B.W.'s Top Twenty Favorite Vampire Movies: The Top Ten

Like the unglued old broad down the street with the noticeably out-of-control cat fancy, we can't stop at ten. Therefore, tonight, I present to you my current top ten fanged favorites of the ever-voluminous vampire genre. Any one of these films is worthy of repeated viewings, and often are, in my digs, no thanks to untimely movie services on the web like Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, and countless other contemptible streaming sites that offer the viewer a miserable pittance of recent direct-to-video detritus and very little in the way of classic genre fare. Go ahead and scoff at the idea of owning physical media like the soft-boned beardneck weakling you probably are, I can watch any movie in my gargantuan collection whenever I want, and never have to allow for unacceptable terminology like "availability". But that's another rant for another evening. Onwards.


Last Man on Earth (1964) Based on the 1954 Richard Matheson novel, I Am Legend, this low budget cult classic pits the glorious Vincent Price against a vampiric plague that has seemingly engulfed much of humanity. A grimly chilling apocalyptic shocker that has been copied with vampires (and zombies) numerous times in the decades since.


Dracula (1931) When it came to cinematic portrayals of the legendary Count when I was a much smaller and younger Wop than the one you see before you today, Bela was my favorite fella, poised, dramatic, and intense, as he translated his American theatrical successes as Dracula to the big screen in Tod Browning's immortal adaption for Universal Studios.


I tre volti della paura AKA/ Black Sabbath (1963)  'The Wurdulak" segment of Italian director Mario Bava's consummate horror anthology stands as my favorite in the film, which is well worthy of placement among the best the genre has to offer.


Lat den ratte comme in AKA/ Let The Right One In (2008) A young,  twelve year old, oft-bullied Swedish boy develops a symbiotic relationship with a child-vampire; rare and unforgettable, it subsequently breathed new life into a genre that had stagnated for decades. One of the most superlative and sublime modern vampire films to date.


Dracula cerca sangue di vergine...e mori di sete!!! AKA/ Blood for Dracula (1974) Udo Kier, as a sickly Dracula, travels from Transylvania to Italy, in the search for the blood of virgins only to find an aristocratic family of insatiable whores and a communist peasant handyman with a Brooklyn accent. A hilarious, campy, cult classic.


Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922) A German expressionist classic that arguably stands as one of the earliest "cult" films, after most prints were burned or destroyed when Bram Stoker's estate sued for copyright infringement and won, but a much duplicated surviving copy had already escaped for international distribution, and lives on to this day as a mercurial paradigm of vampire cinema.


Dracula AKA/ Horror of Dracula (1958) Of the seven times the late, great Christopher Lee would portray the legendary nobleman with a propensity for blood, this first Hammer Studios effort directed by Terence Fisher stands,  for me,  as the first step in the evolution of the character from the oft-lampooned cliche' that rose out of Bela Lugosi's earlier portrayal. After seeing it as a child, there was only one Dracula as far as I was concerned.


Les levres rouges AKA/ Daughters of Darkness (1971) Elegant and mesmerizing, Delphine Seyrig gives us a Dietrich-esque Countess Bathory whose outward flamboyance hides her jaded views from a self-centered newlywed couple in Brussels. A movie that I've always held in the highest regard, as a fine genre example and otherwise.


Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)  With a lineup that features names like Herzog, Kinski, Adjani, and Ganz, one could almost predict the ingenuous product that would spring from the collaborative effort. Tragic and beautiful, passionate and lyrical, a worthy tribute to Murnau's then-fifty year old German classic and the second of five films that director Herzog would team up with the famously imposible actor Klaus Kinski for.


Martin (1977) Leave it to Pittsburgh zombie king George Romero to tackle the vampire genre as effectively and engagingly as anyone ever has. Often overlooked in favor of his wildly popular flesh-eating ghoul movies, this one is arguably the best he's done, hands down, with a performance that's both stellar and poignant from John Amplas, a regular in Romero's work, and top notch gory realism from FX wizard, Tom Savini. My favorite. Period.

