Double Shadows: The Shadow - The Case of the Cotton Kimona (Charles F. Haas, 1954); Invisible Avenger (James Wong Howe, Ben Parker and John Sledge, 1958)

"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?  The Shadow knows!"

Created in 1931 by jobbing pulp writer, crossword puzzle setter and magician (now that's a heck of an eclectic resume!) Walter Brown Gibson, the beak-nosed and behatted Shadow is a veritable legend of pulp noir detective stories and very much a proto superhero with his secret identity - actually secret identities, plural: this guy was presenting multiple personas decades before Steven Grant and Jake Lockley were even a gleam in Marc Spector's fractured mind's eye -  and instantly recognisable costume for tackling crime.  Initially merely an introductory voiceover for radio's Detective Story Hour, the mysterious Shadow was soon evolved into a character in his own right when Gibson was hired to flesh out this enigmatic raconteur of 'tec tales with a backstory and modus operandi all of his own.

Debuting on the 31st of July 1930 as the narrating character, the Shadow was initially voiced by James La Curto but soon the role was taken over by Frank Readick Junior whose vocal talents made the character a popular sensation - both men would alternate turns over the following couple of years.  Meanwhile in the world of pulp fiction, Gibson was cranking out stories at a rate of knots - beginning with the debut text story The Living Shadow on the 1st of April 1931, he would pen 282 Shadow tales over the following two decades.  These novellas - all written under the in-house pen name of 'Maxwell Grant', used by Gibson and other authors alike - would fill in the fictional background of the mysterious crime fighter known as the Shadow: his original and true identity as First World War pilot Kent Allard who, after faking his own death in a plane crash, returns to New York City to fight crime on the streets as a masked - well, scarfed - vigilante.  With a brace of alternative identities such as wealthy playboy Lamont Cranston, business maven Henry Arnaud and a learning disabled janitor named Fritz who mops up at NYPD HQ (handy for surreptitious information gathering) and with a cadre of collaborators and informants including socialite Margo Lane (huh, a dual-identity hero having a female sidekick / romantic interest with the surname 'Lane'?  That might just  catch on... indeed, Philip Jose Harmer's Wold Newton universe postulates Lois and Margo Lane as sisters), cabbie Moe 'Shrevvy' Shrevnitz and police Commissioner Ralph Weston at his disposal and clad in his iconic slouch hat and red-lined opera cloak over a dark double-breasted suit and armed with a pair of Colt .45 pistols and an array of stage magician's tricks and illusions to baffle and distract his prey: the criminal scum that the rain fails to wash from the city - he is the Shadow.

Who, of course, knows.

While the stories continued in the pulps, the character's radio days were entering a purple patch as the Shadow went from mere introductory narrator of tales to main character, with the gravelly tones of a young Orson Welles (Unicron himself, fellow philistines!) incarnating the role.  The programme began on the 26th of September 1937 with 'The Death House Rescue' and as well as Welles as Cranston / the Shadow (like many future adaptations into other media, Lamont Cranston became the character's real name, rather than one of many adopted identities) the show starred Bewitched's Endora Agnes Moorehead - who was followed by the more name-appropriate Margot Stevenson - as Margo(t) Lane; apparently it's spelled 'Margot' for the radio character, as if you can hear a silent 't' on an audio medium.  The radio series was in fact the origin and debut for Lane, who was swiftly incorporated into the pulp stories' continuum.  It was over the UHF airwaves that the Shadow gained "the power to cloud men's minds", learned from Yogi mystics in India, rendering himself effectively invisible to his enemies until about to strike - this being conveyed by the voice of Welles and subsequent Shadow players having an effect overlaid when he switched from Cranston to the Shadow.

After numerous big-screen attempts (including the awesomely-named Rod La Roque in 1937's The Shadow Strikes and the following year's sequel International Crime, Victor Jory - The Man Who Turned to Stone himself! - in the eponymously-titled 1940 Columbia Pictures chapter serial, and Spy Smasher Kane Richmond in a 1946 Monogram made trilogy), it was surely television's turn.   The Case of the Cotton Kimona is the better-known and more distinctive title for the more prosaic The Shadow, a 1954 pilot for a projected Shadow television series. Written by prolific radio Shadow scribe Peter Barry, whose most recent script for the wireless show aired mere months before the shooting of the pilot, we meet Lamont Cranston (British export Tom Helmore, a familiar face on U.S. screens both big and small in the '50s and '60s) who is here portrayed as a criminal psychologist on retainer to the NYPD, called in - along with his trusty confederate Margot (yes, with the 't') Lane (Paula Raymond, of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms [Eugene Lourie, 1953] and Blood of Dracula's Castle [Al Adamson, 1969]) - by Commissioner Weston (Frank M. Thomas) to investigate the mysterious murder of a young woman (Peggy Lobbin, who would go on to provide English dub voices for the original Ultraman)  who was shot in a kimono.  I mean, she was shot by an unknown assassin in the doorway of her apartment whilst wearing a kimono, which everyone insists on referring to as a 'kimona'.

So Cissy from Springfield is slain at the scene (that would be some much more satisfying if her name were spelled 'Sissy', a la Spacek, but it isn't and so stands as proof that we live in an imperfect universe), though not of course by the Springfield Slasher; Mr Frederick Krueger wouldn't be plying his razor-gloved trade in that town for at least a decade.  Cranston and Lane, ever partners in crime, are soon investigating Cissy's death, with the hindering 'help' of newly-arrived in town Springfield detective Harris (Norman Shelly) who seems possessed of an obsessive interest with the murder of his home town girl.  The focus of Harris's harassment is Cissy's boyfriend Alex Bromm (William Smithers, another familiar face who I instantly recognised from episodes of Star Trek and Spider-Man), who repeatedly denies involvement in finalising his fiancee but Harris is absolutely driven and determined to pin the rap on him.  Almost suspiciously so.

Lamont and Margot (who he addresses, charmingly, as "Milady" at one point) aren't entirely convinced and follow up another lead - that of Cissy's impressively-named music teacher Professor Rollo Grimbauer (Alexander Scourby).  When an initial questioning proves fruitless, Cranston returns later that evening as the Shadow, his mind-clouding invisibility conveyed by a strobing key light and his disembodied echoing voice:

"You can't lie to me!  The Shadow knows!"

After Grimbauer is shot dead before giving up his information and Bromm is fit up by Harris for not only Cissy's murder but that of the clerk in the store where the weapon was purchased, Cranston figures out that the rogue detective was dangerously obsessed with the girl from Springfield and killed her when she knocked him back for the patsy Bromm.  Getting to Margot just in time after she comes to the same conclusion and is about to be capped by the killer cop, the Shadow makes a dramatically disarming entrance - "The fear of retribution in men's minds... I am justice!" - to disarm the disgraced detective and bring him in.

Helmore is a perfectly acceptable Cranston / The Shadow, even if he's a little long in the tooth - and moustache - for the part, and Raymond makes for an appropriately elegant and beautiful Margot despite getting relatively little to do. In all, it's certainly an interesting relic to watch, but not a great surprise that a regular series never resulted; whether that's due to an unprepossessing script or some ideas conveying better on print and audio than film is perhaps up for debate.

Four years later in 1958, Invisible Avenger came together (can you see the joins?) as a combination of two prospective pilots made as a second abortive attempt to get a Shadow television series off the ground.  This Frankenstein-ing together results in a 'film' with three directors: James Wong Howe (one of his few directorial credits, but an Oscar-winning cinematographer and pioneer of camera techniques whose resume includes everything from Tod Browning's Mark of the Vampire to John Frankenheimer's Seconds), Ben Parker (disappointingly not Spider-Man's uncle) and John Sledge, though only Wong Howe and Sledge receive an on-screen accreditation.

