PRIME EVIL: FANGS OF THE LIVING DEAD (1973) **

Anita Ekberg inherits a crumbling old castle and heads off to the old country to claim the title of countess.  She stops for a drink at an inn where she learns everyone in the countryside is afraid of her family.  When Ekberg arrives at the castle, she discovers she comes from a long line of vampires and that her uncle (Gianni Medici) is a master of “necro-biology”.  Naturally, he plans on making Ekberg a vampire too. 

Fangs of the Living Dead comes to us from Amando de Ossorio, the director of the Blind Dead movies.  Although those films were atmospheric and unforgettable, everything about this one is thoroughly ordinary.  There’s nothing here you haven’t already seen hundreds of times before.  We have busty barmaids serving drinks in taverns full of suspicious townsfolk, flashbacks of women being burned alive at the stake, angry villagers brandishing torches, lap dissolve vampire deaths, and crumbling castles complete with spooky graveyards, creepy crypts, and a torture dungeon. 

De Ossorio relies heavily on these durable clichés and proudly wears his influences (the Universal horror movies of the ‘40s and the Hammer horror films of the ‘60s), but never quite finds a way to make them gel.  It mostly feels like a greatest hits package of horror clichés than a real movie.  All of this is watchable certainly, mostly because of Ekberg’s heaving bosom.  Even then, it isn’t quite enough to make Fangs of the Living Dead a winner. 

AKA:  Malenka.  AKA:  Bloody Girl.  AKA:  Malenka, the Niece of the Vampire.  AKA:  The Vampire’s Niece.  AKA:  Malenka, the Vampire.

PRIME EVIL: AENIGMA (1988) *** ½

Lucio Fulci is one of my favorite directors of all time.  I mean I have a Lucio Fulci T-shirt.  I can’t say the same for Alfred Hitchcock.

Because of that, I’ll watch anything Fulci directed, no matter how bad it is, and trust me, he made some pretty bad ones in his time.  For every Zombie, there’s a Manhattan Baby.  Luckily for me, Aenigma contains some of the most bonkers imagery Fulci ever put on film.  He made it just after The Devil’s Honey, and if you thought your jaw dropped on that one, wait till you check this out.

Aenigma plays like a cross between Carrie and Patrick.  A prank goes wrong at a girls’ college, leaving a student brain dead and in a coma.  Soon after, the perpetrators of the prank begin dying off in increasingly bizarre ways.  Every time someone dies, the girl’s brainwaves spike.  She also takes to possessing the new girl in school and using her as an instrument of revenge.

I’ll concede that some of the kills are stupid (like when a statue comes to life).  For the most part though, they’re flat-out amazing (like the cannibalism sex dream).  Fulci (who also has a cameo as a cop) goes for an over the top Argento vibe for these scenes and while some may argue that none of it makes sense, there is a sort of Elm Street-style logic to it all (like when a girl keeps running from room to room and finds the same decapitated body).  

Whatever faults the film may or may not have, you have to admit, it’s centerpiece sequence packs a wallop.  The snail attack scene has to be seen to be believed.  What makes it great was that the actress really was covered head to toe in slimy slithering snails to accomplish the scene, which to me is an impressive feat.  Seriously, fuck CGI.  For my money, this sequence (which begins with a single snail hanging ominously from a Rocky 3 poster) ranks right up there with the spider scene in The Beyond.  

Am I being a little to generous showering praise upon Aenigma?  Maybe.  Did I have a blast with it from start to finish?  You bet.  It may not be perfect, but it’s hard not to love any movie that contains a scene in which a poster of Tom Cruise portends the appearance of an evil spirit. 

AKA:  Enigma.  

PRIME EVIL: HELLITOSIS: THE LEGEND OF STANKMOUTH (2017) **

 

Rival realtors bring prospective home buyers to a spacious house in the middle of the desert that reeks of shit.  During the walk-through, a massive dust storm kicks up and everyone becomes reluctantly stranded in the house.  With nothing to do, they start drinking heavily and one by one they are picked off by a killer with a butthole for a mouth.

Hellitosis:  The Legend of Stankmouth is a cheap, gross, and dumb horror-comedy that goes for easy laughs, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t successful.  There are some genuinely funny moments along the way.  You just have to get through a fair amount of crap (both literally and figuratively) to get to it.  As far as movies about killers with a shithole for a mouth go, I’d say this one delivers just about what you’d expect. 

