The Hanging Woman (1973)

Original title: La orgía de los muertos

Sometime in what I assume to be the late 19th Century. Globe-trotting man of action Serge Chekov (Stelvio Rosi) comes to a small town in backlot Europe for the reading of the will of his recently deceased uncle. What he initially encounters in the village are a population with a hysterical fear of the night, and the corpse of a woman hanging from a tree in front of the graveyard.

The corpse turns out to be his cousin Mary (Aurora de Alba). As Serge soon learns at the reading of the will, Mary would have been his co-inheritor of dear uncle’s wealth, as well his new ward. It’s a bit of an awkward situation, but even the lovingly rude inspector called from the next town over (Pasquale Basile) can’t hang anything on the newcomer, particularly once it turns out that Mary hasn’t actually hanged herself but died of heart failure – out of fright – only to be tossed up the tree later.

This is only the beginning of Serge’s troubles, for his late uncle’s household is a peculiar one: there’s dear uncle’s wife Nadia (Maria Pia Conte), a self-declared black magician who has inherited nothing of use to her (land without serfs, she complains), and seduces Serge as quickly as possible for better prospects; a butler (Carlos Quiney) with anger issues that don’t hold up against our hero’s two-fistedness; Professor Leon Droila (Gérard Tichy), a scientist whose experiments concerning the electrical energies dissolving in death the uncle financed, and who now fears to lose his financing as well as his cellar lab in uncle’s mansion; and Droila’s lovely daughter Doris (Dyanik Zurakowska), obvious good girl love interest. With this cast of characters – also including the great Paul Naschy hanging around the borders of the plot as a necrophiliac grave digger - it’s no surprise that Serge soon has to fight off murderous attacks, does not fight off seductions, sits in on a seances, romances Doris and solves the mysteries surrounding his uncle’s death.

So it’s pretty useful for the film that Serge is a moustachioed Italian 70s macho who is as good at punching people – living and dead – than he is at baring his chest; it’s also a very nice change for a gothic horror movie to have a protagonist so lively, he’d feel right at home in a Eurospy movie instead of the usual stiff-necked pieces of wood who tend to be the least interesting bits of their respective movies. While I never managed to actually like the guy (machismo this large is not one of my favourite character traits, and I’m immune to bared male chests), he’s certainly highly entertaining to watch even when he’s just having a conversation, exuding nervous energy.

I just called José Luis Merino’s The Hanging Woman a gothic horror movie, but apart from that, it is also a macabre mystery whose mystery solving-process is driven much more by Serge’s two-fistedness than too much clever ratiocination. Which isn’t a complaint in a film with as much pulp energy as this one displays.

The pretty wild genre mix works very well for the film in particular because Merino displays a hand for all the genres and tropes he has packed in here. The early scenes of gothic horror as well as the obligatory séance are wonderfully creepy and claustrophobic (with a picturesque graveyard featuring as something as a bonus), the action scenes of Serge doing his Serge stuff are as punchy as they are supposed to be, and the sleaze elements are enhanced by some choice early 70s psychedelia. Who, after all, wouldn’t want the film’s main sex scene to consist of Nadia and Serge rotating on a bed intercut with Naschy’s Igor zooming in on one of his dead sex partners? Well, please don’t answer that one in the comments, come to think of it.

Speaking of sleaze, another high point of the film is the scene in which Nadia dresses up as a corpse to seduce Igor (the film never gets around to telling us what she actually wants from him there), only to be rejected as way too alive for the man’s tastes when she starts moaning a little. Naschy, as Naschy did, really seems to get into this sort of thing, too, providing this creepy dude with feverish intensity. But then, this is one of those sort of gothics where really everyone in the cast seems to enjoy going all out – even Zurakowska’s good girl is not as boring as those usually are, actress and script giving her at least some backbone.

All, this – and some sweet undead make-up – adds up to a film bound to entertain anyone even vaguely interested in 70s European cult cinema and its wild and woolly ways. The Hanging Woman is a keeper.

Three Films Make A Post: ON THAT DAY... WE ARE DEMON. Hopefully not ironically.

