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

"Lust for a Vampire" (1971) d/ Jimmy Sangster

Despite some pretty famous hate from star Ralph Bates, who replaced the elder Peter Cushing, who'd bowed out of the production to tend to his ailing wife, Hammer's last minute swap of directors (Sangster for Terence Fischer), and Mike Raven's laughably dubbed, dollar store Christopher Lee portrayal of Count Karnstein, there's a lot to like about tonight's review, the studio's meaty follow up to The Vampire Lovers(1970), further exploring the ungodly acts and deeds of the Karnstein clan, and showcasing the loverly Yutte Stensgaard, a blonde any red-blooded man'd love to get his fangs into.


"This is one of the worst movies ever made, mate!", scoffs Giles (Ralph Bates).
After seeing a throaty young strumpet provide the red stuff in a sacrificial rite of resurrection, where her blood is poured over the veil-draped skeletal remains of none other than Carmilla Karnstein, we're then introduced to the aptly named Richard leStrange (Michael Johnson),  a writer of lurid horror fiction, who lands himself a cushy gig at a nearby finishing school for girls, just as Countess Arritzen (Barbara Jefford) arrives on the scene, with her blood boilingly beautiful blonde niece, Mircalla (Yutte Stensgaard), in tow. Richard is instantly smitten with the mysterious young girl, as is the dusty headmaster, Giles Barton (Ralph Bates), who seems strangely acceptant when his frolicking young fillies start disappearing, one by one.


That's no stake in my trousers, I'm just glad to see Yutte.
It turns out that Barton is an aspiring student of the Black Arts, and through extensive grimoire research and love-born portrait sketches, he relates to Mircalla that she is, in fact, Carmilla, and pledges his servitude to the ageless predator, even hiding the lifeless body of one of her late night snacks down a well, and ultimately earning a fanged up neck-death for his blind loyalty. Meanwhile, Richard also blindly vows his love and allegiance to the vampire, who lets him dine on her instead of the usual eating arrangements we've grown accustomed to seeing (I'll be humming "Strange Love" the next time I'm performing cunnilingus, for sure). Further complicating matters,  Janet (Suzanna Leigh) the gym teacher has inexplicably fallen in love with Richard, a guy she's barely talked to since he joined the staff. From here, it's bare breasts, bloody neck bites, Bishop-driven lynch mobs, and flaming castle support impalement. Ain't nothing wrong with any of that.


Look, it's Nick Frost, the 1830 variant. Cornetto?
Sadly, Yutte bowed out of the Hammer spotlight after her appearance here, feeling under-appreciated in the genre. Personally, I've always appreciated the Hell out of her small-but-impressive body of work. She'd even make a needlepoint video sexy. Lighter on the on-screen lesbianism than it's predecessor, but heavier with Hammer honeys like Pippa Steel, Lust is packed top to bottom with splashy blood and bursting bosoms, gothic sets you may recall seeing in other movies, like Scars of Dracula(1970), and is a ripper of a time to be had, in general. Twins of Evil (1972), another favorite of mine, came next. If you're on board for a true Hammer terror classic, you won't find it here, for sure, but it's still a classic in my book, exploitatively speaking, and well worthy of three Wops on the rating scale. Next up, I'll be taking center stage over at Theater of Guts to scrutinize some genre material, so you'll definitely want to check that out.


I wasn't down for this particular Count. Like, blah! Blah!

"Burke and Hare" (1972) d/ Vernon Sewell

The West Port Murders, carried out over ten months in 1828, by a pair of enterprising body brokers named Burke and Hare, have inspired a slew of genre movie variations to date, from 1945's The Body Snatcher with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, to The Flesh and The Fiends (1960) with Donald Pleasence and George Rose, and even Freddie Francis' The Doctor and The Devils (1985) with Jonathan Pryce and Stephen Rea. Tonight's review is another, the last film directed by Vernon Sewell, the man responsible for Blood Beast Terror and Curse of the Crimson Altar (both 1968), with Derren Nesbitt and Glynn Edwards as the titular duo. This one's played mostly for dark laughs, but you'll have a hard time missing Danish Hammer-pastry, Yutte Stensgaard and dark angel/French Mauritian, Francoise Pascal. Far from a laughing matter, either bird.


These two'd nick your goldfish and pop back 'round for the stringy-wastey bits.
Burke (Derren Nesbitt) and Hare (Glynn Edwards), beware of 'em, the pair of 'em. Life on the dirty streets of Scotland in the 1800's was hard enough with disease and poverty rampant among the flock, and then these two low types decide to go into nefarious business tah-gedder,  robbin' corpses o' their final eternal peace and sellin' 'em to Dr. Knox (Harry Andrews) for up to eight bob, as specimens for the dissection table at the medical college, all sneaky in the middle of the night-like. Luckily, there's a brothel nearby, with working girls like Janet (Yutte Stensgaard) and Marie (Francoise Pascal) to...ease the tensions and put good again the humour of young doctors-in-training; one virginal goober ready to fall in love with the very prostitute that deflowers him, after having had a peeped upon romp with a soldier in a kilt, no less.