"Titan Find" (1985) d/ William Malone

Four years removed from 1981's Scared to Death (and prior to his House on Haunted Hill remake (1998), and Feardotcom (2002)...two toilet bowl sinkers that we won't rub it in too much about here at the Wop, at least, for now...), director William Malone once again reiterates his unquestionable love for Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), with this low budget rip-off of said movie, starring television regular Stan Ivar, Wendy Schaal, who provides the voice of Francine Smith on Seth MacFarlane's animated hit, American Dad, and Ferris Bueller's dad himself, Lyman Ward. Cult icon Klaus Kinski also returns to space here, putting his stamp on the picture by delivering some archetypal Kinski tomfoolery on camera.


Ashton Kutcher gets the change done at the shop...details at eleven.
When a crew of scientists that apparently don't know each other on a first name basis lands on Titan, a moon of Saturn, to document some artifacts believed to be two thousand centuries old (that's the date they put on it, and I'm too wasted to tackle the math), their ship detects that a rival German spacecraft has already landed in the cavernous crater, forcing Davison (Stan Ivar) to touch down sneaky-like on the outer perimeter, which naturally collapses, leaving their spaceship in a state of utter and complete fuck. An inspection of the German crrraft by space suited search party sees Susan (Marie Laurin), who really does look like Ashton Kutcher in drag, get snuffed by unseen slitherer, after which Bryce (Diane Salinger) gets felt up by the lone survivor of that failed mission, Hofner (Klaus Kinski), who offers oxygen, bombs enough to blow up the elusive beast, and a space-campfire tale about how twenty-two Deutschlanders stumbled upon this ancient metaphoric collection of butterflies, but not all of the butterflies were dead, nor were they all friendly, as they were to tragically find out. He then grabs Bryce's ass and is set upon by a space-zombified Susan.


"You vill come vis me to mein crrrrraft...I promise not to suddenly grasp your breasts. Maybe your ass, yes?"
Meanwhile, with the oxygen running out back on the American ship, Davison, his tech support/ squeeze Sladen (Wendy Schaal), and Ferris Bueller's dad watch helplessly as their crew mates are whittled down, one by one, like a nice chunk of Balsa, before their very eyes. Before too long, zombies in Members Only-esque space suits and throbbing latex bladders on the sides of their headpieces are tricking unsuspecting folks into wandering into that damned engineering sector, where the prop-fiend lies in wait among cobwebbed neon and flashing lights. Zombie-Hofner terrorizes Sladen, who can't seem to draw a bead on any of her dialog marks afterwards. She suggests that they try electrocuting it, a la a sci-fi movie about a space carrot she once saw (The Thing, perhaps?), but the xenomorph-ish killer proves harder to kill than Steven Seagal, just like a hundred more impressive aliens, in a hundred more effective movies. With the selfless sacrifice of Ferris Bueller's dad, helped by Hofner's explosives, Davison and Sladen are free to escape to Earth in the German ship with Bryce, who...got lost somewhere (I didn't write it), and perhaps learn each other's first names in less-stressful surroundings...


Exploding heads were big in the eighties. Don't get any meninges on your boat shoes, dude.
I'm sure Kinski's wandering hands were a mere flash of the great artist's improvisational talents (Ha!), and not anything you'll find in the script. Kinski's not on screen for long, but still manages to deliver the most coherent acting performance in the whole movie. The already choppy pacing is slowed to a crawl by perfunctory delivery of a script, derivative as a Broadway bootleg to begin with, by most of the other actors on board, and to a screeching halt by ten minutes of inanimate rubbery alien that looks like Giger's design if it was tackled by a Chinatown knock off street vendor. One wop for Klaus. Approach with caution, if at all.


He secretly wished Jennifer Grey would have refrained from the raspberry preserves before recognizing him at the 20th Anniversary Ferris Bueller reunion.

"Psycho-Circus" (1966) d/ John Moxley

Though tonight's movie, a German/British thriller/whodunit from the man who brought you the excellent City of the Dead (1960), doesn't nearly contain the atmosphere of that earlier film, there are enough twists and turns, red herrings and double crosses here to keep the viewer engaged right up until the final reveal. What's more, you've got Christopher Lee as a hooded lion tamer, the ever-creepy Klaus Kinski lur-kink about in ze shadows, the delectable Margaret Lee, and the equally scrumptious Suzy Kendall. And if you smoke half as many cigarettes as I do, you'll revel in amazement at the number of actors with hardcore tobacco-stained fingers in this movie. I can't ever recall seeing anything like it. On to the story, after this next cigarette. Sorry, force of habit...


