Christopher Frank Carandini Lee (27 May 1922 – 7 June 2015) was an English actor, singer, and author. With a career spanning nearly seventy years, Lee initially portrayed villains and became best known for his role as Count Dracula in a sequence of Hammer Horror films. His other film roles include Francisco Scaramanga in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), Saruman in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001–2003) and The Hobbit film trilogy (2012–2014), and Count Dooku in the final two films of the Star Wars prequel trilogy (2002 and 2005).

Obituary:

We knew it was coming – the man was 93, after all – but you could easily believe that if anyone was going to live forever, it would be Christopher Lee. His death on Sunday, announced today, shows that even he was mortal.

But what a life. It’s fair to say that whoever you are and however long you live, you will never be as utterly cool as Christopher Lee. This is a man who was a wartime spy, had a film career than lasted almost seventy years – working with everyone from Jess Franco to George Lucas – and in his Nineties recorded a bunch of heavy metal albums, picking up a Metal Hammer award to go alongside his knighthood, BAFTA  Fellowship and other gongs.

Lee made so many films that even listing the highlights will turn into a gargantuan list. He rose to fame working for Hammer – in The Curse of Frankenstein, he was simply the monster – sorry, ‘creature’ – but then got to prove his acting chops with Dracula the next year, in the process becoming the iconic version of the character in a variable series of films. Lee would be a Hammer regular in the late 1950s and continued to work with them, often co-starring with Peter Cushing, throughout the 1960s and 70s, on films as varied as She, Taste of Fear, The Man Who Could Cheat Death, Pirates of Blood River,The Devil Rides Out, Terror of the Tongs and the final horror film of Hammer’s first incarnation, To the Devil a Daughter. In 2011, he returned to the revived company to appear in The Resident.

Lee also worked frequently for Hammer’s rivals Amicus – he starred in their first horror film The City of the Dead (aka Horror Hotel) and would be one of their go-to stars for films like Dr.Terror’s House of Horrors, The Skull, The House That Dripped Blood, Scream and Scream Again and I, Monster. But Hammer and Amicus were just the tip of the iceberg when it came to Lee’s horror work in the 1960s, as he travelled across Europe to star in a huge number of films. He worked with Mario Bava on The Whip and the Body and Hercules in the Haunted World, spoofed his Dracula role in Uncle Was A Vampire (he would do likewise in 1976 in Dracula and Son) and also appeared in The Virgin of Nuremberg, Terror in the Crypt aka Crypt of Horror, Castle of the Living Dead, Night of the Big Heat, Circus of Fear, The Blood Demon and The Oblong Box amongst others. He played Sir Henry Baskerville in Hammer’s Hound of the Baskervilles and then graduated to playing Sherlock Holmes.

Also in the 1960s, he developed another recurring role, playing arch villain Fu Manchu in five films. The last two of these were directed by Jess Franco, who Lee would go on to make several films with – from the ambitious but ultimately misguided Count Dracula (an attempt to stick to Stoker’s novel) to The Bloody Judge and Eugenie: The Story of Her Journey Into Perversion, though Lee maintained that he was unaware of the sort of film he was making in that instance!

In the early 1970s, Lee continued to make international horror films, including The Creeping Flesh, Horror Express, Dark Places, Nothing But the Night (for his own Charlemagne company) but increasingly found himself able to move beyond the genre. While still a horror movie, The Wicker Man was a cut above the usual in terms of respectability, while other films like The Three Musketeers, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, western Hannie Caulder and Julius Caesar allowed him to move away from the genre to a degree.

A move to the USA and an iconic role in James Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun cemented a move to the mainstream, and in the latter half of the decade and early 1980s, he had major roles in the likes of Airport ’77, Return from Witch Mountain, 1941, Bear Island, Goliath Awaits and a surprising number of martial arts action films: An Eye for an Eye, Jaguar Lives and Circle of Iron. Not that he abandoned low budget genre films – he was essentially tricked into hosting The Hollywood Meatcleaver Massacre, but also appeared in The Keeper, Starship Invasions, End of the World, Arabian Adventure, House of the Long Shadows and, most bizarrely, Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf and the appalling Funny Man.

In the 1990s, he worked with Alejandro Jodorowsky on The Rainbow Thief, appeared in Police Academy: Mission to Moscow and turned up in Joe Dante’s Gremlins 2: The New Batch. This latter appearance was a precursor to his 2000’s career revival when he was often hired by directors who grew up watching him. So he worked with Tim Burton on Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride, Alice in Wonderland, Sleepy Hollow and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and appeared in both the decade’s biggest franchises, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. And he just kept working – between 2010 and 2013, he made twelve films!

And it was more than just films and TV. Lee lent his voice to numerous audiobooks and latterly provided voices for video games – he also appeared in CD ROM project Ghosts in the mid 1990s. He fronted collections of horror stories, and wrote his autobiography, and made numerous records – in the 1970s, he narrated Hammer’s Dracula LP and made an opera single, in the early 2000s sang a handful of shockingly bad pop songs and then became a heavy metal star, first working with symphonic metal band Rhapsody and then releasing his won albums. He seemed to genuinely love this new and unexpected career twist, presumably no longer giving a damn what anyone thought of him.

They say that you shouldn’t meet your heroes, and they are often right. But I met Lee twice – once while working on a The Wicker Man featurette with David Gregory, and once when hanging around with the boys as they filmed Lee and Jess Franco for The Bloody Judge extras. Lee was exactly what you wanted him to be – dignified, serious, gentlemanly and charming. In short, he seemed a thoroughly decent chap. When he called me up after The Wicker Man shoot to get a number for one of the crew, my inner ten year-old exploded with excitement: Dracula on the phone!

Lee might not have been entirely comfortable with his ‘horror star’ reputation, but I think he eventually came to realise how much his work meant to so many people – including those now employing him. And regardless of what he thought of the films he’d made, he was a genuine connoisseur of the gothic and the nightmarish in literature. He never seemed ashamed of his past.

The death of Christopher Lee is the end of an era. I doubt any living actor will clock up the sheer number of credits that he has, or leave the same sort of cultural imprint. I’ll miss never seeing another Lee Christmas message. And I’ll miss his reassuring presence – he was an integral part of my life since I was a small child and the world feels that little bit emptier now.

David Flint, Strange Things Are Happening

Filmography

Horror films and westerns are two of cinema’s great mainstays, having established their distinct identities and sets of conventions in the earliest days of the medium. So distinct from each other, in fact, as to seem entirely incompatible – as different as night, the domain of horror, from day, the traditional setting for westerns.

And yet, this is to overlook, or underestimate, the commercial cinematic will to find a way – or to flog a dead horse, no matter how rotting the carcass. While the notion of ‘horror’ conjures up specific images or referents – castles, vampires, zombies, graveyards, summer camps – it is not defined by time or place, nor confined by character type or cultural/historical context. The western may appear to be immutable, certainly by contrast, although stories can slip north or south of the United States border, even into the present day, and remain hitched to the genre. It has never been impermeable, however – hence there are Cold War westerns, noir westerns, feminist westerns (albeit a rare breed), even – Wayne forbid – quasi-Marxist westerns, imported from Italy.

Horror began seeping in, like a virus, in the Twenties, mostly in the form of cloak-wearing villains whose ghostly aura was always dispelled in the end, much like every episode of the old-school Scooby-Doo. The novelty of combining seemingly disparate formulas quickly wore off through overuse (not before it produced The Phantom Empire, a western serial targeted at the Flash Gordon crowd, in which singing cowboy Gene Autry discovers a subterranean colony of ray-gun-firing robots). It was revived in the heyday of drive-in movies and creature features – the anything-goes era – and surfaced in the more baroque European productions, on the back of a gothic-horror revival.

The horror western has never had a ‘moment’, as such. That said, in the past decade a steady stream of titles has capitalised on the renewed popularity both of horror films – especially those centred on the undead – and, relatively speaking, of westerns. Not that we are talking about a golden age – nobody has yet calculated the perfect ratio of one genre to the other. If there is a unifying theme to these more recent films, it is that zombies and bloodsuckers have replaced the Native American as the feared and despised Other; the id that must be scratched (whether the land bordering the frontier belongs rightfully to the dead in the same way it is spiritually bound to the Red Man – at least according to romantic art and literature and revisionist western fiction – is not a notion these films entertain). Beyond that, it is a belief that style takes precedence over substance, and a misconception that references to Leone and Romero are both mandatory and sufficient.

Given the blurring of genre lines, exactly what constitutes a horror-western is not always obvious; there is not, as yet, an algorithm that can be applied to the problem (just what have mathematicians been doing with their time?). With that in mind, this is a subjective selection. The films in this overview all feature something uncanny, or at least allude towards it, and are set either entirely or substantially in the Old West. They must also utilise frontier iconography in a more than perfunctory or decorative fashion. Ergo House II: the Second Story, is omitted, zombie cowboy notwithstanding, as is the playful Sundown: the Vampire in Retreat, a contemporary horror-comedy with a light dusting of western tropes. And as for all those portentous Native American curse flicks – Death Curse of Tartu, Shadow of the Hawk, Nightwing, The Manitou, Scalps, ad nauseam – the bulk of these are not westerns and properly comprise a sub-genre of their own for some future article.

The majority of titles here were prepared for theatrical release, with one or two made for TV. More recent entries reflect the increasing importance – indeed, the crucial role – of home media formats as an alternative mode of distribution, certainly at the cheaper end of the market.

Haunted Gold (1932)

An early example of The Cat and the Canary-type school of mystery film that plays on the fears of its characters and its audience in much the same fashion, exploiting setting and superstition to instil fear of a supernatural, or at least superhuman, presence that turns out to be anything but.

The plot, which centres on disputed ownership of a gold mine, is as creaky as the furniture; as a vehicle for John Wayne, however, then just twenty five years-old and the next big thing in westerns, it is lifted out of the routine by the spooky atmosphere conjured by Mack V. Wright’s lively direction and Nicholas Musuraca’s contrast-rich photography (Musuraca later graduated with distinction to film noir).

Wright utilises the murky environs – ghost town; abandoned mine; dark woods – and old-dark-house clichés – sliding panels; secret passageways; black-robed ‘phantom’ – with verve and imagination (some footage was spliced in from a silent western, The Phantom City, of which this film is a remake). There is relatively little physical action, for a western: the high point, quite literally, is a hair-raising tussle between Wayne and a villain in a mine cart, suspended over a canyon; shortly after, Wayne is saved from doom by the intervention of his horse, Duke – a co-star in at least six of Wayne’s westerns at Warners in the Thirties, and likely the source of the star’s future nickname.

Overall, this is a fair example of what Paul Green, in his Encyclopedia of Weird Westerns, calls the ‘Weird Menace’ sub-genre. The mystery element is unmasked without too much fanfare, but one aspect of the film likely to horrify modern viewers is the performance of the black actor Blue Washington, who plays Wayne’s sidekick as a jittery, bumbling, bug-eyed racial stereotype.

‘Phantom’ was a popular appellation for veiled villains and Zorroesque heroes in mystery westerns of the time. See also: The Vanishing Riders; Tombstone Canyon, in which chunky Ken Maynard discovers, in a typical twist, that the Phantom is his presumed-dead father; The Phantom of the West and The Phantom of the Range, both starring Tom Tyler, who later played a different Phantom in the 1943 cliffhanger serial based on Lee Falk’s comics and The Mummy.

The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956)

Emerging from a herd of dino-themed creature features – Two Lost Worlds, The Lost Continent, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The Land Unknown – this ersatz western rouses itself from a prehistoric plot about romantic/territorial rivalry for a rip-roaring climax. For almost an hour, the story of gringo rancher Guy Madison and his dispute with a Mexican landowner – over both cattle and a woman – plods its course, occasionally referring to a legend surrounding the titular mountain, the swamp at its base and a creature “from the dawn of time”.

Madison’s travails as an expat do not provide the basis for an affecting study of cultural dislocation along the lines of 1959’s The Magnificent Country. Rather, they form a flimsy pretext, ensuring there is an American hero on hand to battle the beast once it eventually appears – this he does virtually single-handedly, luring it into the swamp while a group of Mexicans watch from a safe distance (Anglo protagonists were always preferable, and demonstrably superior, to foreigners or racial minorities where the majority of Hollywood westerns were concerned).

The presence of Willis O’Brien’s name among the credits – as writer – may arouse expectations, but unfortunately the animation genius behind the original King Kong didn’t handle the effects here. The stop-motion work is as primitive as the ill-tempered Allosaurus itself, whose first full appearance in model form is preceded by close-ups of rubbery, clawed feet striding manfully into shot. It’s from here that the picture gathers pace – model cows are eaten, cattle stampede, Madison saves his enemy from the jaws of death and performs some Tarzan-like derring-do with his lariat.

It’s generally well photographed – the exception being the rear-projection footage in the dinosaur scenes, which is difficult to distinguish – and no sillier than most other monster movies of the period. Yet without a compelling context – the threat posed by nuclear technology, say – it’s merely average escapism. The premise of cowboys versus dinosaurs was realised in a much more accomplished manner in The Valley of Gwangi.

The Swamp of the Lost Monsters (1957/English version 1965)

This mutant offspring of Creature from the Black Lagoon was dredged from the depths of cinematic obscurity by the opportunistic producer K. Gordon Murray, who scraped together a few dimes and dubbed and retitled a slew of Mexican monster movies for the Sixties drive-in circuit and late-night TV. Over-plotted and under-funded, it ropes in a cowboy detective (Gastón Santos) when the body of a wealthy rancher seemingly disappears from its coffin. The cause of death was a “fishy-eyed ghost” that inhabits the local swamp, but functions equally well on dry land and knows how to use a spear gun – and Morse code.

The time-honoured ‘man in a rubber suit’ technique is more acceptable here in that the creature is, indeed, a man in a rubber suit. His identity is not difficult to ascertain once the dialogue brings in ‘life insurance’ as a plot element. The attempt to fuse matinee-western clichés (a super-intelligent horse; the curse of the comedy sidekick) with monster motifs is haphazard to the point of parody; the addition of melodrama – the dead man’s widow has been concealing the fact she is actually blind – takes it beyond that stage by some distance.

Santos was also a popular bullfighter and was a capable physical actor. He usually appeared on screen with his steed, Moonlight. The fact that the horse Moonlight can dance is not at all out of step with the tone of the film.

Teenage Monster (1957)

Like its most memorable line – “This is no time for hysterics; there’s a killer terrorizing this town” – this drive-in also-ran is one long non-sequitur. The title suggests a conflation of two of the most popular trends in Fifties cinema – juvenile delinquency and science fiction – but what transpires is a primitive creature feature in western duds, with the titular tearaway played by a fifty year-old stuntman in a fright wig, hairy gloves and bad teeth; a rebel with claws, if you will.

Seven years previously, in 1880, young Charles was injured in a meteorite strike, which killed his father and afflicted the boy with an unexplained mutation. So far, so sci-fi, but the fireball (actually, it would seem, a children’s sparkler) is the extent of the film’s dalliance with the genre. The rest of the plot is taken up with the efforts of Ruth, Charles’ mother, to keep her hulking offspring’s existence a secret, not easy when he repeatedly sneaks out (in daytime) for adolescent high jinks, from killing cattle to throttling passers-by. Then the bitchy waitress Kathy discovers the truth, blackmailing Ruth and manipulating Charles’ undeveloped affections.

If the film-makers were hoping to elicit sympathy for the eponymous man-child and his jealousy of mom’s new boyfriend, the town sheriff, this is dashed by the sheer zaniness of the premise. This has the giant actor Gil Perkins, already burdened by comical creature make-up (this was a bad day at the office for Jack P. Pierce, who had designed Frankenstein’s monster for Universal since the Thirties), communicating in muffled grunts and groans (somehow his mother and the minxy Kathy can understand him), interspersed with the occasional intelligible word. “No Charles, don’t talk like that,” rails Ruth during one of his diatribes, and Perkins probably wished he hadn’t been obliged to.

Appearing in Teenage Monster perhaps hastened the retirement plans of Anne Gwynne, a minor star in the Forties, whose displays of maternal devotion as Ruth are nevertheless persuasive. The real star, in a film predicated, at least in title, on youthful petulance, is twenty year-old Gloria Castillo as Kathy, who turns on a dime from demure to devious, ensnaring the love-struck Charles with her doe eyes one minute; flashing them maliciously at Ruth the next. Whether venting her spleen or trilling coquettishly – “You love me, Charles? More than you love your mother…?” – she is far more frightening than the wolfman-like protagonist, who is a far cry from the “teenage titan of terror” proclaimed by the posters.

