"Captain Kronos-Vampire Hunter" (1974) d/ Brian Clemens

Tonight we look at one of the odder vampire flicks in the Hammer canon, a strange mixture of action, comedy, and horror, that showcases some excellent cinematography and moments of genuine atmosphere in bringing a vastly different genre experience to the silver screen than the familiar Lee/Cushing formula that the studio regularly churned out in their heyday. Once intended to be the first in a series of films chronicling the adventures of the good Captain, poor box office returns made certain that would never happen, after the production stagnated on the shelf for two years before finally being released. This would also mark the final appearance of scream queen Caroline Munro for the studios, who were experiencing a marked decline at this point.


Kronos is unsure where the vampires are, while Grost (John Cater) has a hunch.
After freeing a  comely 19th century gyppo bird named Carla (Caroline Munro) from the stocks, the dynamic team of Captain Kronos (Horst Janson) and Professor Grost (John Cater) gallop across the European countryside in search of active blood sippers, who differ greatly from their conventional neck-supping counterparts, in that they drain the life energy from their victims rather than the usual red vino on tap, leaving behind withered (yet alive, if only briefly) husks of humanity as evidence. Kronos is a former Dragoon who was forced to depart his own wife and child from existence when they showed signs of vampirism. He's joined by his pal Heironymous, a crook-backed member of academia whose specialty is dispatching fanged types. Carla hitches a ride with the duo offering them her assistance, and even regular gyppo trim for the blonde hero, though she denies Grost the same benefits, as hunchbacks must not be her bag, man. Along the way, Kronos is forced to come to the aid of his deformed chum in a pub, when three local toughs mock him. Did I mention Kronos is a master swordsman? Yeah, he really isn't.


"Flappy brought mommy her strawberry preserves! Mommy loooooves her lil' Flappy..."
On their journey, they follow the trail of innocent peasant girls with the life sucked out of 'em like so many Mountain Dew slushies, leading to unorthodox vampire hunting techniques, such as the burying of several dead frogs in boxes in suspected areas of sharpened incisor activity, with the hopes that any passing vampires will bring the nearest frogs back to life. There's also a bell-heavy tripwire of little effectiveness. The trio meet up with the local physician, a sensible chappie named Marcus (John Carson), and perhaps the last one of his ilk in the region, with the peasants mostly being of the suspicious and superstitious variety. Could the local aristocracy be sheltering the responsible pair of fangs? There's poncy fop, Paul (Shane Briant) and his ageless ginger sister, Sara (Lois Daine), and their terminally ill mother, Lady Durward (Wanda Ventham) herself, confined to her deathbed with a grill like a dead man's frosting bag. You'll find out all the who's, why's, where's and when's if you snag yourself a copy and screen it, soon afterwards.


"I can see your reflection in that steel, dahling, you look maaahvelous."
Did I really just reference Billy Crystal's Fernando Lamas impersonation from 80's SNL? Holy ham steaks, I'm old. Brian Clemens gained fame more for his writing skills than directing, as evidenced by the scripts he penned for And Soon the Darkness (1970), Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971), The Watcher in the Woods (1980), and even an epsiode of tv horror anthology series, Darkroom (1981). German actor Horst Janson, who would also appear in Murphy's War (1971) opposite Peter O'Toole and The Last Days of Patton (1986) opposite George C. Scott, has enjoyed a long career in television. Despite being miserably awful in the film's awkwardly choreographed action sequences and offering little more than one or two facial expressions throughout the production, Janson is pretty likable in the lead role here. Ian Hendry you'll recall from appearances in things like Get Carter (1971), Tales From the Crypt (1972), and Theatre of Blood (1973). John Carson showed up in genre fare like Blood Beast from Outer Space (1965), Plague of the Zombies (1966), and Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970). Two solid Wops for Kronos, a film you'll want to check out for yourselves if you've never done, for sure.


"Both you and your spouse have fallen and can't get up? I'm calling paramedics and your family, Lady Durward..."

"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."

