is a genius particular to Chaney. Even if Naschy were equally gifted (I'm not going to make any arguments about it, yay or nay), the idiom in which he works is so different that comparisons are probably unwise. Naschy is closer kin to Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland and their irrepressible "let's put on a show!" moxie. I love that about him.

Fortunately, the movie lets the audience get used to Naschy as an Indian. He actually doesn't look bad in the part.

Calling Mr. Auric Goldfinger.

Anyway, Vengeance of the Zombies. There's weird sense of déjà vu here, given that so many of the principles from Horror Rises from the Tomb reappear here, most notably Víctor Alcázar (here billed as "Vic Winner"). As in that movie, Naschy plays multiple parts. Like that movie, this one was written in a fever over a couple of days. Unlike that movie, this has an odd seventies jazz score in place of the faux-Gothic organ score in Horror. The storyline follows Elvire, a follower of Krisna, Naschy's Indian guru, as she dodges a series of murders seemingly aimed at several families who once lived in India, including hers. She flees London (the film was shot on location in London), for Kishna's manor house in the country, where the station agent in town regales her with tales of the manor's cursed past. This is just set dressing. No curse or haunting ever manifests itself. In this regard, Vengeance of the Zombies actually keeps its eye on the ball. Oh, there's still a kind of blender effect, but it's not as pronounced in this movie (I'll get to that in a minute). The perpetrator of the murders is Krisna's deformed brother, Kantaka, who is working up to a grand voodoo ceremony. Toward this end, he sends out his entourage of zombies to do his bidding. The movie explains the lion's share of its plot by including a feckless Scotland Yard investigation, where Elvire's guy pal, Lawrence (Alcázar) lays out the aims and methods of Kantaka's voodoo. Surprisingly, Lawrence isn't the dashing knight who rescues the damsel. It leaves that task to a character the movie pulls out of its ass.

The plot of this movie isn't nearly as digressionary as the plots of some of Naschy's movies, but the way it mixes and matches elements mark the film as distinctively as if it was. The strange conflation of Indian mysticism and voodoo creates some level of cognitive dissonance, while the portions of the movie devoted to the police may as well be from a completely different movie. Additionally, this is clearly a vanity project for Naschy, who uses the film as an excuse to portray himself as a lady's man, in addition to a monster, etc. Naschy surrounds himself with beautiful women in this movie (again!), even when it makes no sense. I mean, is it really necessary to dress the exclusively female zombies in sexy lingerie? There's a whiff of necrophilia in this, even as it caters to the star's ego. It's kind of creepy, actually.

Naschy has a way with the ladies...

...even the dead ones.

Naschy's multiple roles allow for a pretty broad display of his talents here. He's better in the "straight" role in this film, though his character has a touch of the tragedy of Waldemar Daninsky, which is familiar territory for the actor. The betrayal in the character's past, and the way he's controlled by his brother make him more complex than one would expect. Naschy's portrayal of the villain, however, is again the highlight. Kantaka is equal parts Murder Legendre, Eric the Phantom, and Doctor Phibes, and Naschy sells it. He manages the interesting trick of blowing himself off the screen. There's nothing to be said about Naschy's appearance as Satan, here, given that it's mostly the make-up and costume that does the job here. He leers nicely, but there's no dialogue in that sequence and he's not called upon to emote, really. He's a presence, not a performance. The rest? Well, Naschy and his director, León Klimovsky, are savvy to the way movies are built around stars, and they are careful to diminish any chance that the co-stars will upstage Naschy. Nobody goes to a Naschy movie to see Victor Alcázar.

Naschy and Klimovsky don't skimp on the horror movie mayhem. They're fairly modern in how they orchestrate the movie's horror beats, placing them at roughly ten minute intervals (at the reel changes). Some of these beats are sex. Some of them are gore. It's about an equal mix, though it seems almost programmatic in retrospect.

For the most part, this is a lesser Naschy. While the elements that make his movies fun are certainly present here, the filmmakers have an annoying tendency to linger on the shots of London. It's as if, having paid to shoot there, they were determined to get the most out of the locations. There's a shot, for instance, of the sign for New Scotland Yard that Klimovsky holds far longer than its function as an establishing shot really merits. There are a lot of these kinds of shots, actually, and one whole sequence that seems completely contrived to show Naschy walking around the streets of the city. This has a soporific time dilation effect and kills some of the mood. While there are certainly pleasures to be found here, on balance, the negatives probably outweigh them.

...and the cops stand around at the end looking dopey. In how many horror films does this scene recur? I wonder.