Also going by the alternate title of Bourbon Street Shadows, denoting the relatively exotic New Orleans setting, the film begins - and indeed end, the identical scenes bookend the piece quite nicely as well as giving the feeling of the eternal return or ewige wiederkunft; perhaps the Shadow has always been here and will be again - with a shot of crepuscular nighttime lamplit streets with a shadow moving along the wall.  Is this just a shadow or the Shadow ("What am I, but a shadow of a Shadow?" as the Drakh said to Londo Mollari)?  The question is answered by the echoing refrain of his trademark catchphrase, ensuring that we as well as he definitely know.

Way down in Louisiana, down in New Orleans we are introduced to Felicia Ramirez (Jeanne Naher) and her father Pablo (Dan Mullin) through jazz musician Tony Alcalde (Steve Dano) who is meeting them in the Famous Door jazz club.  Pablo's brother - apparently his identical twin brother, since when we see him later he's also played by Mullin, and for some reason sporting the same surely fake oddly-cropped beard as both characters - and Felicia's uncle Victor is, we are told, the rightful ruler of their Latin American home country whose role as El Presidente has been usurped by the Generailissimo (Magnificooo!) and these exiles on Bourbon Street are attempting to plot and action a popular uprising to restore the Ramirez family to their rightful status and supplant the military junta that has taken a stranglehold on Santa Cruz.  When Tony leaves the table to place a telephone tip-off to Lamont Cranston (Richard Derr, star of George Pal's classic When Worlds Collide) in New York, he has little time to convey many of these facts before being assassinated by villainous henchman Rocco (Leo Bruno).  Talk about your call being cut off.

Cranston and his faithful telepathic 'Asian' servant - this adventure supplies him with his very own Kato, presumably in a nod to the character's abilities being taught by a 'Yogi priest' at the Temple of the Cobra, though at least Burt Kwouk was actually Asian and not a clearly Caucasian actor in makeup with a questionable accent - Jogendra (Mark Daniels, in his penultimate role; his final film would coincidentally be 1964's Felicia) try to make sense of Tony's dying clue about 'Tara'.  Could it be a hint about Scarlett O' Hara's plantation?  Or maybe a planet of lifelike androids once visited by Doctor Who*?  No, of course not.  It's a reference to the jazz club's proprietress Tara O' Neill (former child actress and star of Abbott and Costello meet Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Monster on the Campus and Tales of Frankenstein [on which...] Helen Westcott).  Taking a flight to the Big Easy, Cranston's arrival at New Orleans airport plays out very like Bond's in Jamaica in Dr No four years later - tracked by the villains and met by a treacherous fake driver, in this case Charlie (Sam Page).

Rocking up to the Famous Door, Cranston attempts to inveigle himself into the swinging scene by dropping some scat talk to Tara.  No you dirty buggers, not like that - we (sadly) don't get any coprophilia or Cleveland steamers here.  This does not impress Rocco, who - like Johnny - hates jazz (so much for Rocco's modern life.  No wait, that was a wallaby, not a hep cat) but Tara thinks that our man Lamont is "a good lookin' hunk o' man" but advises him to go back North and look for love in a cold climate.  Clearly a Nancy Mitford fan.  Rocco and his boss, a man known only as 'the Colonel' (Lee Edwards), make an attempt on Cranston via 'swatting' i.e.: hitting him with a car, but a psychic message from Jogendra allows him to dodge the rogue Dodge (it probably isn't, I don't know American cars) in the nick of time.

Adopting his Shadowy invisible persona, Cranston makes contact with Felicia and her father and together they discover that uncle Victor is in fact a traitorous turncoat working with the Generalissimo's regime and attempting to stifle the coup and arrest and deal with dissenters and dissidents in a deadly fashion.  With the Shadow's help the quisling is conquered and the story concludes with Pablo being hailed as the new El Presidente and vowing to restore justice and democracy as he returns to Santa Cruz with his daughter.  Bye Felicia!

A decent story and at just under an hour more room to breathe than the brief and brisk Case of the Cotton Kimona, Invisible Avenger is hampered by a weak link in the lead: Derr is acceptable if a bit workmanlike as Cranston but his Shadow fails to fully convince, the muffled echo placed on his voice making him sound like he's gargling the lines from the bottom of a well.  No Margo(t) either, so minus points there.  But there's some decent action and it's certainly decently directed, as one would expect with James Wong Howe calling at least some of the shots.  Shame that the only available copy is of such ropey quaility really. 

The Shadow would have another go at the silver screen in 1994 between other period superhero revivals The Rocketeer and The Phantom ("SLAM EVIL!" indeed) with another eponymous entry helmed by Russell Mulcahy of giant swine terror flick Razorback and duelling immortals fest Highlander; starring Alec Baldwin as Cranston (I do hope that there was a competent arms specialist on set) and Penelope Ann Miller as a newly-telepathic Margo - not a 't' to be seen here - Lane who team up to contend with the menacing Temujin descendant Shiwan Khan (John Lone, The Last Emperor himself; appropriate as 'Pu Yi' was something like the critics' reaction to the film on release) and his plot to detonate a slightly anachronistic nuclear bomb in New York City.  Penned by genre stalwart David Koepp, the '94 movie mixes elements of the original pulps such as the lead character's multiplicity of identities and the iconic design replete with wide-brimmed hat and scarf and beaked nose - Baldwin sporting a prosthetic conk to look the spitting image of the original illustrations with edgy and stylised '30s period dialogue.  Alas, once again it failed to result in any follow-ups.  A Shadow filmic franchise really seems - La Roque's duology and Richmond's trilogy aside - doomed to not happen.  As to why, who knows?

The Shadow knows.

(*Please don't come at me with comments like "Actually, I think you'll find the character is called 'The Doctor'".  I've been watching Doctor Who since I was three years old - that's over four decades now, and you don't even get that for murder - and he / she / they are called Doctor Who.  Deal with it.)

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror ([Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens] F. W. Munrau, 1922)

"And when he had crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him."

With Robert Eggers' acclaimed new iteration/interpretation (I refuse to use the word 'reimagining' seriously; was it Tim Burton who started that with his 2001 Planet of the Apes?  The film that may as well have had the tagline "you'll believe a chimp can be sexy"?) of Nosferatu - the third recitation of the decrepit revenant Count Orlok's macabre machinations after the 1922 original and Werner Herzog's masterful 1979 remake - due out on December 25th 2024 - at least in the States, here in the old country we have to wait 'til New Year's Day but at least that's U2's best song so there's some solace to be found in that I suppose - (someone needs to get the hashtag #NosferatuIsAChristmasMovie trending, if it hasn't been done already), I thought it was high time to go back ("back, back to the beginning!" as Morbius roared to the Fourth Doctor as he previewed the Timeless Child storyline back in the day) to the source of this particular sanguineous rivulet that runs like an offshoot from Bram Stoker's 1897 Dracula and flows out to its own delta of delicious devilment.

Now, it's very likely that anyone reading a blog like this has at least a passing familiarity with Nosferatu's history, but allow me for the sake of exposition and clarity to infantilise you - like a businessman who pays good money on a weekend to be dressed in a nappy, breast-fed and spanked.  No kink-shaming or judgement here.

Stoker's tome of terror had, as said, been published in 1897 and swiftly went on to be performed live on stage as a dramatic reading organised by the author himself in his day to day workplace of London's Lyceum Theatre on the 18th of May that same year, during which the establishment's principal star - and the man whose physiognomy Stoker had used for the physical description of the vampire Count - Henry Irving had declared the text to be "Dreadful!".  This criticism notwithstanding, the novel would be adapted into a fully-fledged theatrical (as in on stage live as it's performed, rather than in the American sense where they really mean 'cinematic') production by actor-producer Hamilton Deane which began a wildly successful tour in Derby in 1924 and would in turn be transferred to Broadway (with an Americanised, or rather 'Americanized' script by John L. Balderston) in 1927 for a run starring Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi that would run for 261 performances to packed houses of enraptured audiences and lead to Universal's immortal yet stagey 1931 classic movie.  

