Strange Love of the Vampires (1975)

Original title: El extraño amor de los vampiros

aka Night of the Walking Dead

A small European village apparently a good way off from any proper town in the 19th Century (or thereabouts) has been the playground for occasional vampire attacks for decades. By now, it has become customary to stake every corpse left behind by those vampires, despite the protestations of the city-bred town doctor. What the villagers don’t realize is that these vampires are clever enough to remove those stakes and keep up their numbers. But then, these villagers will turn out to be spectacularly bad at organizing anti-vampire measures, even when they know exactly what to do and to whom.

Young Catherine (Emma Cohen), daughter of the village’s head bourgeois, has never been a ray of sunshine. Understandable, given the place where she lives, and the fact that she’s diagnosed with one of those romantic illnesses that will kill her young and decoratively. Her proto-goth disposition grows yet more maudlin after the vampire death of her sister Miriam (Amparo Climent), followed by the betrayal of her lover Jean (Baringo Jordan). Jean prefers other female companionship, for he is apparently afraid of her because he “only sees death in her eyes”. So Catherine is just the right candidate to fall for the (genuine) romantic advances of oh so tragic head vampire Rudolph of Winberg (Carlos Balesteros), despite his penchant for mass murder and self-serving philosophising about Good and Evil.

Their romance comes just in time for the yearly big vampire party.

León Klimovsky certainly was one of the work horses of Spanish horror of the 70s; at times – most often when paired with Paul Naschy, who’s not in this one – he managed to turn the flaws films of this place and time seemed to acquire as their birth right into genuinely engaging movies. Well, engaging for people like me, that is, the mileage of civilians and viewers unaccustomed to the rhythms and illogic of this kind of European horror will vary considerably.

If you are one of us, Strange Love turns out to be one of Klimovsky’s best films: it is languid, has very specific and peculiar ideas about the erotic (as well as love, life and death), and carries off that dream-like, occasionally nightmarish, feeling I love so well with aplomb.

It also is nearly plotless, features characters that pop in and out of the film as if they slipped the dreamer’s/director’s mind until they become useful props again, and makes vague gestures at actually being about something. What that is, I’m not sure. Mostly, because the various directions the film pushes in seem to have too little to do with each other to make any kind of logical sense. Sometimes, the vampires feel like walking metaphors for social outcasts, in the next scenes, they are simply murderous monsters; Winberg’s philosophical approach has no conceivable through line; and the film’s attempts at painting him in a tragic light suffer from the fact that his only pleasant acts are in service of looking good for the (much younger) woman he wants to bang. Something the filmmakers clearly don’t realize does just make him look even worse.

Instead of that boring theme and logic stuff, Klimovsky delivers the obligatory amount of sleaze – early on, the film regularly threatens to become a sex farce – as well as quite a few moody, archetypal scenes of horror. Catherine coming face to face with her dead sister through a closed window, saved by a cross her mad mother has scratched into the glass; the vampires rising in a very bright night (cough) out of graves that ooze fog; vampires dragging away screaming victims as snacks for the vampire party – all of these are moments that simply get the feel of gothic horror in its 70s European guise so right, their lack of coherence is absolutely beside the point.

In its final act, Strange Love perpetually hovers at the point where the dream-like becomes downright surreal. Particularly the vampire party is a thing to behold: cheap costumes, coloured balloons (!) and other New Year’s accoutrements, as well as the emotional cruelty of an EC comic culminate in a sequence where Winberg shows Catherine bizarre visions of what his minions are feeling right now, or are dreaming off, which is apparently the sort of thing that makes a girl get rid of her cross right quick.

It is fantastic in a way you simply couldn’t get away with in a time where people even complain about the lack of exposition in something as clear and linear as Hellboy: The Crooked Man, and pretty damn beautiful to boot.

