TOMB OF TORTURE (1966) ***

Tomb of Torture opens with an atmospheric credits sequence highlighted by some cool camerawork.  As the camera glides along the corridors of a creepy decrepit castle, it builds up a growing sense of dread, culminating with a nice little stinger.  The opening sequence is equally awesome as the movie wastes no time getting right down to business. 

Two girls sneak into a castle where they don’t belong and are captured and taken to the torture chamber by a giggling deformed hunchback with a fucked-up face.  After killing one girl, he puts her friend on the rack and tortures her.  Then the plot begins. 

A mentally fragile girl named Anna (Annie Alberti) believes she’s the reincarnation of a dead countess.  Her father, a know-it-all shrink (Adriano Micantoni) takes her to stay at the countess’ castle as a form of shock therapy to disprove her claims.  It doesn’t take long before Anna’s seeing visions of the countess, cackling skeletons, and suits of armor walking around all by themselves.

One of the many cool things about Tomb of Torture is the beautiful sepia-tint cinematography.  It helps to give a film that’s already loaded with atmosphere an added dreamlike feel.  (There’s a distinct Mario Bava vibe throughout the picture.)  Anna’s nightmare/freak-out scene looks particularly badass thanks to the visual flourishes of director Antonio Boccaci. 

Even though it was released in 1966, there’s just enough skin here to be provocative without really revealing too much.  The only things we get to see are bare legs, midriffs, and shoulders but it’s all done in such a sleazy way that it often feels more exploitative than it really is.  These moments are contrasted by the lighthearted (and genuinely funny) comedy bit where our romantic love interest (Marco Mariani) has a meet-cute with Anna while she is skinny-dipping.  It’s a little reminiscent of Last House of the Left how it goes from balls-out horror to over-the-top comedy on a dime, but it still manages to work somehow.  This sequence is accompanied by comedic music like you’d hear in an old Charlie Chaplin movie, which adds to the overall effect.  

It’s here however when Tomb of Torture kind of loses a little steam.  Once Mariani begins investigating the goings-on in the castle, the breakneck pacing begins to flag.  The ending is a little contrived too, but there’s still enough cool shit here to make it worthwhile for horrorhounds everywhere. 

Micantoni gets the best line when he tells a cop, “You’ve been drinking!  A good enema is what you need!”

SANTO VS. THE GHOST OF THE STRANGLER (1966) ***

Immediately after the events of Santo vs. the Strangler, the Strangler’s body is picked up from the crime scene and taken away in the meat wagon.  His beefy assistant sneaks in, kills the morgue attendant, and steals his body from the freezer.  After carrying him through a series of subterranean tunnels, he arrives at his secret lair and revives his master.  The Strangler goes back to his old ways, playing piano like Phantom of the Opera before his assistant fashions him a mask made of human skin so he can go around and wreak more havoc.

Naturally, the only man in all Mexico who can stop the Strangler’s reign of terror is the famous masked wrestler, El Santo!  

The idea of the Strangler wearing human skin masks instead of the latex ones in the original is kind of creepy.  His scarred visage under the masks is pretty cool too.  I also liked the fact that he kept his victims sitting around a roulette wheel.  Returning director Rene (Santa Claus) Cardona doubles down on the atmosphere and gets a lot of mileage out of the tunnel and graveyard sets.  He also gives us plenty of wrestling scenes that showcase El Santo’s lucha libre skills.

As with Santo vs. the Strangler, it has a lot of musical numbers that act as filler.  At one point there are four numbers back-to-back-to-back-to-back that really have no bearing on anything.  I could be hard on the movie because of this.  However, if you have to make a sandwich, fold some laundry, or file your taxes while watching the movie, this is an excellent time to do so because you’ll miss absolutely nothing.

Speaking of missing something, I did kind of miss the nutty flavor of its predecessor, but this is a much more competent and atmospheric picture all around.  There’s a great bit where El Santo catches the Strangler and his partner doing a bit of graverobbing.  He tries to stop them, but they knock him unconscious and bury him alive!