"...and then I make you unconscious in ze het.", hisses Manfred (Klaus Kinski).
After a daring and elaborate armored car robbery in broad daylight on London Bridge, no less,  nets a gaggle of thugs a quarter of a million pounds in stolen loot and a murder rap, a phone call from the anonymous boss sends a suitcase full of notes to a deserted farmhouse, but the bag man takes a circus throwing knife in the back for his attention to detail. Meanwhile, back at Scotland Yard, Inspector Elliot (Leo Genn) traces some of the stolen cash to Barberini's Circus, on winter hiatus nearby, and goes undercover as a press photographer to solve the case. A lanky wank of a lion tamer named Gregor (Christopher Lee) who was mauled in the facepiece by lions and wears a dramatic black hood to hide his hideous scars, conceals the suitcase away under the big cats' cage for safe keeping, but is he the criminal mastermind and calculated murderer we've been looking for?


Gina (Margaret Lee) shouldn't be snooping around by the lion cages in the dark.
...Or could it be carnal-minded cutie, Gina's knife-throwing beau, Mario, whose short fuse over her continued infidelity grows shorter all the time? Could it be Mr. Big (Skip Martin), the half-pint blackmailer with one dwarfish ear to every trailer door? Maybe it's Manfred (Kinski), who ducks in and out of the shadows long enough to zmoak a zigarette? Is it the owner, Barberini himself, spurred on to criminal misdeeds by a mountain of debt? Perhaps it's the ringmaster, Karl, who is driven to find his own father's killer, and harbors some unhealthy lust for both Gina and Natasha (Suzy Kendall), Gregor's sensual young protege. Suspects begin turning up dead, one by one, each by throwing knives with a distinct silver triangle, from a set once used by the greatest knife thrower the world had ever seen...so come one, come all, to the most dangerous show on Earth, where nobody is who they seem or even claim to be, and the bounds they'd push for greed's sake are limitless, as you'll gather for yourselves after the final reel.


"I'm the Bob Fosse of lion tamers!", exclaims Gregor (Christopher Lee).
Though Lee stays hooded for three-quarters of the movie, his stature, ridiculous bullwhip gestures, and booming voice are an unmistakable giveaway from his first moments on screen. He looks as though he had a blast making this one. Kinski, though perhaps underutilized here, is effective and memorable, as always. The only negative I drew from the experience was repetitive footage of dirty circus animals, obviously not having the same great time the cast and crew might have had, being led through metropolitan streets, crammed into cages, and forced to act for the cameras against their nature. Go ahead and call me an old softie. I dare you. Three wops on the rating scale, and a solid recommendation.


"I'd pay a significant amount of this money for a sturdy toehold right now..."

"Nosferatu a Venezia" (1988) d/ Augusto Caminito

More Kinski?? Despite burning through directors (Maurizio Lucidi, Pasquale Squitieri, Mario Caiano, producer Caminito, who ended up finishing the movie with some help from Luigi Cozzi, and reportedly Kinski himself, along the line) like Bette Davis through a pack of Lucky Strikes, tonight's review is an evocative, sometimes surreal follow up to Werner Herzog's 1979 remake of the silent 1922 F.W. Murnau classic.With the elegant beauty of Venice as a backdrop, the historically intolerable Kinski reprises his vampire role,  famously refusing to sit in the make up chair for the ugly, pitiful Max Shreck-esque look of the original, and even attacking a few of his female co-stars on the set. Also on board are no less than Christopher Plummer, Donald Pleasance, Barbara De Rossi, and the natural beauty, Anne Knecht, in her only film appearance to date.


"Vould you direkt me? I vould direkt me...zo zo hardt."
Professor Catalano (Plummer), who's dedicated his entire life to researching and hunting down the legendary vampire, Nosferatu (Kinski), arrives in plague-ridden Venice on account of a letter from a woman named Helietta (De Rossi) who claims that a coffin in her family crypt houses the very same apex blood drinker (that may or may not just be a slight extension of Kinski's Paganini with fangs here, but who can tell for sure, anyway?) that he's been after. Catalano's skepticism drives Mrs.Canins to hire a psychic to attempt to contact the monster, and although he hasn't been kipping in Helietta's cellar as she had thought, the medium's seance awakens him from a centuries-long slumber among a caravan of gypsies, suddenly feeling compelled to return to Venice and endlessly cruise the city's waterways in his gondola when he isn't clacking through the shadows in his buckled high heel shoes, in search of those foolish mortals who would dare to disturb his silent peace...


