Mystery of the Bat-Man: The Lost Serial (Ryan Bijan and Paul Bisnette, 2016-2020)

I have a great fondness for false history.  

Wait, no, don't run!  Not in a scary Stalinist 'erased from the photographs and the official history' way, or a Maoist 'Year Zero' way, or an even more terrifying (since it's happened relatively recently) 'extremist right wingers trying to infiltrate the National Trust to stop people talking about the actual facts about Empire, like slavery' (for Stateside readers, think Lindsay Halligan's 'museums shouldn't make slavery seem bad') kind of way.  They're all pretty chilling.  No, I mean in a falsified fictitious film history kind of way.

Ever since I saw 2009's House of the Wolf Man and admired the recreation of a 1940s Universal horror movie down the film grain and aspect ratio, I've loved the escapism of sitting down to watch that kind of modern (re)construction of the filmic world of a bygone age and slipping into an alternate reality where it really was made back then; the adaptations of The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society - made in 2005 and 2011 respectively, but made as though they emerged from the aether in the 1920s and 1930s - stand as wonderful examples of the art.  The loving craft, if you will.  Heh.  I will, even if you won't.

Fun, then, to go back through the list of actors who have essayed the role of the Caped Crusader - the Dark Knight Detective - back, back to the beginning.... Before Adam West.... Before Gordon Lowery... Before Lewis Wilson... To find...

Ryan Bijan?  Huh.  Okay.  Let's go with this.

So here we are in an alternate 1939 - a reality where the Batman made his celluloid debut a full four years earlier than in our harsh realm, in the same year as his comic book premiere.  In this quantum state Mystery of the Bat-Man predates the 1943 Batman (a.k.a. The Batman) and all of its extraordinarily dodgy yellowface villainy and wartime anti-Japanese attitudes, giving us a far less problematic Bat-inception... now there's a Christopher Nolan crossover just waiting to happen.  I mean, the Nolanverse is getting weird, isn't it, with the Scarecrow inventing the atomic bomb or whatever?  I think that's what happened.  I dunno, I watched Barbie instead.

Anyway...we are presented with a constructed reality wherein this 'lost' motion picture serial from 1939 has been rediscovered in a barn outside Beesville, Texas - rather than in a relay station in Jos, Nigeria by archivist and mentalist Philip Morris (another one for the Who fans out there.  Yes, I still refuse to say 'Whovians': it sounds silly and I'm set in my ways).  The fiction we are buying into here is that this was a mooted twelve part serial of which only the first six were made (and so it remains eternally, maddeningly, incomplete like the Cliffhangers serials of the eponymous 1979 portmanteau series [comprising Perils of Pauline pastiche Stop Susan Williams, pulpy Phantom Empire tribute The Secret Empire, and the marvelous Gothic vampire tale The Curse of Dracula - the only one of the trio of tales to actually get a televised ending]), before the poverty row studio producing it - BJC Studios - folded.

It begins...

Chapter One: The Case of the Chemical Syndicate

And so we make a good start by adapting - or at least using the title and a few guest characters from - Detective Comics issue #27, the actual debut story of the Bat-Man himself.  Created by writer Bill Finger and artist Bob Kane, as I'm sure everyone already knows, the character was the embodiment of a veritable smorgasbord of ingredients including Johnston McCulley's Don Diego de la Vega a.k.a. El Zorro from The Curse of Capistrano and it's sundry sequels as well as the criminal protagonist of the 1926 silent The Bat (or, more likely, the 1930 talkie remake The Bat Whispers - though silent cinema would certainly plant the seeds of the Bat-Man's chief nemesis the Joker through Conrad Veidt's grinning Gwynplaine from 1928's The Man Who Laughs).

Initially released on the 28th of August 2016 and opening with a 'new', 'present day' introduction from purported film scholar Michael Monro - who for all I know may well be a real person - which details the falsified history behind the Mystery, the serial starts with a very authentic-seeming opening credits sequence that just gives the kayfabe away with knowing wink credits for a 'Frank Adams' as assistant director and a 'Neal Miller' as art director (referencing much later than '39 Batman alumni Neal Adams and Frank Miller respectively) and leaves both protagonist the Bat-Man and antagonist the Red Hood uncredited - the former given an enigmatic '?' despite Bruce Wayne being separately billed; creator, director, star and all-round auteur Bijan taking the name of Desmond Harmon for his performance as the millionaire playboy.  Were this from 1939 of course, most of the movie-going but non-comic reading public would be unaware of the lead character's dual identity so the artifice makes total sense.

The opening titles replete with split-screen character intros are spot-on and period-accurate and lead us into an opening scene a post-heist robber being waylaid on a rooftop by the masked vigilante that's a great Batman intro, but does give the game away / drop the kayfabe somewhat with its very modern seeming handheld camera shots.  But that's a relatively minor quibble.  Commissioner Jim Gordon (Michael H. Price, supposedly a veteran of classic Westerns, according to Monro in the introduction; I find myself wondering whether this is the same Mr Price who co-authors the wonderful Forgotten Horrors series of tomes on genre obscurities and lost Poverty Row genre flicks?) is discussing the case at his home with millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne (Bijan) who expresses feigned incredulity at the exploits of this "costumed fruit" as Gordon rather politically incorrectly phrases it and directly references pulp and radio vigilante the Shadow with his maxim of "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" (and for more on Walter B. Gibson's noirish forerunner to the Bat, see here) before Gordon's lovely daughter Barbara (Marisa Duran, a rather prolific voice actor in various anime series and video games the only one of which I know is One Piece; Duran's imdb page says she's non-binary but says she uses she as well as they so I think I'm okay in continuing to refer to her as 'she', especially as I'll generally be referring to Barbara Gordon in character) enters and her father makes rather clumsy introductions and attempts at match making - including mentioning that Wayne has recently returned from "a sojourn in the Orient".  The rather awkward scene is interrupted by a call alerting Gordon that old Lambert, the "chemical king" (I used to know somebody at university with a similar moniker, but I must stress for very different reasons), has been found stabbed to death.  This rather gory news comes as something of a relief and Gordon asks Wayne if he wants to tag along to the murder scene, as you do.