Nightmare (2012) aka 青魇: As happy as I am that Hong Kong exploitation veteran turned more mainstream director Herman Yau is still making movies, I’m not at all happy with this generically titled mix of slight headfuck movie and bland mystery. It’s all nice and glossy looking, but neither the “is this dream or is this reality?” business nor the film’s mystery are very interesting. Worse for a film like this, the solution to the mystery as well as the (boring) explanation of what’s really going on are abominably obvious, which is a bit of a problem in a film that hasn’t anything else to offer beyond a handful of rote jump scares.

Nurse 3D (2013): As regular readers know, there’s little I loathe more than films that excuse their crappiness by being “ironic”, and by “not wanting to be taken seriously”, which nearly always are codes for “we just couldn’t be arsed”. Douglas Aarniokoski’s horror comedy is no exception to the rule. It doesn’t help that I found the film’s sense of humour aggressively unfunny and obvious, its attempts at ironic sexiness and ironic exploitation (seriously, you can do neither “ironically”, that is, without committing) painful to the extreme, and Paz de la Huerta’s central “acting” “performance” (I just gotta use scare quotes here and also ask myself why the production didn’t hire an actress with basic skills and just as willing to drop her clothes, until I remember this crap is based on Huerta pin-up photos, though ironically, I presume) extremely painful yet also very very dull. The whole film is pretty much anathema to everything I want and like in a horror movie, be it a comedy or not.

Hell Commandos (1969): José Luis Merino’s Spanish-Italian Euro War movie, on the other hand, is not a very good film either, but it does at least hit the main beats of its particular genre without being ashamed of them, reaching the coveted level of filmic mastership known as “perfectly watchable”. As is typical of its sub-set of war films, the tone fluctuates between sentimentality and cynicism in awkward yet entertaining fashion, while people get killed, the Second World War is won, Nazis are pigs, American soldiers are pigs until they decide to sacrifice themselves for a good cause, and a romantic subplot is a lot like nature in Jurassic Park. From time to time, the film stumbles onto exploitation gold, clearly without noticing, when it explains how French resistance women (well, one at least) can identify American soldiers by the way they kiss, or when just inexplicably weird shit happens for no good reason at all (and definitely without ironic detachment).

There’s also, alas, a bit of a homophobic undercurrent that’s quite difficult to miss, which in its own sad way does fit the film’s romantic politics as a whole well in being deeply unpleasant and ill thought through. On the plus side, it’s not the “ironic” kind of homophobia that leaves the perpetrator an easy way out to explain it away.

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Battle of the Last Panzer (1969)

Original title: La batalla del último Panzer

During the Allied invasion of France, at a point when Germany has been beaten back far enough that more than one soldier of their side knows which way the winds blows regarding the whole master race thing, a single Tiger tank finds itself caught behind enemy lines, and worse for the handful of soldiers involved, commanded by a Lieutenant (Stelvio Rosi) who is still a gung ho Nazi out to win a war that’s already lost.

Not surprisingly given these circumstances, the handful of soldiers decreases in numbers fastly, what with the good Lieutenant’s unwillingness to just surrender to someone. There are encounters with the French resistance, a village repeatedly in need to change the flag congratulating their newest conqueror/liberator, an innkeeper’s wife (Erna Schurer) with a bad taste in men to live out her existential crisis with, and much interpersonal wrangling. And that’s before the Americans get wind of the German tanks loose behind their lines and send in Guy Madison (as well as a dubious plan). It won’t come as a surprise to anyone that things will end badly.

If you are one of these sad people populating even sadder parts of the Internet demanding historical accuracy from your cheap Spanish war movies, and get in a tizzy when an on-screen Tiger isn’t an actual Tiger, or when soldiers wear the wrong helmets, or really, if you’re the kind of person who cares about the helmets people wear in a war movie instead of what any given film has to say about the people wearing those helmets, you’ll probably probably die of a heart attack watching this. Me, I’m made of sterner stuff when it comes to films that aren’t documentaries, and really don’t think the helmet makes the movie, though it is of course nice when a film can afford the money and care to find the right ones.

Really, José Luis Merino’s Battle of the Last Panzer is worth a bit of tolerance, seeing as it features a handful of moments of clever filmmaking and a script with some ideas of its own you don’t find in every World War II film - though generally more often in those made in Europe, because the filmmakers will approach the theme from a different direction, and perhaps with more mixed sympathies.