"I'll do ze fanks....zumtimes. But not ze balt het."
Don Alvise (Pleasance) delivers some memorably rambling speeches about God and evil, then disappears entirely, and when finally faced with his nemesis and life's obsession for the very first time, Catalano naturally offs himself. Wait...what? Nosferatu lustily paws at the local beauties and wills poor old grannies to throw themselves onto spikes, though his old angst-belching soul has but one true desire; the finality of death that can only come at the hand of a virgin whose love for him is throughly unconditional, and ironically, when he's later tracked down by some vampire hunters, they can only manage to mortally wound Maria (Anne Knecht), robbing him of the one girl who can grant him what he needs. He mournfully carries her nude body through the swirling morning mist...


"Fangs for that orgasm, baby..." coos Maria (Anne Knecht).
Some consider the late actor to be little more than a waxy-lipped bundle of Germanic hormones or worse. Don't count me among those folks, as his participation in a film only boosts it's stock for me; sometimes only just slightly, but in instances like tonight's review, he's an insane spectacle that demands the viewer's attention for every frame he passes through, as though the actor's very ego itself was the vampire in question, hypnotically commanding the audience to note his presence like an eager virgin might await the kiss of blood in her bed, once the sun has gone down. As for the film on the whole, it's a bold and visual one, tasting surprisingly coherent despite it's multiple chefs, nearly matching the atmospheric perfection of Herzog's film, and scoring an impressive three Wops on the rating scale. If you can snag a copy, by all means, do so with all speed. Highly recommended.


"Time has no meaning in a life that never ends...", hisses Nosferatu (Kinski).

"Le orme"(1975)d/Luigi Bazzoni

Four years removed from his first giallo, Giornata nera per l'ariete aka/ The Fifth Cord (1971), director Luigi Bazzoni serves up a visually interesting if not entirely engaging psychological thriller/mystery that lacks just about every identifying giallo characteristic; there's no black gloved killers, no beautiful model types being violently killed off with exotic weapons, and not much sci-fi to wrap your mind around here, either, despite the alternate "Footprints on the Moon" title. What there is, is some nice, atmospheric cinematography from Vittorio Storano, who also worked with Argento on L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo aka/ The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970), and a solid performance from lead actress, Florinda Balkan, with supporting appearances by Italian 70's ginger-kid extraordinaire, Nicoletta Elmi, and, of course, Klaus Kinski, misleadingly billed as a lead here.


"...all of this fucking cheese belongs to me now."
Alice (Balkan), a Portuguese translator,  has no recollection of the past three days and a recurring nightmare vision about astronauts bouncing about on the surface of the moon that she attributes to an old movie (with the same title as the one the audience is currently watching, mind you) that she must have missed the ending to. A discarded photograph of a hotel on the isle of Gama compels her to pay the holiday hot spot a visit in attempt to piece it all back together. To further complicate matters, several of the island's residents seem to already know her from the previous week, only as Nicole, a red head who sought refuge from some sort of imminent danger there, despite having no memories of ever having been there, at least, as Alice, anyway...


"...e il mio capelli rossi fastidioso per voi?" asks Paola (Nicoletta Elmi).
More sleepless nights filled with images of helpless men in space suits left behind on the moon (I dunno, that's gotta be pretty high on anybody's list of unsexy things that could happen to a person, huh? Still, you can't hear the Dave Matthews Band from space, so that's a plus...) and an abrasive scientist named Blackman (Kinski), who briefly bickers with some off-screen colleagues about his mind control experiments, the results of which have stranded some poor bastard on the moon's surface, to test his mental resolve. The bad karma finds it's way into Alice's dreams from space, and thus, aligns her as the logical choice to be Blackman's next lunar guinea pig. In the end, we see her being dragged off, screaming, by astronauts, no less...


