"The Beast Must Die " (1974) d/ Paul Annett

Eleven years after British horror rival Hammer Studios produced their only werewolf movie, Curse of the Werewolf, Amicus Studios put out their own in tonight's review, though it's less a horror film than a groovily light seventies whodunit with a Castle-esque gimmick thrown in at the outset and three quarter mark for nostalgic effect. Utilizing Calvin Lockhart instead of originally slated  Robert "Count Yorga" Quarry in the lead role gives the film a dynamite blaxploitative flavor and elevates the production from the typical fear fodder it might have otherwise become. Along for the ride are Peter Cushing, Anton Diffring, Charles Gray, and Marlene Clark. Let's get into it.


"Beyonce start the halftime show without me?", wonders Newcliffe (Calvin Lockhart).
After being informed of an impending "werewolf break" (I shouldn't have to tell you that's a warning I can get behind),  we meet independently wealthy big game hunter Newcliffe (Calvin Lockhart) as he's being chased over every inch of his extensive property by armed men, who are aided by electronic surveillance/security he's only recently had installed, as evidenced by the video cameras robotically panning from the trees and microphones jutting from the earth below. His progress is being tracked by a man named Pavel (Anton Diffring), who questions the necessity of such equipment in the first place, as do his eight house guests, which include the likes of Dr. Lundgren (Peter Cushing), a self-proclaimed expert on lycanthropy, a pompous ass named Pennington (Charles Gray), a pianist named Jarmokowski (Michael Gambon) and his current piece of army candy, Davina (Ciarron Madden), a libertine named Foote (Tom Chadbon) who's previously tasted human flesh on a whimsy, and let's not exclude Tom's own sultry wife, Caroline (Marlene Clark). Over dinner, he divulges the reasoning behind the equipment, and why he's gathered them there in the first place. You see, one of these cats is a werewolf, the one beast Tom hasn't had the pleasure of hunting down and killing,  as of yet.


"Like, groovy disguise, Scoob! Come down from there, and we can, like,  make some tasty sandwiches before that spooky pterodactyl ghost comes back."
 We're given the full moon's glorious arrival, signalling moving Radio Shack-esque blips on a dated grid map the likes of which I haven't seen since little boys in polyester checked slacks sunk each other's Battleships, and it's not long before Tom is running around in the day-for-night with a high powered rifle, looking for the optimum shot at the ferocious beast. And it's even sooner that he's got his guests all taking turns holding a solid silver candle holder, their inability to do so surely signifying werewolfery. Lundgren introduces some fake lycanthropic science involving wolf's bane pollen with a poker face, while Pavel gets himself chewed up and spit out by the titular beast, who doesn't forget to destroy all of Tom's high tech equipment, in the process. With no leg up from his groovy gadgetry, Newcliffe naturally points more than one accusatory finger at each of his guests, with all the zeal and twice the paranoia of the Twilight Zone's "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" episode. Discovery of the werewolf's secret identity is given to you, the viewer, and late in the final reel, the aforementioned "Werewolf Break" occurs, providing you with the opportunity to solve the murderous mystery before you. I won't do your detective work for you here, either, as you'll have to score a copy to handle it yourselves. You'll be glad you did.


Seinen hals ist verwundet und sein auge ist weg.
Despite the film's lo-fi werewolf being little more than a common German Shepard with some extra fur glued on, I applaud the film's producers for envisioning a four-legged beast a la/ Landis' An American Werewolf in London (1981), instead of the usual Wile E. Coyote two-legged standard we've come to expect. It's an appreciated change of pace, despite the obvious budgetary restrictions. It's that same change of pace that makes this one so refreshing and entertaining for just about anybody who'd give it a look, and thus, well worthy of the solid three Wops I've gotta bestow upon it here. Recommended, for sure.


This is just his Facebook profile pic, he's really a Jack Russell terrier.

"Faceless" (1987) d/ Jesus Franco

As we enter the second month of 2016 our thoughts quickly turn to love and romance, and the great lengths we go to prove it to our significant other, usually spending vulgar amounts of cash around the middle of the month, just to save face. In the world of cult cinema, saving face can take on entirely different connotations, and in the case of tonight's review, a late eighties gore-packed variation on his initial effort, director Jess Franco does an awful lot of it. In fact, he also ruins some faces, removes a few, and throws in a chainsaw and a power drill just for kicks. You've got to appreciate the man's unwavering dedication to capturing intimacy between the sexes on celluloid. The Richard Marx-esque late eighties synth pop soundtrack that (constantly)accompanies this one? Not so much. Not so fucking much at all. Still...