The horror elements are rather clunky.  The problem is that the killer, Stankmouth, who runs around wearing soiled underwear smeared with shit, isn’t exactly funny, scary, or memorable.  He kills people using predictable toilet-based methods like suffocating them with a shit-covered plunger and shoving a toilet brush down their throat.  Also, the scenes of the victims having their guts ripped out quickly get repetitive.

The humor works more often than not though.  It’s definitely in the vein of a Troma movie, just not with the same kind of consistency.  Speaking of Troma, Lloyd Kaufman appears briefly as the homeless guy who finds baby Stankmouth in a dumpster.  It’s Michael Boris who gets the best line of the film when he gets a whiff of the shit-stained house and says, “It smells like a fart threw up in here, then the throw-up took a dump!”

PRIME EVIL: TRICK OR TREATS (1982) **

Carrie Snodgress has her rich husband (Peter Jason) sent to the loony bin.  Several years later, she attends a costume party on Halloween with her new husband (David Carradine) and hires Jacqueline Giroux to watch her bratty kid (Chris Graver, son of Gary, who also directed).  Throughout the night, the kid terrorizes Giroux by playing practical jokes on her non-stop.  Things get especially hairy for Giroux when Jason escapes from the booby hatch and begins making menacing phone calls.  

Trick or Treats has a promising concept, but the repetitive nature of the kid’s endless stream of practical jokes really started to test my patience after a while.  Your enjoyment of the film may rely solely on your willingness to get jerked around for over an hour as the kid plays prank after prank on Giroux.  I guess this wouldn’t have mattered so much if there was actually a little horror sprinkled throughout the flick.  As it is, you’ve got to wait till the last ten minutes or so to get any treats.   Even then, the so-called “treats” are predictably doled out and the body count is pitifully low.  You’ll be able to spot the last-second twist ending from a mile away, but Gary Graver’s handling of the finale is awkward.  Things end so abruptly that it almost feels like there might’ve been an alternate ending that was cut out, and Graver had nothing to replace it with.

There admittedly isn’t much of a movie here.  The whole thing could’ve played out as a short film and it would’ve worked much better.  Even though Trick or Treats is heavily padded, there are one or two funny asides (like the scene where two women edit a cheesy horror movie and the part when a live newscast is taken over by mental patients) that keep it from completely running out of gas.  

At least the cast is good.  Jason does a fine job as the whack-a-doodle, who sometimes dresses in drag.  Giroux makes for a fetching heroine, and Carradine seems to be having fun as the drunk husband of Snodgress.  Speaking of Snodgress, the whole movie was filmed in her house, so the production must’ve saved a fortune on her accommodations.

AKA:  Don’t Prank the Babysitter!

PRIME EVIL: BLOODBEAT (1983) * ½

Ted (James Fitzsimmons) brings his girlfriend Sarah (Claudia Peyton) home for Christmas to meet his family.  Soon after, his mother (Helen Benton) is having odd psychic premonitions and painting ominous pictures.  One night, Sarah finds an old sword and before long, a glowing samurai ghost is knocking people off left and right. 

I’m always on the lookout for a Christmas themed horror movie, but something tells me I won’t be re-watching Bloodbeat come December.  Imagine if Bill Rebane remade The House Where Evil Dwells and that might give you an idea of what we’re dealing with.  There’s an occasional odd scene that’s good for a laugh, like when Benton has a psychic argument with her daughter.  (“Don’t you dare come into my mind!”)  My favorite scene though was when Peyton was making love and orgasmed every time the samurai killed someone.

Speaking of the samurai, he is one of those heavy breather types who sound like Darth Vader.  His glowing sword sort of looks like a poor man’s version of a lightsaber too.  Heck, even the ending plays like a Jedi power battle with lots of people throwing their hands in the air and acting like they’re concentrating REALLY HARD to defeat the demented samurai ghost.

The low budget and hokey low-tech effects are one thing, but the amateurish acting pretty much sinks it.  The negative vision photography also gets annoying, especially when it’s used in such a random fashion.  Still, this is the only movie I can think of in which a can of Tab attacks someone.  So, I guess that’s fairly original.

The most amusing aspect of Bloodbeat has nothing to do with the movie itself, but more with how the film is set up on Amazon Prime.  Sometimes, I have to turn the sound down when I watch a movie, especially when everyone in my household has gone to bed.  Prime’s closed-captioning for Bloodbeat is priceless.  The audio cues are funnier than anything in the flick itself.  A few of the samurai attacks are accompanied by a weird sound and the subtitle, “mystical boinging” appears at the bottom of the screen.  If that technical term isn’t good for a laugh, I don’t know what is.