But during the in-between days, the lacuna betwixt the staged reading of the novel and the first professional and official acted rendition there crawled from the dark heart of Europe in 1922 the wholly unofficial and unauthorised first film adaptation (though not the first Dracula film, as in a film featuring the character of Dracula, the now lost Hungarian flick Dracula's Death [or Drakula halala] directed by Karoly Lathjay and co-scripted by future Hollywood maven Michael Curtiz emerging a year earlier in 1921, though this unrelated tale of a visitor to an asylum for the insane seeing visions of the Count is certainly an atypical entry in the canon).  Directed by cinematic pioneer Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau who would go on to helm classics such as The Last Laugh (1924), Faust (1926) and Sunrise (1927), Nosferatu would dodge paying Florence Stoker - widow of Bram Stoker and executor of his literary estate - for the rights to Dracula forcing Murnau and screenwriter Henrik Galeen to come up with their own (albeit barely disguised) spin on the tale of terror.

Murnau, who had previously tried to circumvent copyright on Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde [and see here for more on early adaptations of that tale) by simply changing the names of the protagonist's alter egos to Dr Warren and Mr O'Connor in the now sadly lost - like many of the twenty one films in his canon - 1920 Der Januskopf.  The dual role was essayed by Conrad Veidt who in your correspondent's humble opinion would have made a fine screen Dracula, and in fact was Universal head Carl Laemmle's pick to play the role (after Veidt's turn as the Joker-inspiring Gwynplaine in Paul Leni's 1928 The Man Who Laughs) subsequent to the loss of Lon Chaney Sr., firstly to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and then to the cold grip of Thanatos due to throat cancer - other actors such as Victor Jory, Ian Keith and William Courtney also being taken under consideration before Lugosi successfully lobbied for the role.

"Freely adapted" by Galeen, as the credits phrase it, Nosferatu like Der Januskopf attempts a "not Dracula, honest guv!" veil by giving the characters different names; so we are introduced to solicitor Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim), our Jonathan Harker analogue and Ellen, his wife (called Nina in some prints, rather giving the Mina game away, played by Greta Schroeder) as our distaff Mina Murray-Harker combined with Lucy Westenra who dwell in the town of Wisborg (the filming location was the similarly-named real world city of Wismar as well as Lubeck) in the year 1838.  True to the usual versions of the story, Hutter is sent on a mission to deepest, darkest Transylvania (represented by location filming in Slovakia including Orava Castle for Orlok's damned demesne, a location later used for the Count's citadel in Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss's rendition) by his employer, the bizarre and eccentric estate agent Knock (Alexander Granach) - a strange hobgoblin of a man with whom the vampire client Count Orlok communicates in letters containing esoteric Kabbalistic signs and Enochian symbols.  These pictograms reflect the producer Albin Grau's esoteric inclinations; Grau was responsible for set designs and props including the Orlok/Knock correspondence and imbue the sinister characters with a feeling of an ancient and dreadful power - Orlok is as much a sorcerer (Orlok the Warlock?) as a vampire.  This calls to mind the mentions of the Scholomance from Dracula - the hidden school of witchcraft hidden among the peaks of the Carpathians wherein the Count trained as a Solomani, something that also finds a modern echo in in the 2024 version (2025 if you're in the UK, due to what the TV guide used to call "regional variations").

Leaving the distraught Ellen with Harding, a ship owner and the Hutters' neighbour (Georg Heinrich Schnell) and Ruth, his sister (Ruth Landshoff, in a similar fashion to the way Hammer's 1958 version makes Lucy Arthur Holmwood's sister) and takes the familiar journey to Transylvania, a land replete with fearful peasants dwelling within inns warning travelers to beware the castle on the hill so familiar after a century of entries in the Universal and Hammer canon and derivatives thereof.  In this land of phantoms, gods, monsters and werewolves that look suspiciously like striped hyenas, Hutter finds himself swept through a negative-tinted landscape at unbelievable inhuman speed - for the dead travel fast; it's interesting that these days one might depict a terrifying supernatural journey with slow motion, as Herzog did in the '79, rather than the opposite - to come face to monstrous visage with the Count. 

 Max Schreck's Orlok is certainly not the suave and slick bloodsucker familiar to audiences now and exemplified by the likes of Lugosi, Lee and Langella and first introduced in the form of Lord Ruthven (pronounced 'Rivven' - yes, I've been mentally mispronouncing it for decades too) in Polidori's The Vampyre, but a truly folkloric vampire.  Stoker's Irving-inspired Count may have been portrayed as noble of brow with a strong aquiline nose, but Orlok is a of rodentine, reptilian race apart from humanity; with a skull-like head from which protrude pointed ears and central incisor teeth - which make more sense for his diet than the now-traditional canines - and overgrown talons for fingernails like the pointed fingers of the nocturnal aye-aye, he certainly seems more animal than man, the lone surviving embodiment of an ancient race, the very seed of the daemon Belial rather than Stoker's moustached undead nobleman that inspired other embodiments including Bill Skarsgard in Eggers' film.  Orlok certainly appears every inch the disease-bearing beast, which brings us to the derivation/etymology of "nosferatu" - whether it comes from the Greek nosophoros meaning 'plague carrier', or Romanian nesuferitul signifying 'the unsufferable one', he fulfils both remits, his black shadow of death spreading across Europe like the mediaeval Black Death or the (then extremely, uncomfortably recent) Great War.

The vampire dwells in a realm of dreams and nightmares, a shadow land beyond life and death, and perhaps represents our shadow selves.  The eldritch thing that is Orlok himself may be Ellen Hutter's animus - in the Jungian sense, the masculine part of her, as well as the other sense of ill-feeling or ill-will; their deep and primordial destructive attraction for each other resulting in their mutual destruction.  Murnau plays up the shadow of the vampire (arf!) with some real Expressionistic shadowplay: the iconic shot of Orlok ascending the staircase to his and Ellen's terminal conflagration in flagrante delicto (taking the sexual term of le petit mort, "the little death" to its literal apogee) is one of the most recognisable in horror cinema if not cinema in toto.

As it turned out, the attempts to skirt copyright (despite actually crediting Bram Stoker in the title credits!) resulted in Stoker's widow Florence suing Prana Film into bankruptcy and gaining a court order to have all copies of the film destroyed.  Whatever the legal rights and wrongs though, thankfully for us lovers of the macabre some copies slipped through the net and survived (and yet a perfectly legal film like London After Midnight [for more on which...] didn't, such are the vagaries of the fickle finger of Fate) and to this day 103 years later - a vampiric lifespan - we can thrill to the chills of Orlok creeping through the darkness of German Expressionism to feast on our life's blood.

Or maybe just flick our lightswitch on and off.

Oh, Nosferatu!

THE JOHN SAXON BLOGATHON: Night Caller from Outer Space (John Gilling, 1965) [for 6th to 8th December, 2024]

Look, I'm just fashionably late, as per, okay?

So there I was peeking in at Xitter after having taken a long hiatus both from social media and quite frankly the world, when I espied amidst my many notifications (actually, cards on the table, there were fewer missed notifications than I expected; I was clearly not as missed as I'd liked to imagine.  Boy, is my ego bruised) a Tweet - or Xeet or whatever they're called now - putting out the word that another Blogathon was underway care of Barry from Barry Cinematic and Gill from Weemidgetreviews and that the subject of this one was none other than the late great and legendary John Saxon.