It's not often that we see Brigitte doing the poking. Just sayin'.
Dr. Flamand (Helmut Berger) witnesses his sister, Ingrid (Christiane Jean), block a vial of acid that was meant for him, chucked by a disgruntled, partially scarified former patient, with her own beautiful face, leaving her with a permanent Manwich grill, and leaving her brother to spend every resource available to him to restore her former beauty. Nathalie (Brigitte Lahaie) helps out by kidnapping unsuspecting donors from the Paris nightclub scene of the late eighties, locking them naked in cells in a private wing of their clinic, and subjecting them to the advances of Gordon, an especially creepy subordinate with a perm-ullet and no fucking eyebrows. When they abduct Barbara (Caroline Munro), a coked-out model, right from her photo shoot, her father (Telly Savalas) enlists a cat named Morgan (Chris Mitchum) who comes off as a skinny, less imposing Dirty Harry,  to fly to Paris and find his daughter. When Flamand and Nathalie consult Dr. Orloff (Howard Vernon) for helpful face transplant hints, he suggests they bring Dr. Moser (Anton Diffring), an escaped Nazi surgeon who specialized in such operations at Dachau, on board.


Also just sayin': I'd wrap those legs around my head like a turban.
Luckily for Flamand, Moser is seemingly available for work almost immediately, but he shows up and fumbles the first attempt, destroying a young whore's face, and forcing Gordon, chainsaw in hand, into action, as he beheads her with it. Meanwhile, Morgan is bullying Barbara's last employer (sort of a French Charles Nelson Reilly) for answers, leading to a ham-fisted comedic scrap with a muscle-bound gay named Doudou, and copping cheap feels from the headless corpses piling up at the morgue, to the dismay of the French authorities. In need of new face, Flamand and Nathalie come upon none other than Florence Guerin (as herself) in the dance club, talk her into some menage a trois action, and kidnap her for impending facepiece surgery. Don't sweat it, Flo. Can't be any worse than appearing in Bruno Mattei's Caligula et Messaline (1981). As Morgan traces Barbara's credit card to the clinic, where he also notices Nathalie sporting the jewel-encrusted watch that Babs was wearing when she went missing in the first place. Will he rescue her before Ingrid can adopt her good looks? Will Dr. Moser fumble the dermal mask again while staring at Nat's ample pornographic charms? Will Gordon get a decent haircut and grow his eyebrows out? Did Telly Savalas just speak French? The answers to these questions and more await you, once you've bagged yourselves a copy and screen it personally.


"I've eaten all the strawberry preserves, but that Florence Guerin face roll up looks appetizing."
Besides playing more than his fair share of archetypal Nazi villains over a film career that spanned nearly fifty years, Anton Diffring turned up in a few horror movies along the way, usually as an unhinged plastic surgeon, like this Jesus Franco update of his own pioneer genre effort, The Awful Dr. Orloff aka/ Gritos en la noche (1962), where he plays a nazi and an unhinged plastic surgeon. Faceless, which marked the second last role for Diffring before his death in 1989, would also be the last big screen appearance of Telly "Kojak" Savalas, but they're not the only recognizable names in the credits, as British scream queen Caroline Munro, Visconti regular Helmut Berger, Robert Mitchum's son Chris, Lina Romay, and even French porn goddess Brigitte Lahaie all make the scene. If you can manage to ignore the awful soundtrack, and some of the horrible eighties fashions on display, as hard as that is,  you'll probably enjoy Faceless, though it isn't nearly the best of it's kind, or even the best Franco approach on the subject matter. On the scale, a modest two Wops sounds fitting here. Give it a look.


"Don't be silly, darling...you're still very reverse-beautiful."

"La morte negli occhi del gatto"(1973)d/Antonio Margheriti

To be certain, entirely too much time has passed here at the Wop since we've examined another effort by Antonio Margheriti aka/Anthony M. Dawson, the prolific Italian genre-master, a long-time favorite of mine, and tonight's entry oughta effectively right that wrong.An atmospheric blend of both giallo and classic gothic horror, with enough seventies Euro-flesh, brilliant cinematography with beautifully framed shots and Bava-esque color filters, and solid performances from a stellar cast of cult regulars to sate the belly-rumblings of the most gluttonous genre nut.What's more, the folks at Blue Underground have rendered all those shitty heavily-chopped VHS prints we've had to make do with for the past thirty years or so, with a long-needed gloriously uncut anamorphic print that's bound to rock yer socks.You'll recognize Venantino Venantini, the chap who introduced Johnny Morghen's grillpiece to a drill press in Fulci's Paura nella città dei morti viventi eight years later, as well as Jane "Je T'Aime...Moi Non Plus" Birkin and then-husband Serge Gainsbourg, Anton Diffring, and even the late Hiram Keller(or "Earthworm Jim", as he was known in Une Vraie Jeune Fille) among the game cast, with typically mint score provided by maestro Riz Ortolani.The story goes something like this...

