THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #30: LORD SHANGO (1975) ***

(Streamed via Night Flight)

Lord Shango is a voodoo-themed horror-drama that was released in the midst of the ‘70s Blaxploitation craze.  Unlike many of those films, it doesn’t feel like it’s capitalizing on a thriving subgenre.  Instead, it’s an effective chiller in which the characters just so happen to be black.  

Femi (Bill Overton) is a voodoo practitioner who tries to prevent his girlfriend Billie (Avis McCarther) from being baptized in a river.  The congregation gets a little rough with Femi and he accidentally drowns when they try to “convert” him.  Things go from bad to worse when Billie’s stepfather Memphis (Wally Taylor) rapes her, causing her to leave town.  Her furious mother (Marlene Clark) then turns to a voodoo priest (Maurice Woods) to see that justice is done.  

Marlene Clark is excellent as her performance requires her to run a gamut of emotions.  She’s particularly engaging in her scenes with Lawrence Cook, who plays the town drunk, who just may know a little more than he lets on.  McCarther and Woods are equally good in tricky roles.  

I liked the way director Ray (The Last Porno Flick) Marsh resisted the temptation to lean into the horrific elements of the story.  Instead, he patiently allows characters to slowly seal their own fate with their actions. You probably won’t even mind that the horror is more subdued as the sometimes-icky family drama and strong performances are enough to keep you glued to your seat.  Not only that, but Lord Shango is a searing indictment of religious hypocrisy.  It’s also interesting the way Marsh contrasts elements of voodoo with Christianity, leaving the viewer to decide which of the two does more harm than good.  

Lord Shango probably runs on about ten or fifteen minutes longer than necessary.  However, this is one movie in which the marinade is more important than the meat.  It might move a little pokey in sports, but it’s a damned fine alternative to some of the schlocky Blaxploitation horror flicks of the era.

AKA:  The Color of Love.  AKA:  Soulmates of Shango.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #29: CURSE OF THE VOODOO (1965) ***

(Streamed via Raygun)

Director Lindsay Shonteff and his Devil Doll star Bryant Haliday reteamed for this effective voodoo thriller.  Haliday plays a smarmy great white hunter who kills a lion on sacred ground in Africa.  Since the local tribe worship lions as gods, they put a voodoo curse on him.  Once Haliday is back in London, he tries to reconnect with his estranged wife (Lisa Daniely).  It is not a happy reunion, however, as he is haunted by the witch doctor’s fiendish curse wherever he goes.  

Shonteff delivers a couple of solid sequences, namely the big game hunting scene which is accompanied by an almost humorously bombastic score.  Other memorable scenes involve Haliday going out for a midnight stroll and being menaced by the sound of a snarling lion, and when he is pursued by the apparition of the witch doctor on the streets of London.  The best scene is the terrific African dance sequence set in a London nightclub where a black dancer does what can only be described as the ‘60s version of twerking.  I would like to think the reason this scene goes on for so long was because Shonteff was trying to juxtapose the native dancing of Africa with the more modern dance of swinging London in the ‘60s.  More than likely, he just wanted to get lots of footage of the dancer shaking her moneymaker for all its worth.

With his pale, pockmarked face and devilish demeanor, Haliday is ideally cast as the big game hunter getting his just desserts.  He’s just as good at being an asshole in Africa as he is being haunted by specters in London.  Dennis Price also lends fine support as Haliday’s hunting buddy.  

What sets Curse of the Voodoo apart from typical voodoo-themed horror flicks is that much of the horror is psychological.  Yes, Haliday’s visions stem from the witch doctor’s curse, but they can also be seen as a metaphor for his alcoholism (many characters chalk up his increasingly erratic behavior to his drinking) and/or guilt.  Although the pacing sort of sags here and there (especially once Haliday lapses into a comatose state) and the final confrontation is a tad underwhelming, this is nevertheless an entertaining, low key horror flick that works more often than not.

AKA:  Voodoo Blood Death.  AKA:  Curse of Simba.  AKA:  Lion Man.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #28: DRACULA’S WIDOW (1988) ***

(Streamed via Freevee)

Two things I learned from the title of this movie:  Dracula’s 1) Married and 2) Dead.  Shit.  Had I known that, I would’ve sent flowers… to both the wedding and the funeral.  

All kidding aside, Dracula’s Widow was the first movie directed by Christopher Coppola, who would later go on to direct the immortal classic, Deadfall.  It would make a great triple feature of Late ‘80s/Early ‘90s Coppola Vampire Movies, alongside the Nicolas Cage-starring Vampire’s Kiss and Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  

Lenny Von Dohlen is the temperamental owner of a Hollywood wax museum who winds up receiving the remains of Dracula’s widow (Emmanulle’s Sylvia Kristel).  Before long, she bites him, makes him her familiar, and goes out into the night turning her victims into hamburger.  This is why you should always inspect your packages before you sign on the dotted line for them.