B.W.'s Top Twenty Sex Sirens of Cult Cinema : Twenty to Eleven

                         20) Ornella Muti

                        19) Lina Romay

                    18) Yutte Stensgaard

                           17) Pam Grier

                      16) Linnea Quigley

                      15) Danielle Harris

                         14) Linda Blair

                  13) The Collinson Twins

                    12) Caroline Munro

                    11) Jamie Lee Curtis

"Il gatto nero" (1989) d/ Luigi Cozzi

While we Italian genre maniacs were all waiting patiently for the final installment of Dario Argento's Three Mothers trilogy at the tail end of the eighties, director Luigi Cozzi,  of Starcrash (1978) and Contamination (1980) fame,  went ahead and delivered his own take on the witchy goings on,  in the form of tonight's review, with splashes of colored light, a pinch of gore, and obligatory rubbery sorceress action courtesy of Rosario Prestopino. The film, alternately known as Demons 6: De Profundis, showcases the familiar genre faces of Urbano Barberini, Florence Guerin, director Michele Soavi in a brief cameo, and of course, Caroline Munro. Wouldn't be a proper Cozzi film without her, and in this particular case, lots of her.


"Stress lines, cover wear, staining...and you call this copy VG/FN??"
We meet a rising actress and new mother named Anne (Florence Guerin) as she's working on a formulaic horror film based on Poe's The Black Cat for a hack director named Carl (Michele Soavi...yeah, right!) while her husband Marc (Urbano Barberini) jockeys to get his next project funded. With the upcoming film's subject matter concerning the third, and most horrible of the Mothers of Sorrow, as imagined by author Thomas De Quincey, and Marc even name dropping Dario Argento along the way, is it any wonder that such a blasphemous production would awaken a witch named Levana, with copyright infringement, possession, and bloody witchcraft-based death in mind. The rubbery resurrected spellcaster takes her would be cinematic namesake's role research personally, infiltrating her dreams with space footage borrowed from Cozzi's Hercules movies,  repeatedly visiting from inside her mirror, Exorcist-style projectile vomiting, and even haunting the poor girl's refrigerator and creating refrigerator repairmen mirages, along the way. Just stay outta the veggie crisper, Levana, come on now.


She's Lump, she's Lump, she's Lump. She's got a rubbery head.
Of course, the film's producer, is an invalid named Leonard Levin (Brett Halsey) who may or may not be in secret cahoots with Levana,  having that cleverly homonymous last name and all, and Anne's actress/gal pal and girlfriend to Marc's scriptwriter,  the ever-mugging Nora (Caroline Munro)'s sun-scorched leathery skin is too similar in texture to Levana's latex black magic acne problem for her own good, methinks. Oh yeah, people get murdered along the way, there's a close up neck ventilation, a slow motion exploding midsection that will more than remind some of you of Cozzi's earlier Alien (1979) rip-off, Contamination (1980), and a television screen that vomits entrails and soupy goop in a similar fashion to that famous Cronenberg 1981 floor model. Levana kidnaps Anna's newborn, with designs on sacrificing her, naturally, but Anna allies herself with the spirit of a fairy, and that can only mean one thing: it's time for a lackluster, low budgeted, laser effect-packed "what the fuck just happened?" finale. Roll credits.


When Celiac sufferers eat pizza made with high gluten flour, this is often the tragic result.
Whether you consider this one Demons 6, Suspiria 3, or The Black Cat (I don't really consider it a true sequel to anything, really, more of an ultra cheap spin off), depends on what characteristic rises to the surface from Cozzi's cloudy soup of genre elements for you, I guess. If it's poxy eighties hair metal, nonsensical gore, and Urbano Barberini, then you'd roll with Demons 6. If the colored filters, cues lifted from Goblin's Suspiria score, and direct references to the Argento film stand out, you'd probably call it Suspiria 3. There's barely anything Black Cat-ish to speak of, here, though Fulci allegedly expressed some desire in taking the chair on the movie, despite having already covered all things ebony feline himself, some eight years earlier. You see where I'm going with this, don't you? On the scale, Il gatto's much too incoherent and balls up to merit anything more than a single Wop, though you completists and trash lovers might want to hunt down the Japanese VHS, which may very well still be the only legitimate release of the film to date, just the same.
 

Cheap laser visual effects. Nothing embodies the powers of eighties-style witchery like them.