The film’s script is quite loosely structured, only escaping the description of “episodic” by not having all that much happen in it at all. However, the stretches of little happening with an undercurrent of watching psychological damaged people getting close to their breaking points, followed by violence, followed by little action again, which make up the film’s structure seem to fit the nature of the war as its German protagonists experience it quite well. Now, I’m not necessarily saying the script uses this structure on purpose, however, the impression while watching stays the same in any case. What I definitely am saying is that the film is more interested in the psychological pressure of the situation and exploring the strain of people in a situation built to crush them than in clever plotting. This approach works quite well for the film, too. It has its share of boring scenes, but also a cast of characters that is as a rule more complicated than you’ll find in most war movies.

The complicated relationship between Erna Schurer’s Jeanette and her husband, as well as the thing going on between her and the Lieutenant come to mind at once, or the fact that the Lieutenant is not just a deeply unpleasant Nazi thug (though he is that, too) but also shows moments of kindness. He also suffers from PTSD, something films generally seem to think is ennobling, and therefore only inflict on whomsoever they deign to be the good guy in any given situation, as if history (and hey, even World War II) wouldn’t make quite clear that monstrosity and vulnerability are both very human traits, and both traits can appear in the same person, perhaps even one entwined with the other so much it becomes difficult to tell which is which.

The violence here is generally not of the fun and adventurous sort, yet also keeping away from the kind of gruesomeness that produces a visceral reaction in its audience (one suspects there wasn’t a budget for the latter). It stays in a middle ground where violence is a bad thing, and war is hell, but there’s nothing spectacular or emotionally disturbing shown. There is, though, one blunt yet clever directorial trick in a scene that would have been a big (or biggish, with the budget involved here) violent action set piece in most films but turns it into something quite different, and arguably more interesting, here. When the Lieutenant and his surviving crew slaughter the French resistance members, Merino films the action through a simple red filter, turning what we see of the violence surreal and strange, and echoing the estrangement, and what I’ve read described as the tunnel vision of battle, of the men involved.

It’s difficult to disapprove of a film that exchanges a sure-fire moment of outward excitement for something like this, and for me, this scene is emblematic of Battle of the Last Panzer’s ambition as well as of its strengths. Not a bad thing for a cheap exploitation movie.

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In short: Blood Castle (1970)

(Il Castello Dalle Porte Di Fuoco, as the film is originally titled, should not be confused with Blood Castle made in 1972 or the other Blood Castle made another year later, nor of course with Castle of Blood.)

Ivanna Rakowsky (Erna Schürer) comes to a small town in Eastern Europe to work for Janos Dalmar (Carlos Quiney), the local Baron. The townsfolk are not pleased with their Baron. They believe he and his hounds are responsible for a series of murders of young women. It would sound a lot like the usual babbling of superstitious peasants, if not for the rather problematic fact that each of the young women had an affair with Janos before her demise.

When Ivanna arrives at the castle to take her new position as a chemist, she steps into a Gothic soap opera. Her employer is at times charming and soft, at other times abrasive, while the household's chief servant Olga (Cristiana Galloni) is homicidally jealous; the maid Cristiana (Agostina Belli) is also in love with the Baron.

Given this heated atmosphere, I wasn't at all surprised to learn that Ivanna is to help Janos continue his recently deceased brother's research into "matter regeneration". The baron seems to think that successful research could even be used to revive his brother, whose body rests in a bubbling fluid in the lab.

It does not take long for Ivanna to fall in love with the completely irresistible Janos, overlooking little problems like the murders, or the locked part of the castle nobody is allowed to enter, or that she spent her first night in the castle naked and bound to a rack while someone lovingly fondled her body and admonished her to stay pure.

What oh what might just be the secret of it all?

 

Blood Castle certainly isn't one of the better Italian Gothics (can I blame the Spanish influence into the production?). One problem is the pedestrian and terribly unoriginal script - although the last third of the film has some amusing Freudian elements; another one a direction seriously lacking in flair. Director Jose Luis Merino was one of those typical Spanish and Italian (he worked in both countries) filmmakers who had to dabble in each genre a little, without achieving much of artistic merit or entertainment value. Still, it is surprising to find a film taking just about every cliche there is in the Gothic handbook (and adding lots of mild nakedness), but stealing none of the genre's visual trademarks. Were the coloured lights and the fog machine broken?

Yet having said this, I must still admit I had a certain amount of fun watching Blood Castle. There was always another cliche to mark on the checklist, while the last third threw around some gloriously bad ideas a better director could have used to produce a more than decent film.

 

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