"Symptoms" (1974) d/ Jose Ramon Larraz

Of the two genre films that cult director Jose' Ramon Larraz completed in 1974, the sapphic and graphic Vampyres is more well known, and thus, easier to come by, but it's his other, more subdued effort that year that we'll focus upon tonight here at the Wop. As the story goes, Symptoms was entered into the Cannes Film Festival that year, vanished and showed back up on British television very briefly in the eighties, and lived on as washed out-looking bootleg rips from the VHS days, with all original source materials allegedly missing or destroyed, at least until the folks at Mondo Macabro announced that they'd secured the negatives and a remastered special edition Blu-ray was scheduled for release this coming spring. The film stars Angela Pleasance, the eldest of Donald's five daughters, who has appeared in things like Hitler: His Last Ten Days (1973), From Beyond the Grave (1974), and The Godsend (1980), all while being a dead ringer for her father, a man who brought many memorable antagonists to the big screen during his own career.


In his new female disguise, Blofeld has taken to stroking a different type of pussy, indeed.
Anne (Lorna Heilbron) is invited to spend some time at a decaying, remote, old estate in the English countryside by her timid, reclusive friend, Helen (Angela Pleasence), an odd bird with an affinity for horticulture and paper doll cutting. She fancies burning them in the fireplace, directly afterwards. Might want to take note of that. The pixie-coiffed, chain smoking Anne has had a recent row with her beau, and volunteers to help rehabilitate her sheltered mate, despite her ambiguity towards the current whereabouts of her last live-in partner, Cora (Marie-Paule Mailleux), who may or may not be the spectral dame intently flitting around the swampy grounds in wisps of mysterious fog. The groundskeeper, Grady (Peter Vaughn), offers very little in the way of calming reassurance, creeping about and eyeballing the troubled woman from a distance.


Anne (Lorna Heilbron) brings Former Lee Warmer a midnight snack.
Extended periods of tedium lead Anne to venture out of her quarters after dark, seeking the source for eerie late night moans of despair, only to find the delicate mouse double-clicking her own mouse in her own chambers. Masturbation aside,  there's still the matter of a mysterious locked door in said bedroom, that inevitably leads to attic filled with dark secrets. Don't they all, really? Her curiosity peaked, she investigates further, after a secret reconciliation with her boyfriend in town, which Helen has taken to look upon with disdain, having developed a bit of a crush on the old girl, in the process. She ascends to the attic, finding Cora's luggage neatly stored away in a corner. Didn't she leave earlier? If she's gone, why has she left her belongings behind...oh boy. I can see where this is all leading, and you can too, now, very soon,  thanks to the thorough chappies at Mondo Macabro.


Making late night jam sandwiches leads to the arrival of jam sandwiches (see: slang). 
I should also mention Angela has shown up more recently in Scorsese's Gangs of New York (2002), though I haven't picked her out in all the times I've viewed it yet, sadly. Giovanni Lombardo Radice, I singled out immediately. Go figure. You've probably noticed Peter Vaughn in things like Ken Russell's Savage Messiah (1972), Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971), and more recently, BBC's Doc Martin series. I look forward to revisiting this one when the new release drops, as I'm sure the improved quality will intensify an impactful feeling of claustrophobia and atmosphere that one can only hint upon in a ghosty, washed out vhs dub like mine. The shitty print and sometimes painfully slow build to this effort force me to lay a median deuce upon it, though I surely enjoyed it, already a fan of the Larraz films I've seen to date. Check it out!


No need to drive this one crazy, she's already there.

"From Beyond the Grave" (1973) d/Kevin Connor

We'll wrap up September with another one of those groovy early seventies British horror anthologies from the folks at Amicus, with segments based on four short stories from R. Chetwynd-Hayes, and featuring the likes of David Warner, Donald and Angela Pleasence, Diana Dors, Lesley-Anne Down, and Peter Cushing tying the whole thing together, as a creepy, old antiques dealer with a clientele of cheats, chumps, and burglars who all get more than they bargained for in the end. The first-time director, Kevin Connor, would move on to Doug McClure drive-in fodder like The Land That Time Forgot (1975) and At the Earth's Core (1976) before moving on to campy cult classics like 1980's Motel Hell and 1982's The House Where Evil Dwells, which, for those of you that happened to be wondering, also stars Doug McClure.


"I seem to have stumbled out of my flat and onto a Mario Bava set..."
In "The Gate Crasher", we see an artsy know-it-all twat (David Warner) con The Proprietor (Peter Cushing) on the sale of an antique mirror, which after an obligatory seance, proves to contain a murderous spirit that resembles Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, leading the man down a dark path that surely can't end well for anyone involved, especially birds picked up on the fly at a dance club. Then, in "An Act of Kindness", an unfulfilled husband (Ian Bannen) pockets a wartime medal  from the shop without paying, thus becoming the focus of a down-and-out war vet named Underwood (Donald Pleasence) and his pin-happy lookalike daughter, Emily (Angela Pleasance). Diana Dors is in there, too, and she's delightfully abrasive, up until her untimely demise.


"He's bad, bad Leeroy Broooown, baddest man in the whole damned tooooown..."
Next, a chap named Warren (Ian Carmichael) switches out the price tags in a pair of antique snuff boxes, and manages to get a troublesome, invisible titular "elemental",  burrowing psychically into his shoulder, strangling his wife in bed, and making a general nuisance of itself until he calls upon the services of  Madame Orloff (Margaret Leighton) who's apparently just the woman for the job. Then, a young fellow (Ian Ogilvy...shee, there's a lot of Ian's in this one) purchases a ornately decorated, bulky antique door for a linen closet in his flat, only to discover that it sometimes leads into a blue room from another era, belonging to an evil nobleman who dedicated his life to the pursuit of, as if you couldn't guess, more evil. Finally, an enterprising criminal enters the shop with designs on relieving it of any excess cash lying around, only to provide the final twist for the audience, whom the Proprietor addresses directly before closing his doors and end credits roll.


For those about to rock, Donald salutes you.
Amicus Studios filled a genre niche with a fine run of pormanteau-style anthologies, starting in 1965 with Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, followed by Torture Garden (1967), The House That Dripped Blood (1971), Tales from the Crypt (1972), Asylum (1972), Vault of Horror (1973), and this, which would turn out to be the final one they'd tackle. Nothing out of the ordinary going on here, but the whole production is handled so well by all involved, you'll be too entertained to notice. On the scale, Grave earns a solid score of three Wops, and should really be checked out, if you're on board with this style of film. Recommended.


"No, you certainly may not have the freeze-dried crocodile for five quid."