For a first-time feature, it’s pretty good.  Coppola bathes many scenes with lots of cool colors (many sequences are lit like a giallo) and gives the whole thing a look that’s a lot artier than you might expect.  Despite being the titular character, Kristel doesn’t seem to be in it a whole lot.  She doesn’t really look like she’s having a lot of fun either, but at least she looks great (even in her bad wig).  The biggest debit though is all the scenes with a hardboiled detective (Josef Sommer) investigating the murders, which aren’t exactly bad, it just feels like they came out of an entirely different movie.  

These quibbles are relatively minor in the long run.  For the most part, Dracula’s Widow is briskly paced, looks slick, and it contains lots of blood, guts, and gore.  Since Kristel is “both beauty AND beast”, she not only drinks the blood of her victims, but turns into a rubber-faced monster and eats them.  The highlight comes when she rips apart a bunch of Satanists during a black mass.  There’s also a solid bat transformation scene near the end which puts lots of today’s CGI crap to shame. 

AKA:  Lady Dracula.

SLASHERMANIACS VOLUME 1 & 2 (1990) **

I remember seeing the video box for The Original Slasher Mania and Slasher Mania 2 double feature in the video store back in the day, but I never got around to renting it.  I may have enjoyed it back then, but as they say, I’m a man now, and my tastes are a bit more refined.  That’s not exactly true.  As a die-hard fan of horror movie compilations, even the most slapdash affairs are usually right up my alley.  Despite my astonishingly high tolerance for the genre, my resolve was periodically tested by this one.  

You can tell it’s going to be a slipshod affair right from the opening title sequence, which proclaims the title as “Slashermaniacs Volume 1” (the title I’m reviewing it under) and not Slasher Mania (or even “The Original Slasher Mania”).  You know you’re in trouble when the compilation can’t even get the title right!

Unlike most horror comps, Slashermaniacs Volume 1 culls from only a few titles, and most of them are public domain.  That’s not the worst thing in the world, but the clips are shown at random and go on seemingly forever.  Sometimes, they’re so long you wonder where one clip ends and the other begins.  

The clips from Volume 1 include Night of the Living Dead (not exactly a slasher, is it?), Alice, Sweet Alice, and another flick I couldn’t identify.  (It would’ve been nice if they had listed the movie titles in the end credits.)  Then, things end with trailers for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Dr. Phibes Rises Again.  The trailers are obviously the highlight, and it’s a shame there weren’t more previews sprinkled about.  It sure would’ve broken up the monotony.

Since each volume is only a half-hour long, I decided to roll my thoughts on Slashermaniacs Volume 2 into this review.  It offers up more of the same, and it’s a slight improvement over the original, if only because the clips are better.  This installment relies heavily on scenes from Night of the Living Dead (again), Horror Hotel (like Night of the Living Dead, it’s not a slasher, but at least the most atmospheric parts are used), and Alice, Sweet Alice (again).

The trailers are much better this time too, even if there are only a handful of them.  The best part is the iconic trailer for Psycho starring Alfred Hitchcock.  Since this is the greatest trailer of all time, I’m immediately inclined to give Volume 2 the edge over Volume 1, but it’s still kinda rough overall.  The tape wraps up with trailers for Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs, but despite the strong finish, the whole thing feels like it was put together by someone hooking two VCRs together than a professionally edited and distributed horror compilation tape.

AKA:  The Original Slasher Mania.  AKA:  Slasher Mania 2.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #27: BLOODY MUSCLE BODY BUILDER IN HELL (1995) ****

(Streamed via Midnight Pulp)

Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell is basically a low budget, hour-long, shot-on-video Japanese remake of Evil Dead 2.  After reading that sentence, you should already know if you are the target audience for this sort of thing.  Even if you didn’t dig it as much as I did, you have to admit:  It has one of the greatest titles in movie history.  

Shinji (writer/director Shinichi Fukazawa) is a bodybuilder who takes his girlfriend and a psychic to investigate his father’s supposedly haunted house.  Before long, the vengeful spirit of his father’s former lover possesses the psychic and uses his powers to lock the couple in the house.  After being tormented endlessly by the possessed psychic, our hero eventually uses his love of weightlifting to smash the demon once and for all.