After a rather nice model house establishing shot, we dissolve to the scene of the crime where there's a dead man in the study - no word on whether or not the chicken's still dancing though - and a guest appearance by Clark Kent (Paul Bisnette, replaced by Beau Coleman in later chapters) himself who's here to cover the story; asked by an exasperated Gordon whether or not there's crime in Metropolis that he should be concerned with his feigns an "aw shucks" demeanour and says there's not so much since "you know who" appeared on the scene.  Questioning the late Lambert's widow Leatrice (Nicole Johnson) Gordon divines that she was out with noted crime boss Tony Zucco at the time of her husband's murder before returning to find her "Daddy" (meaning her husband not her father - don't kink shame) now a deady with a knife in him.  Gordon receives a panicked call from one of Lambert's former business partners Steven Crane (Tommy Cuerri) saying that Lambert was threatened by some mysterious figure named 'the Red Hood' and that he has also had the same threatening call.

Detective Harvey Bullock, a familiar character from the acclaimed noirish Saturday morning Batman: the Animated Series where he was voiced by Robert Costanzo and played in live action by Donal Logue in Gotham, here essayed by Matthew Ham - another prolific voiced actor with roles in such stuff as Fairy Tale and Attack on Titan - is rapidly dispatched to the scene but arrives too late; Crane has already been shot dead by a gang of red hooded goons (red hoods?) and Bullock finds the Bat-Man pummeling one of them on the roof of Crane's domicile only for the masked man to vanish in a puff of smoke.  Resolving that the other two former partners, Paul Rogers (Parker Fitzgerald) and Roland Jennings (Robert Perrin), are next on the hit list both the vigilante and the police head for the laboratory at Apex Chemicals; where the weaselly Rogers has already been struck down by his treacherous compadre - Jennings is a member of the Red Hood's gang and the Bat-Man is walking into a trap...

Chapter Two: The Man Behind the Red Hood!

Continuing the story, the second segment (which emerged not the following week, but on the 18th of April 2017; whether it was the same Bat-time depends on when you watched it I suppose) sees our cliffhanger - in which the Bat-Man, along with Paul Rogers (but not Free or Queen, that would be Paul Rodgers you're thinking of), has been trapped in a chemical gas testing facility - resolved by donning gas masks and waiting for the hulking Jennings to stop nonchalantly listening to music on his Victrola and reading Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Return of Tarzan (they like getting in their references to other pulp heroes in this - I approve wholeheartedly) and open up the sealed gas chamber to remove the bodies.  We get quite a good fight scene between the Caped Crusader and the would-be assassin that moves across the floor of the Apex Chemicals lab; the panning camera move tracking the action one again being the only anachronistic break of kayfabe but it's a nice shot so shhh.  The struggle ends with Jennings being stabbed in the neck and Rogers left alone standing over his corpse where he is found by  the unctuous Alfred Stryker (Jonathan Hardin), the fourth member of the cabal comprising the late Crane and Jennings, the only one still standing along with Rogers.

We now get the artifice of a caption announcing that there is footage missing due to a damaged reel, and we jump to Rogers being pursued through the plant by Stryker - or so it seems - in full Red Hood garb.  Chasing him onto a gantry above the boiling vats of chemicals (I think we all know where this is heading, and you don't have to have read the source comics to have an idea - just a memory of Jack Nicholson in the 1989 Prince soundtracked flick is sufficient), the Hood is surprised by Bat-Man who sends him flying over the rails with a Wilhelm scream to plunge into the bubbling sludge in a scene appropriately tinted green and feeling somewhat like a homage to Michael Curtiz' 1933 The Mystery of the Wax Museum.  

Shifting location - both temporally and geographically - to police H.Q. the following day, we meet once again with Commissioner Gordon as he lays out the facts of the case to an affecting nonchalance and disinterest Bruce Wayne, who tells Gordon that his stories are so good he should write for the Saturday Evening Post, to which he responds that he's "more of a Robert E. Howard guy" (I wonder if there's a pulp fiction heroes drinking game in this to be had?  I'm okay, the hospital's just down the road within wheelbarrowing distance).  Wayne's insouciant demeanour falters however when Gordon says that he has Alfred Stryker downstairs who has confessed to being the Red Hood: it seems that he dressed a member of the janitorial staff in his Red Hood outfit (ah, the 'missing footage' subterfuge becomes clear) and this unwitting innocent is who the Bat-Man knocked into the chemical tank.  Still reeling from the thought of having dispatched an unwitting maintenance man, Detective Bullock enters with the news of a kidnapping on the Madison estate.  Bruce says that he knows the family well and that he'll drop by but turns down the Commish's offer to ride along, saying he'll drop  by later and "take [his] own car".

Meanwhile, a young couple - Jackie (Mackenna Milbourn) and her floppy-haired preppy beau Jimmy (Quinn Moran) - are canoodling by a river when a red-hooded man crawls from the water.  As Jimmy goes to find help, the attentive Jackie removes the stricken man's hood only to be repaid by being brained with  rock clutched in the man's gloved hand before the figure with the visage still unseen departs laughing a maniacal laugh...  What kind of Joker are we dealing with here?