Having participated in the Blogathons in the past - my contribution to the Vincent Price one a while back, 1958's The Fly, can be found here - I thought I'd quite like to get involved; the down side being that coming to it a bit late meant that the more obvious options would have already been nabbed: stuff like Black Christmas, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Enter the Dragon will have been long gone.  Somebody had probably already bid for My Mom's a Werewolf and Blood Beach as well.  I've no idea if From Dusk Till Dawn would count, but putting a bid in for that one would have been a laugh, even if his small cameo may have gone against the spirit of the thing.  Can't be going against the spirits: that would be like Rush going against the spirit of radio.  Spirits are for drinking.  This is why optics are important - they're where the spirits come out of.

Anyway...

The artist known to the world as John Saxon was born Carmine Orrico in Brooklyn in August 1936, scion of a New Yorker father of Italian descent and a Calabrian mother and raised in a household where Italian was the primary spoken language.  Signed to a contract with Universal Studios in 1954 at the tender age of 17, the newly-Christened John Saxon (it being the style of the time for studios and managers to give young stars Hollywood-style names, hence Roy Scherer Jr becoming Rock Hudson, Norman Rambeau transformed into Dack Rambo, Francis McCown gaining the moniker of Rory Calhoun and Arthur Kelm being reinvented as Tab Hunter - all given their new identities, like Saxon, by agent Henry Willson) went on to gain teen idol status starring alongside such luminaries as Mamie Van Doren and Sandra Dee (who was not actually "lousy with virginity", despite what Grease tells us) throughout the '50s.  After expanding into the genres of neo-noir, Westerns and war movies, Saxon got his first taste of the horror genre when, after travelling to Italy in 1962 to make the drama Agostino for director Mauro Bolognini, friend Leticia Roman asked him if he would like to co-star with her in what he thought she he had described as an "art film".  Presumably expecting to be working with Fellini or Visconti, Saxon discovered that he had misunderstood Roman's accented way of saying "horror film" and that he'd signed up for the pioneering giallo movie The Girl Who Knew Too Much (La ragazza che sapeva troppo) for genre auteur Mario Bava - possibly a more prestigious name than Federico or Luchino for us fans of the macabre.

After taking the lead role in 1964 adventure The Cavern for director Edgar G. Ulmer, the man behind such classics as 1934's The Black Cat and 1944's Bluebeard, and completing Filipino-filmed war picture The Ravagers under Eddie Romero of Mad Doctor of Blood Island exploitation infamy Saxon's next assignment would take him to merry old England to make the subject of our discussion.  Released variously as The Night Caller (its original title, not to be confused with the recent Channel 5 Sean Pertwee and Robert Glenister drama of the same name), the slightly more explicit and less elliptical Night Caller from Outer Space and its more ostentatious U.S. distribution title of Blood Beast from Outer Space.  The film was directed by John Gilling, a veteran who had already overseen genre fare such as 1956's Anglo-American co-pro The Gamma People and the 1960 Burke and Hare-inspired The Flesh and the Fiends as well as many works for the illustrious Hammer Studios like the 1961 chiller Shadow of the Cat and 1962 adventure romp The Pirates of Blood River - and would go on in future to helm Hammer horrors The Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile (shot back-to-back in 1966) and The Mummy's Shroud (1967) before ending his career on high horror note with 1975's Iberian iteration The Devil's Cross (El cruz de diablo), an unofficial fifth entry in the Blind Knights Templar series initiated by Amando de Ossorio (further unofficial follow-ups exist, such as this) with a script by El Hombre Lobo himself Jacinto Molina  - such a shame that he had also made the low point of Bela Lugosi's career (yes, even more of a nadir than his work with Ed Wood), 1952's Old Mother Riley meets the Vampire, which I can only gesture towards explaining to modern audiences as Mrs Brown's Boys with a slumming Dracula in it.  Only that sounds fun, and it really isn't.

We begin with our intrepid team of boffin Dr Morley (Maurice Denham, who for all his solid career will forever best be known to me as renegade Time Lord Azmael in Colin Baker's sadly execrable debut 'The Twin Dilemma') and his assistants Dr Jack Costain (our man Saxon, fulfilling the role of the American import a la Brian Donlevy or Dean Jagger in this Quatermass-like - or maybe Quatermass-lite, if that's not throwing shade - scenario) and Ann Barlow (Patricia Haines. ex-Mrs Michael Caine [not a lot of people know that... they probably do] and stalwart of '60s and '70s TV such as Danger Man, The Avengers, Department S and Randall and Hopkirk, who sadly departed this harsh realm all too young aged 45 from lung cancer) as they are tracking what appears to be a meteorite entering Earth orbit, a la Quatermass II or Doctor Who's 'Spearhead from Space', before which we launch into the title sequence which - at least in the version I watched - features a crooning Mark Richardson rather than the original Alan Haven instrumental track.  The team go out on location to the site of the space object's landing, where they encounter a military team comprised of John Carson from Taste the Blood of Dracula as the Major, with the posh slur of James Mason, and Jack Watson as one of his sergeants; Saxon adrift in a sea of recognisable British faces of the small and silver screens - possibly moderating his accent to fit in?  He at least seems to be toning it down a little, even if he's not attempting a 'British accent' (whatever that is).

The object in question turns out to be a small football-sized sphere comprised of some type of carbon, which - after being cleared that the radiation being picked up by the Geiger counters is merely negligible stuff picked up as the orb passed through the Van Allen belt - they take back to their home base of Falsley Park (not, unfortunately, Paisley Park; much as the late His Purpleness Prince Rogers Nelson may well have been an alien) for study.  After Ann stays behind late to finish up her report and is menaced by a malevolent presence that appears in the lab after the globe glows a bit, resulting in a clawed reptilian-looking hand reaching for her around the door, Morley concludes that the object is a receptacle for a matter transmitter: what Mr Spock would call a transporter and Brundlefly might call a telepod.  Morley maintains that he should go on there alone and try to make contact, all miked up by the army men and insisting that no-one come in to attempt to rescue him no matter what they might hear, much to Costain's chagrin, and shortly comes a cropper at the taloned hands of the unseen invader who disappears into the night.

With Morley's Reginald Tate-flavoured Quatermass deceased, Costain steps up to the mark as his Donlevy/Jagger replacement.  Teaming up with Scotland Yard's Superintendent Hartley (another familiar 1969s British face, the Public Eye himself Alfred Burke), who swiftly becomes his Watson-cum-Lestrade, the pair are investigating some twenty-odd cases (yes, I should have taken more extensive notes whilst watching) of missing young women - obviously we've had a bit of a time jump in the narrative, and our alien boy has been busy - all connected to replying to an advertisement for modelling work in Bikini Girl magazine.  Seriously, we've gone from Quatermass sci-fi horror to Her Private Hell sexploitation sleaze.  I do approve. 

Following up on these ads placed by the mysterious Mr Medra (Robert Crewdson, dubbed with the voice of Robert Rietty - whose vocal talents grace many a film including being the original voice of Ernst Stavro Blofeld in From Russia with Love and Thunderball), who has traveled all the way across space to lurk around Soho taking pictures of girls: 'From Ganymede with Lust'?, Costain and Hartley are ably assisted by Hartley's compatriot Detective Grant (Stanley Meadows).  Allowing Ann to go undercover as a prospective model to infiltrate Medra's operation, via his seedy associate Thorburn (Aubrey Morris, another seemingly omnipresent UK genre face who's been in everything from Blood from the Mummy's Tomb to The Wicker Man to Babylon 5) our heroes and imperiled heroine discover that Medra's plan is to repopulate his war-torn world - or moon, if we're been finicky - with human females as they're running rather low on the ladies.  Ganymede wants women as much as Mars does, it seems.  All of this leads to a rather unexpectedly but rather refreshingly downbeat ending; Ann is dead, clawed and strangled by the angered xenomorph, and the victorious Medra, his mission completed, beams away back to his home leaving our awestruck protagonists dumbfounded in the ashes.