In fact, El Santo spends a lot of the picture getting knocked out and trapped by the Strangler.  In addition to the buried alive scene, the Strangler also shackles him underneath a hydraulic press and sends him down a trap door into a gas chamber.  Not to worry El Santo fans!  These traps are easily escapable, allowing him to get back on his feet and kick some major ass in seemingly no time at all.  These scenes also help give this entry a decided Saturday matinee serial vibe, which is much appreciated. 

Viva El Santo!

AKA:  Ghost of the Strangler.

THE 31 DAYS OF HORROR-WEEN: PRIME EVIL: NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1983) ****

When I was compiling a list of movies to watch this month, I sort of figured the majority of them would be bad.  Heck, I was kind of counting on it.  Let me tell you, I was completely floored by just how awesome Night of the Demon was.  It is one of the grimiest, grossest, grindhouse-iest movies ever made.  Not only that, it is far and away the greatest Bigfoot flick of all time.  

A professor (Michael Cutt) wakes up in a hospital with bandages on his face.  Everyone wants to know what happened to him, so he relates a series of flashbacks.  First off, some inconsequential guy gets his arm ripped off by Bigfoot.  I don’t know if that was something the professor actually witnessed or just some cool-ass shit to kick off the title sequence, but that was some pretty groovy gory goodness.  

During the title sequence, you’ve got to listen to a lot of flute-led smooth jazz while a bunch of dull white people that look like they stepped out of a JC Penney catalogue walk around endlessly.  Then, the plot begins.  The professor watches recovered home movie footage that convinces him Bigfoot is in his woods.  One of his classmates tells a story about a couple banging in the woods being attacked by Bigfoot.  (If you’re keeping score, this is a flashback inside of a flashback, which makes it even better… and there will be many more to follow.)

This sequence is incredible.  Bigfoot interrupts the couple while they’re getting it on inside their van.  The heavily-bosomed woman watches, mouth agape as what’s left of her lover’s bloody body slides down the windshield while she repeatedly screams, “Oh!  Oh!  Oooh!  Oh!” before dying of fright.  This is truly some funny shit.

The professor then takes his students into the woods looking for Bigfoot.  When Bigfoot steals their boat and leaves them stranded, they go looking for help in the form of the mute “Crazy Wanda” (Melanie Graham) who lives in the woods.  She’s mute on account of the fact the Bigfoot raped her and when she had Bigfoot Jr., her Christian father killed it at birth, so the enraged Wanda burned him alive.  Yeah, I guess I wouldn’t talk much neither after all that.  Now, Bigfoot occasionally leaves her trinkets he finds in the woods (possibly lifted from his victims), which I guess makes it kind of like a warped version of Bigfoot alimony.

You know how most Bigfoot movies he’s portrayed as a missing link type thing?  In this one, he’s basically a furry Jason Vorhees.  That description is quite accurate when you consider he kills someone while they’re in their sleeping bag.  This sleeping bag death puts the one in Friday the 13^th Part 7 to shame.  

The gore in this thing is off the chain.  Bigfoot uses an axe on a lumberjack, makes two Girl Scouts stab themselves to death, and there's gut-ripping and eyeball-popping too.  It’s the scene where Bigfoot rips a guy’s dick off that is the real showstopper.  

In short, Night of the Demon is the movie The Legend of Boggy Creek should’ve been.  They actually have a lot in common.  Both contain scenes of the local yokels being interviewed about the legend of the monster.  It even shares the same flashback-heavy structure Boggy Creek had.  However, unlike Boggy Creek, it’s got lots of T & A and gore.  That is to say it’s the greatest Bigfoot movie ever made.  

THE 31 DAYS OF HORROR-WEEN: PRIME EVIL: VARAN THE UNBELIEVABLE (1962) * ½

Myron Healy stars as an American military man stationed on a Japanese island.  His assignment is to pump a bunch of chemicals into the sea to help the locals refine their drinking water.  Of course, in doing so, Healy’s experiments wind up awakening a giant prehistoric monster. 