Chapter Three: Bye-Bye, Baby!

Released on the nineteenth of January 2018, the third instalment of our chiropteran saga opens with a caption advising we the viewer that "The following is a love letter to the films of the 1930's and 40's.  It is an artistic interpretation, and is not meant to be a wholly accurate re-creation of the era, or its filmmaking techniques" [sic]; rather throwing my couple of minor criticisms of shots that wouldn't have been manageable at the time for the petty quibbles that they are.  I wonder if similar critiques were being made at the time for them to append such a disclaimer to the third episode?  In any case, suitably chastened I shall refrain from harping in the same vein and instead resort to criticism of bad use of apostrophes.  Because I am that petty.  So there.

In the heart of the city at night a robbery is underway at the diamond exchange, observed from the rooftops by the solitary spectral figure of the Dark Knight Detective through his Bat-binoculars (at least Adam West would have called them that).  The crooks, Gloves (Jordan Pokladnik) and Ricky (Adam Kullman), kill the elderly employee (Robert Monroe) when he triggers the alarm before they flee with their ill-gotten gains only to get into a surprisingly well-choreographed rooftop scuffle with the vigilante.  Some short time later, we see a bruised and beaten yet undefeated Bruce Wayne in civilian garb sitting in a cinema... pardon me - movie theatre to watch the exploits of El Zorro unfold on the flickering silver screen.  As Douglas Fairbanks capers, we are treated to a brief series of flash backs to not only the story so far but also a brief glimpse of a gun as Wayne seems to hear the voice of his dead father asking him why he keeps on doing what he does; seeing the prototype cape-wearing avenger strengthens his resolve to continue.

Stopping by at the Madison residence and having just missed Commissioner Gordon, Wayne finds Detective Bullock holding court and interrogating the household staff; despite his attempts to intercede being dismissed as an "armchair investigation" he tries to calm the maid Beulah (Tori Polk) and ascertain the circumstances of the kidnapping of the Madison child Jackie.  Just then, Councilman Madison (William Baffle) arrives home demanding to know what the police are doing to find his missing scion.  Receiving a ransom demand for $70,000 to be delivered by 10 P.M. on Tuesday evening in the park in exchange for Jackie's safe delivery, the panicking politico has his nerves assuaged by a friendly Bruce who offers his reassurance and help. While investigating the grounds for clues, Bruce is surprised by an old acquaintance: Madison's adult daughter Julie (Madison Calhoun, a case of nominative determinism in casting perhaps) who has been away filing "a Basil Karlo picture" - a neat reference to the original incarnation of the villain Clayface.

First appearing in Detective Comics #31, Julie Madison was Bruce Wayne first recurring love interest .  A socialite and actress and later Princess, marrying into the royal family of the European state of 'Moldacia' (turning her into the Bat-verse's analogue of Grace Kelly) she was menaced by the vampiric Monk until she finally got sick of Wayne's apparent lacksadaisical approach to life and left in issue #49 after ending their engagement.  She wouldn't appear in live action until 1997 when she was essayed by Elle MacPherson in Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin.

When the belligerent and bellicose Bullock arrests Beulah, the Bat-Man behooves it befitting to be on the case.  Searching for the missing baby, he finds himself engaging in a rooftop kung-fu fight with a trio of animal-masked henchpersons: the Fox (Thonda Durant), the Shark (Brent Mize) and the Vulture (Blake Allen Calli).  This surprisingly bloody battle - slightly reminiscent of Nicholas Hammond's rooftop duel with the kendo stick-wielding henchmen in the 1977 Spider-Man pilot - finishes up with the Caped Crusader plummeting from the roof of the building, seemingly to his certain demise...

Chapter Four: Scandalous

Scandal streaked the screen scarlet in February 2019 as the 28th of the month saw the resolution (there's going to be a resolution, yeah, you know) of the previous instalment's rather literal cliffhanger - roofhanger? - ending, but not before an opening scene with the caption slide 'Gotham City' establishing our location  - the first on-screen acknowledgement, I think, that this is in fact Gotham set in a church where Fingers and Ricky are marched before their masked boss the Monk (Toney Dempsey) by the Fox and the Shark.  After enquiring after the whereabouts of the Vulture (Adrian Toomes or Blackie Drago?  Oops, wrong comic company) and being told of the Bat-Man's fall, Fingers is dispatched for his bungling, for such is the disposability of henchmen, and Ricky is dragged off to be imprisoned in the cellars while the Fox declares that "the Bat is dead".

OR IS HE?  (Spoiler: no)

Aspiring actress Julie Madison has supplied the ransom money for her kidnapped little brother and waits for her father the councilman - perhaps a less inspiring title than My Father the Hero but at least that has a young Katherine Heigl in it - to return from the drop off, but he comes home forlorn and empty handed after the child nabbers were a no show.  They get a phone call from the miscreant saying that he suspected police involvement and that he'll be holding on to little Jackie for a while longer, but that he won't charge a further fee for his babysitting services.  

Meanwhile, Commissioner Gordon and Detective Bullock are chatting about the murdered university student (see the end of Chapter Two, True Believers!  Excelsior!  Oh damn, that's Marvel again not DC) and how good it is to have her boyfriend Jimmy arrested and safely off the streets; Harvey mentions how crazy the tale of a "green-haired clown" emerging from the river is and how it doesn't make the best case for a sound mind.  Barbara Gordon enters dressed in a waitress uniform - another fetish catered to, thank you - and asks her father about the whereabouts of millionaire philanthropist Bruce Wayne; he replies that he was supposed to appear at the Shreck's Department Store (another neat reference nod) gala but hasn't been seen for a few days.  This prompts Babs to call Julie Madison in the guise of "Officer Craig" (Ha!  Like Yvonne Craig, DO YOU SEE?) and makes enquiries about the case and the whereabouts of Wayne, mentioning that he has past form for mysterious disappearances such as his excursion to Asia (see Batman Begins, Bat-fans!).