A grim finale to an interesting collision of science fiction with gritty (or maybe grotty) British cinema of the 1950s and '60s - an auspicious start the John Saxon's science fiction resume which would soon see him fighting the vampiric Martian Queen of Blood and taking part in a Battle Beyond the Stars. 

Doctor Terror: The Horror Films of Leon Klimovsky (Part One)

Being Parte the Firste of a study of the horror genre forays of director Leon Klimovsky

Argentine-born Leon Klimovsky Dulfano and Norfolk-born Roger Meddows Taylor share two things in common: one, they would abbreviate their birth names to something slightly less unwieldy for their future professional careers, and two, they would both train as dentists before embarking upon their more well-known callings.  There the similarities end as, despite it being a matter of opinion as to whether Taylor would spend the decade of the 1970s unleashing  horrors onto an unsuspecting public (though it is the opinion of your humble correspondent that 'I'm In Love With My Car' is actually quite genius [though only when drunk]), in Senor Klimovsky's case this is a matter of record.

Born in 1906 in Buenos Aires into a family of Polish Jewish extraction, and the elder brother of noted mathematician and epistemologist Gregorio Klimovsky, Leon spent fifteen years in his dental career whilst exploring his passion for the cinematic arts firstly by founding Argentina's first film club in 1929 - giving Cineclub's burgeoning membership their first chances to see art movies and other less mainstream fare - and later by shooting his own short movies before progressing to working on features, beginning as second unit director on the 1945 family drama Se abre el abismo (The Abyss Opens) helmed by French director Pierre Chenal who had fled his Nazi-occupied homeland due to his own Jewish heritage.  By 1948 Klimovsky had become a director in his own right and helmed a duo of back-to-back films about the Argentine tango music legend Carlos Gardel (Se Llamaba Carlos Gardel [His Name Was Carlos Gardel] and La Guitarra del Gardel [The Guitar of Gardel] both released in 1949) before going on to cover many other subjects - ofttimes with a scriptwriting co-credit to his name as well as being at the directorial reins - including a fairly lavish Argentinian-Mexican co-production of Alexandre Dumas pere's The Count of Monte Cristo in 1953.

A prolific journeyman who spanned many genres, Klimovsky's output included such movies as 1950's exploitation potboiler Marihuana which became a surprise hit and was an entry at the 1951 Cannes film festival; the 1951 Cornel Woolrich adaptation The Earring and 1952 dark psychodrama The Tunnel - based on the novel by acclaimed Argentine essayist and scientist Ernesto Sabato - which like 1955's Express Train starred Romanian-born starlet Laura Hidalgo who would in that same year star in the first celluloid adaptation of The Beast Must Die (not the Amicus 'where wolf?' movie, but the revenge story penned by a pseudonymous Cecil 'Daniel's Dad' Day-Lewis, which would be later filmed by famed Gallic nouvelle vague auteur Claude Chabrol and recently adapted as a hit Britbox miniseries).

After relocating to Spain in his mid-forties, Klimovsky continued as a reliable jack of all genres with a variety of output compassing romantic musical (La Picara Molinera [The Mischievous Miller], a.k.a. The Miller's Saucy Wife, 1955), action adventure (1957's Los Amantes del Desierto [Lovers of the Desert] alias Desert Warrior, starring future KHAAAN! Ricardo Montalban) and of course the Spaghetti - or, rather, Paella - Western (1966 alone giving us the twin-spin of A Few Dollars for Django [Pochi Dollari per Django] - one of the countless myriad of semi-sequels in name only to Sergio Corbucci's seminal 1966 Django - and Two Thousand Dollars for Coyote [Dos Mil Dolares por Coyote].

After a brace of Spanish-Italian World War II action movies - 1968's Seven Into Hell (original title Giugno '44 - Sbarcheremo in Normandia) starring former Klaatu Michael Rennie, 1969's Fall of the Giants (Horo cero: Operacion Rommel) with Jack Palance and the same year's Bridge Over the Elbe (No Importa Morir) featuring then still closeted beefcake Tab Hunter - Klimovsky found himself partnered with Iberian icon Paul Naschy for a brace of horror movies.

Born Jacinto Molina, former professional weightlifter turned cinematic all-rounder (acting, scriptwriting and ultimately also directing and producing) Naschy had quite literally made his mark on the genre with 1968's La Marca del Hombre Lobo: a title that translates as The Mark of the Wolfman but was retitled for various markets including Les Fantomes de Dracula en de Weerwolf (The Ghosts of Dracula and the Werewolf) in Belgium, Hell's Creatures in the U.K., and - most bafflingly for a werewolf film that also features vampires - Frankenstein's Bloody Terror in the U.S.; notorious distributor Sam Sherman of Independent International not letting the absence of anything to do with Mary Shelley's creation stop him from publicising it this way when the Frankenstein movie he'd promised exhibitors failed to materialise.  Multiple nomenclatures aside, the film introduced Naschy's best-known character in the furry form of the ill-fated wandering werewolf Waldemar Daninsky. 

After reprising the iconic Daninsky in the alleged lost film La Noches del Hombre Lobo (Nights of the Werewolf, which was apparently never completed after its elusive director Rene Govar was killed during filming) in 1968, alien invasion monster mash Los Monstruos del Terror (Monsters of Terror, a.k.a. Assignment Terror, a.k.a. Dracula vs Frankenstein [spoiler: true to form for these U.S. distribution titles, Count Dracula doesn't meet the Frankenstein monster in the flick, due to not being in it!]) in 1970 and La Furia del Hombre Lobo (The Fury of the Wolfman, alias Werewolf Never Sleeps) the same year Naschy partnered with experienced director Klimovsky for 1971's La Noche del Walpurgis, translating to Walpurgis Night but best known as Werewolf Shadow (or, in tres prosaic American terms,The Werewolf vs the Vampire Woman).

Klimovsky lends the film an eerie Gothic quality as the audience is immediately pulled into the mise-en-scene of a Bond-style pre-credits sequence located in a windswept countryside morgue, the wind howling like the hounds of hell as pathologist Dr Hartwig (Julio Pena) and his assistant Muller (Barta Barri - something of a ubiquitous face in Spanish horror films of the period, like Michael Ripper was to Hammer) unwisely elect to remove the silver bullets from the corpse of Daninsky, allowing him to spring back to lycanthropic life under the influence of the waxing silvery moon.  Post credits, we're introduced to our female protagonist duo of Elvira (Gaby Fuchs) and Genevieve (Barbara Capell),  who are departing Paris - leaving behind Elvira's policeman beau Marcel (Andres Resino) - to embark upon a trip to the wild north to complete their graduate thesis on black magic, witchcraft and the Inquisition in France.  Their research on the topic has led to them trying to track down the resting place of infamous mediaeval Satanist and blatant Erzsabet Bathory analogue Countess Wandesa Darvula de Nadasdy (American expatriate actress Patty Shepard, a frequent pulchritudinous presence in Spanish horror flicks of the '70s): a goal shared by our hirsute hero Waldemar.  Teaming up to locate Wandesa's tomb, our trio of two students and a werewolf inadvertantly cause the Countess' resurrection by removing the silver Mayenza cross from her remains and unleash her vampiric terror upon the world - which Waldemar knows he must defeat before Walpurgis Night arrives and all the evils of the world will come under her thrall.