"The Devil Within Her" (1975) d/ Peter Sasdy

Hungarian-born director Peter Sasdy has had some great genre moments over the years, from Taste the Blood of Dracula(1970) and Countess Dracula(1971), to Hands of the Ripper(1971) and Nothing But the Night(1973). Tonight's review, alternately known as The Monster, Sharon's Baby, and I Don't Want to be Born, is an entirely different story altogether. Besides Joan Collins showing her full acting range as a pleasure-starved trollop in various states of undress, you've got Donald Pleasence, Caroline Munro, and Ralph Bates and Eileen Atkins in a "Worst Italian Accent-Off" that'll have your ears bleeding out like a pair of emo-cutters on a suicide pact in a warehouse full of cutlery. Wait, it gets worse...


Acting 101: Is Joan Collins giving birth or in the sensual throes of earth-shattering orgasm?
Despite being in her forties, we first see Lucy (Where does "Sharon's Baby" factor in to any of this? I don't think anybody in the whole cast is named Sharon...) as she's clearly enjoying the arrival of a nearly twelve pound baby boy through her birth canal. Dr. Finch (Pleasence) notes that her son "doesn't want to be born", before the little bugger scratches up his mother's facepiece (off-camera) to further amplify that sentiment. So troubled she is from the outset at her boy's antisocial behavior, that her ridiculous-sounding Italian husband Gino (Ralph Bates) seeks out his even more ridiculous-sounding Italian sister, a nun called Albana (Eileen Atkins) for help, as his little troublemaker makes a general off-camera nuisance of himself; shoving his pram-pushing babysitter into the Thames, punching Lucy's former lovers in the face, and biting anyone foolish enough to let their baby talking rubber faces slip too close to the little devil, or " dev-EEL" as Albana would say.


" 'Ere, Bates, was that supposed to be an Italian accent, then?"
A distraught Lucy confides to one of her stripper mates named Mandy (Caroline Munro), in between shopping sprees and candlelit dinners, that all of this strange phenomena may be occurring since she once denied the amorous advances of the co-star of her stage show during her own dancing days, a British dwarf named Hercules(!), and the jilted little fellow slapped a curse on her. Sounds legit. In any case, Lucy's son escapes his playpen, bending the bars on his nursery window, and hanging-ah poor Gino-ah from a tree outside-ah. He later lops off Dr. Finch's head with a spade, and runs his own mother through with a dagger in the tit. Albana performs a mostly uninteresting exorcism on the troubled infant in the end, while Hercules unconvincingly slumps dead on stage at the strip club, surrounded by showgirls. Phew, that one hurt.


" I've 'eard you was a free-thinking sexy broad with a dirty mouth. Wanna try for 'free-thinking sexy broad with a dirty mouth wot's shagged a randy dwarf in a jester costume' ?"
Pleasence gives the only performance that doesn't reek of week old rubbish here, and even then, it's not even one of his better turns, by a fucking long shot. Even the ever stunning Caroline Munro is wasted as a stripper who never strips, only spouting mundane Cockney dialog that seemingly always ends in exaggerated hand gestures and "Dahhhhhling!". Ralph Bates probably should have known better, too. Despite possessing exactly zero moments of on-screen tension and plenty of hokey off-screen mayhem, you just might spend the whole screening laughing out loud, as I did, and whether that was the intent of the film's producers or not(it wasn't), laughing's never a bad thing. One wop on the scale...


So that's how Donald Pleasence's head comes off. Always wondered about that.

"The Abominable Dr. Phibes"(1971)d/Robert Fuest

As Vincent Price is one of the greatest character actors of all-time, so then is this perhaps the single most persuasive testimony to his brilliance upon the silver screen, and undoubtedly the acmatic cult classic of our time.His unrivalled presence and flair,stolen too early from this world in 1993,are never more apparent than in this Fuest vehicle,irreplaceable by any, savoured by all.He delighted in the inexhaustible array of acting gifts he was blessed with, and never shrank from the task of drawing raw emotion from an audience with them.As a tribute to this immortal legend of the cinema, and specifically, his performance in this paradigm of genre art, I thought we'd depart from the ordinary review just once, and dream up something special, that were he present to read himself, just might bring that familiarly sardonic grin to his face one more time.Forward...