We are then treated to a montage sequence of Barbara getting herself ready in a disguise - including her dad's mysteriously missing driving gloves - to go out on a vigilante patrol of her own intercut with good time girl Kitty (Stephanie Oustalet) picking up a rather rough and violent john (Ivan Munoz) who'd rather carve her up with a switchblade than pay for her lovely services until the nascent Bat-Girl intervenes.  Meanwhile, in Metropolis (which is of course presented in Technicolor rather than the monochrome of Gotham), reporter Lois Lane (Courtney Walsh) tells her co-worker Clark Kent (Beau Coleman) of the situation in that there Gotham, prompting the mild-mannered journalist the declare that this is a job for SUPERMAN to the fanfare from the Fleischer Brothers animated shorts...

(Speaking of 'shorts', the post-credits scene where the Daily Planet's janitor enters the room and stands with his mop watching Clark slowly remove his business suit like a listless stripper at the world's worst hen party and change into his Superman togs is extremely amusing.)

Chapter Five: Face to Face

Not finally but fifthly, Face to Face features as our penultimate adventure just mere months after the last; the 27th of June 2019.  Continuing the action of the precious instalment, with the masked and anonymous Barbara Gordon breaking into the room where the sex worker 'Kitty' is about the by murderer by her non-paying client.  After a nicely violent close-quarters fight scene where the pugilistic punter is getting the better of Babs, he finds himself in for a free spot of unexpected and non-erotic asphyxiation as the abused call girl garrotes him with her whip.  "Well, he definitely finished" she quips, Bond-style over his corpse in her lingerie.  Some of us would pay good money for that.

The action of the episode proper begins after this reprise with a news bulletin broadcasting over the Gotham radio waves, updating the populace of that benighted city about the continued search for the missing infant Jackie Madison as well as the rise of "charismatic preacher" (why does that phrase chill the blood in my veins?) the Reverend Michael Monk (Toney Dempsey) and his Lazarus Ministries church.  This pastor of disaster has been performing alleged miracles in his evangelical house of lies, and probably speaking in tongues and handling snakes too.  Hallelujah!

We then get a brief flashback wherein a younger Bruce Wayne and Julie Madison leave a showing of Cecil B. DeMille's 1934 Cleopatra (showing on a great double-bill with Edgar G. Ulmer's spooktastic The Black Cat - what a date night!), the young Julie dreaming of one day being like Claudette Colbert on the silver screen when they are jumped by a pair of hoods.  Bruce seems able to handle himself until he hesitates in punching out the younger mugger only for the older one to cosh him unconscious.  This is what charity and fair play get you on the mean streets, I guess.  Flashing forward to "NOW", Clark Kent is interviewing the Rev. Mr. Monk who prates about the "Jewish-owned newspapers" and "globalists" and the dangers of putting your faith in men dressed in spandex; at the same time, we are caught up on the Bat-Man's circumstances since his plunge from the rooftops.  Badly injured with a sprained arm, fractured ankles and various and sundry cuts and bruises, he has been tended to by a couple of guys in bandana masks - one of whom used to be a doctor.  The struck-off ex-medic outlines his blackmail scheme to the stricken Mr. Wayne: pay up a cool half million, or he'll let the press know that Gotham's favourite son was found bleeding out in an alleyway dressed in the Bat-Man's outfit.  Before Bruce is Mickey Finned back into unconsciousness, he becomes aware that the baby Jackie is being held by the same men as he sinks into the embrace of Morpheus.

Julie has paid a visit to the Reverend Monk at his church and he is suspiciously reluctant to shake her hand when he notices her silver bangle, saying that he has an allergy to the metal.  Later that night, a strange man calls by the church claiming to have lost his memory.  He removes the muffler that conceals his face revealing his Joker visage (John Scott) in all his gory Gwyplaine glory; laughing, he stabs the minister repeatedly and goes to leave before the vampiric Monk rises like a revenant and bares his fangs...

Chapter Six: The End is the Beginning is the End

How nice to close on a Smashing Pumpkins reference - and a Batman-related one at that (albeit a Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin one.  Personally, I think REM's 'Revolution' was the better song from that soundtrack but it's pretty slim pickings [wasn't he in Dr Strangelove?] on a tracklist awash with the likes of the Goo Goo Dolls and Bone Thugs-'n'-Harmony).

Debuting on the 1st of May 2020, the concluding chapter of the serial sees the dream team of Kitty and Barbara, having disposed of the body of the murderous john (who won't be writing up a Punternet review anytime soon - if Punternet's still a thing these days, I dunno), on a mission knocking door to door in Kitty's apartment block.  The call girl and the commissioner's daughter hit the jackpot when they wind up at the threshold of the domicile currently containing both the baby and the brutalised Bat-Man.   Made an offer of a threesome he's can't refuse (who'd turn down the prospect of being the Lucky Pierre filling in a Bargirl / Catwoman sandwich?) the disgraced doctor (James Jackson) is tempted back to Kitty's room along with the ladies, leaving his brother and compatriot Billy (Johnny Loyd) sipping on 'World's Finest' whisky - ha! - and guarding the hostages.  Bruce seizes on the opportunity to take advantage of his credulous custodian, asking to be passed his utility belt for the 'medicine' contained within one of the pouches thereon.  Meanwhile, while Kitty distracts the doctor Barbara has made her way through the ventilation shaft to rescue baby Jackie and call the police for back-up.