Klimovsky handles the scenes of supernatural terror with an expert eye, and his use of techniques such as slow-motion photography for the vampires as well as the shambling revenant of the devilish monk Baptiste Verdun lend an oneiric and otherworldy air, aided by judicious use of dry ice graveyard mist and an appropriately spectral soundtrack.  After the behind the scenes shambles of Naschy's previous pair of projects, including the alleged perpetual drunkenness of Fury of the Wolfman's director Jose Maria Zarabalza whose open disinterest in the material included allowing his teenage nephew to rewrite the script during production, Klimovsky's professionalism and keen eye for a good shot were a veritable godsend for Naschy, who was more than keen to continue their working relationship.  Klimovsky was agreeable, and after taking on revenge Western Su le mani, cadavere!  Sei in arresto (Raise Your Hands, Dead Man, You're Under Arrest!) and Spanish civil war drama La Casa de las Chivas (The House of Goats) the pair reunited for 1972's Dr Jekyll and the Werewolf.

Bringing Naschy's pulpy 1940s Universal Pictures monster mash inspired script to life with the appropriate look and feel of a lurid Technicolor comic strip, Klimovsky spins us the tale of expatriate Hungarian big businessman and big game hunter Imre Kosta (Jose Marco, who had essayed the role of the unlucky Pierre in Werewolf Shadow) who is displaying his trophies to his wedding guests: he has a mounted Bengal tiger and Bavarian wolf on display to go with his beautiful and much younger trophy wife Justine (Irish actress Shirley Corrigan, memorable in Jean Brismee's The Devil's Nightmare the previous year, and who would go on to play the titular Fanny in 1974's Around the World with Fanny Hill).  Having collected from Bengal, Bavaria and Begravia, Imre feels homesick and wishes to whisk his brand new bride away for a honeymoon in sunny Transylvania to see his home town of Baliavasta.  

Bidding farewell to their circle of friends, including research scientist and namesake of his infamous ancestor Dr Henry Jekyll (Eurotrash stalwart Jack Taylor, who viewers may recognise from anything from Jess Franco's Female Vampire to John Milius' Conan the Barbarian), Imre and Justine leave the bright lights of swinging '70s London for the misty mountains of the Carpathians - a land inhabited by stock frightened peasants (including - it's that man again! - Barta Barri as the innkeeper who warns the couple to beware the graveyard and the cursed Black Castle on the hill) and knife-wielding bandits as much as wampyrs and werewolves.  When they visit the proscribed cemetery to visit the graves of Imre's late parents, Justine is given more to worry about than catching pneumonia (kudos to Ms Corrigan for being a trouper, acting her heart out in the snowy landscape wearing a miniskirt and go-go boots; spirits seem to have been high on location, though, her relating an anecdote about Klimovsky dealing with filming in the mountains by shouting direction over a megaphone, with Naschy amusing the cast and crew by responding with a loudhailer of his own) when the Kostas are accosted by armed robbers who stab Imre to death.  The unhappy widow is rescued by the castle's inhabitant, Waldemar (Naschy), and upon discovering his lycanthropic malediction she brings him back to London in the hope that the renowned Dr Jekyll can effect a cure.

Klimovsky makes good use of the limited location shooting in London (no doubt all done on the fly, guerilla filmmaking style) not only to establish Daninsky, a Polish-Spanish werewolf in London, wandering Trafalgar Square and flagging down a black cab but - once Jekyll's unhinged attempt to wipe out werewolfism with his grandfather's personality splitting formula results in Waldemar becoming a new and even more sadistic Hyde - great footage of a top-hatted and caped Naschy strolling around seedy Seventies Soho at night.  The incongruous sight of the anachronistic 19th century monster twirling his cane along a neon-lit street, past a billboard advertising the Lyric Theatre's production of How the Other Half Lives starring Robert Morley and Shiela Steafel, on his way to pick up, use and dispose of an unfortunate lady of the night is a wonderfully handled sequence with a surreal touch.

In the brief interim before next working with Naschy, another Klimovsky joint materialised under the title of Mean Mother: originally shot in 1971 as El hombre que vino del odio (The Man Who Came from Hate, also variously known as Run For Your Life and A Soldier Named Joe), this Vietnam-influenced thriller - starring American lead Joe Safran and red-maned Italian actress Luciana Paluzzi, backed up by a cast of familiar Euro horror faces such as Barta Barri, Julio Pena and Antonio Mayans - was picked up by Sam Sherman of Independent-International; Sherman's regular participant in cinematic crimes Al Adamson shot new footage with Afro-American performers Clifton Brown (a.k.a. Dobie Gray) and Marilyn Joi to turn it into something resembling a blaxploitation picture.  The resulting slice of spliced-together near incomprehensibility surfaced two years after the original movie's release, in 1973.

Meanwhile, Klimovsky and Naschy teamed up once again for that year's La rebelion de las muertas, more accurately transliterated as The Rebellion of the Dead Women but alias Vengeance of the Zombies, once again with Klimovsky directing a Naschy-penned script that pulls us into the mise-en-scene of an English graveyard at night where the cemetery's caretaker cum part time body snatcher August (Fernando Sanchez Pollack, who would go on to co-star in two more Naschy genre efforts - 1973's El retorno del Walpurgis [a.k.a. Curse of the Devil] and 1975's Le venganza de la momia [The Mummy's Revenge]) and his nagging wife Flora (Montserrat Julio, who had just featured in Naschy's '73 classic El espanto surge de la tumba [Horror Rises from the Tomb] and would go on to work for another Spanish horror maven in Jose Ramon Larraz' wonderfully-titled 1978 The Violation of the Bitch) are preparing for the disinterral of the recently murdered Gloria Irving; this slaughtered scion of a wealthy family has been buried with her jewels which Flora has cajoled her henpecked husband into retrieving for her.  Needless to say this does not go according to plan, as the resurrectionists find themselves sealed into the tomb with the literally resurrected Gloria when a mysterious robed figure locks the door and performs an eldritch voodoo-style necromantic rite invoking Baron Samedi and calling the late Ms Irving (Norma Kastel) from the beyond to rise in Klimovsky slow motion like the ethereal vampires of Werewolf Shadow.

After a post-credit whirl of travelogue footage of early '70s London (much of it looking like the same shots from Dr Jekyll and the Werewolf: standard Big Ben, Picadilly Circus, red buses, etc) we are introduced to a sitar-accompanied tantric display - no, not like that, you dirty sods - from Bernares-born Brahmin Krishna (Naschy, looking like a dead ringer for Ricardo Montalban's legendary eugenic ubermensch Khan from Star Trek TOS' 'Space Seed' - from the Latin actor in Indiaface down to the barrel chest and black bob wig).  This ritual is being observed by a crowds of interested onlookers including Elvire Irving (played by the mononymic Romy - misspelled 'Rommy' in the credits - nee Carmen Romero; Naschy one again using the name of his wife Elvira Primavera for his heroine a la Werewolf Shadow) and her companion Dr Lawrence Redgrave (two-time Naschy collaborator Victor Barrera, alias Vic Winner).  Elvire (who is currently residing with her bereaved aunt and uncle after the death of her cousin Gloria) and Lawrence are both interested in Krishna's current British tour to promote his philosophy and way of life and he extends an invitation to the house he has taken in the village of Llangwell (not pronounced with a Cymric trill despite the double L; nevertheless another Chaney nod from Naschy, the name being a clear analogue of fictitious Welsh village Llanwelly - ancestral home of carnivorous lunar activity perpetrating protagonist Lawrence Talbot of 1941's The Wolf Man).

While La Irving becomes besotted with the Indian mystic that she clearly wants to fakir, we also intercut with the story of a cloaked killer wearing a selection of "hideous latex masks", as Would I Lie To You's Bob Mortimer might phrase it.  This mystery assassin, behatted and caped like pulp detective the Shadow if he'd become a giallo-style homicidal maniac, is ceremoniously (quite literally, given that each slaying is immediately followed by a resurrection incantation) dispatching and resuscitating young women of prominent and wealthy families.  Doc Lawrence investigates the murderer's macabre modus operandi and starts to uncover the truth about the targeted families: the Irvings, Mortimers, Hendersons and Mortons had been involved in an incident in 1957 Benares (more properly Varanasi since 1947) involving the rape and killing of Elizabeth Irving by Krishna's twin brother - that old U.S. soap opera staple of the evil twin, also played by Naschy - followed by his Cropsy style burning by the family members.  After the incident was officially and officiously covered up due to the families' 'importance', Kantaka has returned as a vengeful Asian Freddy Krueger using the daughters of the families as his undead instruments of vengeance.