Curse of the Undead (1959)
Residing somewhere between a B-western and a Z-grade horror film, this mid-alphabet quickie goes for the jugular from the opening moments as the credits, backed by a theremin, roll over images of grave markers and tombstones. Nearby, a girl lies dying, the latest victim of an epidemic whose physical symptoms include puncture wounds on the neck…

It sounds obvious but, were it not for its supernatural flourishes, the plot of Edward Dein’s film would be indistinguishable from countless other westerns about rival ranchers and water rights. Here, in a minor twist, the requisite hired gunman (paradigm: Jack Palance in Shane) is in the employ not of the land-grabbing bully of the piece, but the smaller rancher (Kathleen Crowley) fighting to survive. The major twist, of course, is that the mercenary killer is a vampire, played by Michael Pate, whose attraction to Crowley adds an edge to his rivalry with her intended, Eric Fleming’s town preacher.

Despite issuing from Universal, a studio steeped in Dracula lore, and being released a year after Hammer initiated a Bram Stoker revival, Curse of the Undead draws upon a different cultural tradition. Pate’s character is afflicted by vampirism after remorsefully committing suicide, a mortal sin in Catholicism. He is not evil, and Pate – an Australian expat whose wide-mouthed, leathery features saw him typecast as a heavy – plays him as a lost soul, more human than monster, eliciting greater sympathy than the more conventionally heroic Fleming. “What mercy did [God] show me?” demands Pate, whose woes began when he killed his brother in a red mist. Fleming, sanctimonious throughout, remains utterly implacable. (We might infer a certain amount of jealousy colouring the preacher’s judgement, given Pate’s involvement with the comely Crowley; unfortunately, the script avoids the issue.) When the showdown arrives, Fleming, armed with consecrated ammunition, is smugly assured of victory: “My boss’ll see to that.”

The ending satisfies the punitive demands of both second-feature westerns and mainstream religion, but it is the attention paid to Pate’s predicament that confuses the issue and makes the title, Curse of the Undead, more than just a throwaway concern.

The Living Coffin (1959/English version 1965)
Buckskinned detective Gastón Santos returns, wonder horse in tow, for this variation on the legend of La Llorona, the ‘weeping woman’ of Mexican folklore. (Rafael Baledón, the director of Santos’s earlier Swamp of the Lost Monsters, made what is generally regarded as the best screen version of the tale, The Curse of the Crying Woman, in 1963). The traditional fable centres on a grieving mother reputed to have drowned her children for the sake of a faithless lover; she then spends eternity wailing and searching for them. In this rendition, superstition is rife that the late Doña Clotilde blames others for the death of her offspring in a swamp, and is responsible for a chain of killings. Santos has no truck with such talk, and suspects the location of a gold mine on Clotilde’s property is the root of the trouble.

Although far superior to …Lost Monsters, there are several issues with this Mexican hybrid (originally known as El grito de la muerte – the cry of death). The plot tangents, intended to forestall deductive reasoning, create instead the kind of narrative entropy that often results when the supernatural is employed as a cloak for the mundane. Not everybody will warm to the listless Santos, the equine heroics of his mount (rescuing his master from a pit of quicksand by tossing him a rope; firing a rifle – off-screen, sadly) or the comedic bumbling of his entirely dispensable sidekick, who short-circuits suspenseful build-up on more than one occasion. Nor can one overlook the incompetently choreographed fistfights, with blows that clearly miss by several inches.

Elsewhere, however, director Fernando Méndez (The Black Pit of Dr M) cooks up an oppressive, Poe-like atmosphere of morbidity and dread. Clotilde’s hacienda, where her sister resides in a limbo state, is shrouded in gloomy shadows, from the subterranean passageway, where ghostly señoras flit in the darkness, to the mausoleum, rigged with an alarm system that rings whenever a coffin has been disturbed. The nearby town – consisting, for budgetary reasons no doubt, of a single street and a couple of interiors – is subtly lit and eerily deserted; the lack of extras again points to penny pinching, but is explained plausibly as an exodus of young folk, driven away by the weeping woman’s curse. Clotilde herself (or so it would seem) enjoys some Fulci-esque close-ups, her pale, crusty face lit from beneath and looming from the screen. These gothic pleasures compensate for the periodic silliness and the routine climax – all masks, mannequins and mechanical platforms, in which Santos’s super-steed saves the day once more.

The Rider of the Skulls (1965)

An endearingly preposterous, no-budget mash-up of Zorroesque heroics and monster mayhem, this is grade-Z cinema of the highest – or lowest – order. Seemingly cobbled together from a Mexican TV series, which would explain the discontinuity, it follows the titular masked crime-fighter as he subdues in turn a werewolf, a vampire and a headless horseman, each of whom terrorises the same ugly patch of scrubland, among the same derelict buildings, in otherwise unrelated episodes.

The monsters sport crude rubber and papier-mâché masks that would shame a remedial art class; the Rider’s face-wear resembles a niqab at first, although he changes to a full-head mask after dispatching the werewolf. (Indeed, he seems to be played by a different actor from this point.) Most scenes are filmed day for night, or vice versa – hence the absurdity of the vampire taking fright at the onset of dawn (“I must return to my coffin. Sunlight is deadly to me”) when it is clearly daytime already.

But then, everything about Skulls is ill conceived: exposition from a zombie; talking (patently fake) heads; a grown man who adopts the Rider as his “daddy”… The coup de grace of bizarreness is delivered in the final sequence, when the horseman, having recovered his head, disputes with God, represented by stock footage of lightning, like a child defying parental orders to go to bed.

Criticising a film like this is about as worthwhile as punching a kitten. It is one to watch, or avoid, because of the outlandish anomalies and non-sequiturs, not in spite of them.

Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966)

Take generous quantities of ham and corn. Stir. Add marquee-friendly title. Serve to a jaded public. This myth-mash of vampire lore and Old West legend is unfortunatally far duller than its outré title suggests. Its undead villain (he is never referred to as Dracula) preys on a pretty young rancher, posing as her uncle in a plot to make her his mate. He is finally stymied by her sceptical fiancé, one William H. Bonney.

As a western, it is at best perfunctory – there is an indigenous American stagecoach attack, a brief fistfight and not much else. It is equally cursory as a vampire film – Carradine has no reflection, but is fine to walk around in daylight. His entrances are preceded by shots of a distinctly rubbery bat; tongues were avowedly in cheeks, which is just as well.

Director William Beaudine had been making films since the silent era. He earned the sobriquet ‘One Shot’ for his speedy, no-frills technique. This one was made in eight days at the Corrigan Movie Ranch in California, founded by B-western star Ray ‘Crash’ Corrigan. John Carradine responds to the absurdity of the premise with a supremely arch performance centred on the muscles around his eyes, while Chuck Courtney essays perhaps the blandest Billy the Kid in screen history. Nostalgia buffs may note the presence of veteran western players Roy Barcroft, as the slow-witted sheriff; Harry Carey Jr; and Carey’s mother, Olive, who is refreshingly wry as the town doctor, who naturally has a book on vampires among her medical texts.

Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (1966)

William Beaudine’s swansong – begun just a fortnight or so after Billy the Kid… finished shooting – is as plodding and nonsensically plotted as its companion piece. The title again is misleading: Maria Frankenstein, the eccentric villainess, is actually the granddaughter of Baron Victor, whose work she pursues fanatically. Driven out of Vienna with her lily-livered (and inexplicably much older) brother, she has pitched up at a matte painting of an abandoned mission in Arizona, attracted by the frequency of electrical storms – the better to power her experiments. These have resulted in several dead children, but precious little progress. Then Jesse James arrives (don’t ask – contrived doesn’t begin to cover it), seeking medical help for his wounded friend, the muscle-bound Hank, whom Maria sizes up as a perfect specimen.

As in Billy the Kid…, the western plot – stagecoach hold-up, ambush, double cross – is nondescript, but the finale tweaks the tone to something approaching hysterical. In her lab full of buzzing electrodes and bottles marked ‘poison’, Maria transplants Hank’s brain (the difference is negligible), renames him Igor and turns him on Jesse and Juanita, a Mexican spitfire.

Estonian expat Narda Onyx overplays as Maria, whether disparaging peasants or eyeing Hank lustfully, while John Lupton as Jesse looks bemused throughout. “They were made for fun,” production supervisor Sam Manners said of Beaudine’s low-budget midnight movies, which were targeted squarely at the undiscerning drive-in crowd. Fun (and a quick profit) may have been the aim, but the results are lackadaisical more than anything else.

Django, Kill! (1967)
The most notorious of Italian westerns, this concoction of art-film aesthetics and mordant humour is almost Buñuelian in its dreamlike texture and provocative imagery. Director Giulio Questi approached the project from a position of intellectual aloofness, transforming a standard plot – outlaw seeks revenge on treacherous partners/who’s got the gold? – into a macabre meditation on greed and intolerance, cruelty and madness.

All of this lies just beneath the surface of the nameless town where Tomas Milian’s half-breed outlaw discovers the massacred remains of the men who betrayed him. (His name is not Django; the export title merely traded on that character’s popularity.) The inhabitants of what the local Indians call “the unhappy place” are venal and corrupt, overseen by moral guardians who are murderous hypocrites.

Into the mix comes Roberto Camardiel’s jovial/sadistic Mexican bandit, with his retinue of well-groomed “muchachos” (their identical black outfits were Questi’s spiteful homage to Mussolini’s fascists), who torture Milian, tear up graves and (it is suggested) gang-rape a young Ray Lovelock.

There is splashy gore – scalping, bullet-hole fingering, eviscerated horses – and an infernal ending that paraphrases Roger Corman’s Poe series. The powerlessness of Milian’s protagonist mocks the western’s traditional espousal of macho individualism.

If You Meet Sartana, Pray for your Death (1968)
“I feel as if a ghost were following me…” The protagonist of this baroque, sardonic Euro-western is a gambler-cum-conjuror rather than a spectre, mesmerising and mystifying enemies and observers alike with his sleight of hand (made to look even more impressive by some subtle under-cranking) and powers of evasion. A private investigator of sorts, he is played in sly, suave fashion by Gianni Garko, who reprised the role in three additional films. (Garko played an unrelated Sartana, a villain in that case, in the earlier western Blood at Sundown.)

After surviving an attack on a stagecoach he has been trailing, Sartana unpicks a complicated plot involving stolen gold, blackmail and insurance fraud. Everybody is cagey by default – alliances are formed and sundered in the flash of a gunshot. And why double cross when you can triple cross?

Notwithstanding these narrative perturbations, which became a hallmark of the Sartana series, it is the central character’s Mandrake-like talents that make him especially enigmatic and darkly charismatic. Director Gianfranco Parolini, aka Frank Kramer, surrounds his hero with graveyards and morticians, and kits him out with Bondesque gadgetry.

He is augmented further by a front-rank cast of connivers and cut-throats, principally William Berger, Fernando Sancho, in his habitual role of grandstanding bandit chieftain, and a dapper Klaus Kinski – the first of his two appearances in the Sartana franchise.

Sartana describes himself as a “first-class pallbearer”; his chief antagonist thinks he’s more like the devil. Subsequent films would break the spell; here, however, Parolini encourages the impression with mischievous relish.

The Valley of Gwangi (1969)

King Kong with cowboys. Substitute a giant primate with a dinosaur and that’s the concept in a nutshell. Sadly, Gwangi’s mighty roar fell on deaf ears in 1969, when popular cinema was more self-aware and more sensationalistic. “A naked dinosaur just was not outrageous enough,” lamented Gwangi’s creator, Ray Harryhausen, fresh from surrounding a nearly naked Raquel Welch with primeval anachronisms in One Million Years BC. Perhaps it would have drawn greater crowds in the Fifties, when both westerns and monster movies were at their peak. True, 1956’s Beast of Hollow Mountain did not exactly seize the box office in its jaws, but that lacked Harryhausen’s genius and was less evenly paced.

Nevertheless, this remains a rattling adventure. The plot excavates a 1942 project, also called Gwangi, by King Kong animator Willis O’Brien, and apes (ahem) Kong’s narrative: showmen slumming it in Mexico discover a fabulous creature in a “forbidden valley” (another variation on Conan Doyle’s “lost world”), dismiss native superstitions and bring it back to civilisation for an ill-fated exhibition. After a short-lived rampage, the creature meets a noble and oddly poignant demise. (Unlike Kong, Gwangi shows no interest in the heroine, except as a potential snack.)

Gwangi – an imagined cross between a T.Rex and an Allosaurus – is an imposing and vivid creation, all rippling muscles, swishing tail and snapping jaws. He is the alpha beast in Harryhausen’s prehistoric menagerie, which also includes pterodactyls, a strapping Styracosaurus and the rather daintier (and comically misnamed) ‘El Diablo’ – a tiny, horse-like Eohippus, extinct for 50 million years.

It is when El Diablo is stolen from Gila Golan’s Wild West show and returned to the wild by gypsies that Golan and her wranglers venture to the valley, joined by her old flame, the cocky opportunist James Franciscus, and Laurence Naismith’s conveniently placed palaeontologist. After a skirmish, Gwangi is subdued, transported in a wagon and readied for his stage debut; trapped in a blazing cathedral, he literally brings the house down.

There is some consideration to issues raised in other cautionary fantasies (notably Jurassic Park), with the concerns of science pitted against superstition and the profit motive, but these are not pursued with the same vigour with which the characters chase Gwangi, and vice versa. The human protagonists are largely an ignoble bunch; it is Harryhausen’s meticulous stop-motion monsters, and the havoc they unleash, that reward viewing.

Django the Bastard (1969)
When Franco Nero and Sergio Corbucci brought Django to the screen in 1966, they weren’t to know the extent to which the character would take on a life of his own – perhaps even a life after death, if we take Sergio Garrone’s unlicensed follow-up at face value. The original Django had something of the Grim Reaper about him; wrapped in a heavy black cloak, he travelled with his own coffin, and had an unhealthy affinity for cemeteries. It was not too much of a stretch for Garrone and his co-writer and star, the lugubrious Anthony Steffen, to endow the character with seemingly supernatural traits.

Inexpressive even by Steffen’s standards, this iteration of Django is a former soldier on the trail of three officers who left him and his comrades for dead. Instead of a coffin, he totes crosses engraved with the names of his prey. He moves stiffly, like death warmed up (or just about). Through camera trickery and judicious editing, he seems to materialise and disappear at will, terrifying the gunmen employed by Paolo Gozlino, his final target.

Garrone evidently studied the horror stylebook, if only to master the basics, as when Django is revealed in the darkness (most of the film is set at night) by a sudden burst of light, appears as a reflection in a water trough, or slides into shot in close-up; the impression gained is of a spectral presence lurking just beyond the frame. He seems invulnerable until wounded by Gozlino’s brother, a psychotic man-child played by Italian trash-film talisman Luciano Rossi. The injury doesn’t hamper Django for long, however, and the ending restores his mystique.

This ambiguity elevates Garrone’s offbeat western above most of the Django derivatives produced in the same period. (It is often suggested that Clint Eastwood was inspired by this film to make the ostensibly similar High Plains Drifter. Yet Django the Bastard was not distributed in the States until after Drifter had been produced, and even then it was hardly a marquee release. It is not inconceivable that Eastwood – or at least Drifter’s writer, Ernest Tidyman – saw this film in Europe at some point, or read about it, but it seems unlikely.)

And God Said to Cain (1970)
A counterpart of sorts to Antonio Margheriti’s Web of the Spider (itself a remake of his own Castle of Blood), this dark and stormy western, once it dispenses with the preliminaries, transposes the notion of vengeful spirits from the olde worlde milieu of Sixties Italian horror films to an equally fantastical old West.

Klaus Kinski (later to play Poe in Web of the Spider) is cast to type as a wraith-like avenger, back from the dead in a metaphorical sense – fresh out of prison, and fixed on punishing the man who put him there. With his cadaverous features and baleful pronouncements (“I’ve earned the right to kill, even if God chooses to punish me for it”), Kinski is an unnerving protagonist, as inexorable as the storm that symbolises his wrath and convinces the weaker-minded of his opponents that he is a force of nature.

The plot is a mere pretext – Kinski’s quarry, played by co-producer Peter Carsten, is a powerful man with a private army, a proud son and a woman who once belonged to Kinski. What distinguishes the film is Margheriti’s gothic rendering of threadbare material. Much of the action takes place in darkness, with dust clouds billowing; Kinski skulks in a cave system that snakes beneath the streets; natural sounds are amplified; the camera often tilted to disorienting effect.

In scenes highly reminiscent of Django the Bastard, Kinski picks off Carsten’s hired guns with uncanny efficiency (and not just by shooting – Margheriti stalwart Luciano Pigozzi is crushed to death beneath a church bell), before confronting his adversary in a room lined with mirrors. This was a cliché even then, but not in the context of a western – this becomes almost notional, as the director’s staging, combined with the claustrophobic setting, atonal music and the flickering and crackling of flames, takes us into the realm of gothic melodrama, not dissimilar to Margheriti’s own period chillers.