But the maladroit medic isn't distracted by the charms of 'Kitty' Kyle for long and notices Babs' absence.  catching them in the act of escaping, he knocks Barbara out only to be assailed by a batarang and flashbomb from the Bat-Man's belt.Kitty enters the chaotic melee and this kitten with a whip manages to rescue both Barbara and the baby just before the fuzz arrives led by Harvey Bullock who kills Dr. Death just before he can put a bullet in Bruce. 

The full serial in six parts is available to view on the Big John Creations Youtube channel - which also features a great many videos wherein film historians such as Jonathan Rigby, David Del Valle, the late Lee Gambin and others spotlight various movie classics in conversation with Bijan and is highly recommended to all who have an interest in and affection for the annals of cinema.

That's annals with two 'n's, you dirty lot.  Yeesh.

Invitation to Hell (Michael J. Murphy, 1982)

 Like the Murphy's, I'm not bitter.

Obviously, the among-we of the cult film fraternity who have long lurked in the forgotten byways and murky back alleys of cinema history (HMMM... that's a very familiar turn of phrase) know of many an auteur of alchemy that most middle of the road cineastes would spurn and spit upon the name of had they but heard of them.  Maybe that shows better judgement and taste, maybe it's snobbery.  Maybe it's Maybelline.  But Michael J. Murphy is one of those names that could certainly be described (or decried) as an acquired taste.  And seeing his output given the descriptor of "micro-budget cinema" might well conjure up thoughts of backyard productions of the likes of more modern practitioners such as the Polonia brothers or Chris Seaver (creator of his own baffling 'cinematic universe' including the perplexing Teen Ape) but Murphy at the very least shot on film (generally 16mm) rather than video for the majority of his output; though I believe that some of his later end of career stuff may be on digital I'm nowhere near getting to those yet if I'm going to proceed at least roughly chronologically.  Not that there's an imperative to or anything, I haven't started with the actual earliest artefacts from his extant output for the reason that the very earliest projects are non-extant or fragmentary and that didn't seem the best place to dive in.  I'll come back to those later.

I first came across the name of Michael J. Murphy, the Merlin of Murlin (or Murlyn) Films and a veritable wizard of speed and time, in Creeping Flesh: The Horror Fantasy Film Book (a book fleetingly referred to by Murphy himself in one of the Blu-ray extras I've just been watching, enabling this timely addition).  A tome from Headpress imprint Critical Vision containing a number of essays on such sundry subjects as the BBC classic 'A Ghost Story for Christmas' strand, the notorious Parky possessed by Pipes brilliance of Ghostwatch and Steve Coogan's affectionate Amicus/Tigon/Tyburn homage Dr Terrible's House of Horrible in its television section and tributes to relative silver screen obscurities like Alan Birkinshaw's Killer's Moon, the Pete 'n' Dud dud version of The Hound of the Baskervilles (such a comedown for Paul Morrissey after his superlative Frankenstein and Dracula films with the late Udo Kier) and Saxon Logan's Sleepwalker that I was gifted a long distant Christmas past (thanks, John!), 'twas in this latter section that much younger me espied a piece titled 'Looking for a Moment: the Unknown Cinema of Michael J. Murphy' penned by Darrell Burton.  Burton focused in particular on two short-form pieces from Murphy, the 1982 double-hander of Invitation to Hell and its companion piece The Last Night, which were bundled together when they had been released (or perhaps escaped, like a crazed beast) onto VHS in the United Britain of Great Kingdom via Scorpio Video and in the Americanias by Mogul.

Ed Wood, Andy Milligan and Michael J. Murphy, as eternal a golden braid as Godel, Escher and Bach are in the orbits of their own spheres, truly should be carved into the emerald tablets of history as the Holy Trinity of the brilliantly inept but determined art creators.  And there are a number of similarities betwixt the trio - not just the indefatigable underdogs creating genre filmmaking in the howling face of adversity and lack of money or some may cruelly say talent but also the detectable strain of kink (many will know of Ed Wood's penchant for crossdressing either from Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy or Tim Burton's biopic, Milligan's homosexuality and penchant for a walk on the seedier side of life was never kept secret; Murphy's movies certainly have a palpable homoerotic current [too blatant to call it an undercurrent] running through them as well).  Murphy was and remains at least from my viewpoint the most obscure of the three; I was in my twenties by the time I first heard of him and it took until my forties before I actually got round to seeing any of his works, thanks to Powerhouse/Indicator's comprehensively curated Blu-ray box set Magic, Myth and Mutilation which collects pretty much everything that the man ever shot - even down to the couple of minutes' scraps from otherwise lost early films.  It's a truly amazingly extensive overview of a single filmmaker's life collated into on box assembled with the kind of loving care that's usually reserved for the likes of legends such as Hitchcock or Pasolini, and upon finally getting my clammy hands upon it (another Christmas present: at this rate I think I associate Murphy and his oeuvre with the festive holiday season more than Frank Capra) one of the first things I wanted to check out was the short film that had intrigued me so many years earlier: Invitation to Hell.