With a meaty double role for Paul Naschy (actually a triple role including his appearance as a blue-skinned and goat-legged satyr-like Satan in a trippy nightmare sequence), Vengeance of the Zombies is a gleefully ghoulish slice of minor Gothic with a soupcon of slasher served with trademark Klimovsky style.

The Dracula Saga (La saga de los Dracula, also released as Dracula: The Bloodline Continues and the awful but awesomely alliterative Death Death Death) would be Klimovsky's next project as well as his third release of four in 1973 and is a lovely and neglected Gothic gem. Blessed with a literate script by the awesomely pseudonymous Lazarus Kaplan (in reality Emilio Martino Lazaro), good cinematography (if one can let go the obvious day-for-night shots that are the bane of this period of horror flicks) and lush period costumes, sets and locations this is a fascinating piece that sees the last scion of the Dracula dynasty recalled home to the Transylvanian castle.

Our protagonist, Berta (the absolutely radiant Tina Sainz) is the granddaughter of Count Dracula and is travelling home whilst pregnant with her husband Hans (Tony Isbert, who -with his long hair and astrakhan hat, appears to be cosplaying a young Hartnell Doctor). When their coach driver stops in the middle of the forest, a la Dracula: Prince of Darkness, and says that the horses will go no further they have to stop off at 'Borgos' - presumably a village in the Borgo Pass, since they're on their way to Bistritz (there are many references and allusions to Stoker's novel here, it's cool) - where a hunchbacked stable hand, who seems a bit unhinged (an unstable hand?) warns them of the devils and lamias that lurk in the locality.

They decide to forge on, of course (Hans seems to think that a stable isn't good enough for a pregnant woman, even though it was good enough for Mary LOL) and eventually reach the castle which seems deserted by daylight - and Berta is perturbed to find the family crypt contains coffins emblazoned with the names of her grandfather and cousins, the very family that she was expecting to meet. By the way, did you know that Count Dracula's first name is Ivor? Well, it is, his crypt bearing the legend 'Ivor, Voivode Vlad De Tepes - Count Dracula'. Ivor the Chaos Engine, maybe?  Of course the family appear after dusk, with the Count (Narcizo Ibanez Menta, who back in 1952 had been the star as well as co-producer of The Beast Must Die, as quite a book-accurate looking Dracula with his hawklike features and white facial hair.  Possibly the most physically resembling Stoker's imagined villain since Christopher Lee's moustachioed turn in Jess Franco's 1970 El Conde Dracula.  Why is it only the Spanish that can do a Dracula that looks like Dracula?), his bride Munia (the always lovely red-maned Helga Line) and young cousins Xenia (Maria Kosti [be still my throbbing.... heart, yes, let's go with that]) and Irina (Cristina Suriani) welcoming the pair and showing great interest in Berta's gestating foetus - whom the Count is pinning his hopes on to be the saviour of their declining clan.  There's a scene between Dracula and Berta wherein the Count describes the decline of the family as an illness, and calls the Draculas inherently melancholy, pallid and decaying that calls to mind both Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher and Morrissey and Warhol's Blood for Dracula - the feel of a decadent and degenerate aristocratic family in decline (replete with a deformed cyclopean child locked in an attic room: how's that for European regal inbreeding?).

When Hans falls prey to the predations of Munia (who just silently seduces him, no small talk, by disrobing replete with a flash of her cinnamon muff [thanks to Zach Galifianakis and his Amy Adams Between Two Ferns spot for that term nesting in my brain]), Berta finds herself surrounded by a family of the undead who are solely concerned with the vampiric baby who is literally eating her from the inside and drinking her blood rather than her well-being; the young couple have been continually served the rarest and rawest of meats at mealtimes along with a suspiciously sanguineous full-bodied red wine.  This repeated repast has a different deleterious effect on each of the couple as Hans falls further under the sway of all three of the castle's vampiric vixens and Berta weakens into a pallid shell of herself, the monstrous child within her growing concomitantly stronger as her life gradually ebbs away. 

Klimovsky maintains the gloomy atmosphere (aided by a score comprised of the harpsichord compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach, enhanced by some input from Jess Franco regular Daniel White) whilst ramping up the tension until our 'til now passive heroine explodes in a frenzy of violent vengeance with I think best to leave vague for those who may be curious enough to seek out the movie (which I do highly recommend for anyone into Gothic nosferatu action).

"This is my story - a strange incredible story." Berta (or, at least, the voice actress who performed her English language dub) intoned in the trailer. "I can't tell you the ending... and when you see it, don't you divulge it either!"

1973 continued in a vampiric vein for Klimovsky with The Vampires' Night Orgy (La Orgia Nocturna de los Vampiros being its rather prosaically translated original title, also known in the US under its reissue moniker of Grave Desires), which was released in Spain that same year but wouldn't see US distribution until September of 1974.  Opening with a strange scene of a funeral during which the appalling pallbearers drop the coffin into the waiting grave, causing it to burst open and spill out its sepulchral contents: a charred and blackened skeletal cadaver swarming with worms and maggots, we certainly get off to an atmospheric start.  From thence, we cut to a lonely country road and a busload of passengers making their way to an estate where they are going to be employed - we have the chauffeur Ernesto (Gaspar 'Indio' Gonzalez), the lady's maid Alma (Dianik Zurakowska, no stranger to the Spanish gothic horror having been the romantic lead in Paul Naschy's La Marca del Hombre Lobo), tutor Cesar (David Aller), majordomo Marcos (Manuel de Blas), gardener Godo (Luis Ciges, a veteran of Vengeance of the Zombies and The Dracula Saga), and cook Raquel (Charo Soriano) with her young daughter Violet (Sarita Gil).

When the bus driver suffers a heart attack on the road to Bojoni, they decide to had to the more geographically expedient village of Tonia in search of somewhere to spend the night before resuming the journey.  Our group ventures down into the valley and finds the village - a picturesque place of cobbled streets and stone houses - strangely deserted, and assume that the inhabitants must be all in the church (which raises an interesting question as to where this film is set: the assumption seems to make sense for early 1970s Catholic Spain, and the place names Bojoni and Tonia seem authentically Espanol, but there had been a long-standing rule against horror films being set at home - they generally took place in France, or some mittel-European hinterland [hence Paul Naschy's wolfman being Polish rather than Spanish].  Maybe it's set in Portugal?  Amando de Ossorio's Blind Dead must be interred in the next valley), yet strangely a search turns up no trace of such a building.

There's a tavern in the town (IN THE TOWN!  Sorry, it's a reflex, I can't help it), and our gang decide to take advantage of the roaring fire and the well-stocked bar and hunker down for the night.  Here they encounter fellow stranded traveller Luis (stock American in a Spanish genre film Jack Taylor, with his marvelous porn star moustache) whose US manufactured car has broken down, and whose vague air of sleaze and disreputability is lived up to when he discovers a Norman Bates-style peephole in the wall of the bedroom he selects, which just so happens to adjoin Alma's chosen boudoir and gives an eyeful of her changing into her nightie.  It's so nice to have an identifiable hero.  Like Luis, the morning soon comes and with it a suddenly populated tavern and village and the travellers are greeted by mystery man, major and acting mayor Boris (Jose Guardiola) who runs the town on behalf of the mysterious Countess (oh look, it's Helga Line as a sexy vampire again!).  When their seemingly hospitable hosts confer with each other and decide that serving the visitors only bread might raise suspicions, the major-mayor dispatches the intimidating and appropriately named 'El Gigante' (Fernando Bilbao, who played Dr Frankenstein's towering creation in Jess Franco's bonkers double bill Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein and The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein) to lop off the local blacksmith's leg to serve up as a platter of fresh meat.

