"A Candle for the Devil" (1973) d/ Eugenio Martin

Tonight's review, a solid little seventies-tastic genre effort from the director who brought you things like "Horror Express" (1972) and "Death at the Deep End of the Swimming Pool" (1971), explores the horrific end of the inevitable culture clash when conservative Spain meets swinging London. If you're envisioning lots of bare breasts and blood-splashy homicide, you're barking up the right tree. Martin dresses his moody gothic locale with lovelies of the day like Judy Geeson, Esperanza Roy, and even his wife, Lone Fleming,  no stranger to genre films herself, having appeared in two of  de Ossorio's Blind Dead pictures, among others.


The sun burns through to the planet's core, but it wasn't enough, she wanted more.
Marta (Aurora Bautista) and Veronica (Esperanza Roy) are a pair of repressed, judgmental spinsters who run a bed and breakfast in a remote Spanish village that's a current stopover for tour buses packed with free-spirited horn-dawgs and morally reprehensible sluts from all over Europe. Despite the boost in business, this proves too troubling a predicament for the overzealous sisters to deal with rationally, as Marta takes it upon herself to chuck a topless British sunbather head first down a flight of stairs and into a stained glass window, killing her instantly. While Veronica panics, Marta takes an ornate chunk of bloody glass from the corpse's neck, citing the holy sword upon it as a sign from God / rallying cry for religious homicide. Makes sense. While V's skimming the till box for the virile young manservant she's been secretly breaking her bountiful bobblers out for, Marta's been spying on some prepubescent boys skinny-dipping in a nearby pond, their tiny jimmy's sending her into a shameful sexual fervor, which she sates by doing repeated fanatical laps through the thorny briar patch. When Laura (Judy Geeson) makes the scene, looking for her missing sister, things really start getting curious...


"Is that a croqueta in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?"
While the inquisitive Laura scores conservative points a plenty with the unhinged innkeepers thanks to her extravagantly busy bell bottoms, other less bashful tourists aren't so lucky. Helen's (Lone Fleming) propensity to traipse through the fountain in a skimpy top and hot pants and make mocking sexual advances to Marta while she's gussying herself up in the wedding dress she never got to wear ultimately gets her stabbed the eff up in the end, while a young single mother gets removed from the equation for having a child out of wedlock and lying about it to the sisters, even worse. When the latest of Laura's acquaintances mysteriously checks out without a word, she enlists the nearest thing to authority the village has, to investigate the disappearances. It doesn't help matters when one of the dinner guests at the Inn discovers a woman's eye, preserved in alcohol, on their plate. Oh, which of the basement vats holds the good wine again? Just as the sisters are about to add Laura to their list of victims, the curtain falls, revealing the maddening real life diorama to the townspeople and authorities who have gathered outside the window...


"Unless Mil Mascaras books a room here, no one can stop us NOW!"
The lovely Geeson had a nice genre run at the outset of the seventies, appearing in Doomwatch (1972),  Fear in the Night (1972), and tonight's feature, before famously turning up in the schlocky Horror Planet/ Inseminoid (1981), while the late Aurora Bautista also appeared in 1969's La bambola di Satana. The busty Roy can also be seen in de Ossorio's El ataque de los muertos sin ojos/ Return of the Evil Dead, released the same year. You may have seen tonight's review under it's alternate title, "It Happened at Nightmare Inn", but since that cut of the film runs just over an hour and excises all the groovy bits of nudity and violence within, you're probably better off sticking with the uncut eighty-three minute print under the somewhat misleading "Candle" title, available on a region two dvd, from the folks over at Odeon. On the scale, Candle merits an impressive three Wops, and should be seen at all costs. Recommended.


Well I've got to be forgiven if I wanna spend my livin' with a long, cool woman with a cloth gag...

"Inseminoid" (1981) d/ Norman J. Warren

How can you top homicidal inter-species  lunacy in space in the form of a thirty-five cent British Alien(1979) rip-off as overseen by the legendary Shaw Brothers' elder,  Run Run? This stuff is way ahead of it's time, believe me. Just imagine Jason Reitman's Juno if Ellen Page was British sex kitten Judy 'To Sir With Love' Geeson (I like where I'm taking this), and Michael Cera was a rubbery bug-eyed intergalactic horndog with a clear tube full o' green pipsqueak pudding (Okay, maybe not.). Warren's fourth feature, which follows marginal genre fare like Satan's Slave(1976) and 1978's Prey, is as loopy as it's gore is goopy; don't think of it as laughable Dollar Store knockoff of Ridley Scott's groundbreaking 1979 cult classic, think of it as a feature length Doctor Who episode with ample boobs and over-the-top splatter that more than compensates for not having Tom Baker running around the cheap-looking sets with that toothy grin and ridiculously long trademark scarf, don't you think?

 
Remember to always use your low beams when approaching a crater.
While excavating the ruins of an ancient civilization based on dualism and once ruled by a pair of twins on a desolate planet, a team of  Xeno project scientists has set up base precariously near a stage set cheaply decorated to resemble a convolution of catacombs where an alien intellect has taken up residence in some crystals, influencing some of the team members to act in a less-than-British manner indeed. One deranged fellow is plugged with a harpoon gun, while his trapped partner removes her helmet in the deadly atmosphere and freezes solid when a chainsaw foot amputation turns out worse than aspirations. Unfazed by the gruesome deaths, another duo naturally sets out to investigate the murderous crystals, and this time, is set upon by a stretchy-looking alien beast, who extirpates the gent and lays down his partner for some sweet otherworldly dream sequence rape.


"No time for the old in-out, love, I've just come to read the meter."
Rescued by her remaining colleagues, Sandy (Judy Geeson), who's been regularly injected with contraceptives like the rest of the female officers (Call me, ladies) along the way, is now pregnant with twin alien/human hybrids, and as a side effect, is inhumanly strong, and quite prone to dismembering her coadjutors and drinking their blood when she feels her progeny is threatened. Several super sanguinary slayings later, it's up to Mark (Robin Clarke), the senior officer and Sandy's former fuck-buddy, to take her down for keeps after delivering her newly stumbled upon twin reptilian urchins over to Sharon (Heather Wright). Mark C.T.F.O.'s his ex, but discovers one of her mutant kids chewing Sharon's neck upon his return, and is wiped out himself, by the other equally homicidal one. When a rescue team later arrives to investigate loss of communications with the team, the twins stow away on the shuttle as it departs, as no survivors are found...


Sometimes a chick's gotta take a vadge fulla space yogurt for a movie, I guess.
If  you like your cinematic rip-offs like your sin-sating one-offs (cheap n' sleazy, who doesn't?), then you'll do right by yourselves in securing a rental copy of this one at the very least. The more hopeless of you probably already bought it on purpose. Mine's an Embassy VHS print under the alternate "Horror Planet" title transferred to dvd with custom dupe sleeve, though I'm not sure where that places me on the aforementioned  scale.  It'd make a sick fit on a sci-fi / schlock horror drive-in retro triple bill with Galaxy of Terror(1981) and Contamination(1980), for anybody with the money and means out there to make such an affair transpire. Rancid space debris as you like it. One wop.


"I just tasted some Adam's apple, you're a MANNN, BABY!"