Beginning with Murphy's seemingly favoured title sequence with lettering in a Celtic font over a flaming background, also used in 1980's rather good short The Cell (which  really liked, but at a little under fifteen minutes I didn't think worth a review on its own; still, I can highly recommend it), we begin with a house in the country.  Shot over a four or five day stint in a rented farm property deep in the wilds of Devon, the short starts with our protagonist Jacky (Becky Simpson, with amazingly early '80s hair) summoned to the isolated locale of Manor Farm in deepest darkest Mummerset for a reunion with old friend Laura (Murphy regular and producer on a number of his early efforts Caroline Aylward, here acting under the name of Catherine Rolands) and her husband Ed (Joseph Sheahan) who are throwing a fancy dress party much to the unprepared and uncostumed Jacky's chagrin.  Supplied with a last minute Elsa Lanchester Bride of Frankenstein outfit by the accommodating vampiress-clad Laura (wearing the same black bob wig that Aylward sported in Murphy's Hellenic-set giallo short Death in the Family the previous year), Jacky joins in with the other revellers including one guest in a cheap plastic Halloween skull mask that is eerily evocative of my childhood trick or treating: just seeing it onscreen brought the smell of the cheap hot plastic pressing against my face and the bite of the elastic into the back of my head all rushing back.

"If you try to leave, he'll stop you."

The perils of Jacky in the wild, wild land of the yokel really begin - menacing and oppressive atmosphere from arrival notwithstanding, as it's the countryside isn't it, and one has to expect that kind of thing - when she's led outside the farmhouse to a burning pyre as part of some kind of Summerisle-on-Sea ritual and roofied by her hostess.  Waking the morning after the night before, she finds that not only is she missing memory but has gained some suspicious scars on her inner thigh courtesy of her midnight tryst with daemonic forces beyond human understanding.  So I suppose as well as the obvious Wicker Man (or perhaps the BBC's paganistic Play for Today Robin Redbreast, another tale of rural shamanic skullduggery; I suppose that film's karate-loving 'Rob'/Edgar could be compared with this piece's piece of countryside beefcake Maurice, both being under the control of outside forces) influence, we get a pinch of Rosemary's Baby added to the mix as well as a hint of Lovecraft.

Finding herself seemingly trapped with the more afraid than antagonistic Laura and Alan (who provides the warning about the unnamed "he" who just might walk between the rows and will definitely impede any attempts at egress) along with servant Tina (Tina Barnett) and farmhands Alan (Steven Longhurst) and the mute brute Maurice (Colin Efford), Jacky begins to panic and the apprehension isn't assuaged by the appearance of her boyfriend Rick (Russell Hall, another early Murphy regular who had appeared in the short films The Cell, Stay and Death in the Family before this, his screen swan song) who makes it clear that he hasn't only just arrived but has been on site all along.  It probably isn't paranoia when it turns out then all your friends genuinely are part of a weird and eerie conspiracy involving and against you.

It slowly begins to dawn that whatever the state of Jacky and Rick's relationship, it hasn't progressed to the fully carnal stage and it's because of her being virgo intacta that marked her out as being the required participant in the ceremony.  Whatever cthonic primordial force it is that haunts the land doesn't go for anyone else's sloppy seconds, I guess.  But it's fine with possessing in turn first Alan to issue commands in a daemonic voice to Maurice (after Alan, whilst completely under his own aegis, admiringly observes Maurice pumping iron topless) and then the man mountain himself to kill off the farm's other denizens in a variety of ways including rolling up his erstwhile roommate-cum-lover and former possessee in a carpet and tossing him onto a fire, whereupon Alan rises like a revenant for revenge.

Over the brief span of forty-four minutes we get low budget thrills and chills, a smidge of homoeroticism, some damn effective gore and a great burned skellington / Grim Reaper taking names and tearing out still-beating hearts in the climax.  What more could one ask, to be honest?

I have no idea how easy this is to access short of splashing out the full price for the Indicator set but being a bite-sized slice of folk horror with a nicely eerie, evocative and menacing synth score from Terence Mills makes this an ideal introduction for newbies and acolytes to the wild and wacky world of the Murphyverse.  Something that I'd highly recommend to any and all other voyagers on the wyrd back roads of cult cinema.

All the Strange Vices: the Early '70s Gialli of Sergio Martino

I don't think you're ready for these gialli.  Even if they're five months overdue.

Okay, so I'm a little bit late for Giallo July with this. By at least a couple of months.  But, y'know... I've been a bit busy.  Life not only finds a way, as Ian Malcolm so sagely spake, it can bloody well get in the way too.  Still, better late than never I guess, and as the vacillating eye of Providence (that's not an H.P. Lovecraft reference: this is giallo) there's the event of Gialloween that I can repurpose and aim for.  I'll let the wonderful Alex the Bookubus fill in the meaty deets on that for you if you care to find out.

'Meaty deets'.  Fucking hell.  What have I become?  And anyway as you can tell, dear reader,  I also missed the dates for the Gialloween weekend as well.  Fingers crossed I can get this finished for actual Halloween*.  I swear I'm getting worse than Douglas Adams for deadlines.  The lines are dots to me.

(*Reader, I didn't.  I should definitely have finished the piece before the 31st of October, but as I type these words I've come down with either a terrible case of the flu or a dose of the COVID, causing a fourth delay to getting this done.  A very happy, very belated Samhain to all of you at home as well as a merry and maybe messy Christmas and the most joyous of New Years.)

And so Giallo July hath once more come and gone.  That time of the year in which some of the braver and hardier denizens of Booktube venture into the sanguineous depths of that particular subgenre, replete is it is - in both the printed word and celluloid ribbon versions - with murder, mystery and suspense.  Which, if memory serves, was the title of an ITV strand on weekend evenings with a truly terrifying (for a child) opening logo featuring thunder and lightning tearing the night sky asunder that showed a mixture of American TV movies - including occasional edition of franchises like Columbo and Ironside - featuring the titular themes.  Certainly the murder and mystery parts: I suppose whether they were genuinely suspenseful or not is subjective.