Other Italian westerns with comparable inclinations include: Margheriti’s Vengeance, a sulphur-scented 1968 film featuring a flamboyant supervillain, and Whisky and Ghosts (1974), a botched attempt to rejuvenate the slapstick Trinity formula with supernatural frissons – Rentaghost is funnier; Lucio Fulci’s The Four of the Apocalypse (1975), with Tomas Milian as a Manson-like sadist; Sergio Martino’s A Man Called Blade (1977), a formula revenge plot embellished with gothic frills; Tex and the Lord of the Deep (1985), a mediocre adaptation of a long-running Italian comic strip, which involves Giuliano Gemma’s Tex Willer with Native American supernaturalism, among more mundane distractions.

Black Noon (1971)
At a time when Satan spread his wings over much of popular culture, this modest TV movie exploited the same paranoid fears and fantasies about all things diabolical or pagan that fuelled The City of the Dead, Rosemary’s Baby, The Devil Rides Out, The Brotherhood of Satan, The Exorcist, et al. It projects those fears onto an Old West setting, where minister John Keyes and his wife, Lorna, are found stranded in the desert by the good folk of nearby San Melas. The mood that develops is subtler than the in-joke (Melas-Salem) suggests. Roy Thinnes’ man of God is slowly corrupted by the flattery of the townsfolk and the longing looks of the mute Deliverance (Yvette Mimieux), who incapacitates his wife with black magic.

The creeping tempo – classic made-for-TV – escalates incrementally. The locals’ Olde Worlde ways prompt Lorna to observe, “It’s as if they were from another time, or another world,” which proves to be prescient. Keyes has visions of a bloodied man pursuing him, while Lorna glimpses a masked gathering, complete with goat and dead owl. The revelation of communal devil worship will surprise nobody evenly lightly schooled in modern horror, but it is well timed by TV veteran Bernard L. Kowalski, whose efforts to convey a dreamlike ambience are only patchily effective.

The casting is astute, and helps keeps the town’s placid veil in place. Old stagers Ray Milland, Gloria Grahame (wasted) and western stalwart Hank Worden are buttressed by the beatific Mimieux; Henry Silva has a more stereotypical role as an all-in-black, mustachioed bandit, shot ‘dead’ by Thinnes in a scene that accelerates his character’s fall from grace.

A flash-forward implies these entrapments occur every hundred years. Like the church that hosts the fiery final sacrifice, which is strongly reminiscent of The Wicker Man, Black Noon is a well-constructed slow-burner.

Cut-throats Nine (1971)
Ultra-nihilistic and gratuitously violent, the final western directed by Joaquin Luis Romero Marchent was the most anomalous assignment of his career. The Spaniard made westerns in Europe even before Sergio Leone. He wasn’t radical like the latter, but had greater integrity and passion for the genre than most of the hired guns churning out ersatz-American shoot-’em-ups in the early Sixties.

How he arrived at this grim tale of greed and bestial savagery is something of a mystery. He co-wrote the story and script with Santiago Moncada, a specialist in cynical horror films, which helps explain the bitter tone – exacerbated by the wintry, mountainous conditions in which a group of escaped convicts and their captives, an army officer (Robert Hundar) and his daughter (Emma Cohen), find themselves.

Yet Romero Marchent was producer as well as director, indicating a considerable degree of professional commitment. Bloodying the waters are the graphic stabbings, slashings and eviscerations that have made the film notorious – it has been suggested, and seems likely, that these were added by someone other than the credited director, perhaps at the behest of distributors.

Cut-throats is thus, in part, a splatter film; in America, it was marketed with the offer of ‘terror masks’ for the squeamish. Looking beyond these inserts, which mark the reduction in the prisoners’ ranks as they succumb to their basest instincts, there is a macabre passage in which one of them hallucinates a vision of an undead Robert Hundar, stalking him through the wilderness.

As a whole it is a bracing and unsettling, if exploitative, experience.

High Plains Drifter (1973)
Clint Eastwood’s first western as both director and star returned the genre to its roots as morality tale, albeit with blurred distinctions appropriate to the sceptical Seventies. Eastwood’s protagonist emerges like a mirage from the desert heat and proceeds to uncover the hypocrisy and collective guilt of Lago, a small mining town, where a marshal was whipped to death by three hired guns with the leading citizens’ complicity. The trio are on their way back from prison to punish the locals for turning them in, but it’s Eastwood’s revenge that counts, posited as a kind of divine retribution that consumes the town – painted red and renamed ‘Hell’ – in a blazing climax.

Building on his Dollars persona while slyly sending it up, Eastwood’s moral vision is very much of its time: materialism and cowardice are worthy of disdain; non-consensual sex a marker of alpha masculinity. He encourages inferences about the stranger’s otherworldly origins but leaves the matter unresolved; the script identified him as the marshal’s brother, but this is never vouchsafed in the film. The first flashback to the murder is from the protagonist’s perspective, in the form of a dream, with the lawman played by Eastwood’s stunt double – their resemblance is close enough for siblings, which would make Drifter a more-or-less straight-up revenge film.

But the only thing definitive about the denouement – bloody vengeance against a backdrop of hellfire, after which Eastwood drops his heaviest hint that the stranger is more avenging angel than mortal man – is that a firm conclusion cannot be drawn. (See also: Eastwood’s Pale Rider [1985], an amalgam of Drifter and Shane that similarly invites metaphysical speculation.)

A Knife for the Ladies (1974)
Nineteen-seventy-four was a pivotal year in the development of the slasher film. But enough about Black Christmas and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Also released, to a clamour of indifference, was this torpid murder mystery, also known as Silent Sentence, for no apparent reason, and Jack the Ripper Goes West, which is no less misleading.

So poorly paced that it sags even at 82 minutes (for a later release it was chopped down to under an hour), the plot follows a chain of stabbings in the Old West town of Mescal, where the grouchy sheriff reluctantly aids a hotshot detective to crack the case. The western setting is elementary – it was shot on the Old Tucson lot, there are actors and extras milling about, flatly intoning clunky dialogue (“This has got to be the work of a madman”), but no sense of time or place. It is difficult to convey a period feel when your lead actor looks as if he would rather be surfing or singing soft-rock ballads.

The kill scenes are similarly perfunctory, as well as tame, and the central mystery is not exactly taxing, although the revelation of the killer’s identity and motive belatedly injects some manic energy into proceedings. The overall impression is of people going through the motions, from Larry G. ‘Nigger Charley’ Spangler’s sluggish direction, to the indifferent acting – the exceptions being Jack Elam’s typically eccentric turn as the aggrieved sheriff, and Richard Schaal’s mannered portrayal of the town’s mortician, the one red herring of note.

Even the soundtrack suggests a production pieced together without much thought – the film opens with synthesized whines that echo the period’s experimental electronica, and closes with a full-throated psychedelic rock song. In between, the music is recycled from Dominic Frontiere’s bombastic score to the Clint Eastwood western Hang ’Em High.

For a western with slasher/giallo tropes, a far superior offering is the 1972 Italian film The Price of Death, with Gianni Garko as a Sartana-like sleuth and Klaus Kinski as a scornful murder suspect.

The Shadow of Chikara (1977)
Equally likely to be overpraised or lambasted, this foray into the crowded realm of Indian mysticism is an atmospheric oddity. Civil War veterans Joe Don Baker (reliably surly), Ted Neeley (of Jesus Christ Superstar) and Joy Houck Jr, as the requisite part-Indian tracker, venture up the Buffalo River to a mountain in search of diamonds. Along the way they rescue Clint Eastwood’s muse Sondra Locke, encounter slack-jawed hicks of the Deliverance variety and are menaced by unseen, arrow-firing pursuers who “leave no tracks… move like a fog through the forest”. It all pertains to a mythical eagle-demon, Chikara, which has banished mankind from its domain.

Writer-director Earl E. Smith had ventured into horror’s hinterland before, having written The Legend of Boggy Creek and The Town That Dreaded Sundown; his scenario foreshadows more polished films like Southern Comfort and, especially, Predator – Houck could be Sonny Landham when he says, “I fear no man, Captain, but these are not natural people; they’re spirits, demons.” No monsters reveal themselves here, unless close-ups of an eagle count.

Smith gets good mileage from dense foliage and precipitous cliffs, shooting from low angles, the camera skirting the river’s surface. The eeriness trickles rather than flows, in true Seventies style, playing on the nerves of the characters – except for the rhino-skinned Baker – and lingering after the ambiguous, fashionably downbeat ending, in which Locke’s character abruptly takes centre stage.

Chikara used to play regularly on UK television in the Eighties. Today, it is trapped in public-domain hell. A washed-out, abbreviated print, under the title Curse of Demon Mountain, one of its many AKA’s, is the only one currently in circulation. A fairer assessment of a film that is haunting but ragged will have to wait until a scrubbed and restored version becomes available.

Eyes of Fire (1983)
Set in the Appalachians during the Colonial era, this is technically a period piece rather than a western. It employs the motif of settlers versus ‘savages’ in a similar way, however, and shares with The Shadow of Chikara a fascination with Native American mythology – here, a belief that “innocent blood… sinks into the earth… the souls of the slaughtered creatures gather together into a breathing spirit, a devil, that captures the living and commands their shadows”.

The ‘devil’ is a shambling, ragged, witch-like creature, complete with the titular orange eyes and a retinue of naked, mud-smeared followers; they prey upon a party of dissident pioneers led by Will, a deluded preacher, who struggles to comprehend the threat to the group. It falls to characters more closely attuned to the natural world – a rugged trapper and a young woman with seemingly magical powers – to confront the evil in the woods.

Director Avery Crounse eventually succumbs to Night of the Demon syndrome – the monster loses power once it becomes too palpable – and an overreliance on (badly dated) psychedelic optical effects. For much of the time, however, he cloaks his story, told in flashback by the sole survivors, in a genuinely weird ambience, all misty greenery, shadowy figures half-glimpsed in flash cuts, amplified ambient sounds and arresting imagery: a tree festooned with feathers; human faces embedded like totems in tree trunks.

Historical detail is solid, from costuming and dialect to the preacher’s (inevitably misguided) faith in Manifest Destiny, but this loses relevance in the third act amid demonic attacks, showers of bones, exploding children and copious green goo.

Karlene Crockett gives the one performance of note, as the enchanted Leah, but the main character, as such, is the Missouri wilderness, which seethes with sinister intent in the best tradition of backwoods horror.

Near Dark (1987)
Classic films are rarely born from artistic compromises, making Near Dark a beautiful anomaly. Kathryn Bigelow yearned to make a western but, in the Eighties, studios had about as much faith in that genre as they had in neophyte directors. So she and co-writer Eric Red, recognising the shared romanticism of westerns and horror movies, spliced the forms together, reconfiguring vampires as nomadic outlaws led, fittingly, by a character named Jesse, old enough to have fought in the American Civil War (like the James boys) and still a rebel more than a century later.

Jesse’s feral “family” – sexy matriarch Diamondback, man-child Homer, leather-clad psycho Severen – unwillingly adopts Caleb, a Midwestern dreamer smitten by, then bitten by, the ethereal Mae, Homer’s protégée. Their relationship dovetails with the gang’s evasion of the law, Caleb’s father and sister, and their primary enemy, the sun. It’s all shot, mostly from dusk till dawn, against a hauntingly hazy backdrop of plains and desert highways, Bigelow folding in elements of film noir (never exclusively an urban phenomenon) and road movie.

Ironically, the swerve towards horror did not pay the dividends everybody had been hoping for. Eschewing gothic trappings (the only cross in evidence is engraved on the butt of Jesse’s Single Action Army revolver – so much for its power as a deterrent), Bigelow’s vision was just too unconventional for the masses, especially compared with The Lost Boys, a contemporaneous reimagining of vampire lore that nevertheless retained much of the old iconography. Yet Bigelow’s melding of dreamy Midwestern milieu, lyricism and grungy violence (viz. the massacre in “shit-kicker heaven”) remains timeless (even Tangerine Dream rein in their digital excesses), whereas The Lost Boys has an unmistakable Eighties date stamp.

Bigelow doesn’t jettison all vampire traditions. Some she embraces, principally the combustible ferocity of sunlight. (Not all the film’s innovations are so convincing – Caleb and Mae are cured of their affliction by simple blood transfusions.) And if there is pathos in the plight of the young lovers, stranded between darkness and light, so there is in the fragility of the outlaws’ existence. For all their murderous hell-raising, there is also something intoxicating about them, even as their rebel yell – radiating from Henriksen’s smouldering Jesse and Bill Paxton’s exuberant Severen – dies out in a (literal) blaze of glory.

Ghost Town (1988)
Not as lurid as most Charles Band productions of the time, Ghost Town pitches a modern-day sheriff into a premise that could have served an episode of The Twilight Zone. Franc Luz’s Deputy Langley follows a missing woman’s trail to Cruz del Diablo, a decrepit settlement in the outback, where the skeletal remains of its long-dead lawman spring from the ground and beg him to “rid my town of evil” – to wit, a gang of undead outlaws led by Devlin, whose men hold the spirits of the locals in a kind of tyrannical limbo, waiting for the right man to send their oppressor to hell and redeem them for their High Noon-like cowardice when their sheriff was killed. This Langley accomplishes, in a routine finale that retreats from the almost oneiric atmosphere built up in the first half.

The opening scenes yield some well-timed jolts and striking images: the capture of Catherine Hickland’s character, swept up in an unholy dust storm; shadowy, whispering figures silhouetted by flashes of lightning, watching Langley as he investigates the town; a cluster of saloon patrons glimpsed in a mirror, but not in the room itself. Langley seems to be slipping in and out of surface reality, although this impression is not sustained and the plot dissolves into a straight-up western scenario, albeit with supernatural inflections. The requisite showdowns obscure the more affecting moments, when the few townsfolk given featured roles (notably Bruce Glover as a blind, fortune-telling cardsharp) voice their anguish at lingering in purgatory, as well as their longing for death.

It is the undead villain, however, who captures the filmmakers’ imagination. Devlin alone among the outlaws has rotting flesh, and the only reason for that, one surmises, is that all the decade’s most iconic horror villains, from Freddie Krueger to Jason Voorhees, had similar afflictions. Despite Jimmie F. Skaggs’ enthusiasm in the role, Devlin is not of that calibre.

Nevertheless, Ghost Town is worth a visit. It has some original ideas, and the production design, costumes and performances are generally convincing, for what was evidently a cheap production. Much like Cruz del Diablo, there are few traces of the film’s existence, with no DVD currently in circulation. Its director, too, disappeared from the scene – this seems to have been the only film he made.

Grim Prairie Tales (1990)
Determinedly old-fashioned, much to its benefit, this anthology employs the discrete talents of Brad Dourif and James Earl Jones as mismatched travellers who trade yarns and insults one night over a campfire.

The stories themselves are not especially substantial – due partly to weak writing and partly to the brevity demanded by the portmanteau format – but this is almost moot. What the raconteurs impart, in their sharply scripted linking scenes, is the simple pleasure of relating and absorbing tall tales. Two of these cover familiar genre territory – the consequences of desecrating sacred Indian ground, and revenge from beyond the grave. The others are more diverting. A clean-cut young man succumbs to lust in the dust with a wandering succubus, climaxing in an image so grotesque it would have graced Brian Yuzna’s Society. The most affecting segment eschews fantasy entirely; the shock here is that a young girl discovers her adored father (an impressive William Atherton) is a brutal racist, yet her moral outrage is tempered, perhaps even outweighed, by filial affection.

If the vignettes are serviceable, the interplay between Dourif, as a peevish urbanite, and Jones, as an ursine bounty hunter, is sparkling. Their relationship even develops a degree of warmth, as the sun comes up and they go their separate ways, and there is a blackly comic sting in the tale that undercuts Jones’s pretensions as a bounty hunter.

Blood Trail (1997)
It is a trope of Native American-themed pursuit westerns that white hunters often find themselves the hunted, outfoxed by a prey with seemingly mystical powers. (See, for example, Robert Aldrich’s Ulzana’s Raid.) The twist here is that the quarry is a white man, a no-account cowboy who is possessed by a vengeful spirit after he and a friend desecrate an Indian burial ground. What unfolds is a mixture of supernatural and serial-killer motifs, in which a group of deputies (and their obligatory Christianised Indian guide) dwindle in number as they track a murderer, nicknamed Bloody Hands for the prints he leaves, through the Indian Territories.

Most of the carnage occurs off-screen, actor-director Barry Tubb building up the atmosphere in subtler ways – fleeting images of the elusive killer and his grisly handiwork; close-ups of an owl, a rather obvious metaphor for the predatory villain. The performances (by a largely unknown cast) are mixed – some lacklustre; others laudably naturalistic. These are ordinary men confronted by extraordinary events, and their reactions are measured and plausible.

Tubb’s judgement is not always so sound: certain daytime scenes would have played better, and generated more suspense, at night; inserts of the Indian warrior in what is presumably the spirit world add little of value; the number of deputies could have been reduced – there are too many for the slender running time to accommodate, and none makes a firm impression. (The involvement of Near Dark’s Adrian Pasdar, the best-known actor, is similarly inconsequential. He has two scenes, in one of which he hangs himself.) The music – New Age lite – is another weak point. Nevertheless, Tubb’s film is quietly effective, merging genre elements without being jarring.