Past Misdeeds: Horror Rises From The Tomb (1973)

Original title: El espanta surge de la tumba

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

France during the Middle Ages. Warlock Alaric de Marnac (Paul Naschy) and his partner in witchcraft Mabille de Lancré (Helga Liné) are killed for their enthusiasm for various evils, including the drinking of blood and cannibalism, of course. Because that's what you do when you're into the black arts, Alaric and Mabille curse the men responsible for their deaths (one of them Alaric's own brother) and their descendants, promising to one day return to plague them with various horrors.

The time for the charming couple's return finally comes in the 1970s. Alaric's descendant Armand (of course also Naschy), his buddy Maurice Roland (Victor Alcázar) - of course also a witch finder descendant - and their girlfriends poke around in their ancestral legends. One séance with possible supernatural phenomena, and a floating Naschy head later, the quartet decides that the only way to decide if they've been duped by a medium or they really have experienced supernatural shenanigans is for them to travel to the old chateau on the ancestral lands of the de Marnacs, far out in the backwoodsiest part of France, and dig up the head of Alaric (who was decapitated, with body and head buried at different places).

To everyone's surprise, this idea turns out to be a rather large mistake. Soon, Alaric's bodyless, redly lit head (excellent "Naschy in a box with his head sticking out effect there") puts mind control whammies on various members of the cast, murders are committed, hearts are eaten, heads and bodies reunited, Linés revived, and the future of all humanity threatened by two very cranky dead witches. Only the hammer symbol of Thor(!?) and a vague monster destroying manual might possibly save the day.

Carlos Aured's brilliantly, and rather truthfully, titled Horror Rises From The Tomb shows the great Paul Naschy at his most bizarre, with nary a thought given to plot logic or emotional believability but very many thoughts to showing off a series of increasingly weird supernatural occurrences. This time around, Naschy (as so often in his career also the man responsible for the script) and Aured get the required dream-logic particularly right, resulting in a film that uses elements of Naschy's beloved Gothic horror, 70s horror movie bleakness, and curious ideas as if it were out to reconstruct a particularly vivid fever dream.

Aured shows himself to be one of Naschy's more aesthetically conscious directing partners, making use of some excellently shot bleak landscapes, Bava-like coloured lighting, and a lot of cheap red blood to create an atmosphere somewhere between a carnival sideshow, a cheaper version of a Hammer horror movie, and that dream you had where Paul Naschy's head hypnotized you into catching various scantily clad women for him to eat. From time to time, the film's curiously naive, and certainly idiosyncratic, approach to horror even produces not just dream-like and strange, but actually nightmarish sequences, like the one in which some of the dead of the film rise again from the local marsh to do the surviving protagonists harm.

The sense of bleakness so typical for horror from the 70s that characterizes that sequence, as well as a surprising character death by shotgun and the mood of Horror Rises From The Tomb's ending, are part of a recurring negative view on humanity and life itself which would become ever stronger in Naschy's body of work during the second half of the decade and the first half of the 80s until  pessimism finally sometimes turned into downright nihilism. This philosophic approach always does mark a strange contrast between Naschy's films and those of the more innocent horror eras he most admired, and often rubs against the sheer loopiness that has always been part of the charm of his films. In this particular case, silly head movie fun and the inevitable doom of everyone involved for no fault of their own go hand in hand, as if they were contrasting impulses in the auteur's personality fighting it out live on screen; the winner is inconclusive.

Even some of Horror Rises From The Tomb's nominal weaknesses turn into surprising strengths. I found it, for example, exceedingly difficult to distinguish between the various female characters in the movie (which is the thing that happens when three of the film's four human female characters are very similar looking attractive brunettes without any character traits), turning the not exactly sharply drawn relationships between the characters diffuse, confusing and ever more dream-like.