So, what’s so unbelievable about Varan?  Plenty!  Let’s start with the incredibly shoddy way the whole thing was put together.  Like the original Godzilla, Varan the Unbelievable is a Toho monster movie directed by Ishiro Honda that was taken by an American studio (in this case, Crown International) who added Americanized scenes of American actors and integrated them with the original plot.  What is shocking about Varan the Unbelievable is how little of the original is left.  Most of the focus is on Healy’s various problems than anything.

What’s more, the footage doesn’t even match!  The lighting, camerawork, and locations are so different that it quickly becomes painfully obvious it was the work of two entirely different crews (from two entirely different nations, no less).  Yes, this process is nothing new, but wait till you see just how carelessly it was cobbled together.  A child could easily tell it’s two different movies stitched together in slapdash fashion.  (Sometimes the original footage appears and disappears so rapidly it almost seems subliminal.)

What else is unbelievable?  How about the fact that they don’t even call him Varan!  They call him “Obake”!  I guess Obake the Unbelievable just didn’t have the same ring to it.

Want to know something else that’s unbelievable?  The print.  It’s one of the worse pan-and-scan crop jobs I’ve ever seen.  Actually, it isn’t even fair to call it “pan-and-scan” because it doesn’t even pan and scan.  Instead, it hops back and forth; sometimes several times within the same shot.  It’s jarring to say the least. 

Another thing unbelievable about Varan is that it takes a half hour before he even shows up.  Till then it’s a LOT of stuff of Myron Healy hanging out on an island.  We’re talking Dullsville here. 

On the plus side, Varan himself is really cool.  He’s the only thing in the movie worth a damn.  He kind of looks like Godzilla, but with a spikier back.  Most of the time, he stomps on two legs, but sometimes he crawls around on all fours like a dog.  Too bad he spends much of his time on an island, so there’s no real buildings for him to smash.  Instead, he causes rockslides and steps on Jeeps.  (You have to wait until the last fifteen minutes to finally see him work over Japan.) 

Apparently, in the original Japanese version Varan flew.  Us stupid Americans unwisely cut it out.  I mean, let’s face it.  Even if the flying effects were bad, at least it would’ve been something different to separate him from the rest of the pack.  At least the ending is interesting because the Japanese are unable to kill the monster, just wound it enough so it goes back into the sea.  I kind of liked that.  Kaiju détente.  However, it would take Varan six years to show up on screens again when he cameoed in Destroy All Monsters.

THE 31 DAYS OF HORROR-WEEN: PRIME EVIL: THE NIGHT WATCHMEN (2017) **

Blimpo (Gary Peebles) is a beloved clown from Baltimore who dies in a freak circus fire in Bulgaria.  When his body is shipped home, it mistakenly gets dropped off at an office building where it must be kept overnight.  Blimpo soon awakens from his coffin as a vampire and begins biting his victims and turning them into bloodthirsty bloodsuckers.  Naturally, the only ones who can stop the vampire plague from spreading are the ragtag group of security guards that work in the building. 

The first thing you notice (or I noticed) about this low budget, locally shot horror movie is the presence of James Remar who plays the nerdy, sexually harassing office manager.  It’s really weird seeing him playing such an oddball character.  I’m more used to seeing him being the badass.  He must’ve taken this role (and the co-producer credit) in an effort to try something new.  The only other “names” in the cast are Scream Queen Tiffany Shepis and Rain Pryor (Richard’s daughter), both of whom don’t stick around very long.

The Night Watchmen offers an agreeable mix of over the top gore and crude humor.  The humor, it must be said, is hit-and-miss and the gore gets awfully repetitive as most of the kills revolve around people getting their throats torn out.  (There is a clever scene where a broken plunger is used as a makeshift stake though.)  Even though the film is about vampires, it’s structured more like a zombie movie.  That’s not really a criticism.  Just a fact.

One thing I can say for it is that director Mitchell Altieri (one half of the “Butcher Brothers”) gets the show on the road rather swiftly.  It’s just that the film spins its wheels a bit too much in the second and third acts to be totally successful.  By then, the movie feels a lot longer than the 79 minute-running-time suggests.  Still, as a former Marylander, I appreciated the jabs made at Baltimore’s expense, so it was hard to completely hate it.