From Dusk Till Dawn 3: the Hangman’s Daughter (1999)
Part prequel, part rehash, this entry in the Tarantino-Rodriguez genre-bending franchise folds in the imagined adventures of the American writer Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared in Mexico in 1913, or so it is believed, after joining Pancho Villa’s revolutionary forces. It is the one sliver of originality in the backstory of the vampire Santanico Pandemonium, future queen of the Titty Twister brothel-slash-vampire haunt.

Although no more necessary than the first DTV sequel, Texas Blood Money, this does at least improve on that, mainly due to Michael Parks’ droll performance as Bierce. Sadly, it’s not primarily his story. Instead, the focus shifts to the charmless outlaw Johnny Madrid, who escapes the gallows and rides off with his would-be executioner’s daughter, Esmerelda. Their flight takes them to la Tetilla del Diablo (which has a more romantic ring to it than ‘Titty Twister’), where their paths converge with Johnny’s gang, his pursuers, and Bierce and the Newlies, young married missionaries. After some preamble involving barman Danny Trejo and a sultry Sonia Braga, the fangs come out, with humans pitched against reptilian bloodsuckers in a ‘twist’ that will wrong-foot only those viewers unfamiliar with the first film. Esmerelda, of course, is revealed to be a vampire princess.

Director PJ Pesce exhibits the magpie-like proclivities of Tarantino and Rodriguez, but none of their finesse. The western action is rendered in the adrenalised style that has become almost compulsory – slo-mo, Dutch angles, rapid panning, fast cutting – to the tempo of a diet-Morricone soundtrack. The spaghetti western influences extend to the visuals, with landscapes coated in twilight red or dusty ochre, and the characterisations, which are plug ugly to a fault. By the time the onus has shifted to horror, most people will be rooting for the vampires.

Ravenous (1999)
Seamlessly melding disparate material, Antonia Bird’s visceral black comedy is almost sui generis, which helps explains its failure to find an audience. (Twentieth Century Fox’s hapless marketing campaign was another factor.) The script pays blood-smeared lip service to the cases of prospector and self-confessed cannibal Alfred (or ‘Alferd’) Packer, subject of 1993’s Cannibal! The Musical, and the Donner Party pioneers, some of whom ate their dead comrades while snowbound in the Sierra Nevadas in the winter of 1846-7.

Yet Robert Carlyle’s Colquhoun, lone survivor of a group of settlers, has not resorted to anthropophagy from starvation alone, but to test a Native American belief that a man who devours the flesh of his fellows gains superhuman potency. This provides the basis for a satire of sorts on the Darwinian dynamics of the western’s survivalist ethos, with Colquhoun challenging Guy Pearce’s emotionally ragged Mexican-American war veteran, John Boyd, to a contest of wills as much as physical resilience. The subsidiary characters, misfits to a man, are largely an irrelevance.

Having eaten flesh himself in a moment of weakness, Boyd is vulnerable to Colquhoun’s fiendish entreaties. “It’s not courage to resist me,” says Colquhoun, “it’s courage to accept me.” Pearce articulates Boyd’s struggle intensely, nerves straining as he clings desperately to his humanity; Carlyle, predictably but no less pleasingly, attacks his role with relish, imbuing Colquhoun with almost evangelical fervour.

Typical of the script’s mordant wit is Colquhoun’s backhanded appreciation of Manifest Destiny – he looks forward to the imminent influx of pioneers much like a gourmet anticipating a new restaurant opening – while the subversion of audience expectations is evident in the hero-shaped hole at the heart of the narrative. That function is notionally Boyd’s, but he is swiftly revealed to be a poltroon, banished to remote Fort Spencer in the Nevadas for battlefield cowardice.

Few things play to type in Ravenous – the wintry vistas are oppressive rather than inspiring; the music rasping rather than heroic. Only in Boyd’s epic duel with Colquhoun in the grand-guignol final act is there the spectre of a classic western trope – that of a damaged man grasping for redemption.

Legend of the Phantom Rider (2002)
Something went badly awry here between concept and execution. The main plot – outlaw gang rules a town by force – feels divorced from the supernatural backstory – the recurring clashes, centuries apart, of good and evil spirits.

After a pre-credits sequence in which two warriors fight to the death in the West of 1165, the story jumps forward 700 years, when Blade, an ex-Confederate officer, leads a band of cut-throats. They subjugate the town of Saugus until a woman named Sarah, whose husband and son were slain by the gang, cries vengeance, and an Indian shaman summons a mysterious, scar-faced gunfighter named Peligidium to do the job.

Blade is described as “pure evil, broken from the gates of hell” but, as written and played (in an insufferably mannered vein) by co-writer Robert McRay, he is a run-of-the-mill megalomaniac, no more intimidating than a thousand other western tyrants. There are hints that he knows Peligidium (also played by McRay, thankfully without dialogue), that these are indeed reincarnations of eternally feuding spirits, but the sense of supernatural forces at play is ambiguous – less by design, you suspect, than because of sloppy storytelling.

We must also infer that Blade’s sparing of Sarah is because she “unknowingly harbours the ‘lost spirit’ of a warrior chief” and is thus Blade’s quarry, as the opening text suggests. This also states that the “battle for supremacy” between good and evil forces “only takes place within the ancient walls of the city of Trigon”, in which case one presumes that Saugus is built on the same site. By such tenuous threads is the plot held together. Eventually it becomes a moot point, since Blade is dispatched not by Peligidium, but by Sarah – hardly a fitting comeuppance for “the devil himself”, with his opposite number rendered redundant just when it matters. It is scarcely Armageddon.

The anticlimax is in keeping with Erik Erkiletian’s direction, which records killings, confrontations and conversations in the same flat manner; not even Peligidium’s interventions raise the tempo, set by a monotonous dark ambient score. With his flowing duster, Jonah Hex-like deformity and stooping posture, this ‘avenging angel’ cuts a certain dash, but his role is poorly defined; neither he nor Blade lives up to his billing. The remaining characters merely fill out the scenery – even Sarah, the galvanising force, limply played by Star Trek: the Next Generation’s Denise Crosby.

Horror devotees may enjoy seeing Phantasm’s Angus Scrimm as the town preacher, who finally takes up arms against the gang. For western fans, there is a minor role for veteran Stefan Gierasch (Jeremiah Johnson, High Plains Drifter) and tributes to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and The Culpepper Cattle Company, among others. These are crumbs of comfort, however, in a film that offers nothing new as a western and a supernatural atmosphere that would dissipate at the striking of a match.

Dead Birds (2004)
Opening during the American Civil War, Alex Turner’s simmering debut takes a sharp detour, via a bloodily executed bank robbery, into the realm of The Amityville Horror, The Shining and The Evil Dead, with a foreboding edifice – in this case, a deserted plantation house where the outlaws hide out – functioning as a portal for demonic forces.

As a western, it is of minor interest – the historical context is only fleetingly addressed – but Turner cranks through the supernatural gears proficiently enough, from unsettling portents – a dead bird; a book of spells; a skinless, deformed animal out in the corn field – to ghostly apparitions and gruesome deaths. The central section unfolds at what may charitably be described as a deliberate pace: characters wander off alone to their doom, synced to electronic drones; ghostly children bear their fangs; mysterious human/animal footprints appear; lightning illuminates nasty surprises. The history of the house involves human sacrifice and occultism, and now it seems that anybody who enters becomes possessed by demons.

The lead roles are capably played, if underwritten, by a cast including E.T.’s Henry Thomas and Man of Steel’s Michael Shannon. Period detail and set design show diligence, as do the gore effects, and the lighting and camerawork imbue the plantation house and its surrounding corn field with palpable menace.

Turner grasps for that clammy, Lovecraftian sense of otherworldly dread, of diabolical terrors inhabiting “a world around our own”; overall, his execution is a little too mechanical to achieve those ends. Nevertheless, Dead Birds holds its own among the glut of ghost stories that have been in vogue for much of the past two decades.

Tremors 4: the Legend Begins (2004)

The original Tremors was an engaging combination of monster-movie clichés, droll performances and smart writing, the Jaws formula transposed from ocean to desert. (Even the posters mimicked Roger Kastel’s famous artwork for Spielberg’s shark-buster.) After two indifferent follow-ups this prequel appeared set in 1889, when the town of Perfection was still called Rejection – purely, it seems, so that characters can remark on its aptness following an exodus of locals and the closure of the local mine.

This is typical of the script’s laboured humour, as are the greenhorn antics of supercilious mine owner Hiram Gummer, the ancestor of series mainstay Burt Gummer (this was the role that practically sustained the career of actor Michael Gross for a decade and a half. He also played the part in a thirteen-episode TV series). Hiram arrives from the East to discover that 17 miners have been killed by unseen creatures, dubbed “dirt dragons” by the smattering of locals who remain. Of course, these are really the mighty-mawed graboids seen in various iterations throughout the series, from “shriekers” to “ass-blasters”, realised here mainly in the form of puppets and miniatures, with CGI (which reared its ugly head in T3) kept to a minimum.

Gradually the familiar Tremors scenario falls into place, with a group of affable characters – augmented for a time by Billy Drago’s scenery-gnawing gunfighter – besieged in an isolated location and improvising a counter-attack against their subterranean foes. (Grafted onto a western setting, it resembles the oft-used situation in which outgunned villagers prepare a trap for marauding bandits.) Familiarity does not necessarily breed contempt, given the lightness of tone maintained by the same group of film-makers responsible for the entire series, but it does mean that, as in many prequels, the script churns up old ground – and eats up a lot of screen time – while establishing continuity with the other films.

There isn’t much about the fourth instalment of Tremors that hadn’t seemed fresher and funnier in the first. Determined fans, however, will enjoy the portrayal of Hiram Gummer as a gun-shy fumbler, the antithesis of his great-grandson Burt, a weapons fetishist. Naturally, by the end of the film, Hiram has graduated from a palm-sized derringer to an 8ft punt gun. (Tremors 5: Bloodline is scheduled for release later this year.)

The Quick and the Undead (2006)
Set 80-some years after a virus turned most of the population into walking corpses, this DTV quickie itself is symptomatic of the plague of modern zombie films: tongue in cheek but witless; stacked with quotes from better-known works; iconographically derivative – spaghetti westerns, Mad Max and, of course, George Romero are the main points of reference.

The only characters are a fistful of bounty hunters, whose trade is on the wane given the dwindling number of zombies. A nefarious scheme to infect more cities and increase demand is introduced too late to have a bearing on the plot, which focuses on antihero Ryn Baskin tracking a rival gang for revenge. Toting a loaded guitar case, El Mariachi-style, and dressed like an outcast from Fields of the Nephilim, the lead actor’s Eastwoodisms quickly become tiresome. (His given name happens to be Clint, but that’s no excuse.) Likewise his bickering relationship with his would-be Tuco-esque sidekick; mercifully, this is terminated halfway through, after a rare attempt at pathos that falls flat because of insipid dialogue – a failing throughout.

The scripting is strictly A-Z; anything that could have added substance or colour is bypassed. Baskin’s connection to the other characters, like his possession of an immunity serum, is given scant attention. The scale of the epidemic is stated at the beginning, but there is little sense of the world outside the frame (the lean budget would account for this to an extent). The make-up effects are passable, and first-time writer/director Gerald Nott injects some energy into the kill scenes and confrontations, but by and large this is a lethargic, unconvincing effort. The wait for a worthwhile zombie-western goes on…

BloodRayne II: Deliverance (2007)
Ford, Mann, Peckinpah, Leone, Eastwood… Trace the line of descent far enough, take a sharp vertical dive and eventually, somewhere near the Earth’s core, you encounter the irrepressible Uwe Boll. This entry in his series of interminable video-game adaptations relocates the half-human, half-vampire heroine of BloodRayne from 18th-century Romania to the American West, where she tangles with a bloodsucking Billy the Kid.

Surely, the premise is not to be taken seriously; what to make of the rest of the film? Technically average, with a few moody shots of the misty environs of Deliverance town offering false hope, it fails in most other areas. The dialogue dies in the actors’ mouths, making already sub-par performances seem that much worse. The pouting Natassia Malthe, stepping into Kristanna Loken’s figure-hugging leathers as Rayne, suffers more than most, her bons mots about as cutting as lamb’s wool, delivered with the desultory air of somebody who expects to get by on looks alone – “You expect me to act as well?” Her physical prowess in the sporadic action scenes is so-so, although Boll’s slack direction does her a disservice – escaping from the gallows, Rayne has what feels like an eternity before Billy’s vampirised myrmidons react. Maybe losing one’s soul dulls the senses.

Not that Boll musters much more energy as a filmmaker, and most of that he squanders on ‘style’: hard stares and close-ups from the Leone school; slo-mo from Peckinpah’s box of tricks. (The score is faux-Morricone, to boot.) Atmosphere and tension evidently were not major concerns. The same can be said for the characterisations – Rayne must be one of the dreariest and least effective protagonists in modern horror, regularly requiring rescue by associates who include a bland Pat Garrett (Boll regular Michael Paré) and a phony preacher whose blessing, nonetheless, is supposed to sanctify garlic-infused bullets. Zack Ward’s Billy the Kid, meanwhile, is camp rather than menacing, hissing his lines in an inexplicable Mittel-european accent.

BloodRayne II can’t even be recommended as a riot of unintentional hilarity. It’s too vapid for that, notwithstanding the presence of a character named Piles and such philosophical musings as, “Life is like a penis: when it’s hard, you get screwed; when it’s soft, you can’t beat it.”

Dead Noon (2007)
Produced for peanuts by a group of friends and gussied up with camera trickery and rudimentary effects, this flashily vacuous pastiche was made in the spirit of The Evil Dead – its director described it as a “love poem to Sam Raimi”. It is an unfortunate comparison. (And unfair to an extent – The Evil Dead had a lavish budget in comparison.) Where Raimi’s rampant imagination cohered around tight plotting and a near-hysterical atmosphere, the makers of Dead Noon proffer half-formed ideas, few of which they generated themselves.

The budget severely hinders the effects work, which is where director Andrew Wiest’s ambitions (and talents) clearly lie, but it is the fundamentals of script, acting and pacing that are the main issues. As the title forecasts, the set-up is High Noon with zombies (not the flesh-eating kind), as an outlaw named Frank returns from Hell (rendered as a green-screened lake of fire, before which Frank and a Stetson-wearing Satan play poker), resurrects his old gang and tracks down the great-grandson of Kane, the lawman who sent him to his grave. It is the younger Kane’s wedding day, of course, but he forsakes his darlin’ in the name of duty.

For his part, Wiest forsakes the tension of High Noon for interminable chase scenes and random kills in drab locations; for all the pyrotechnics, most of this is padding. (Raimi, one feels, would have run riot with the film’s big set piece, a shoot-out on Boot Hill involving zombie extras, crude CGI skeletons and even cruder dummies. Tongues were presumably in cheeks but, again, the scene long outstays its welcome.)

Characterisation is another casualty. Where the viewer felt Gary Cooper’s dilemma in every subtle twitch and nervous glance, his offspring barely musters an emotion. His fate, consequently, is unlikely to stir anybody else’s. The best that can be said for Wiest is that he displays enough visual imagination to suggest that, with a few dollars more and a halfway decent script, he may yet make something worthwhile.

When Lionsgate picked up the film for distribution, it saw fit to commission a framing story, which has another Kane – Hodder, of Jason Voorhees fame – playing one of Frank’s old rivals. Apart from background, these scenes add little of interest, but Hodder does, at least, possess charisma.

Left for Dead (2007)
If there is a visual equivalent of verbal diarrhoea, this would be a textbook case. Albert Pyun’s frenzied assemblage of flash cuts, slow motion, filters, fades, freeze frames and superimpositions makes Tony Scott look like Tarkovsky. As stylisation it’s both superfluous, neither advancing the plot nor expressing the mood of the characters, and tiresome.

Indeed, it wears out its welcome within the first two minutes, during which an extensive opening crawl is intercut with jagged footage of the backstory. This is explained in some detail – the married preacher Mobius Lockhardt’s affair with a whore in 1880 Mexico, her murderous rampage with her colleagues when he rejects her, his pact with the Devil and ghostly graveyard vigil, waiting for the chance for revenge, pause for breath – even though the same events are repeated later in flashback form. Perhaps Pyun felt the need to force the pace because the script, by first-time writer Chad Leslie, was too sluggish or convoluted (fair points both). Whatever the reason, it saps intrigue from the story proper, which follows Clementine Templeton’s hunt for her philandering husband, Blake, and his flight from the same mob of angry prostitutes, who team up with Clementine and track Blake to the ghost town of Amnesty, where they gradually fall prey to Mobius.