Dicono che alle mie palpebre, Klaus.
Bazzoni would only direct a series of documentaries on Rome during the nineties, never returning to feature films, which leaves the genre fan to much speculation on where he could have gone with the medium, had he chosen to continue. Sadly, he passed away in 2012. As for Footprints, it's a little too long-winded for me to recommend to anyone but hardcore Kinski completists and fanatics of visual style, though it remains ambitious enough an effort to avoid being totally boring, and for that, it earns a single Wop score. I prefer Fifth Cord, as space isn't really my bag, maaaaan.


Smettere di resistere...Pianeta Earth è blu, non c'è niente che puoi fare.

"La bestia uccide a sangue freddo"(1971) d/ Fernando Di Leo

More Kinski? If you're into gialli, and who isn't these days, how about this one: A dubbed, chain smoking Klaus Kinski as a doctor in an asylum fulla oft-nude seventies Euro-eye candy the likes of Margaret Lee, Rosalba Neri, and Monica Strebel, as directed by none other than the late Fernando Di Leo, the man responsible for such enjoyably sleazy genre-fodder as I ragazzi del massacro, aka/ Naked Violence(1969), and Avere Vent'anni, aka/ To Be Twenty(1978). Di Leo, a director seemingly unfamiliar with the concept of "high roads", spills plenty of painty-looking stage blood and fills his lens with explicit crotch shots of no less than three of his actresses, in weaving this sometimes sluggish, always visually lush whodunit that's far too vile to not be a dynamite viewing experience for any genre nut worth his or her weight in shadowy, exotic weapon-wielding, black-gloved maniacs.


"Zis fahkink zigaret isss goink to taste zo zo gute."
At an out-of-the-way psychiatric clinic that seemingly only caters to (and hires, in some cases) young  women, some more nymphomaniacal than others, Professor Osterman (John Karlsen) runs an odd boat, indeed, with an impressive open display of various medieval weapons in an easily-accessible lounge, for those moments when a cloaked villain in black gloves fancies repeatedly clobbering a writhing naked woman with an ornate battle axe. It happens. The patients, errr, guests are free to come and go as they please, but seem content to play croquet, drink cocktails, smoke cigarettes, cop sensual nude rubdowns and sponge baths from attending staff members, like the petite ginger Nurse Helen (Monica Strebel), or simply fuck the groundskeeper in the greenhouse, like the sex-mad Anne (Rosalba Neri). Near constant masturbation also seems to be one of the rehabilitative techniques encouraged by the staff, like Dr. Keller (Kinski) who chain smokes and rambles psychoanalytically, when he isn't administering his own, personal brand of treatment to Mrs. Hume (Lee) in private.


I think phonetic Kinski dialog may have replaced preserves jokes here at the big W.
Anne takes an unbelievably groovy shower, and tries to seduce her own brother... like old times (blech), while Nurse Helen sets race relations back a hundred years with an interracial chicken dance with a black patient that naturally progresses into lesbo sex, but play time's undoubtedly over when one of the other nurses gets her head scythed off. Oh yeah, there's a killer afoot. Strangulation, followed by some sensual dagger-play, dude-in-an-iron-maiden, then oversexed Anne gets a post-masturbatory axing, beckoning the shadowy killer to fuck her first(!). Mrs Hume professes her eternal love for Dr. Keller, while the killer is revealed as he's trying to slip a noose around her neck. With the authorities hot on his trail, he locks himself in a room full o' chicks and a flail in hand(!!), and goes Richard Speck on the cornered lot of them, before getting stopped dead in his murderous tracks by some dramatic slo-mo squibs and a final head shot. The end.


Spoke too soon. Heyyy, you smeared some jam in close proximity to yer clam...
While most directors merely flirt with or skirt around the baser instincts of mankind, Di Leo never seemed to have a problem displaying it in his films, cinematically rolling around in it on occasion like a contented sow, hoof-deep in filth. We love him for that, here at the Wop, really we do, regardless of whether the hardcore quim-diddling shots here were inserted post-production, or not. Bestia was only one of eleven credits in 1971 for Kinski, which included Antonio Margheriti's Nella stretta morsa del ragno aka/Web of the Spider, and Giuseppe Vari's Prega il morto e amazzo il vivo aka/ Shoot the Living and Pray for the Dead. We could probably cover a different Klaus Kinski movie every day here until the end of the year and end up with leftovers.My obvious favorites on board, Rosalba Neri worked with all the top genre directors of the day, from D'Amato to Franco, while the lovely Margaret Lee you'll probably remember from The Bloody Judge(1970), and the firey Monica Strebel would go on to play Death in Brunello Rondi's Racconti proibiti...di niente vestiti, the following year.On the scale, the Cold-Blooded Beast garners a warm reception, two wops. Check it out!


