THE HANGING WOMAN (1974) ***

Serge (Stelvio Rosi) is returning home to his ancestral castle.  He takes a shortcut through a cemetery where he finds a dead woman hanging by her neck.  The police investigate and seem to think it was murder.  The main suspect is Igor (Paul Naschy), the creepy gravedigger who is also a necrophile.  Meanwhile, Serge tries to get settled in to his new digs, but the place is kind of crowded.  There’s a horny countess (Maria Pia Conte) who performs voodoo rituals, a professor (Gerard Tichy) who conducts bizarre experiments in the castle basement, and his saucy daughter (Dyanik Zurakowska) who has the hots for Serge.  

The Hanging Woman contains a lot of plot elements that are blended together to create a sort of potpourri of Spanish gothic horror.  None of it ever quite gels, but it's never really boring either.  Just let your brain go on autopilot and appreciate the cliches that keep cropping up.  Said cliches include but are not limited to:  The reading of a dead relative’s will, a drawing room mystery (complete with a longwinded explanation from the killer in the end), long walks through the corridors of a spooky castle, trippy freak-out scenes, seances, and of course, the mad hunchback.  Heck, it even manages to turn into an all-out zombie flick by the end.  Despite the fact that it plays more like a laundry list of cliches in search of a movie, it’s still quite entertaining.  There are a couple of strong shocks to be had as well.  There’s a brief, but gory autopsy scene, a nifty decapitation, and the sequence involving the discovery of the titular character is especially well done.  

Despite what you might think, Naschy is not the star this time around.  He’s mostly lurking on the corners of the story, playing peeping Tom on the women and being a red herring.  Nevertheless, he’s in fine form as usual.  It’s Maria Pia Conte who steals the movie though as the nymphomaniac countess who gets naked at the drop of a hat and even plays kinky sex games with Igor.  Sultry and sexy, Conte commands the screen.  Rosi, who sort of looks like a budget version of David Warner, makes for a fine hero too, and Zurakowska is also memorable as the “good girl” who still manages to get naked.  

AKA:  Bracula:  The Terror of the Living Dead.  AKA:  Beyond the Living Dead.  AKA:  Dracula:  The Terror of the Living Dead.  AKA:  Beyond the Living Dead.  AKA:  Orgy of the Living Dead.  AKA:  Return of the Zombies.  AKA:  Zombie 3:  Return of the Living Dead.