Despite the novelties of setting – the film was shot in Argentina – and a largely female cast, who get to act out the macho one-upmanship popularly associated with westerns, this is thin stuff. It is set up by Clementine’s voice-over (yet another gimmick) as a meditation on revenge and loss, but this amounts to little more than melodramatic soul-baring on the part of the principals and a few self-pitying utterances from Mobius. (Why a holy man-turned-limbo-dwelling avenger should dress like a spaghetti western re-enactor is a mystery. The explanation probably lies in the director’s admiration of all things Leone.) His fleeting appearances, scored by scraping guitars, seem to herald one of those cheap gothic-rock videos from the Eighties, while his status as a tormented lost soul, which could have anchored the drama, dangles from the narrative like a loose thread.

There are positives – the prostitutes are an authentically unglamorous bunch, dressed in rags and smeared in dirt, with a mindset to match the brutalizing circumstances – but these are overwhelmed by negatives – weak characterisations (Victoria Maurette, feeding on scraps, tries her damnedest as the clench-jawed Clementine), a script at cross-purposes (Feminist fantasy? Supernatural revenge saga?) and the whizz-bang redundancy of Pyun’s direction.

Like many directors before and since, the B-movie maverick – who still hasn’t topped his cheerfully schlocky debut, the Conan knock-off The Sword and the Sorceror (1982) – failed to integrate competing genres.

Undead or Alive (2007)
This self-styled ‘zombedy’ aspires to the same combination of broad comedy and genre-specific parody as Braindead and Shaun of the Dead, with additional nods towards Blazing Saddles. The first feature by a South Park alumnus, it has all the silliness of its forebears, and a fair amount of gore, but not the same manic abandon; the pace is too slack and the writing too laboured.

Director Glasgow Phillips’ script tweaks undead lore, positing the contagion as a White Man’s Curse brewed up by the great Apache chief Geronimo as his last act of revenge – hence the creatures are referred to as ‘Geronimonsters’. Moreover, these are zombies that still have the ability to converse and carry grudges, so that running gags continue even after death (shades of Day of the Dead). More is the pity, then, that the characters have little to exchange other than weak wisecracks. Aside from the barbed repartee of the central trio – an army deserter, a fey cowboy and Geronimo’s ball-busting niece – the tone is shamelessly puerile, penis gags and pratfalls being about as sophisticated as it gets.

Much of the humour revolves around the ascription of stupidity to the white man – whether undead or alive. It is a point made repeatedly by Ravi Rawat as the Apache girl, who doesn’t have to try too hard to outsmart her travelling companions: James Denton from Desperate Housewives (self-effacingly smug) and Chris Kattan of Saturday Night Live (fey bordering on camp). Then again, it is Denton’s character who figures out a cure when he gets bitten, infecting Kattan in turn, and it is very much at Rawat’s expense.

The zombies, likewise, are figures of fun. Even when they pen the heroes inside a fort for the inevitable, Romeroesque siege finale, they are more like slapstick props than creatures from the id. The overall vibe of Phillips’ film is cartoonish, but not enough to compensate for a script that is fitfully funny at best.

Copperhead (2008)
Snakes on the plains… This Sci-Fi Channel original (loosely speaking) is simplicity itself, with stock western characters besieged in a town overrun by CGI serpents – replace these with zombies, vampires or graboids and the film would play much the same way.

The production design, on sets constructed in director Todor Chapkanov’s native Bulgaria, is the film’s strongest suit, creating a credibly weathered environment (albeit on a scale commensurate with a slender budget), adequately furnished with period props. The costumes bear scrutiny in a similar way.

Not so the snakes, their threat nullified by slapdash digital effects, especially when they are shown from above, slithering on mass like a spillage of viscous liquid. They at least look more or less life-size, if not especially like copperheads. This being the era of Supergator and Mega Python vs. Gatoroid, however, form dictates the intervention, towards the end, of an enormous mother snake, adding Aliens to the list of films to which this one is in thrall. Chapkanov and composer Nathan Furst are particularly unabashed in stealing from Leone, the gunfight between hero Brad Johnson and outlaw Billy Drago mimicking the maestro’s editing style and the title music from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Drago, reliable as ever, high-tails it from the plot after 30 minutes, leaving a charisma vacuum that remains unfilled. The rest of the film stutters. Drawn-out exchanges of dialogue, mostly in a light-hearted register, are interrupted by snake attacks, seen off with guns, dynamite, a flamethrower and a hand-cranked machine gun, which gets a Heath-Robinson makeover into a makeshift harpoon launcher for the finale.

No explanation for the snakes’ rampage is given. Considering the nonsensical exposition that typifies Sci-Fi (now SyFy) Channel offerings, that was perhaps just as well. Chapkanov followed this comparatively well-mounted production with 2009’s feeble Ghost Town, which begins in the old West before relocating to modern times, where Satanic outlaws (led again by an under-used Billy Drago) terrorise a group of students.

The Burrowers (2008)
A revisionist-western thesis resides in the margins of this frontier allegory, the mayhem caused by its subterranean monsters conjoined with, if not rooted in, cultural misconceptions of the period, military malpractice, and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Where the white protagonists – archetypes to a man – blame the death of local farmers and the disappearance of others on a mysterious Indian tribe, the Sioux and the Utes know better. They speak of demons they call ‘burrowers’, which subsisted on buffalo until white hunters decimated the herds, and now they harvest humans for food.

The script’s critique of American imperialism is neither radical (it all but name-checks The Searchers, a revisionist lodestone) nor subtle – the officer commanding the search party has a tobacco pouch made from a dead Indian’s scrotum – but it adds thematic heft to a story that is concerned just as much with the prejudices and tensions of its human characters as it is with what lurks beneath the prairie. (Those expecting a full-on creature feature may well be frustrated, especially given the measured pace.)

The actors, led by a grizzled Clancy Brown, talk and behave in a plausible manner, given the circumstances; the dread that slowly grips the company is especially palpable, as is the paranoia that precipitates a needless and costly exchange of gunfire with potential Indian allies. The burrowers themselves are restricted to cameos – glimpses of pallid shapes in the darkness; unnerving clicking noises on the soundtrack. Director JT Petty doesn’t let them off the reins until late on, when a gruesome flesh feast reveals them to be vaguely amphibian in appearance, a mixture of practical effects and (inevitably, considering the low budget) dubious CGI.

The lack of a compelling central figure does hamper the human drama somewhat, but the period detail is fine and the landscape, leeched of much of its colour by Phil Parmet’s generally excellent photography, is both majestic and daunting, serving both aspects of the production.

Not much about the burrowers’ background or their (vaguely spider-like) feeding habits stands up to inquiry, but this is almost beside the point. Petty’s grimly ironic ending locates the real horror not in the shallow graves where the creatures’ paralysed victims await their grisly fate, but in the rampant chauvinism and narrow-mindedness that accompanied westward expansion – at least, so the revisionist thesis would have it. (Petty also shot an 18-minute prequel, Blood Red Earth, set 70 years before the main feature – for reasons unknown, the burrowers only make an appearance once in a generation.)

Jonah Hex (2010)
Or: Eight Million Ways to Die at the Box Office. A bounty hunter with a tortured past and disfigured face, Hex first appeared in DC Comics’ Weird Western Tales in the early Seventies. Since then he has fought zombies, gut-shot Batman, travelled through time and diced with aliens, so the mixture of hard action and supernatural fantasy, fictional and historical characters, in this screen venture is not exceptional. Neither is the resulting farrago after rewrites, reshoots and studio misgivings about tone and content dogged the film’s production.

The plot has Josh Brolin’s Hex conscripted by President Grant (Aidan Quinn) to bring down Quentin Turnbull (Malkovich), his old commanding officer in the Confederate army, now preparing a devastating fireworks display for the Centennial celebrations. Hex is motivated by revenge rather than patriotic duty – it was Turnbull who murdered his family and left him for dead. During that ordeal, Hex somehow acquired the ability to reanimate corpses, albeit temporarily; as a plot element, this is almost entirely redundant. (Megan Fox, as an implausibly pulchritudinous prostitute and Hex’s sort-of girlfriend, is similarly superfluous.)

Brolin was born to play a gunfighter, oozing brutish charisma, although the prosthetic scar hampers his delivery. (Given lines as banal as, “Anyone who gets close to me dies,” that’s not necessarily a bad thing.) He deserved a script that wasn’t so choppy and nonsensical (partly a consequence of studio cuts that reduced the running time to 81 minutes), in which spaghetti-western machismo is locked in a forced marriage with mysticism and gadgetry: Hex’s horse is armed with twin Gatling guns; he later employs handheld, dynamite-propelling crossbows.

Behind the camera, Jimmy Hayward directs as if designing a video game, with whizzy camerawork and room-shaking explosions synchronized to Mastodon’s crunching metal score. The attempt at contemporary relevance, with Turnbull explicitly labelled a “terrorist”, complete with WMD, is risible. By the time Malkovich, who looks bored throughout, unleashes his “super weapon” – a kind of giant Gatling gun with cannons for barrels, designed by cotton-gin inventor Eli Whitney, no less – painful, long-suppressed memories of Will Smith’s Wild Wild West float to the surface. (Glowing orange ‘trigger’ balls?) It was no surprise that Jonah Hex missed the mark with critics and public alike.

(See also: horror-western strips in the Eerie and Creepy comic series from the Sixties; Marvel’s Ghost Rider – not Johnny Blaze – later renamed Phantom Rider; and more recent publications such as Desperadoes from IDW and, more loosely, Preacher, from DC’s Vertigo imprint.)

Exit Humanity (2011)
Low-budget zombie films have been spewed out in recent years like so many one-hit wonders. This one, by contrast, is a concept album: adventurous in scope, serious in intent, relatively sprawling. Like many a magnum opus, there are drawbacks: it is somewhat ponderous; the script and execution, while generally strong, cannot quite bear the weight of writer-director John Geddes’ ambitions, which lean towards a study of grief and mortality akin to The Road – how to maintain hope and, yes, humanity, in the midst of catastrophe.

An apocalyptic vision, although lacking the means to convey scale, Geddes’ film traces the stench of reanimated corpses to the dying days of the American Civil War. It follows one ex-soldier, Edward Young, as he loses his wife and son but regains a sense of purpose alongside a small group of fellow survivors resisting the demented Confederate General Williams. To call it a ‘zombie film’ is in some ways misleading (like any intelligent vehicle for the living dead, the ‘z’ word is never used). While they are present in substantial numbers, ready to be dispatched in time-honoured fashion in a seemingly unavoidable tip-of-the-hat to Romero, the undead are actually an unwelcome distraction – any kind of plague would have served to advance the themes and concentrate attention on the human drama, which is what Geddes more or less succeeds in doing, irrespective of the shuffling corpses he shoehorns in. (Perhaps they could be considered, Romero style, as metaphors for the kind of rancid antebellum attitudes represented by Williams; but that would stretch their significance somewhat.)

Young’s torment and findings are collected in a journal, read in mellifluous voiceover by Brian Cox, as one of the character’s descendants. Geddes reinforces the device by breaking up the narrative into chapters and portraying certain events with animation, as if they were Young’s own illustrations from his diary. (They were probably also seen as a cost-cutting measure, expediting the story without the need for shooting additional scenes.)

The antiquated setting, stressed by a desaturated palette (warm colours are reserved for flashbacks to happier times), allows Geddes to pitch his film as a spurious zombie origin story, even as it leans heavily on established motifs. “What force is behind this?” wonders Young, played with earnestness by relative newcomer Mark Gibson. (His anguished wailing, however, quickly gets old.) The answer harks back to voodoo and necromancy; one of the script’s most original notions is that zombie outbreaks have occurred at various points in history, across many cultures, whenever men have chanced to play god. In that sense, Geddes’ whey-faced ghouls could conceivably fulfil another allegorical function.

Having planted this idea, the film wraps up Young’s vendetta against the general, aided by an army of the undead, while the anomaly of another character’s immunity ends Geddes’ dour feature on a cautiously optimistic note.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)
Another audaciously skewed, schlockily titled alternate history lesson from Seth Grahame-Smith, the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Transposed to the screen with his customary gusto by Night Watch director Timur Bekmambetov, it posits the great emancipator as the saviour not merely of America’s slaves, but of its very soul.

His epochal dispute with the Southern elite, while not divested of its moral and economic imperatives, is reimagined as a campaign against the scourge of vampirism, with the bloodsucking landed aristocracy (no heavy-handed symbolism here) allied with Confederate president Jefferson Davis. The battle of Gettysburg, with vampire soldiers among the rebels’ ranks and Yankees wielding silver weapons, becomes a kind of Armageddon – “to decide whether this nation belongs to the living or the dead”.

To decide where Bekmambetov’s film belongs on the action-fantasy-western-horror spectrum is not straightforward either. The premise is barmy, with Lincoln’s political ascendency shadowed by his nocturnal career as an axe-wielding vampire slayer, but it is treated with all the seriousness of weighty historical drama – drama, that is, by way of elaborately staged fights among herds of stampeding CGI horses, or atop speeding steam trains crossing flaming trestle bridges.

In its quieter moments, the film engages on a more intimate level, thanks to the sincere playing of Benjamin Walker in the title role, Mary Elizabeth Winstead as his devoted (but never docile) wife, and Dominic Cooper as Henry Sturgess, his vampire mentor, who has taken a Blade-esque turn against his own kind. Both Sturgess and Lincoln have a personal stake (ahem) in the campaign against the creatures’ leader, played with a supercilious sneer by Rufus Sewell, having lost loved ones to vampires in the past.

With its soft-focus photography and digitally augmented mise-en-scene, the film strives for a measure of visual authenticity amid the mayhem of its set pieces and the ludicrousness of its plot, but the overall effect remains that of a steampunk graphic novel writ large. Somehow, its revered hero emerges with his dignity intact – and his reputation enhanced to an unexpected degree.

See also – or perhaps not: Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies, a direct-to-video ‘mockbuster’ released the same year. As in Vampire Hunter, there is a stronger than expected showing by the central actor, in this case Bill Oberst Jr., who imbues Lincoln with gravitas even when he is dispatching zombies with a sickle. It’s just as nonsensical as Vampire Hunter, but on a much smaller and less ambitious scale.

GallowWalkers (2012)
Wesley Snipes’ tax affairs delayed the filming (begun in 2006) and release of this garbled fantasy, which has done nothing to restore the actor’s credit in Hollywood. (He ought to be doubly grateful to Sly Stallone and co, in that case, for The Expendables 3.) Shot in the starkly beautiful Namibian desert, like much modern action cinema it is more a grab bag of influences than a coherent work in its own right. (Exhibit A: Jonah Hex.)

Partly a revamp of Blade’s comic-strip mythologising – Snipes once again plays an undead avenger, battling undead villains – and partly a mannered stab at Jodorowsky-style surrealism – it opens with Snipes’ desert showdown with three men dressed as cardinals, one of whom has his lips sewn shut – it is in large measure a Leone tribute: wide shots and close-ups; studied mise-en-scène; dialogue cribbed from Once Upon a Time in the West. The use of fragmented flashbacks is also telling, although what they reveal, after a jumbled opening third, is that a slight revenge story – gunfighter kills bandits for raping his woman – has been scrambled and swollen with half-baked ideas about entries to hell and postmortem skincare, not to mention secondary characters who have no bearing whatsoever on the plot.

Snipes, as the redundantly monikered Aman, looks good, in dreads and duster, but constructs his performance from poses and gestures; when he is called upon to intone the backstory – how Aman’s mother saved his life via a demonic pact, but brought down a curse that resurrects his victims – he does so stiltedly. Then again, it is such a clumsy expository device that perhaps he shouldn’t be faulted too harshly.

His adversaries are pleasingly outlandish, led by a bewigged, white-haired psychopath who steals people’s skin – the ‘gallowwalkers’’ own hides do not last long in the sun, apparently. These creatures need beheading if they are to die for good, with Snipes ripping out spinal columns just to make sure – predictably, the CGI effects are patchy. While Snipes was on hiatus, co-writer/director Andrew Goth (seriously?) would have been wiser honing the script, rewiring the characters and cutting out the tangents. As it is, GallowWalkers remains considerably less than the sum of its influences.

Kevin Grant – author of Any Gun Can Play: The Essential Guide to Euro-westerns

NB. If tracked down, the following will be included in an updated version of this article: The Headless Rider (1957), Night Riders (1959), The Devil’s Mistress (1968), Ghost Riders (1987), Stageghost (2000), Blood Moon (2014), Bone Tomahawk (2015).

Image thanks: VHS Collector

Lucio Fulci Poker Cards are the latest offering from UK-based company Gods and Monsters, which had previously issued two, now sold-out, sets of video nasties trump cards. It is the first project in conjunction with the legendary home of cult film rarities, the Psychotronic Store.