"Did that feel like sixpence worth to you?",  muses Marie (Francoise Pascal).
Needless to say, Burke and Hare expand their business horizons from the freshly deceased to live victims, with Hare holding them down while Burke smothers them, and though the body count begins with sickly old codgers already on death's doorstep and butch, belligerent, booze-soaked barflys who nobody's gonna miss, they're soon setting their sights on club-footed neighborhood waifs and they're also not above icing a fire-displaced hooker or two, should the opportunity arise. When the love-struck student sees his beloved Marie on Knox's slab, he investigates the clues that inevitably lead to our dastardly duo, partying it up on Halloween after having sped a little old lady out of her existence, her body tucked away in a chest. Finally, we're told that Burke is ultimately hanged for his crimes, while an exonerated Hare was set on by a lynch mob and thrown into a lime pit, after which he died a penniless, blind beggar. Cue groovy titular pop tune by The Scaffold and that's another one for the books.


"Don't bother to bring bovver to our brothel, brother.",  jibes Janet (Yutte Stensgaard).
The breathtaking Pascal, a fellow Libran who first surfaced to genre fans in the orgy scene in 1970's Bloodsuckers, would famously appear in Jean Rollin's La rose de fer (1973) and in numerous television roles over the years on BBC, from Coronation Street to Mind Your Language. Man, she transcends adjectives, she's so hot.(Oh, Dub, yer so good to your readers) Sadly, this would be Yutte Stensgaard's last appearance in front of movie cameras,only popping up in an episode of the British television horror anthology, Dead of Night (ironically, her episode was among those lost when BBC purged its back catalog in the seventies) , before dropping off the radar completely. Thankfully, her full talents are on display here, for posterity's sake. Ahem. Two's the magic number tonight on the scale, as well, a body worth snatching once or twice, for sure.


"Stop bloody breevink awready, Papa fancies 'avink a new bowlah!"

"Scream and Scream Again" (1970) d/ Gordon Hessler

Tigon Studios really left the crazy cage wide open on this one, a minor masterpiece of espionage and mystery, well seasoned with elements of  horror and sci-fi, purveyed upon the screen by an all-star genre cast of casts, the first time the likes of Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and no less than Vincent Price himself all share the marquee, though I warn you up front: the elder statesmen of horror never appear in the same scene all together. Still, that's a small complaint to register against such a dizzy nuthouse of a cult classic as this one. Veteran genre director Gordon Hessler, who'd done movies like The Oblong Box (1969) and Cry of the Banshee(1970) for A.I.P., builds a rambling, schizophrenic narrative off the foundation of a sci-fi novel by Peter Saxon, but pulls it all together nicely for a wild finish if you can manage to stay on board the whole time.


"Sometimes I'm not very nice at all... a dreadful chap to make your acquaintance, really."
Just as London's getting it's swing on, the groovy partying is disrupted by a series of modern-day vampiric slayings, only this Dracula's more on the Thin White Duke side, with flash clothes and motor, C.T.F.O.ing go-go birds and draining their blood just as they're thinking they've landed themselves a real keeper. Meanwhile, a poor heart-afflicted bloke gets poorer by the minute, waking up in hospital significantly less of a man than he was the last time he checked. Also, there's a cyber-bully uber-fascist (Marshall Jones) who's been rising through the regime's runic ranks via a neat little trick he learned from Sifu Spock: the old Vulcan nerve pinch-to-the-shoulder, Achilles heel to both intergalactic dictators and Peter "One Scene" Cushing, alike.


" ...I think I'll just skip this round of 'If You're Happy and You Know It', if it's all the same."
When the Old Bill finally gets the bead on the young psycho (Michael Gothard) after a well-lengthy chase sequence, he pulls his own hand off while handcuffed to a car bumper, proceeds to ascend a real nose-bleed of a vertical climb, only to get pegged in the dome with a rock by one of the unarmed constables below, causing him to tumble awkwardly back down to justice. Was that trip worth it, young man? The trail leads to a private clinic that specializes in organ replacements and transplants, as run by Dr. Browning (Price), who's been secretly building a super race of cyber-men for that shadowy militaristic organization we saw earlier, and he's paid a visit by the synthetic uber-fascist, which leads to an enjoyably hammy nerve pinch-off between the two, culminating in the good doctor dunking the hit man in his nifty acid bath like a two hundred pound glazed kruller in coffee. Finally, Fremont (Christopher Lee) makes the scene, revealing himself as the real head honcho in the insane precedings, and wills Browning to dip himself into his own acid tub, which he does, emotionlessly.


"These swollen tonsils should be removed right away!"
You'll remember Gothard from Russell's The Devils the same year, and Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce(1984), while Yutte Stensgaard later made herself famous as Carmilla/Mircalla in the Hammer production of Lust For a Vampire (1971), the sequel to it's own Vampire Lovers(1970). Welsh pop group Amen Corner also appear in one of the nightclub scenes. Originally, the final reveal was to be aliens behind the sinister plot, just as in the novel, "The Disoriented Man", but the film's producers chose to roll with unexplained and mysterious, instead, which worked out just fine, I think. On the scale, Scream earns a well-deserved three Wops, and stands as an enjoyably ludicrous ride that comes with my recommendation. See it!


Say, what's that your ham is soaking in...