As the group are gradually whittled down one by one - first the corpse of the bus driver vanishes from the vehicle, then Ernesto is ambushed by a crowd of the undead on the moonlit streets (another wonderfully atmospheric nosferatu sequence by Klimovsky) before returning as a revenant himself, Cesar is first dated and then predated upon by the voluptuous vampiric Countess (after feeding on his blood, she thoughtfully tosses his corpse from her balcony for a crowd of her wampyr willagers to feast upon) and Godo and Marcus are lured onto the bus by Ernesto only to find it full of said villagers pounce upon them and tear them asunder - Luis and Alma pair together as our horror film final guy and girl.  When little Violet is lured away to play by a spectral child (Fernando Romero) we are treated to a sequence of Raquel searching for her missing daughter that features the exquisite deathless dialogue "Violet?  Violet, dear, are you there?  Don't worry, I'm not going to hit you."  Top parental guidance.  How times have changed.  Or have they?  Unsurprisingly, this leads to our Mother of the Year mug owner being pursued by the Countess back to her room, where - in another highly effective scene - her undead compatriots are waiting to devour her.

Luis and Alma finally manage to get his car started and make it out of Tonia and back into the outside world, and are suddenly attacked in a jump scare in the form of the Countess, who's been hiding in the back seat of the vehicle like Michael Myers - only to be thwarted by a cross-wielding Alma and rapidly disintegrating; and this the movie is bracketed by shots of rotting corpses covered in a writhing mass of maggots: the funeral opening, with the coffin cracking open, and toward the end with the rotting Countess in the back of the car.  Thus the pair finally arrive at a police station with no proof of their crazy story bar a messy back seat, and the scoffing sceptical sheriff (Antonio Paramo) relectantly accompanies them only to find the ghostly hamlet completely missing - the valley is empty, and the village a virtual vampiric Brigadoon.

Leon Klimovsky will return.

Vampire (E. W. Swackhamer, 1979)

1979's TV movie Vampire is as an odd a creature as its titular undead bloodsucker.  A strange hybrid of horror movie and police procedural (in fact, co-written and executive produced by the late Steve Bochko of later Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law and NYPD Blue fame - in the period before these shows and when he had definite SF/fantasy cred for penning the screenplay for Douglas Trumbull's 1972 Silent Running and creating the 1975 David McCallum-starring The Invisible Man and its Ben Murphy sequel-cum-remake Gemini Man), it dwells in a twilit world betwixt genres.

As the film opens, we see the inauguration of construction on a new San Francisco church, marked by the unveiling of a gaudy gigantic metallic cross on the site - one suspects that the eventual church will be one of those hideous modern monstrosities of glass and concrete; call me old-fashioned, but I believe (in that I don't, not actually being a believer, but you know what I mean) that these sorts of buildings should be terrifying Gothic edifices.  If you're not going to do something properly, why bother?  Anyway, this parish's particular Reverend Lovejoy (played by Scott Paulin, who fans of genre flicks will probably recognise as Kirk Lolley from 1985's Teen Wolf and the original Red Skull in the 1990 Albert Pyun Captain America [oh, yeah, here) is making his speech watched by husband and wife architectural design power couple John and Leslie Rawlins (The Exorcist's more junior exorcist Jason Miller, and Nightwing's Kathryn Harrold) as well as mysteriously lurking ex-cop Harry Kilcoyne (E.G. Marshall of Superman II, Creepshow and many others), who remains loitering around the premises after the ceremony is over, noticing that the ground where the shadow of the cross was cast has slightly scorched.

That night when the moon has risen, the badly reacting earth finally spits out its unwelcome contents as the vampiric Anton Voyteck (Richard Lynch, who in common with fellow 1979 TV screen vampire villain Reggie Nalder gained his distinctive appearance through scarring from burn injuries - in Lynch's case self-inflicted from setting himself ablaze whilst off his face [history fails to record whether or not he was shouting about being "real gone" at the time like a freebasing Richard Pryor]) crawls out of the soil of his resting place of many years.  You don't get all that many blond-maned male vampires, do you?  Apart from Geordie Johnson in Dracula: the Series, Julian Sands in Tale of a Vampire and Christopher Atkins in Dracula Rising of course.  But they do seem a comparatively rare breed.

Skipping ahead some weeks, we move to a house party given by the Rawlins where some guests are gossiping about the recent spate of homeless people being found dead with their throats torn out (in a vampire film?  Unconnected, I feel sure) and lawyer Nicole DeCamp (Jessica Walter, probably best known these days from Arrested Development and lending her distinctive tones to Archer) introduces first Leslie and then John to her new beau Anton who has a business proposal that they might be interested in.  Now dapperly dressed in a sharp '70s suit and taking to wearing his overcoat draped over his shoulders to create a classic cloaked Dracula-style silhouette, Voyteck presents as a mysterious, charming and urbane wealthy aristo who has family interests in the Heidecker estate where the new church is going to be built.  He claims that the grounds of the property contain a great many priceless works of art that were removed from Europe during World War II for safekeeping that might be lost forever when construction begins in earnest, and he wants to commission a survey to retrieve them.  John expresses scepticism over the endeavour, but agrees and to his surprise soon locates a underground vault containing not only countless lost masterpieces but also skeletal human remains.  Calling in his friend on the force Chris Bell (Michael Tucker, who would go on to star in Bochko's L.A. Law alongside his wife Jill Eikenberry) it's established that not only were the artworks looted from their rightful owners during WWII but that the remains are those of an ex-cop who also disappeared in the 1940s; Voyteck is arrested by Bell and his men and before being taken away threatens Rawlins for grassing him up to the filth, saying that he will soon "repay him in kind".

Bailed out by Nicole just as he is attempting to escape by wrenching the cell bars asunder at sunrise, Voyteck dashes home to the secret coffin stashed in his swanky apartment without a minute to spare before rising at nightfall to pay a visit to the Rawlins household.  Persuading the home alone Leslie to invite him in, he swiftly takes his vowed vengeance by sinking his teeth into her lovely neck and leaving her exsanguinated corpse for her husband to find and we are faced with the prospect of John going rogue after his wife's brutal death: we all know what architects can do when they take the law into their hands after the murder of a loved one - have the SFPD not heard about the Paul Kersey case?

The distraught designer is contacted by Kilcoyne, who has been mooching around the sidelines investigating - back in the '30s and '40s he was the partner (in a cop rather than romantic sense) of Maurice Bernier, the previous one non-careful owner of the skull and other remnants that were found in Voyteck's vault of stashed artworks.  Bernier had become convinced of the existence of evil and creatures such as vampires and left the force join a seminary (a place for trainee priests rather than semen, but there may be a lot of that too) whilst Harry was off fighting in the war; upon Kilcoyne's return home Bernier had vanished mysteriously whilst playing amateur occult detective and sniffing around.  Which is a shame, because a noirish 1940's-set series about a detective-priest investigating the paranormal would have been pretty cool, but we'll just have to make do with this tale of a bereaved architect and an aged hard-boiled cop teaming up to take out their mutual vengeance upon a centuries-old vampire.  Which is good enough, honestly.  Rawlins and Kilcoyne (Vampire Slayers) become like Van Helsing's "God's madmen" from Stoker's tome, diligently tracking down Voyteck across all of the property interests where his multifarious coffins lie. It's an entertaining and breezy hour and a half of safely TV movie horror fun with an ending screaming 'pilot that was never picked up for a continuing weekly series' and it's available to watch free on Youtube as of the time of writing.