"Nine killed her; nine shall die! Eight have died, soon to be nine. Nine eternities in doom!"
We embark on a fable about a man, Anton Phibes(Vincent Price)
whose Victoria(Caroline Munro)perishes on an operating table
whose vehicle wrecks as he recklessly drives
silently assisted by Vulnavia(Virginia North), who's decked out in sable
A concert organist and doctor of music and theology
Gruesomely disfigured, he rebuilds his face
from the responsible doctors he'll accept no apology
with Inspector Trout(Peter Jeffery)of the Yard assigned to the case
Inspired to blood vengeance by the plagues of the Pharoah
He plots the horrific demise of all parties involved
Dunwoody's bat-shredded body chills constables' bones to the marrow
with no clues to build on, the murder's unsolved
Hargreaves is strangled by a masquerade frog
and Longstreet is siphoned of every drop of his life
While no suspects get penned into the inspector's crime log
Phibes continues to avenge the premature loss of his wife

"There are a lot of strange men practicing medicine these days."
On a countryside road,Hedgepath freezes to death
while rats in the cockpit signal Kitaj's demise
A catapulted brass unicorn steals Whitcombs last breath
as Trout starts to flesh out where the real blame lies
He teams with Vesalius(Joseph Cotten)to predict the upcoming curse
Nurse Allen's face is devoured by locusts right under their noses
For Victoria's head surgeon,Trout fears the worst
when his first born is abducted, it's clear what his biblical dose is
He has just six minutes to free his son from a shackled gurney
before acid drops from above upon his young face
while Phibes makes preparations for his final journey
to disappear from this world with nary a trace
As Vulnavia destroys, the inspector arrives
embalming fluid replaces blood from jars on the shelf
The surgeon rescues his boy, but there's no sign of Phibes
It seems he saved the last plague of dark for himself.

"The curse of hail in the bloody middle of nowhere."
For any horror aficionado or fan of cult cinema this should be regular viewing, without an iota of resistance.Price, who had memorized everyone's lines in the script, and whose post-dubbed delivery drew legendary balks of disapproval from co-star Joseph Cotton, serves up a tour de force of under and overstated campiness and black humor.The supporting cast which includes Cotten(in a role Peter Cushing was forced to decline due to health issues),an uncredited Caroline Munro,Virginia North,the ever smarmy Terry-Thomas,and Hugh Griffith,are all solid in this witty and original revenge-aganza opus.The soundtrack by Basil Kirchin is appropriately incredible.The black humor,inventive deaths,and witty dialogue are second to none.An enjoyable sequel surfaced a year later.Both films are available as a double disc,essential to every self-respecting woprophile's collection.Bravo, dear Vincent.Four big ones to an all-time favorite.Highly recommended.

"...when the acid reaches him, he will have a face like mine!"

"Dracula A.D. 1972"(1972)d/Alan Gibson

The weekend draws nearer,droogies,and I don't know about you guys,but who's waiting?I noticed this morning that my left earlobe,which has been perma-pierced since Reagan rocked the reds,is hanging lower than my right one.WTF.I'm lacing up my UK12 steelcapped party boots a night early,and getting good and shitty tonight.If you're stuck behaving yourselves for one more night,no big deal,you can party vicariously through your humble N over here,then catch up tomorrow.With decadence fresh in mind,we'll draw focus on Hammer's somewhat limp attempt to sanguinarily swing seventies-style with Messrs Lee and Cushing before we turn our attention to several monster-based movies in a row.Little change of pace never hurt anybody.
Riding on the cape-edges of the success of Count Yorga,Vampire a year earlier,Hammer decided to inject some new modern blood into its own Dracula series and set tonight's entry in present day swinging London.Even with Lee and Cushing firmly in place as previous boxoffice success would dictate,the film remains a kind of sour note in the series,mostly panned by critics and shunned by theater patrons alike.Though it's not top Dracula fare by Hammer standards,the weakest in my opinion would not materialize until the next chapter in the Dracula saga,The Satanic Rites of Dracula(1974), which was also based in present day England,and signalled the end of Christopher Lee's long running portrayal of the vampire for Hammer Studios.Bogged down with shortcomings,groovy datedness,and cliched seventies occultists,tonight's entry works on an exploitative level,methinks,and there plenty enough going on in the film to keep the viewer modestly interested up to the climax.Hammer serves up delectable scream queens Caroline Munro and Stephanie Beacham this time around,and thus,impressive cleavage is rampant here in the seventh Dracula film for the production company,and sixth to feature Christopher Lee in the title role.So,to summarize,Christopher Lee,Peter Cushing,satanic cults,human sacrifices,grooviness to the gills,and the studio's trademark bountiful bobblers.In Germany,they called this one "Dracula Chases the Mini-Girls".Come on,now.Why did so many people thumbs down this movie again,exactly?