Tombstone Shadows

My first encounter with Paul Naschy was as a reference in The Howling. One of the characters in that movie was named "Jack Molina," which I discovered soon afterward to be Paul Naschy's Spanish name. It took me a few years to actually track down any of his films. The first was Frankenstein's Bloody Terror. I didn't know what to make of it at the time. I don't mean this in a derogatory manner, but Naschy's films seem like they come from a Mexican tradition. They have the same "throw a bunch of stuff against the wall and hope something sticks" aesthetic one finds in movies like, say, The Black Pit of Dr. M or The Brainiac. While there's certainly a lot to criticize in this approach, there's also an undeniable charm, too.

One can see this approach in full force in Horror Rises from the Tomb (1973, directed by Carlos Aured), written by Naschy as Jacinto Molina and featuring the actor in multiple roles. In spite of my desire for werewolf mayhem, Netflix insisted on sending me non-lycanthropic movies. There's nary a distant howl in this movie, but that's okay, I guess. This features every other full-dress Gothic trope you can imagine, sometimes appearing seemingly at random. Note: this is spoilerific. Not that it really matters with this film.

Horror Rises from the Tomb starts well. In the middle ages, a warlock and his concubine are taken into the wilderness for execution. Alaric de Marnac (Naschy) is accused of all manner of crimes, and members of his own family act as executioners. As you might expect, de Marnac curses his executioners and vows to return and wreak a terrible vengeance upon them. The only problem with his plan, though, is that his head has been chopped off and hidden away from his body so that they might never reunite. Fast forward to contemporary Paris, where two of the executioners' descendants are invited to a seance. These are Hugo de Marnac (Naschy again, natch) and Maurice Roland (Víctor Alcázar) who are both skeptical. The medium channels Alaric, who tells them where to find his head. As a lark, the two friends and their gal pals journey to the de Marnac estate to find out if the medium was for real. Unfortunately, she is, and soon, Alaric is back in business. He and his concubine, the lovely Mabille, reincarnate as quasi-vampires, indulge in human sacrifices, and command an entourage of zombies. This, on top of the hostile locals who refuse to help our heroes (and who, upon capturing a couple of fugitives, hang them on sight). This follows a "One Damned Thing After Another" plot construction, and when Hugo and his lover, Elvira, find the talisman that will defeat Alaric, it's seems totally random. But then, so does most of the movie.

Obviously, with so many balls in the air, Horror Rises from the Tomb is bound to drop a few. A lot of the movie--most of it, actually--seems constructed from the leavings of other movies. The opening should be familiar to anyone who has seen Black Sunday, while the zombie interlude reeks of The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue. Like those Mexican horror movies I mentioned at the outset, this is what I call a "blender" movie, in which the filmmakers take a bunch of stock genre tropes, stick them in a blender, and hit puree. This also shares a total shamelessness in its approach and it covers for its lack of originality by barging through its plot with a "damn the torpedoes" forward motion. It doesn't hurt that the filmmakers have populated the film with stunningly gorgeous women. Or that they are often nekkid. There's also enough creative gore to satisfy the adolescent sadists in the audience. One particular scene has Mabille rip open the chest of a man to pluck his still-beating heart from his chest (the filmmakers then turn oddly coy when deciding whether to show our villains actually eating the heart, even though you can totally see where the scene is going). Naschy knows his audience and strives to give them what they want.

This is Naschy's show, as you might expect, and it points out the actor's strengths and weaknesses. Since he plays both one of the heroes and the main villain, you get a portrait of an actor who is phenomenal in villainous parts, but who struggles with "straight" roles. When Naschy is hamming it up as Alaric, you can't take your eyes off of him. When he's playing Hugo, he kind of fades into the woodwork. The movie wisely kills Hugo off, and leaves Víctor Alcázar to handle the heroic duties. But even he is upstaged, alternately, by Emma Cohen as our heroine, Helga Liné as Mabille, and Cristina Suriani. It's hard to hold the screen against gorgeous, often nude women, I guess. The real star of the movie is the locations, anyway. This movie covers a LOT of faults by filming in picturesque locations during the bleak heart of winter.

Sometimes the faults can't be papered over, though. When Naschy portrays Alaric as a head sitting on a shelf, I couldn't help but giggle. It's such an absurd sight that it takes one right out of the movie. It's fun, but it's fun in spite of the film, not because of it. Still, fun's fun, right? Seriously, if you can't have fun with Naschy's films, you're in trouble, so take it as it is.