PRIME EVIL: DEMON SEED (1982) ** ½

So, in between all the various horror franchises, sequels and remakes I’ll be reviewing this month for The 31 Movies of Horror-Ween, I’m going to try to sprinkle in a few reviews for some of the bizarre, offbeat, and generally WTF movies I stumble upon while perusing Amazon Prime.  If you’re like me, you find tons of this oddball oddities while searching Prime.  Most of them have misleading titles, strange thumbnail images, and/or cryptic plot synopses.  Whenever I find something that looks incredibly weird (and sometimes just plain bad), I immediately put it into my watchlist.  Folks, this is about as close to being in a video store and renting the most random, strangest movie on the shelf you can find as we’re likely to get in the 21^st century, so we must embrace it.

The first film in this (hopefully ongoing) column is Demon Seed.

Now, Demon Seed is a film that’s popped up several times while searching for other movies with the word “Demon” in the title.  I incorrectly assumed it was the Demon Seed where Julie Christie gets impregnated by a horny supercomputer.  I looked a little closer and saw that the cast list was completely different, so I took a chance on it.  As it turns out, Demon Seed is actually Fury of the Succubus, a movie I’ve always wanted to see after reading about it in Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In.  While it isn’t perfect, it made my jaw drop enough times for me to want to create this new column.

The opening crawl states, “Loneliness is the gateway to the supernatural”.  Lucky for us, our main character, Lisa (Lana Wood) is a lonely married woman who is about to have a run-in with the supernatural.  She lives with her family in a house by the beach and… can I interject something here?  Why is it all these emotionally troubled women in these movies live by the beach?  Is it because it affords the director an opportunity to give the audience endless shots of actresses wandering around in a daze in their nightgown as they slowly sleepwalk towards the crashing surf?  It certainly helps to pad out the running time, but it does diddly for the atmosphere.  

Okay, where was I?  Oh, after having a bad dream, Lisa’s asshole husband, Carl (Don Galloway) picks a fight with her and storms out of the house.  That night, she is attacked and raped by an unseen force.

Remember when Wood played Plenty O’Toole in Diamonds are Forever?  Well, she gets plenty of tool in this movie.  Invisible demon tool that is.  These scenes are a lot like the invisible rape scenes in The Entity, except done on a nonexistent budget.  That is to say, they just rely on Wood to roll around the bed naked a lot.  That’s right, Wood gets plenty O’Nude scenes too. 

The specter isn’t always invisible though.  Sometimes it appears as a purple smudge on the camera lens.  Other times, it’s a projection of Octopussy’s Kabir Bedi on the ceiling. Or sometimes, it’s a pulsating pink light.  About halfway through the movie, Bedi just appears and starts making love to her in the flesh.  By this time Wood has become his willing sex slave, which starts to put a crimp in her already testy relationship with her husband.

So, what does Carl do?  He asks her best friend Ann-Marie (Britt Ekland, from The Man with the Golden Gun, and if you’re keeping score at home, that’s THREE James Bond alums in the picture) to check in on her.  When their hot tub almost kills poor Ann-Marie, Carl finally starts to realize the Wood Lana has been getting belongs to the devil. 

All of this SOUNDS great.  The first half when Wood is getting naked and yielding her will to the sexual desires of an unseen demon is good times.  The second half isn’t nearly as much fun.  It’s here where Ekland’s character becomes more prominent (she was top-billed don’t you know), which gets in the way of the supernatural shagging.  You also have to put up with a lot of blurry-vision nightmare sequences, many of which are too dark to make out.  Speaking of which, there’s a potentially awesome accidental death-by-guillotine scene that’s completely undermined by the fact you can barely see what’s going on.  

It also hurts that Wood gets less and less to do as the movie wears on.  She basically just stands around looking catatonic for the second half of the film.  The finale, which mostly requires the cast to hang around a burning basement before a few of them accidentally stumble into the flames, is weak too.  Hey, The Entity’s ending sucked too so what did you expect? 

Despite that, there are enough moments of WTF lunacy here to make Demon Seed marginally recommended.  You also get John Carradine popping up in one scene as a priest who offers up a lot of helpful plot exposition shortly after a funeral.  All in all, Demon Seed is worth planting.

AKA:  Satan’s Mistress.  AKA:  Dark Eyes.  AKA:  Demon Rage.  AKA:  Fury of the Succubus.  AKA:  Incubus.