For the as yet uninitiated, a brief history: the nomenclature for the subgenre, 'giallo', is the Italian word for the colour yellow.  This was the hue (and cry!) selected for the pulpy paperback printings from the publisher Mondadori whose Italic translations of authors such as Agatha Christie and Edgar Wallace made a curious yellow the shade of mystery, murder and mayhem; though as we shall learn, there are many other colours of the dark. 

Gialloween seemed as good a time as any for me to finally take a deeper dive (making a bigger splash, mayhap, if one wants to get Hockney about it) into the directorial career of Sergio Martino.  "Who he?" you cry - I shall endeavour to elucidate.

The man who would arguably be the fourth face on a putative Mount Rushmore of Italian genre directors - after  Mario Bava, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci - Martino was born in Rome itself on the 19th of July 1938 (Wouldn't it have been nice if I'd managed to have written this in time to post on the day of  his eighty seventh birthday?  Alas, I only realised too late, so it was either write this as a belated tribute or put it off until next year [and at this point of repeated delays and disappointments I may as well have done, to be honest with myself]) into a family already steeped in the cinematic tradition.  His grandfather was Gennaro Righelli who had been directing films since 1910 including a 1927 version of Svengali starring genre legends Paul Wegener (the Golem himself) and Alexander Granach (Nosferatu's Renfield knock-off, Knock) and had been a pioneer, helming the first Italian talking picture The Song of Love (La Canzone dell'amore) - an adaptation of Luigi Pirandello's In Silenzio - in 1930.  Sergio's older brother by almost five years Luciano Martino also worked in the film field as a writer and director but was best-known as a pretty prolific producer who would work with his sibling on many famed and feted entries in the joyous giallo division, a number of instalments of which starred Italian scream queen par excellence, the absolutely incandescent Edwige Fenech (who at the time was the wife of Luciano; lucky Luciano I calls 'im), the gorgeous Franco-Italian actress who I think looks a bit like Alejandra Villareal Velez from The Warning if one squints just slightly.  And if you don't know who they are, I'm afraid that I cannot help you and we cannot be friends.  Because you are surely going to hell.

So am I of course, just for different reasons.

"Blood has a strange effect on her.  It excites and repels her at the same time."

It's not cool to kink-shame, you know.

The first pairing of Martino and the Fenech fox, The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh  (originally Lo strano vizio della Signora Wardh and also known as Blade of the Ripper Stateside and by the oddly absurd moniker of Next! in Britain) commenced filming in August 1970 and was released on the fifteenth of January 1971 for a limited Italian run, gaining a wider release in its home country a month later in February.  The story starts with a quotation from the Freud dude himself before we join a mysterious driver on the night time streets of the capital of Osterreich (the film was known as The Killer of Vienna in Austria and Germany) scoping out the ladies of the night line up to select the latest victim of his slasher serial killer campaign.  As this is going on, diplomat Neil Wardh (Alberto de Mendoza, familiar to fans of Euro horror as the Temu Rasputin-a-like Pujardov the mad monk in Eugenio Martin's superb Horror Express) and his emotionally and erotically neglected wife Julie (Fenech) fly in to be met at the airport by a couple of business acquaintances, leading to his neglected younger beautiful bride to take the ride home alone - a trip that involves a police traffic stop and the following exchange between her driver and the cops: 

"Was it Sex Fiend?"

"Yes, and he's still using the razor."

Educational and informative.  That's what we need.  And a slasher wreaking a campaign of blood-flecked terror just might be what an unholy trinity of men conspiring to do away with a certain woman who intersects their lives might need as a cover for their Machiavellian machinations.  In what might prove surprising news the initial script from Ernesto Gastaldi (probably European cinema's first horror specialist, starting in the genre in 1960 with The Vampire and the Ballerina and following it up with such monstrous delights as Werewolf in a Girl's Dormitory, The Horrible Dr Hichcock, The Whip and the Body in 61, '62 and '63 respectively following by the feral flurry of Terror in the Crypt, The Vampire of the Opera and The Long Hair of Death all in '64) did not contain the giallo staple of the black gloved killer, being more in the mould of the '60s Gaslight influenced proto gialli before Martino suggested the addition - doubtless with an eye on the developing trends post Argento's L'ucello dalle piume di cristallo from the previous year.

At a party, Julie's fast friend Carol (Conchita "Christina" Airoldi) introduces her to George (George Hilton, also apparently a member of the extended Martino family), Carol's Australian (at least according to the subtitles, the dub actor in the English language version certainly isn't attempting 'Strine) - but sadly for Morrissey fans, not Alsatian - cousin.  Sadly this budding romantic diversion from her ailing marriage and cold, perpetually absent husband is complicated by the persistent attentions of former lover Jean (Ivan Rassimov, with his devilish smile) with whom Julie was entangled in an obsessive sado-masochistic relationship which he keeps sending her notes reminding her about.  Surely we must all feel for Julie's dilemma - looking for an alternative to her staid and stagnant domesticity with her husband and suddenly spoiled for choice trapped betwixt George Hilton's 'unrealistic handsomeness' and the dark magnetism of  Ivan Rassimov, possibly giallo's hottest hunks.  At least, according to the brilliant Katie of the Night on Youtube in both her top ten giallo actors video and her giallo hunks collab with Selis from Sweet 'n' Spooky.  Essential viewing.

"Worst part of you is the best thing you've got, and it will always be mine - Jean."