We are promised:

1 High quality plastic-coated poker-sized cards
2. 36 ‘pip’ cards, all featuring artwork from films associated with Lucio throughout his career (not limited to just the director’s horror films)
3. 16 face cards, featuring actors and crew from Fulci’s films
4. 2 jokers and cover card exclusive to this edition
5. Brushed steel box featuring a holographic image taken from an iconic film in Fulci’s canon.
6. Strictly limited edition of 300 units worldwide. Individually numbered.

They are available to order from:

Gods & Monsters

Psychotronic Store

Starship Invasions is a 1977 Canadian science fiction film with a horrific sub-theme written, produced and directed by Ed Hunt (Bloody Birthday; The Brain). It was re-released in the United Kingdom as Project Genocide. It stars Christopher Lee and Robert Vaughn (Teenage Caveman). The film’s notable score is by Gil Melle.

Plot teaser:

The black-clad Legion of the Winged Serpent, is a rogue group of human-like telepathic aliens led by Captain Rameses (Christopher Lee). The Legion’s home planet Alpha in the Orion constellation is about to be destroyed in the imminent supernova of its star, and Rameses is leading a small force of flying saucers to Earth to examine its suitability for their race. Performing several alien abductions, they discover they are descendants of transplanted humans and that the planet is perfect for them. They plan to make way for themselves after killing everyone through the use of a device whose signals prompt people to commit suicide…

Reviews:

“Although it is relatively painless to watch, Starship Invasions takes itself a little to seriously to really be successful. It’s obvious that Hunt is fascinated with UFOlogy, having made no less than three films which delve into the subject. Unfortunately, his attempt to marry the more “scientific” UFO lore found in dusty library books to “space opera” concepts such as underwater pyramids and Durbal, the ill-conceived robot, was doomed to fail from the beginning.” Canuxploitation!

“Star Wars used up all of the special effects, Christopher Lee doesn’t get to move his mouth at any point during the film, and we’re pretty sure the million dollars mostly went toward the staggering quantities of meth Ed Hunt et al must have consumed to make this movie.” Something Awful

“This film is chock full of 1960s and 1970s cliches that Star Wars more or less abolished, including the UFO abduction thing, space battle sequences that look cheesy rather than cool, and aliens saying things like “oh yeah, we built the pyramids,” and “You humans use only 1 percent of your brains.” Sigh.” i09

“Half the time it’s silly and laughable like those Italian Star Odyssey knock-offs. But the rest of this Canadian made picture is eerie and strange, an apparent attempt to take UFOs seriously. As I write this in 2010, many viewers posting on YouTube or the IMBd recall being frightened by it children. Distorted sound effects and blatant suicide sequences can still unnerve adults 30+ years after initial release.” David Elroy Goldweber, Claws & Saucers

Cast:

• Robert Vaughn as Professor Allan Duncan
• Christopher Lee as Captain Rameses
• Daniel Pilon as Anaxi
• Tiiu Leek as Phi
• Helen Shaver as Betty Duncan
• Henry Ramer as Malcolm
• Victoria Johnson as Gazeth
• Doreen Lipson as Dorothy
• Kate Parr as Diane Duncan
• Sherri Ross as Sagnac
• Linda Rennhofer as Joan
• Richard Fitzpatrick as Joe
• Ted Turner as Zhender
• Sean McCann as Carl
• Bob Warner as an Air Force General

Filming locations:

Toronto, Ontario.

Wikipedia | IMDb

‘Vampire leopard women prowl the jungle”

Night of the Sorcerers – original title: La Noche de los Brujos translation: “Night of the Warlocks” – is a 1973 Spanish horror film written and directed by Amando de Ossorio (Tombs of the Blind Dead, Night of the Seagulls, Demon Witch Child).

Cast:

Maria Kosti, Lorena Tovar, Barbara King, Kali Hansa, Jack Taylor, Simon Andreu and Joseph Thelman.

Plot teaser:

1910, Bumbasa, West Africa: A white missionary (Barbara King) is kidnapped by native Bokor (sorcerers) to be sacrificed under a full moon. The Bokor tie her between two posts, whip her, then decapitate her. However, the voodoo ceremony is interrupted by British soldiers who shoot all the participants. Unnoticed in the melee, a shedim (demon) takes possession of the woman.

Years later, Professor Jonathan Grant (Jack Taylor) commands a safari investigating the disappearance of elephants. The safari team stumbled across the clearing where the natives had performed their rituals, before being wiped out in colonial times.

Unfortunately, they decide to camp nearby…

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Reviews:

” … it’s hard to find a better-paced, more enjoyable exercise in sensationalism of its kind. It can’t decide what kind of horror movie it wants to be, so vampirism, voodoo, possession and the walking dead are all tossed in like a big salad, and a very tasty one at that. The film is also not afraid to spill blood or allow for some kinky sadism, notably in repeated rituals where pretty women have their blouses literally whipped off… George R. Reis, DVD Drive-In

” … a mean-spirited, poorly made exploitation picture that relies on nudity, brutality, and gore rather than story, acting, and characterization. And what’s worse, it’s not even competent on this level, for it breaks the first rule of exploitation filmmaking: Shock, sicken, and titillate, but never, never bore your audience.” Bryan Senn, Drums of Terror: Voodoo in the Cinema

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“The film’s general shoddiness is everywhere. In the daytime, the vampire women take the form of animals, played by stuffed leopards whose heads peer out through some bushes. Fernando Garcia Morcillo’s roller-rink organ-driven score is like something out of an Emmanuelle knock-off. The tired jungle cliches uneasily mix with the ’70s sexploitation elements, which in turn don’t blend well with the intended horrors.” Stuart Galbraith IV, DVD Talk

“The plot is paper thin, the acting amateurish and some scenes were too dark due to the shooting process. Although, that said, when the shots weren’t too dark there was some great lighting and atmospherics. It hasn’t a shred of pc awareness and, you know what, it is great fun. It is leopard skin bikini vampiric fun from a master of exploitation horror.” Taliesen Meets the Vampires

“Graphic violence and plentiful soft-core sex cannot relieve the tedium…” Phil Hardy (editor), The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Horror

” … endearingly kitsch jungle exploitation flick … De Ossorio brings his familiar spooky touch to scenes where zombies crawl out of their graves and cannibals cavort around piles of skulls. By the far the most enjoyable aspect are the leopardskin bikini-clad vampire women, as Barbara Rey and Loli Tovar prance around the jungle with demonic glee.”Andrew Pragasam, The Spinning Image

“Racist, risible and completely redundant, it’s a forgettable effort.” Jamie Russell, Book of the Dead

Filming Locations:

Aldea del Fresno, Madrid, Spain

Wikipedia | IMDb | Image credits: Chilling Scenes of Dreadful Villainy | VHS Collector

‘Rotting ghouls return to life in an orgy of cannibalism’

Corpse Eaters is a 1973 Canadian horror film directed by Donald R. Passmore and Klaus Vetter based on a screenplay by producer Lawrence Zazelenchuk, with additional dialogue by Alan Nicholson. 

Cast:

Michael Hopkins, Ed LeBreton, Terry London, Michael Krizanc, Helina Carson, Douglas Deering.

Some the film’s gore scenes were apparently removed for it’s theatrical release and the footage has since been lost. According to Caelum Vatnsdal’s book They Came from Within, Corpse Eaters was produced in 1973 by teenager Lawrence Zazelenchuk, who owned The 69 Drive-In on Route 69 outside of Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. He had saved $36,000 from working at a nickel mine and decided to write and produce a horror film to screen at his own drive-in. Director Donald R. Passmore was hired, then fired after four days and replaced by Klaus Vetter. Once finished, Zazalenchuk found he could not afford the lab costs to have the film developed, but finally saved enough in drive-in proceeds to get it processed. It premiered at The 69 Drive-In in 1974 and went on to a long local run before it was bought by a New York distributor in the market for a tax write-off.

Reviews:

“With easily has the most extreme effects of any Canadian horror movie, The Corpse Eaters is worth a look if for no other reason, than it has the distinction of being the first gore film made in the Great White North. Unfortunately, the film itself leaves much to be desired it never really recovers from the success of the initial zombie attack, seemingly unsure of which direction to proceed in.” Canuxploitation

“Whether it’s an awkward sex scene or total mutilation by zombies, this film never hesitates to go over the top and push boundaries.” The Zombie Site

“An ugly, poorly lit, cheap looking and technically inept film, this has bad acting, Halloween kit makeups (which are also by Zazelenchuk) and a dull storyline culled from the aforementioned Night and Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1972). This is only really worth seeking out for curio value and for zombie movie completists.” Bloody Pit of Horror

“Aside from the gore similarity that one could compare to certain European romps, there’s ironically a fair amount of Fulci/Franco trademark zooms to the character’s eyes. Conversely, the film has a Herschell Gordon Lewis feeling to it because of bad/inane dialogue and obviously over-the-top gore. There’s always something about experiencing a lost film that makes a horror viewer smile, and Corpse Eaters is no different, except it has a much more interesting and personable story behind it.” Oh, the Horror!

“Sleazy, gory and a little sloppy, startling obscurity has kept you from seeing this. Tenacity must push you onward, until the two of you meet over Friendship & Beers.” Bleeding Skull!

IMDb

Bob Larkin (born July 10, 1949) is an American artist primarily known for his painted covers for Marvel Comics in the 1970s and early 1980s. His horror-themed work for Marvel included Planet of the Apes, Satana and The Tomb of Dracula.

Besides his artwork for Marvel, Larkin has painted covers for Warren Publishing’s Vampirella, Curtis’ magazine Monsters of the Movies and a host of paperback novels.

Larkin has also created images for notable film posters such as Shock Waves (1977), Kingdom of the Spiders (1977), Piranha (1978) and its sequel, The Visitor (1979), Humanoids from the Deep (1980) and Just Before Dawn (1981).

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Wikipedia | We are grateful to the Bob Larkin Blog for some of these images.

WH

‘A hunger from beyond the grave!’

Love Me Deadly is a 1972 horror film directed by Jaques Lacrete from a screenplay co-written with producer Buck Rogers, based on a story by Robert Cleere and Roger Wall. It stars Mary Charlotte Wilcox (Beast of the Yellow Night; Psychic Killer), Lyle Waggoner (Murder Weapon; Dream a Little Evil), Christopher Stone (The Howling; Cujo), Timothy Scott (Monster Squad TV series) and Michael Pardue.

Plot teaser:

Attractive Lindsay Finch (Mary Charlotte Wilcox) has a habit of dressing in mourning and attending wakes for men she never knew. When everyone else leaves, she kneels before the coffins and kisses the corpses passionately. However, at the many parties she holds at her house, she shows no interest in any of the (living) men. She is also fixated with her deceased father (Michael Pardue), frequently daydreaming about her childhood with him and putting her hair in pigtails to visit his grave.

Her friend Wade Farrow (Christopher Stone) is romantically interested in her, but she rejects his affections. Meanwhile, mortician Fred McSweeney (Timothy Scott) notices Lindsay’s attendance at the wakes and, although she won’t admit to her secret passion, he recognises her as a kindred spirit.

McSweeney has a Satanic coven that meets after hours in the mortuary for necrophilic orgies with the latest cadavers…

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Reviews:

” … mostly a camp-fest directed by someone who obviously had little knowledge of the horror genre and no film experience whatsoever. However, this doesn’t mean that it’s not a watchable time capsule curio, and the backdrop of early 1970s Southern California is just as interesting as the actors themselves. The sight of statuesque Mary Wilcox kissing actors pretending to be corpses while not trying to crack a welcomed smile is amusing, and this is about as intense as her necrophilic activities get.” George R. Reis, DVD Drive-In

“While a good part of the movie is devoted to a pretty standard, sexless romance between funeral-haunting rich-bitch heroine Lindsay (Mary Wilcox) and humpy-yet-bland suitor Alex (Waggoner, who must still be cursing his agents to this day for this role), it’s punctuated with enough nastiness (attempted date-rape, corpse orgies, aforementioned crocheted ensembles) to keep you suitably off-balance.” Camp Blood

“Sleaze fan-addicts will likely be disappointed in this exercise of sex with the living and the dead. The storyline has so much going for it, but the director wastes far too many opportunities for me to recommend this to anyone other than die hard 70’s horror film completists.” Cool Ass Cinema

“As in Psycho–the film Love Me Deadly wants so desperately to match in terms of “shock value”–director Lacerte offers a full psycho-pathological post-mortem toward the end of the story. But who cares, really?  Hitchcock’s decision to spend the last ten minutes of Psycho “diagnosing” Norman is the film’s one stumble, and the device is even less convincing here.” Ludic Despair

Wikipedia | IMDb | Image credits: Cool Ass Cinema | Ad mats courtesy of Raleigh Bronkowski via the Psychotronic Movies Facebook page

Hex –  aka Charms; The Shrieking and Grass Land – is a 1973 American horror film directed by Leo Garen from a screenplay co-written with Steve Katz, based on a story by Doran William Cannon and Vernon Zimmerman (Fade to Black). It was filmed on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation.

Main cast:

Keith Carradine (Dexter; Cowboys and Aliens), Dan Haggerty (Terror Night; Elves; Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan), Gary Busey (Silver Bullet; Piranha 3DD; Mansion of Blood), Scott Glenn (Gargoyles; The Keep; Silence of the Lambs), Hillarie Thompson and Cristina Raines (The Sentinel, billed as Tina Herazo).

Plot teaser:

Set in 1919, immediately after the First World War, a loosely knit band of motorcyclists back from fighting in Europe is making their way across the United States to seek their fortunes in California. They come upon the fictional town of Bingo, Nebraska and are challenged to a race by a local hot rodder. The outcome of the race is disputed, and the bikers flee into the surrounding countryside. They hide on a farm owned by two sisters, Oriole and Acacia, whose recently deceased father was a Native American shaman. The bikers are soon discovered by the sisters, who reluctantly allow them to stay overnight. One of the bikers attempts to rape the younger sister, after which the older sister dons her father’s shaman regalia and casts a hex on the gang. The bikers soon start departing this world in not so natural ways…

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Reviews:

“Mostly humdrum, the muddled and incomprehensible plot is additionally hampered by clumsy attempts at lightheartedness. But the cast of solid ’70s performers bring a strange watchability to this wayward tale.” The Terror Trap

“None of the characters seem to react realistically to the strange events that go on around them; when one of the characters finally says that there’s “something strange going on”, it’s so late in the movie that it became the biggest laugh line in it for me (and a lot funnier than the intentional comedy). In the end, it feels like a somewhat arty mess. Recommended only to the extremely curious.” Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings

“Largely a mess, but an engaging one. A horror film/Western/World War I biker movie, it exudes an improbable degree of charm precisely because of a freewheeling script that refuses to be tied to any one genre. Although the girls’ motivations remain consistently traditional (well, almost), on the whole the film exudes the feeling of being, almost subliminally, a nostalgic valediction to the counter-culture. ” Time Out

Wikipedia | IMDb

WH

“If you have a craving for terror come to the class reunion”

The Redeemer: Son of Satan (also known as Class Reunion Massacre) is an American horror film directed by Constantine S. Gochis and starring Damien Knight, Jeanetta Arnette, Nick Carter, Nikki Barthen and Michael Hollingsworth. It was filmed over four weeks in 1976 and released in 1978.

Plot Teaser:

Six people are trapped within the confines of their old high school during their 10th high school reunion with a psychotic, masked preacher who kills them off for their sinful lives they have made for themselves…

Buy The Redeemer on DVD from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Reviews:

“From a production standpoint the direction and acting all hold a lot better than other low budget horror films. And the overall quality of this production is even more impressive considering that this was the only film that most of the cast, the screenwriter and the director ever worked. Ultimately if you can look past its shortcomings, Redeemer: Son of Satan is a fun ride that fans of the slasher film genre should thoroughly enjoy.” 10K Bullets

“Ultimately, despite the fact that it’s basically a stalk and slash, The Redeemer has enough going for it in terms of creativity and unpredictability that horror fans should find a lot to like about the movie. It’s not a perfect film and there are moments that work better than others, but overall there’s plenty of entertainment value here and even a couple of creepy thrills.” DVD Talk

“The Redeemer: Son of Satan is a truly great, forgotten horror movie. Yes, it’s got it’s cheesy problems just like any other film of its era, but it also builds a sense of foreboding doom more palpable than a lot of movies I have encountered. From the minute the hapless victims set foot into the school, you feel they are in great danger and a number of moments in the film come off as genuinely suspenseful.” Oh, the Horror!

Wikipedia | IMDb

WH

‘Believe the Unbelievable!’

In Search of Dracula – original title Vem Var Dracula? – is a 1975 Swedish/French documentary film produced and directed by Calvin Floyd (The Sleep of Death; Terror of Frankenstein) based on a script by Yvonne Floyd. The film is based on a best-selling 1972 book by Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu.

The film is narrated by Tor Isedal and Christopher Lee who appears as himself, historical Wallachian ruler Vlad Tepes and Count Dracula (from Jesus Franco’s 1970 film of the same title).