THE 31 DAYS OF HORROR-WEEN: PRIME EVIL: ROCKULA (1990) *

Luca Bercovici is mostly known as an actor, but he’s probably best remembered in this household for directing Ghoulies.  He had to wait six years to make his follow-up feature, a vampire-rock n’ roll-comedy-musical called Rockula.  He should’ve waited longer.

Dean Cameron stars as Ralph, a 400 year-old-virgin who still lives at home with his domineering mother (Toni Basil).  He’s cursed to perpetually look for the reincarnation of his lost love (Tawny Fere) and save her from a menacing pirate (Thomas Dolby).  Every time he’s tried to rescue her, something’s gone wrong, causing him to be stuck in a centuries-long dry spell.  When Ralph meets his true love in the present day, he freaks out and lies to her, saying he’s in a rock n’ roll band.  To woo her away from the pirate once and for all, he makes the band a reality, christening himself “Rockula”.

If you can’t already tell by that description, there’s a LOT going on here, but nothing ever really happens.  The endless exposition dump in the early going pretty much stops the movie on a dime and it never recovers.  On top of that, the movie adds a bunch of new, needless, and odd “rules” to the traditionally accepted vampire lore that just don’t work at all.  (Like Dolby’s quest for an “emerald peg leg” and Cameron’s ability to communicate with his mirror image, who has a life of his own.) 

If Rockula was nothing more than a collection of lame comedic vampire shenanigans, it would be one thing.  Add in a bunch of terrible musical sequences and you have a recipe for disaster.  The music is too new to work as nostalgia and it isn’t cheesy enough to be camp.  It’s just plain bad.  I mean would it surprise you that Cameron sings a song called “Rapula” that contains the lyric, “He’s the DJ, I’m the vampire”?  Not only is the music bad, but the staging and choreography is awful too.  The only passable dance sequence belongs to Basil, who (no surprise here) did her own choreography.  (Who could blame her?)

I loved Cameron in Summer School and Ski School, but in those films, he was playing characters that had a bit of an edge.  Stuck with such a wishy-washy nerdy character, he’s just kind of there in this film.  I will say he’s slightly more successful as his mirror reflection than as his Rockula persona.  (The scene where he sings a song dressed like Elvis is particularly dire.)

Bercovici manages to waste a talented cast of musicians too.  I’m not sure if it’s because they’re musicians and not really actors, but even their music isn’t even very good here.  I mean what the Hell is Bo Diddley doing in this?  At least give him something worthwhile to do.  Dolby’s particularly annoying as the villain.  It’s probably not entirely his fault considering the material he was given.  (There’s a scene where he does a local commercial for a funeral home that offers a rotisserie coffin “to keep you turning over in your grave!”)  Only Susan Tyrrell manages to make an impression as one of Rockula’s band members.

THE 31 DAYS OF HORROR-WEEN: PRIME EVIL

Well, folks.  October’s finally here.  It’s the month when us movie bloggers drop what we’re doing and only watch, write, and tweet all things horror for the next thirty-one days.  Of course, not EVERYTHING I’ll be reviewing will be horror related (I mean there’s no way I’m going to wait till November to see Joker), but it will definitely be about 95% pure horror.

For more than a decade, I have been doing The 31 Days of Horror-Ween in October as a celebration of my favorite genre.  Every year has had at least some sort of vague theme that ties all the films together.  This year’s theme is Prime Evil in which I’ll be watching and reviewing thirty-one horror movies from my Amazon Prime watchlist.  There won’t be an overreaching theme to the films themselves.  I’m just watching thirty-one horror movies that have been hanging out at the bottom of my queue ever since I added them a few years ago.  

Hopefully, we’ll make some fun discoveries along the way.  Most likely, the majority of them will suck, probably due to the fact that I just added them to my watchlist indiscriminately.  I mean, I’m just a sucker for the “Customers Also Watched” recommendation list.  I usually can’t add just one movie and be done with it.  I typically add two or three (or four).  

So, let’s buckle up and do this thing.  Thirty-one days of (almost) nothing but (probably) crappy horror movies starting… now.  I hope you’ll have as much fun reading about my movie-watching exploits as I had writing about them.