Love to ruin it for ya. I, Spoiler.

"La morte ha sorriso all'assassino" (1973) d/ Aristide Massaccesi

Let's kick it off properly with what is arguably Italian sleazemeister Joe D'Amato's best genre work, in a Poe-inspired gothic 1973  giallo that stars Euro staple-creep Klaus Kinski and Swede-born confectionery item, Ewa "Candy" Aulin. Insert: lip smack here. In fact, those only familiar with the director's later, more crass efforts might be pleasantly surprised at the attention he dedicates to the film's dreamy look, a juxtaposition of horrible images against beautiful ones that I'm unsure he was ever able to purvey to an audience as effectively as he does here. As far as I know (a range that encompasses "just about everything" to "next to nothing" on any given day), it stands as the only other film in his two hundred (besides 1977's Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals), in which he uses his real name on a directorial credit, from a period when he clearly cared more about the artistic aspects of his movies than the financial success, as was visibly the case later in his career. Some might even go so far as to call it his "masterpiece"... Don't get the wrong idea, folks, this is still a D'Amato movie, and there's plenty of gory splatter and  nudity abound here, and you might have difficulty tracking the incoherent plot line even with the help of microchip implants, but such is the cinema, no?


More style and profile here than a Ric Flair wrasslin' promo. Woooo!
At the turn of the twentieth century, after a handsome doctor (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) impregnates the female half of an incestuous pair of siblings, resulting in the death of mother and child, her jilted, hunchbacked brother Franz (Luciano Rossi) sets out to restore her life. Three years later, on the doorstep of the estate of Walter Von Ravensbruck (Sergio Doria), son of the aforementioned doctor, a gruesome carriage accident finds beautiful passenger, Greta (Aulin) injured and the carriage driver skewered through the heart on the vehicle shaft.Walter calls in Dr. Sturges (Kinski) first to examine the driver's corpse for the authorities, then to diagnose the young, unresponsive woman. Sturges unflinchingly sinks a needle clear into her wide-open eye(!), then recognizes an inscription on the amulet around her neck as just the Incan formula for resurrection he's been looking for, for years! He scurries down to his sub-basement lab and laboriously fiddles with beakers and test tubes, before getting C.T.F.O.ed by mysterious hands just as his latest concoction brings a male corpse back to life. Thorough as a shadowy killer usually is, he re-snuffs Sturges' mute assistant and the reanimated corpse, for good measure. Upstairs, both Von Ravensbruck and his wife are mesmerized by their lovely new guest and play nudie prod games together while a maid that's haunted by visions of Franz gets her facepiece blown the eff off by the shadowy killer, who proves he's not against using a gun once in a while.


"Hold ztill. I'm goink to inzert zis pin into your eyeball..."
Walter's wife Eva (Angela Bo) walls up Greta in the musty cellar, after failing to drown her while giving her a bath, but ultimately fails in stopping the inevitable spectral haunting/ violent death in store for both she and her husband. The Von Ravensbruck's trusty manservant, Semian, reveals himself to be Greta's murderous accomplice, but she inexplicably rewards his loyalty by sending him off to join the choir invisible. After her objet du vengeance, Walter's father, is trapped in his daughter-in-law's crypt as her eyes ominously snap open, we flashback to Greta's resurrection at Franz's hands three years earlier, his success garnering him a nasty end from an ornery black feline that has issues with eyes. The grisly aftermath is discovered by a police inspector, who rehashes the strange details of the case to his elderly, invalid wife, who's been turned away from him in her wheelchair the whole time. When she turns to face him, he realizes that she is in reality, Greta, a harbinger of his own horrible fate, perhaps? Roll credits.