In the US, the film was released by Sam Sherman’s Independent-International (Blood of Ghastly Horror; Horror of the Blood Monsters; Brain of Blood; Raiders of the Living Dead) company.

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Shorter TV version:

IMDb

‘… the classic tale of mystery and suspense!’

The Cat and the Canary is a 1978 horror-themed murder mystery thriller film written and directed by American erotic filmmaker Radley Metzger (The Lickerish Quartet; The Opening of Misty Beethoven; Barbara Broadcast) and produced by British Richard Gordon (Tower of Evil; Horror Hospital; Inseminoid).

The film is a loose adaptation of John Willard’s 1922 black comedy play of the same name which had previously been filmed several times, the first being a 1927 silent horror film version.

Cast:

Honor Blackman (Fright; Tale of the Mummy; Cockneys vs. Zombies), Michael Callan (Swamp Thing [TV series]; Leprechaun 3), Edward Fox (The Frozen Dead), Wendy Hiller (The Curse of King Tut’s Tomb), Olivia Hussey (Black Christmas; It), Wilfred Hyde-White (Chamber of Horrors; Fear No Evil; Ritual of Evil), Beatrix Lehmann, Carol Lynley (The Shuttered Room; Beware! The Blob; Dark Tower), Daniel Massey (Shadows of Fear; Vault of Horror), Peter McEnery (Tales That Witness Madness; Hammer House of Horror; Witchcraft [TV series]).

Plot:

On the 20th anniversary of his death, the remaining relatives of Cyrus West (Wilfred Hyde-White) are called to Elsinore mansion to view the filmed reading of his will. Cyrus reveals that Annabelle West (Carol Lynley) is to be the sole beneficiary, stipulating that in order to claim the inheritance she must spend the night in the house with the rest of the family and be deemed sane the next morning.

A doctor from the asylum up the road, Dr Hendricks (Edward Fox), arrives and informs the guests that a homicidal maniac, has escaped and is hiding out in the area. With a history of insanity in the family, a mansion replete with secret rooms and corridors and “The Cat” murderer on the loose, the night becomes a tale of gruesome murders, mystery and suspense…

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Reviews:

“The jokes are lame, the characterization often questionable and mostly bad, the intentionally hokey acting aggravating, the plot development inconsistent and, worst of all, the whole film is as innately homophobic and misogynistic as it is thoroughly boring.” A Wasted Life

“Metzger elicits good performances from his cast, considering the silly story and purple prose that passes for dialogue. If characters sound stilted, that’s only because a pornographer with artistic aspirations put the words in their mouths.” Steve Evans, DVD Verdict

“It’s obvious from the start whodunit; so the cast are much given to eye-rolling and chilling smiles, either to throw off the scent or disguise their embarrassment, for this adaptation is so turgidly faithful one expects that the entire lot (mauled bodies and all) to take a bow as the credits roll.” Fiona Ferguson, The Time Out Film Guide

“The over-familiar plot looks both contrived and simplistic when compared with the labyrinthine plots that came into fashion with Hammer’s psycho thriller in the sixties and the post-Argento giallo crime movies in the seventies…” Phil Hardy (editor), The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Horror

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Cast:

Choice dialogue:

Cyrus West: “Good evening, leeches. Take your places. As you know, I am Cyrus West. Now first of all, let me tell you, you’re all a bunch of bastards. I know, I know the people you came from. They’re all a bunch of bastards. Yes, your fathers, your mothers, your uncles, your aunts, your nephews, your nieces, your sons, your daughters, not to mention a cartload of cousins. All a bunch of bastards except, of course, Mew Mew, and perhaps one or two others.”

Paul Jones: “Wanna hear my new song? I wrote it while I was unconscious. It’s called ‘Kiss My Heiress’.”

Hendricks: “Weapons can be as dangerous as maniacs.”

Filming locations:

Pyford Court, Ripley, Surrey, England (also in Tales from the Crypt; The Omen)

Wikipedia | IMDb

‘Everything that makes life worth leaving!’

The Vault of Horror is a 1973 British anthology horror film made by Amicus Productions. Like the 1972 Amicus film Tales from the Crypt, it is based on stories from the American EC Comics series written by Al Feldstein. The film was directed by Roy Ward Baker (The Vampire Lovers; Scars of Dracula; Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde) from a screenplay by Milton Subotsky.

None of the stories are actually from Vault of Horror comics. All but one appeared in Tales from the Crypt, the exception being from Shock SuspenStories.

The film is also known as Vault of Horror, Further Tales from the Crypt and Tales from the Crypt II.

Buy: Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Cast:

Terry-Thomas (The Abominable Dr. Phibes; Dr. Phibes Rises Again), Dawn Addams (The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll), Denholm Elliott (To the Devil a Daughter; Hammer House of Horror), Curd Jürgens (The Sleep of Death), Tom Baker (The Mutations; Doctor Who), Michael Craig (Inn of the Damned; Turkey Shoot), Daniel Massey (Shadows of Fear; The Cat and the Canary) and Anna Massey (Frenzy; Haunted).

Framing Story

Five strangers board a descending lift, one by one, in a modern office block in London. They reach the sub-basement, though none of them have pressed for that destination. There they find an elaborately furnished room which appears to be a gentlemen’s club. The lift door has closed and there are no buttons to bring it back, nor any other exit. Resigned to waiting for help, each tells of a recurring nightmare…

Midnight Mess (Tales from the Crypt #35)

Harold Rodgers (Daniel Massey) tracks his sister Donna (Anna Massey) to a strange village and kills her to claim her inheritance. After settling down for a post-murder meal at the local restaurant, he discovers the town is home to a nest of vampires…

The Neat Job (Shock SuspenStories #1)

Obsessively neat Arthur Critchit (Terry-Thomas) marries Eleanor (Glynis Johns), a young trophy wife who is not quite the domestic goddess he hoped for. His constant nagging about the mess she makes eventually drives her mad. Upon his shouting at her, “Can’t you do anything neatly?”, she kills him with a hammer and cuts up the corpse, putting all the different organs into neatly labelled jars.

This Trick’ll Kill You (Tales from the Crypt #33)

Sebastian (Curd Jürgens) is a magician on a working holiday in India, where he and his wife are searching for new tricks. Nothing impresses until he sees a girl (Jasmina Hilton) charming a rope out of a basket with a flute. Unable to work out how the trick is done, he persuades her to come to his hotel room, where he and his wife Inez (Dawn Addams) murder her and steal the enchanted rope. Sebastian plays the flute, and the rope rises; Inez climbs it, only to disappear with a scream…

Bargain in Death (Tales from the Crypt #28)

Maitland (Michael Craig) is buried alive as part of an insurance scam concocted with his friend Alex (Edward Judd). Alex double-crosses Maitland, leaving him to suffocate. Two trainee doctors Tom (Robin Nedwell) and Jerry (Geoffrey Davies) bribe a gravedigger (Arthur Mullard) to dig up a corpse to help with their studies. When Maitland’s coffin is opened, he jumps up gasping for air…

Drawn and Quartered (Tales from the Crypt #26)

Moore (Tom Baker) is an impoverished painter living on Haiti. When he learns that his work has been sold for high prices by dealers and critics who told him that it was worthless, he goes to a voodoo priest and his painting hand is given voodoo power; whatever he paints or draws can be harmed by damaging its image. Returning to London, Moore paints portraits of the three men who cheated him, and mutilates them to exact his revenge…

When the story of the final dream is told, the five ponder the meaning of their nightmares…

Reviews:

“All in all, The Vault of Horror contains enough to warrant repeat viewings. Whilst it is sometimes a product of its time and the film’s twist can be seen from space, it has that strangely comfortable feeling you only get from the output of companies like Amicus and Hammer Horror. It’s like settling down into a cracked leather chair next to a roaring fire with a glass of brandy. It just seems to work.” John Noonan, HorrorNews.net

“Vault of Horror is a great anthology – more camp than Asylum or Tales from the Crypt, but infinitely more enjoyable than the turgid Torture Garden. A surfeit of 70s locations, some great character actors, and a healthy dose of humour don’t hurt, either.” British Horror Films

“Whereas Francis often managed to inject some atmosphere into his Amicus omnibus movies, Baker’s flat direction can’t overcome the lengthy and plodding expository scene, making this the least interesting of the series in spite of the excellent photography and Tony Curtis’s pleasing sets.” Phil Hardy (editor), The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Horror

“Art direction, music and photography are all uniformly impressive, and Roy Ward Baker pulls the directional strings with consummate professionalism. Added to this is a smart line in grim humour (and an amusing in-joke that sees Michael Craig flicking through the paperback tie-in to Tales from the Crypt), which at times succeeds in achieving a little of the EC Comics style…” Allan Bryce, Amicus: The Studio That Dripped Blood

“The first story is the most memorable and Glynis Johns does a wonderful comic turn in the second. The rest of the film has little to offer in the way of thrills.” Gary A. Smith, Uneasy Dreams: The Golden Age of British Horror Films, 1956-1976

” … director Roy Ward Baker goes through the paces in a somewhat workmanlike manner, relying mostly on the writing, editing and performances to carry the stories, with minimal instances of clever staging or stylised atmosphere. This is all the more unfortunate when Baker actually does flex his directorial muscles, as these snippets of visual inspiration call deeper attention to how flat the rest of the film often is. Having said that, it’s still worlds more stylish than Freddie Francis’ uncharacteristically flat direction in most of Crypt.” Mitch Davis, Ten Years of Terror: British Horror Films of the 1970s

Buy: Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Cast and Characters:

• Daniel Massey as Harold Rogers
• Terry-Thomas as Arthur Critchit
• Curd Jürgens as Sebastian
• Michael Craig as Maitland
• Tom Baker as Moore
• Anna Massey as Donna Rogers
• Glynis Johns as Eleanor Critchit
• Dawn Addams as Inez
• Edward Judd as Alex
• Denholm Elliott as Diltant
• Robin Nedwell as Tom
• Geoffrey Davies as Jerry
• Terence Alexander as Fenton Breedley
• John Witty as Arthur Gaskill
• Jasmina Hilton as Indian Girl
• Ishaq Bux as Fakir
• John Forbes-Robertson as Wilson
• Maurice Kaufmann as Bob Dickson
• Arthur Mullard as Gravedigger
• Mike Pratt as Clive
• Marianne Stone as Jane
• Erik Chitty as Old Waiter
• Tommy Godfrey as Landlord
• Jerold Wells as Waiter

Choice dialogue:

Maitland (Michael Craig): “There’s no money in horror.”

Filming locations:

Millbank Tower, London, England

Sheen Lane, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, England
(Where Tom Baker’s character, Moore, hails a taxi)

Twickenham Studios, London, England

Beyond the Vault of Horror:

There is a shot, apparently from the original closing sequence, in which the characters walk to the graveyard with dead, skeletal faces. It may be that this shot has been lost, or was deemed too crude, edited out and used for publicity purposes only. Does anyone know?

Trailer:

Wikipedia | IMDb

Buy original poster from Amazon.com

‘He needed her body and her blood to live!’

Love Brides of the Blood Mummy – original title: El secreto de la momia egipcia – is a 1973 Spanish/French horror film directed by Alejandro Martí [aka Ken Ruder] from a screenplay by Vincent Didier and Julio Salvador (Hannah, Queen of the Vampires). In the UK, it was released as Lips of Blood (not to be confused with Jean Rollin’s film of the same name).

Cast:

George Rigaud, Michael Flynn, Catherine Franck, Frank Braña, Patricia Lee, Sandra Reeves, Julie Presscott, Jacques Bernard, Martin Trévières, Teresa Gimpera.

Plot:

James Barton (Frank Braña), an Egyptologist, travels to Dartmoor Castle because there is a rumour that the Count (Jorge George Rigaud) has a collection of mummies. There are also rumours that a number of young women have gone missing in the area. When he comes across the Count he is shocked to find him whipping a mummified hand he has nailed to the wall…

Reviews:

” … this Spanish/ French adventure is not without its own quirky charms. There is some fondling and the occasional flash of flesh. There are a lot of scenes involving the butler chasing women around. The mummy stares at people a lot. And there is some odd use made of irising in and out of scenes.” Dan Budnik, Bleeding Skull!

“Aside from any nudity found in the uncut version, the only other thing this has going for it is the shooting locations. It was filmed during the Autumn and the outdoor scenery is lovely. There are lots of colorful trees, fields of tall wheat blowing in the wind and some nice shots along the ocean. The director, who seems obsessed with both shooting reflections of people in water and horse riding, has a nice eye for landscapes. Too bad the rest of this sucks.” The Bloody Pit of Horror

“Unfortunately this is one of the dullest pieces of Euro-Horror I have sat through in recent memory. Most of the film is a boring series of repetitive scenes of a kind of hypnotized servant going out to drag female victims back to the castle dungeon for the ‘mummy’ to molest and drain of blood.” Rod Barnett, Pit of Rod

“Unfortunately it is pretty darn boring as well, the pacing is plodding and we don’t really get any characterisation to draw us in.” Taliesen Meets the Vampires

“For an exploitation picture, it feels eerily serious with its strong and creative score, moody with piano and percussion. Pacing is slow, yet something is always happening on screen. I loved the chase through the tall grass … it’s a good weird atmospheric exploitation picture that fans should seek out…” David Elroy Goldweber, Claws & Saucers

Buy: Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Also released as:

Le sang des autres (France)
Les chemins de la violence (France)
Perversions sexuelles (France)

IMDb | Image thanks: The Bloody Pit of Horror | Mark Williams | Taliesen Meets the Vampires | Wrong Side of the Art!

Ghost Eyes – aka 鬼眼 or Gui yan or Gwai Aan – is a 1974 Hong Hong supernatural horror film directed by Chih-Hung Kuei (The Killer Snakes; Hex; Corpse Mania; The Boxer’s Omen) from a screenplay by Yun-wen Chen and Kuang Ni (Human Lanterns; The Nine Demons) for Shaw Brothers.

Cast: 

Szu-Chia Chen, Wei Szu, Wei Tu Lin, Ping Ha, Ching Ho Wang, Mei Hua Chen, Ko Ai Chiang, Li-ju Chang

Reviews:

“The photography is striking, right from the opening credits wherein the camera slowly pulls back from a cackling green skull with glowing eyes. Hong Kong becomes a neon-lit hell on Earth from whence there is no escape. The film has some chilling sequences, including the unmasking of Shi as a rotting ghoul with a grotesque waggling tongue (his jaunty whistle sends genuine shivers down the spine), but too often uses the supernatural to gloss over some plot holes.” Andrew Pragasam, The Spinning Image

“As if to make up for this decided lack in obvious thrills, Gwai provides his film with a visual surface that is glossy and intensely coloured like a comic (or a giallo), and a narrative tone as high-strung as a horror manga by Kazuo Umezu that permanently threatens to spill over into the outright hysteria of the films shock sequences.” The Horror!?

Trailer:

IMDb

Blood and Lace is a 1970 (released March 1971) American horror film directed by Philip Gilbert from a screenplay by co-producer Gil Lasky (Spider Baby; The Night God Screamed). Co-producer Ed Carlin also handled The Evil (1978) and Superstition (1982). In the US, it was distributed by American International Pictures (AIP).

Cast:

Gloria Grahame (Mansion of the Doomed; The Nesting), Melody Patterson, Len Lesser (Ruby; Grandmother’s House), Vic Tayback (Tales from the Darkside; Beverly Hills Bodysnatchers) and Milton Selzer.

Plot:

After her prostitute mother and her client are beaten to death while they are asleep in bed, teen-aged Ellie Masters is sent to an isolated orphanage run by Mrs. Deere and her handyman. Taking an avid interest in her welfare is detective Calvin Carruthers. Taking almost no interest at all, is social worker Harold Mullins who is completely under Mrs. Deere’s thumb.

A number of unpleasant surprises are in store for Ellie, not the least of which is the fact that Mrs. Deere and her handyman are both brutal sadists, who run the orphanage like a concentration camp and the strong possibility that her mother’s hammer-wielding killer is now stalking her…

Reviews:

“Blood and Lace is one helluva fun movie. It’s got unintentional humour, high camp, a teenage cat fight, a few lashings of gore and a bucketful of sleaze. It’s hard to believe that little kids would have been allowed to sit through this twisted tale that takes in the murder of children, pedophilia and incest! Certainly this isn’t hard-core horror but neither is it a Disney flick, either. Gloria Grahame’s performance is probably better than the movie warrants.” Justin Kerswell, Hysteria Lives!

“Of course, Blood and Lace is not for everybody. It’s acting is amateurish in spots, the story and the character’s behavior push credibility often and the whole business is drive-in trashy. The soundtrack, which comes across as random records being played, is the biggest drawback and could possibly be blamed entirely for this movie missing the appreciation that it deserves.” Kindertrauma

“Blood And Lace swipes beauty tips from Blood Freak, procrastinates with Scream, Baby, Scream, and weeps next to an After School Special. In essence, it’s the greatest thing that Donald F. Glut (I Was A Teenage Movie Maker!) and Brad F. Grinter (you know who he is) never collaborated on. Amateurish yet decently budgeted, it’s all sunshine, sloppy edits, bursts of perversion, and ill-suited orchestral bomps (good stuff) backed up against a 30 minute midriff of talking heads and rehashed details (not so good stuff).” Bleeding Skull!