Some scenes follow Evil Dead 1 and 2 pretty closely, and the recreations are quite impressive considering the time and resources that were available.  Fans of Sam Raimi’s trilogy will enjoy these moments to be sure (everything from the headless corpse attack to the iconic “Groovy” scene is here), but I was even more impressed by Fukazawa’s original flourishes and twists on Raimi’s standbys just as much.  The eyeball stabbing scene is great, and the part where a necklace comes out a person’s mouth and digs into their eye is kind of freaky.  The film even manages to one-up Raimi when the dismembered hand fuses together with a severed head, creating a Bride of Re-Animator-esque creation.  Also, those who were always incensed that Evil Dead 2’s poster boy, the skull with human eyes, was nowhere to be found in that movie will be pleased that a very low budget version shows up here.

In front of the camera, Fukazawa mimics Bruce Campbell’s performance rather closely and nails many of his facial tics.  Weirdly enough, this was his only movie, and it’s sort of a shame.  Even though it’s clearly a riff on Evil Dead (I hesitate to call it a “rip-off” as it’s more of a homage than anything), his own unique spins on Raimi’s films are enough to make you curious what he might’ve been able to do with a completely original premise.  

“Sayonara, baby!”

AKA:  The Japanese Evil Dead.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #26: ADVENTURE AT THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (1966) ** ½

(Streamed via Otherworlds TV)

Julia (Carmen Molina) and her boyfriend are taking a tour of a cave when they sneak off for a little hanky-panky.  They fall into a hole and her man is killed by a giant rubbery reptile.  A professor (Jose Elias Moreno) then gathers together an expedition to find the monster responsible.  

Directed by Alfredo B. (Santo vs. the Martian Invasion) Crevenna, this Mexican sci-fi horror flick suffers from a lot of padding.  The opening narration is especially longwinded, there’s an inexplicable musical number that brings things to a screeching halt, the diamond smuggling subplot goes nowhere, and the slow-moving scenes of the expedition traipsing through the caverns are likely to bore you.  The funniest form of padding comes during the hilarious scene where the professor preps his team for the journey by showing them footage from One Million B.C. and Unknown Island.  Usually, these kinds of films try to incorporate shots from other movies into the action, so it was nice to see monster fights from other flicks being passed off as “research” material.  

If you can get past the scenes of real animal cruelty and casual racism, you’ll be treated to some terrific rubbery monsters.  There’s a cool cyclops, a giant bat monster (who has a hilarious flying scene), and a big ass fuzzy spider.  The shots of the monsters’ eyes glowing in the dark are quite atmospheric and the monster attacks are even a little bloody.  Another memorable sequence occurs when the expedition is attacked by bats while perilously dangling above a lava pit.  

For a film filled with so much padding, it sure ends awful abruptly.  I mean, appreciate it when a movie wraps things up before it wears out its welcome, but it’s still a little jarring.  However, for all its faults, when the monsters are front and center, Adventure at the Center of the Earth is cheesy fun.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #25: PAGANINI HORROR (1988) ***

(Streamed via Plex)

Paganini Horror starts off with some of the worst/funniest scenes of terrible musicians performing awful rock n’ roll numbers since Pod People.  The band’s manager is understandably upset and hates the song almost as much as the audience.  “I know the difference between a hit and the mundane!  We need another hit… not rehashed bullshit!”

Concerned, one of the band members gets in contact with a poorly dubbed Donald Pleasance who sells him an old parchment of a lost song by Paganini.  To double down on the whole Paganini-Mania the kids obviously go gaga for nowadays, the band decides to film their music video in Paganini’s old villa (ran by Daria Nicolodi, who also wrote the flick).  Here, we are treated to another hilarious/awful rock video segment where a guy in a gold mask stalks the band.

I’m sure you probably can guess that the real Paganini (who allegedly sold his soul to the devil for fame and fortune) comes to life and starts to make mincemeat out of the band and the video crew.  You probably didn’t predict he would do so with a switchblade violin.  (Then again, you might, if you saw it under its alternate title, The Killing Violin.)  

In short, this is some of Luigi (Starcrash) Cozzi’s finest work.  Although he can’t quite sustain the WTF momentum of the early scenes throughout the entire running time, Cozzi gives us enough face melting and flesh dissolving to make this a cut above your typical rock n’ roll horror flick.  If the shoddy musical numbers didn’t endear Paganini Horror to you, or if the sight of Donald Pleasance throwing money from the top of tall buildings failed to make you smile, or if the brightly colored balls-out scene of horror didn’t leave an impression, then the dialogue will at least make you sit up and take notice.  There are howlers aplenty here.  I think my favorite line came when the band gets the idea to film their horror-themed music video and one of the gals says, “No one has ever done anything remotely like it before!  Except for Michael Jackson and his fantastic Thriller video clip!”

AKA:  The Killing Violin.