"...and the big dance is tonight! I'm ruined!!!"
What manner of insanity is this? A D'Amato movie that's not hardcore porn, and it merits a Wop, doubled, on the mostly infallible and oft-imitated ratings scale?? Believe it or not, despite his under-use of Kinski here, the convoluted story line, and some signature jerky handheld P.O.V. shots that he'd revisit again and again, in things like Porno Holocaust(1979) and Antropophagus(1980),  this just might be my favorite of all of the director's genre work, with mostly solid performances from the cast, palatable cinematography, and an aptly phantasmagorical score from Berto Pisano. D'Amato would follow this one up with several over the next few years under the name Michael Wotruba, including 1974's Eroi all'inferno, a war movie that also starred Rossi and Kinski. The adorable Aulin would next appear in Jorge Grau's Ceremonia Sangrienta (1973).


"Ho bisogno di aiuto! I've got a sheep's eye glued to my face!"

"Schizoid" (1980) d/David Paulsen

Sorry about the delay between reviews lately, I'm sure you probably feel like that forgotten anole lizard in the barren aquarium in the corner of some irresponsible little bastard's bedroom by now, your sunken eyes frantically scanning the dirty glass for a mere wax worm or micro cricket worth of sustenance. Hang tight, my woprophiles, I've got an impressively opulent stack of genre movies we'll be looking at this month, and leading it all off, is a surprisingly engaging American pseudo-giallo disguised as typical slasher fare of the era (the one sheet is a dead giveaway, I dunno), that you might otherwise slag off if you're searching for the blade-generated tomato paste so often promised in knifer flicks. If you did that, you'd be missing out on a rare subdued Kinski (save for some creepy incestual tension in one spot), Marianna Hill, who you might remember in "High Plains Drifter" as Ghost Eastwood's objet d'viol, Donna (Jaws 2) Wilkes, Craig (Body Double) Wasson, and hell, throw Jim from Taxi in there, and slap a silly mustache on him, to boot. Let's roll...


"Uv corss I'm not vatching you get undresst. Don't be silly."
When Julie (Hill), a newspaper advice columnist who's going through a sensitive divorce with her sweaty husband (Wasson), starts receiving increasingly unnerving anonymous cut-n-paste letters with murder as the subject, it just so happens to coincide with a mounting body count; comprised mostly of her fellow therapy group members, all of whom seemingly had been secretly lovers of Pieter (Kinski), the therapist himself, before learning the fatal mistake of playing with a big-assed pair of scissors, or more importantly, playing with a shadowy figure in foppish hat and leather gloves that happens to be wielding said sizeable, sharpened snips.Whether Pieter is the culprit or not, he still manages to peep-tom his own daughter Alizzin,errr..Alison (Wilkes) in the buff to score magnificently on the creep-o-meter, regardless. But the creeps to choose from in this lousy burg are many, as we soon find out.


The Chooper got her, and we knew it.
Besides the polyamorous shrink (who's also taken to having his sexual way wiss,errr...with Julie by now) and Julie's clammy ex, there's Gilbert the lonely maintenance man (Lloyd), there's the boys in blue who treat the psychotic letters like a big joke(, and little Alizzin, err...Allison's not without suspicion herself, with that incendiary jealousy of Julie, and the drawer full of cut-out letters, and all. When Julie finds out it's Pieter's daughter behind the letters, she draws her out into a gun-frontation with her husband and the therapist, who's soon on the scene. It was the sweat-drenched Doug, afterall, who kidnaps Allison and Julie (who hates hairbrushes, apparently) and duels with Pieter in the dark (you haven't lived until you've seen a hammer-wielding Kinski square off against Wasson) until an untied Allie plunges his own trademark scissors into his back as he's beating the therapist and accusing him of stealing his wife, and, of being a nazi, as well. You're thinking of Eroi all'inferno (1974), Craig...err, Doug. As Doug slumps lifelessly over a piece of overturned furniture, the cops finally come in.


"Zose frozen peas in zere are turnink me on, baby..."
After completing Savage Weekend(1979) and tonight's review, Paulsen went on to direct episodes of Dallas, Dynasty, and even Knots Landing, ferchrissakes. Though Schizoid might be a little too dry for the modern slasher crowd, especially those of the 80's camp, fans of Kinski will do well to add this one to their "to see" queue's in the near future. It's nothing too exceptional, but highly watchable, anyway. Two big ones.


"Playing Twister at her age, she shoulda known better..."