Cast and Characters:

• Gloria Grahame as Mrs.Deere
• Melody Patterson as Ellie Masters
• Milton Selzer as Mr. Mullins
• Len Lesser as Tom Kredge
• Vic Tayback as Calvin Carruthers
• Terri Messina as Bunch
• Ronald Taft as Walter
• Dennis Christopher as Pete
• Peter Armstrong as Ernest
• Maggie Corey as Jennifer
• Mary Strawberry as Nurse
• Louise Sherrill as Edna Masters
• Joe Durkin as Unidentified Man

Choice dialogue:

“I didn’t ask to come to your crummy hospital!”

“All girls tease Bunch, it’s just part of the equipment.”

“Well, evil breeds evil, honey.”

Trailer:

Wikipedia | IMDb | Image thanks: Wrong Side of the Art!

What Have You Done to Solange? – original title: Cosa avete fatto a Solange? – is a 1972 Italian-West German giallo-krimi thriller film directed by Massimo Dallamano (Dorian Gray; What Have They Done to Our Daughters?; The Cursed Medallion) from a screenplay co-written with Bruno Di Geronimo. The film is very loosely based on the Edgar Wallace mystery novel The Clue of the New Pin. It features a score by Ennio Morricone (A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin).

Main cast:

Fabio Testi (Rings of Fear), Karin Baal (Dead Eyes of London; The Monster of Blackwood Castle), Joachim Fuchsberger (The College Girl Murders; The Hand of Power; The Fan/Trance), Cristina Galbó (The House That Screamed; Let Sleeping Corpses Lie), Camille Keaton (I Spit on Your Grave), Günther M. Stoll (The Hunchback of Soho; The Bloodstained Butterfly).

Plot:

A sadistic killer is preying on the girls of St. Mary’s Catholic school. Student Elizabeth witnessed one of the murders, but her hazy recollections of a knife-wielding figure in black do nothing to further the police’s investigations. Why is the killer choosing these young women? And what does it have to do with a girl named Solange?

Buy: Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

On 14th (UK) and 15th (US) of December 2015, Arrow Video release the film on Blu-ray + DVD with the following features:

• Brand new 2K restoration of the film from the original camera negative
• High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentations
• Original Italian and English soundtracks in mono audio (uncompressed PCM on the Blu-ray)
• Newly translated subtitles for the Italian soundtrack
• Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing for the English soundtrack
• Brand new audio commentary with critics Alan Jones and Kim Newman
• Newly filmed cast interviews
• Original Theatrical Trailer
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Malleus – http://www.malleusdelic.com (to be revealed)
• Booklet featuring brand new writing on the film, illustrated with original stills

Reviews:

“The film offers some truly oddball red herrings, sumptuous ‘scope cinematography (courtesy of Aristide Massaccesi aka Joe D’Amato), cheesy subjective camera shots from the killer’s point of view, Morricone’s classy score (alternating between a sanguine main theme and some atonal jazz pieces), authentic London locations and a truly sordid plot … Solange is a great giallo.” Adrian J Smith, Horrorpedia

“What Have You Done to Solange? is a fairly accomplished film that should keep even the most hardened of giallo fanatics guessing until the very end and is worth watching. Indeed, the contrast between rural scenery and violent murder creates interesting images of life and death, and the film is not a simple compilation of murders, a trap that some of the more simplistic gialli fall into.” Flickering Myth

” … director/co-writer Massimo Dallamano opted to tell a coherent story and flesh out his characters, so as a result he doesn’t spend much time on nonsense or drawn out kill scenes. It’s got the random misogyny and gratuitous nudity you’d expect (including a hilarious bit where the cop says “The girls are under surveillance” and then Dallamano cuts to a peeping tom watching the girls shower), but if you go in expecting Argento-y kill scenes you might leave disappointed.” Horror Movie a Day

“In the first half of the film themes of innocence and purity are woven into the fabric of the narrative, and are then subverted in an ironic counterpoint at the conclusion. The film is full of little ironies, and it is able to alight on moments that seem inconsequential because of an incredibly patient and careful method of storytelling.” Shaun Anderson, The Celluloid Highway

“The murder scenes are sometimes beautiful and very stylized in their execution, usually from the point of view of the killer and never really shows much of their body, so it could be either male or female. The film is bloodless in a beautiful way, able to show the brutality of each act without getting overly graphic. The female nudity – and there’s quite a bit – also does not feel that graphic, but rather natural and normal for each situation that it shows up in.” The Girl Who Loves Horror

” … one of the few films of this type that deftly combines sleaze, murders with disturbing sexual components, a whodunit plot, gorgeous cinematography, and characters that actually have depth. And unlike some giallo flicks, it actually makes sense in the end. As icing on the cake, the soundtrack to Solange is among Ennio Morricone’s best work for this style of movie.” Horror Fan Zine

Cast and Characters:

Fabio Testi … Enrico ‘Henry’ Rosseni
Karin Baal … Herta Rosseni
Joachim Fuchsberger … Inspector Barth
Cristina Galbó … Elizabeth Seccles (as Christine Galbo)
Camille Keaton … Solange Beauregard
Günther M. Stoll … Professor Bascombe
Claudia Butenuth … Brenda Pilchard
Maria Monti … Mrs. Erickson
Giancarlo Badessi … Mr. Erickson
Pilar Castel … Janet Bryant
Giovanna Di Bernardo … Helen Edmonds
Vittorio Fanfoni … Enrico’s friend
Antonio Casale … Mr. Newton (as Antony Vernon)
Emilia Wolkowicz … Ruth Holden (as Emilia Wolkowich)
Daniele Micheletti … Mr. Bryant
Rainer Penkert … Mr. Leach, the headmaster
Carla Mancini … Susan, girl in Enrico’s class
Antonio Anelli … Father Herbert
Joe D’Amato … CID officer w / The Daily Telegraph (uncredited)

Filming locations:

Shot in London, England, over the course of six weeks in the autumn of 1971.

Trailer:

German ‘krimi’ trailer:

Previous releases:

When submitted for a UK cinema release as Solange by Meteor Films it was rejected by the BBFC. It was eventually released in the UK on the Redemption video label in 1996 after 2 minutes 15 secs of cuts to edit the bath murder, and heavily reduce shots of nudity and knives between victim’s legs and knees.

The 2002  “uncut” DVD has some scenes in the still and artwork gallery that are not shown in that 2002 video release. These include: more nude shots of Elizabeth’s body (Cristina Galbó); a scene of a topless Solange (Camille Keaton) being visited by the unidentified killer which is very crucial to the plot; the shower scenes are cropped so that the schoolgirls are only shown topless. This does not necessarily mean that those scenes were actually included in the original theatrical release print, so the DVD could be “uncut”.

Buy: Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Alternate titles:

• Das Geheimnis der grünen Stecknadel (Germany)
• Solange (UK)
• Terror in the Woods (USA)
• The School That Couldn’t Scream (USA)
• The Secret of the Green Pins (USA)
• What Have They Done to Solange? (USA)
• What Have You Done to Solange? (UK)
• Who Killed Solange?
• Who’s Next? (UK)
• ¿Qué habéis hecho con Solange? (Spain)
• Que Fizeram a Solange? (Portugal)
• O Que Fizeram a Solange? (Brazil)
• ¿Qué hicieron con Solange? (Argentina)
• ¿Qué le han hecho a Solange? (Peru, Venezuela, Colombia)

Wikipedia | IMDb

Gods & Monsters

Lurid Trumps are a card game based on the fondly remembered Top Trumps of the 1970’s and 1980’s, themselves based on an even older game called Quartets. The third in a series of four covering the so-called Video Nasties films banned in Britain during the 1980’s, the final two sets will cover the Section 3 films – those which were not banned outright but which could still be seized by local authorities and the owners/sellers tried at magistrates courts.

Produced by UK-based company, Gods & Monsters, Lurid Trumps are a card game playable by two or more players. Each player is dealt an equal number of cards from a shuffled pack, keeping the face of the card shielded from prying eyes. From the dealer’s left, each player in turn reads a category and score from their top card – the highest value wins, the winner taking all the cards played in that hand and placing them at the bottom of their stack. The ultimate winner is the player left with the most cards.

The first two series of Video Nasties Lurid Trumps covered the 72 films banned outright as a result of the Video Recordings Act 1984, which required all home released videos to be assessed and rated by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). The 72 films listed by the Director of Public Prosecution (DPP) were each given a rating on their respective cards. The categories are:

Gore Score

Gratuitous Sex

Infamy Level

Nasty Rating

Each is given a rating out of 100 – no one card is impossible to beat. With the first two sets having sold out within days (and now commanding absurdly high prices on internet auction sites), Gods & Monsters have now released the penultimate set, covering the murky world of titles classed as “Section 3”. These films were liable to get a conviction under the lesser section three of the Obscene Publication Act:

3. In section 3(5) of the Video Recordings Act 1984 (exempted supplies), for paragraphs (b) and (c) substitute—

“(b)does not, to any significant extent, depict any of the following—

(i)human sexual activity or acts of force or restraint associated with such activity,

(ii)mutilation or torture of, or other acts of gross violence towards, humans or animals, or

(iii)human genital organs or human urinary or excretory functions, and

This would mean the confiscation and destroying of video tapes ordered by a magistrate but were not considered to be capable of getting a conviction at the High Court – though there were examples of guilty pleas at Magistrates Court.

The list of the Section 3 titles is as follows:

Abducted

Aftermath

The Black Room

Blood Lust

Blood Song

The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll

Brutes and Savages

Cannibal (aka Last Cannibal World)

Cannibals

The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

The Child

Christmas Evil

Communion

Dawn of the Mummy

Dead Kids

Death Weekend

Deep Red

Demented

The Demons (Jess Franco)

Don’t Answer the Phone!

Enter the Devil

The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein

The Evil

The Executioner

Final Exam

Foxy Brown

Friday the 13th

Friday the 13th Part 2

GBH

Graduation Day

Happy Birthday to Me

Headless Eyes

Hell Prison

The Hills Have Eyes

Home Sweet Home

Inseminoid

Invasion of the Blood Farmers

The Killing Hour

The Last Horror Film

The Last Hunter

The Love Butcher

The Mad Foxes

Mark of the Devil

Martin

Massacre Mansion

Mausoleum

Midnight

Naked Fist

The Nesting

The New Adventures of Snow White

Night Beast

Night of the Living Dead

Nightmare City

Oasis of the Zombies

Parasite

Phantasm

Pigs

Prey

Prom Night

Rabid

Rosemary’s Killer (aka The Prowler)

Savage Terror

Scanners

Scream for Vengeance!

Shogun Assassin

Street Killers

Suicide Cult

Superstition

Suspiria

Terror

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

The Thing

Tomb of the Living Dead

The Toy Box

Werewolf Woman

Wrong Way

Xtro

Zombie Holocaust

Zombies Lake

Zombies -Dawn Of The Dead

As with the previous sets, the cover card will feature a key figure in the history of the Video Nasties saga: following in the footsteps of Mary Whitehouse (Series 1) and former BBFC zealot James Ferman (Series 2), Series 3 will feature Graham Bright, an MP who was particularly outspoken about films he’s never actually seen, going as far to suggest that some of the films had the power to even corrupt innocent dogs who may be watching! Having been made a Sir (British democracy at its finest?), keen dog-protector Bright is now a highly-paid Cambridgeshire Police and Crime Commissioner, although he finds it difficult to attend meetings that finish “too late in the evening”…

”They exist on the flesh of the young and beautiful’

The Ghost Galleon – original title: El Buque maldito – is a 1974 Spanish supernatural horror film written and directed by Amando de Ossorio (Tombs of the Blind Dead, Night of the Seagulls, Demon Witch Child).

In the US, the film was released by Sam Sherman’s Independent-International as Horror of the Zombies. It stars Jack Taylor (Night of the Sorcerers), Maria Perschy and Bárbara Rey.

Plot:

A pair of swimsuit models are out in a boat to stage a publicity stunt by appearing to be stranded. They discover a mysterious galleon shrouded in mist and board it. When contact is lost, the wealthy and unscrupulous businessman who sent them out decides to mount his own rescue mission and abducts one of the models’ friends. The abducted girl makes an unsuccessful escape attempt. The businessman and his secretary recruit an eccentric scholar to assist them in their search for the missing models and their boat.

Unfortunately, the phantom galleon carries the coffins of the Knights Templar, eyeless living dead beings who hunt humans by sound…

Reviews:

“The entire first half plays out as a wonderfully suspenseful set piece in which the Blind Dead gradually make themselves known, whilst he even manages a nice little twist at the film’s closing even as he fluffs the ending. Indeed, The Ghost Galleon may not be the best example of a Blind Dead movie, but it’s by no means a major disappointment. ” Anthony Nield, The Digital Fix

“although the essential ingredients of de Ossorio’s tried recipe are present, … here they aren’t as well exploited as the first two movies.” Peter Dendle, Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide

“The Ghost Galleon is a very nicely shot film, and the sequences on the ship are a nice fit with Amando de Ossorio’s taste for the eerie and atmospheric. The Templars themselves look great, although the miniature effects are ridiculous, looking almost as if the ship had been yanked out of a box of Fruity Pebbles and dropped in a bathtub.” Adam Tyner, DVD Talk

“The first hour is somewhat slow, with the running time including posing sessions with the models and a rather incongruous scene in which the megalomaniacal magnate holds the model’s roommate hostage in a dungeon-like chamber … The atmospheric scenes aboard the decrepit galleon (long shots of which obviously are of a model ship, unfortunately) are genuinely creepy and may have been borrowed by John Carpenter for The Fog (1980).” TV Guide

Buy: Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Cast and Characters:

• Maria Perschy as Lillian
• Jack Taylor as Howard Tucker
• Bárbara Rey as Noemi
• Carlos Lemos as Professor Grüber
• Manuel de Blas as Sergio
• Blanca Estrada as Kathy
• Margarita Merino as Lorena Kay

Choice dialogue:

Female photographer: “C’mon Greta, lean back and stick them out.”

Lillian (Maria Perschy): “I think he’s seen too many horror films.”

Trailer (as The Ghost Galleon):

Trailer (as Horror of the Zombies):

Wikipedia | IMDb

‘Here comes Trog. You’ll laugh at yourself for being so scared… but don’t laugh at Trog.’

Trog is a 1970 British science fiction horror film directed by Freddie Francis (The Vault of Horror; Craze) from a screenplay by Peter Bryan, John Gilling (The Plague of the Zombies), and Aben Kandel.

The project was originally developed by Tony Tenser at Tigon Films then sold to Herman Cohen (I Was a Teenage Werewolf; Horrors of the Black Museum). It stars Joan Crawford (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?; Strait-Jacket), Michael Gough, Bernard Kay, Kim Braden.

The film is listed in Golden Raspberry Award founder John Wilson’s book The Official Razzie Movie Guide as one of ‘The 100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made’.

Plot:

Doctor Brockton (Joan Crawford) discovers that a troglodyte is alive in the caves of the British countryside. She gets the creature to the surface and attempts to train him, but runs into trouble as a few people oppose this, especially a local businessman afraid of negative commercial consequences, Sam Murdock (Michael Gough). Murdock frees the creature, leading to a rampage…

Reviews:

“There is, however, a rudimentary virtue in Trog… in that it proves that Joan Crawford is grimly working at her craft. Unfortunately, the determined lady, who is fetching in a variety of chic pants suits and dresses, has little else going for her.” The New York Times

“Trog is truly ungodly. The performances are rotten, the Trog makeup is so bad it looks, at times, like it will slide right off the actor’s face, and everything proceeds at a snail’s pace to idiotic situations. It’s really sad to see such a huge star [Crawford] be consigned to the Z-grade abyss of films like this. But, hey, a girl’s gotta eat.” Ned Daigle, Bad Movie Night

Buy: Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

“The worst horror movies are those that don’t understand their own absurdity. Trog!, on the other hand, understands it all too well.” RogerEbert.com

The dinosaur sequence was stock footage from the movie The Animal World (1956)

Cast:

• Joan Crawford as Dr. Brockton
• Michael Gough as Sam Murdock
• Bernard Kay as Inspector Greenham
• Kim Braden as Anne Brockton
• David Griffin as Malcolm Travers
• John Hamill as Cliff
• Thorley Walters as Minister
• Jack May as Dr. Selbourne
• Geoffrey Case as Bill
• Simon Lack as Colonel Vickers
• David Warbeck as Alan Davis

Trailer:

Wikipedia | IMDb | Worst Horror Films of All-Time