Even the old Naschy-ism of pretending his own characters to be virtually irresistible to all women is put to good use here, giving the film an even more surreal feeling. In the case of evil Naschy it's the result of hypnotism anyhow; and really, in the context of everything else going on in the movie, it's not a surprise that Naschy suddenly appearing in a woman's bedroom is answered by instant excited writhing. Evil Naschy, by the way, is the sort of fiend who wears absolutely nothing under his cape, as does Helga Liné who for her part has the rather curious ability of killing men by raking her nails across their backs. On paper, it's all just a way to show off a bit of nudity, of course, but the film's execution turns even standard sleaze material like this into dream-like/nightmarish eroticism of a sort not generally found outside of European horror films of the 70s (more’s the pity).


Horror Rises From The Tomb really is Naschy at his most concentrated, showing off his virtues and faults particularly clearly. This also means that, if you can't stand European horror movies of the non-realistic persuasion, this is not a film for you. If, on the other hand, it's exactly the strange and the weird you're looking for from your horror, you just might find a new favourite movie of the hour.

In short: Cut-Throats Nine (1972)

Original title: Condenados a vivir

US cavalry sergeant Brown (Claudio Undari) and a handful of men are transporting seven highly dangerous chain gang prisoners through a snowy, mountainous landscape. Things go very wrong indeed when the local crazy bandits attack.

Soon, Brown finds himself and his daughter Sarah (Emma Cohen), who was also part of the transport for reasons that will become clear much later, alone with a groups of decidedly dangerous men clearly dreaming dreams of escape. To complicate matters further, the men soon find out their chain is actually made of gold, the consequence of one of the more idiotic secret gold transport plans in the history of idiotic plans. Furthermore, one of the men, though the Browns don’t know which one, is the killer of Brown’s wife.

Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent’s Cut-Throats Nine is a Spanish Western trying to out-nasty the more brutal arm of the Spaghetti Western, succeeding at its aim quite marvellously. It also happens to be a pretty great nihilist film that openly denies not just all the core values of the US Western but also the more generous ones its genre brethren often follow, with any believe in authority, or morally upright independent actors, or even simple human compassion quickly drowned in the film’s - at the time it was made probably quite shocking - amount of Fulci-style gore. Reading about the film, I expected its comparative goriness to be a cheap gimmick to sell the film. The gore surely is that, too, but it also is an important part of the film’s generally unpleasant mood, emphasising quite loudly the depravity of the characters committing the violence but also carrying with it a tone of what I can only read as a loathing of the human body as such, as if the film were screaming: “Look, this is how disgusting we all are inside”!

Which is of course what everyone’s actions here say already, with even the logical candidate for that other great Western value, redemption, turning out to be quite beyond it in the end, and quite ineffectual at his failed attempts in the direction too. There are some clear parallels in mood, theme, and dirtiness of the snow between this and Sergio Corbucci’s grand The Great Silence, but where Corbucci seems to express sadness about the state of humanity perhaps hiding a smidgen of hope behind the still rather shocking ending of his film, Marchent’s film is all bitterness and loathing, with Sarah, embodied by Cohen with a dignity that really brings home how horrible the things done to her during the course of the film are, as the only character with any kind of moral compass. And what she gets for that, and what she will do because of it, is in the end not very different from what the murderers and rapists around her do.

Marchent films all this very effectively, as well as appropriately unsubtly, in all the colours of mud and dirty snow, showing basically nothing but the mud, unwashed people, uncomfortable close-ups on actors making their most brutish faces, and oozing guts. While it’s not a pleasant experience, there’s actual conviction behind the film, offering up a view of humanity most of us thankfully only share on certain days.

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,in short,western,joaquín luis romero marchent,emma cohen

On Exploder Button: Assignment Naschy: Horror Rises From The Tomb (1973)

Heads. We all know their fiendish ways, their horrible roundness, their hypnotic powers. Now just imagine a head belonging to Paul Naschy himself, rising from his tomb to do typical evil head stuff, like hypnotizing people into carrying him around and bringing him fresh human hearts.

Hold that thought and click on over to this week's column on Exploder Button!

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,reviews,horror,gothic,carlos aured,paul naschy,emma cohen,victor alcázar,helga liné,other places