These must be the same rats that attacked that city baby.(Whoa, G.B.H. reference)
We begin with an undetermined accoster snuffing the life out of an anonymous gent within the walls of Dragonstone, a massive Scottish castle and ancestral home of the MacGrieff clan.His lifeless cadaver is dumped in the catacombs where the rats immediately proceed to snack on his face(!).The current Lady of the castle, who's having difficulty keeping up the creepy old citadel, finds a ray of hope in the unexpected arrival of the daughter of Lady Alicia(Dana Ghia), Corringa(Jane Birkin), who she plans to pair up with her reclusive oddball son, Lord James(Hiram Keller).James is a weird one alright, having allegedly killed his own baby sister as a tyke, never leaving the castle, painting in his room, and tending to his caged pet orangutan.Wait.What.James' apparent madness is treated by resident doctor, Franz(Anton Diffring), who also sleeps with Lady MacGrieff, and when the good Lady's back is turned, Suzanne(Doris Kunstmann), a sexy Franch teacher who was brought to Dragonstone to seduce James.After offending all the guests at the dinner table, save for the village priest(Venantino Venantini), James spurs Alicia and her daughter to beat a path for the front door the next morning, except someone sneaks into her room that night and pillow-smothers the old dame.Lady Mac convinces Franz to falsify the death certificate and Corringa to remain as a guest at the castle, though talk of the family curse, which states that any MacGrieff that dies at the hands of a relative will return from the grave as a vampire, soon grows more serious in tone.

...and this must be the same pet orangutan..wait, that's just an Italian in a bad monkey suit.
Suddenly, things take a turn for the peculiar, as the titular family cat pounces on Alicia's coffin at the funeral, spurring Lady MacGrieff to seal the pesky feline in the tomb with her sister, and when a servant returns that night to free the beast, he discovers an exploded, empty coffin and is given an extra mouth with a straight razor for his troubles.Cousins James and Corringa take to the sheets to get reacquainted(blech) while Franz asks a bare-boobed Suzanne,"Are you excited by all the blood that's been flowing around here?"(I've gotta use that one sometime), before getting unexpectedly cockblocked by the good Lady, who threatens to throw him out as he threatens to spill the beans if she does so, but the orange tabby appears, signaling an untimely, bloody end for the doctor-turned-gigolo.Someone does in James' orangutan(also named James btw),and Franz turns up in Lady Alicia's death box, while Corringa finds Lord James' cufflink at the crime scene.The plot thickens.Suzanne makes a lesbo play for Corringa as the police investigate Dragonstone for clues as Lady MacGrieff herself is implicated in one of the murders.With people dropping like flies and/or adding themselves to the seemingly endless list of suspects at every juncture, and the supernatural possibilities being discussed, the killer is finally revealed in the final reel.I won't spoil it for you woprophiles here, but let's just say it's none of the above, and the only thing missing is the familiar "I would've gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for you meddling kids!" line, and the flowery-stickered Mystery Machine full of teenage sleuths and their Great Dane.

Heeeeey, you're leaking neck sauce all over my new Trussardi's!
Margheriti followed this one up with a slapstick comedy(!), Schiaffoni e karate(Hercules Against Karate) and Flesh for Frankenstein.After breathing heavily on pop records and her appearance here, Jane Birkin has gone on to score herself roles in no less than eighty(!!) films, including the excellent Hercule Poirot vehicles, Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun.Venantino Venantini, on the other hand, has more than doubled that output to date, with appearances in three Emanuelle movies, La bestia nello spazio, La ragazza del vagone letto, Cannibal Ferox, and Apocalypse domani among his prolific genre work.Diffring, long known for his despicable Nazi characters,and remembered by genre fans for The Man Who Could Cheat Death, Circus of Horrors, and the never-released Jerry Lewis clusterfuck, The Day the Clown Cried among others, allegedly died of AIDS in 1989.Wrapping it up, Seven Deaths is classic stuff, and recommended viewing.Three wops.

Anton Diffring, champion grab-titter for 1973.