Under Van Helsing's wheels,The Count couldn't let him be.
The year is 1872,and eternal enemies Professor Van Helsing(Cushing) and Count Dracula(Lee)battle atop a runaway carriage,which confuses the living fuck outta me,since the first time the two meet allegedly takes place in 1880,and what follows isn't how the previous movie(Scars of Dracula) ends,but what the hell do I know?The carriage crashes,and the Prince of Darkness is impaled on a wagon wheel,while his mortal nemesis dies from the impact as well.One of Dracula's legion collects up his remains and days later,buries them near Van Helsing's grave.Fast forward one hundred years to Van Helsing's descendant,Lorrimer's(also Cushing) granddaughter,Jessica(Beacham),being goaded into participating in a weird occult ritual at the abandoned church involving blood and bobblers by Johnny Alucard(Christopher Neame).What's the worst that could happen,right?After ressurecting Dracula(oops!),the group flees for their lives,leaving the Count to drain Laura(Munro),the centerpiece of their black magic rite,of all that nuisance blood in her sexy body.Inspector Murray(Michael Coles) rightfully suspects some cultish elements to the young girl's murder,and calls in his old friend,Lorrimer who's an expert on the occult sciences for consultation.He surmises that Count Dracula is behind his granddaughter's friend's death,as Alucard is Dracula backwards,afterall.And Lorrimer is an anagram for "your parents musta hated you,champ".

Yeah,that's 1972 alright.
Johnny Alucard escorts another one of Jessica's girlfriends to St. Bartolph's,where Dracula sips n' sups upon her,and rewards Johnny boy with eternal life as a nosferatu.He tries out his nifty new eye teeth on an unlucky fucker,before luring Bob,Jessica's boyfriend,to a bohemian joint they frequent.There,he turns him into a fellow member of the undead,after which Bob lures her to the cafe' where she's captured by the dual denizens of the dark and brought to Dracula.Van Helsing discovers his granddaughter is missing,gets the coordinates of Alucard's digs and dispatches him,then finds a mesmerized Jessica and a very dead Bob at the church,where the Count plans on exacting his hundred year old revenge on Van Helsing by turning his top heavy young relation into a vampire herself.Lorrimer sets a trap for the blood drinker's return at nightfall,where during a struggle,the infernal creature with the alleged strength of twenty men bumbles his way into a pit filled with spikes which effectively shuffles off his immortal coil.Jugular veins are once again safe...until next year.

You've got red on you,Caroline.
Tonight's entry was inspired by the Highgate Vampire of the early 1970s,where alleged supernatural beings were reported in and around Highgate Cemetery,bloodless fox bodies,a charred headless woman's body being discovered,and other mysterious details.Gibson went on to direct mostly television,importantly Hammer House of Horror and Tales of the Unexpected,before dying in 1987.The tandem of Cushing and Lee next collective effort would be the excellent Horror Express.Caroline Munro had only just begin to gain popularity,and went on directly to Dr. Phibes Rises Again,Golden Voyage of Sinbad,Kronos,and At The Earth's Core.Beacham acted in genre fare such as Schizo and Horror Planet(Inseminoid) as well as a myriad of small screen work.A.D. 1972 merits a rather average scale rating of two wops,but fans of Lee and/or Cushing will want to check it out anyway.

It's a bobbler,ferchrissakes,not a clove of garlic,Dracula.Go ahead and hook up a firm Swedish grip.