The messages from the past paramour continue, and Julie vacillates betwixt husband, blossoming new relationship and being lured back into the thrilling danger of her her old lifestyle.  Poor George.  What's he meant to make of all these mixed signals?  Almost like if a girl got increasingly flirty with one, including revealing her kinks ("Are you into choke fucking?") and then suddenly went as frigid as a nun in winter and talked about how much she loved her boyfriend.  Can you imagine such a thing happening?  No, nor can I.  Ahem.  Anyway...  I'll get over that one day, I'm sure.

Is Jean not only a stalker, forever lurking on the peripheries of Julie's mind and vision, but also the maniacal Ripper?  Or is far more going on than we or she might possibly know?

"Now I know you're trying to get away from me... But your vice is like a room locked from the inside and only I have the key." 

This gnomic and evocative simile makes me smile, and portends a later Martino joint that was to come the following year.  We'll get there, don't worry.

We suddenly smash-cut to a spot of Spanish scuba diving (these sunny Spanish seascapes situated in Sitges, famed for its Festival of Fantastic Film) and the film suddenly goes all Thunderball, with Hilton as 007 and Fenech as Domino.  Actually, Edwige would have made a marvellous Bond girl; her fellow giallo ingenue Barbara Bouchet of course featured in the '67 parody version of Casino Royale (Daliah Lavi too, now that I think about it).  Julie and George's idyll suddenly swerves from Thunderball to Casino Royale (the proper one) as Julie realises that her paradise has been invaded by a malevolent pursuer: but rather than the one-eyed Adolph Gettler who pursues Vesper Lynd, it appears to be the undead spectre of Jean who haunts her steps.

With a cry of "You're my wife now!" Neil channels The League of Gentlemen's Papa Lazarou.  But a jealous husband who's planning to off the straying missus and pin the blame on the serial killer who happens to be running rampant is the least of Mrs Wardh's (the odd spelling, incidentally, is down to a real window by the name of Ward who allegedly threatened legal action for defamation) worries as multiple men in her life turn out to be plotting against it and Julie is trapped unconscious in the kitchen filling with gas, an ice cube melting under the latch to seemingly render this a locked room mystery, some real Jonathan Creek shit.

Accompanied by a wonderfully haunting score by composer Nora Orlandi, including the repeated haunting electronic organ and choral refrain over the electric organ in 'Dies Irae' ('Day of Wrath') - sung by Orlandi herself, without a credit for her vocals - that acts like a motif for Julie's fragile and fraying psyche that would by recycled / repurposed by Quentin Tarantino for the scene where Michael Madsen's Budd contemplates his oncoming death in Kill Bill Volume 2, the film builds on previous dark entries of Italian cinema like the Luciano Martino-produced The Sweet Body of Deborah and Mario Bava's The Whip and the Body to deliver a heady mix of sex and violence  that set the trend for the giallo pictures of the '70s.

Killer in a wetsuit.  I know, I know, it's serious.

Opening with a shot of the lovely Lisa Baumer (Ida Galli, under her regular nom de cinema Evelyn Stewart) strutting through the streets of London in her rather splendid and fashionable hat, with a score from the legendary Bruno Nicolai that sounds like an early precursor of Goblin's later scores for Argento's giallo flicks, The Case of the Scorpion's Tail (La coda dello scorpione, released August 16th 1971) sports a script from a returning Ernesto Gastaldi along with Eduardo Manzanos Brochero (given a token nod despite doing no work on the film as a Spanish co-production needed an Iberian writing credit) and Sauro Scavolini  (who provided the basic story before leaving Gastaldi to craft the screenplay solo) as well as a cast that includes both George Hilton and Alberto de Mendoza returning from Mrs Wardh as well as familiar Euroslash faces Luigi Pistilli (Romolo Guerrieri's aforementioned The Sweet Body of Deborah, Riccardo Freda's The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire and Mario Gariazzo's Exorcist homage The Eerie Midnight Horror Show among others - including a Martino film we'll be getting to shortly) and Janine Reynaud (probably most recognisable to genre fans from Jesus Franco movies such as Succubus and the 'Red Lips' duology of Sadisterotica and Kiss Me, Monster).  With a pedigree like that, it would surely contend for the Best in Show at any Euro sleaze Crufts.

Absent is Edwige Fenech, who was pregnant at the time (Lucky Luciano striking again) of filming, but on the bright side we have Galli/Stewart subbing for her (now there's an image) as our lead in the earlier part of the movie but with the Psycho-style twist - or a "change of horse", as writer Gastaldi phrased it - with Galli's Lisa initially presented as our central character to follow until she's offed around half an hour into the movie, after which Anita Strindberg (who also featured in Lucio Fulci's giallo A Lizard in a Woman's Skin the same year, and would go on to be utilised again by Martino the following year) fills the designer pumps of giallo girl as the indefatigable investigative reporter Cleo Dupont.  So maybe if Fenech had been available she'd have played Cleo rather than Lisa.  Carry on, Cleo - the scene where Cleo is menaced in her apartment lit in a crepuscular green lighting a la Mario Bava or Argento would seem to affirm her as our lead to root for, so I think this would have been Edwige's part for the taking.

Even though this was filmed and released after Strange Vice, in some ways the film feels more like the earlier Lenzi-lensed jet set gialli. Like Strange Vice's third-act change of scene and change of style from Vienna to the Catalonian coast, the switch of locale from still Swinging Seventies London (replete with requisite red buses and 'phone boxes) to the sun-drenched Athens locations ("A black-gloved killer stalks the streets of Athens" as the trailer tells us) giving the film a Fleming-esque travelogue sweep.  Lisa makes her way to the Helios-blessed climes of Hellas after her husband Kurt's life is curtly cut short in an aeroplane 'accident', leading her to inherit a lot of money much to the suspicions of the authorities including urbane insurance investigator Peter Lynch (Hilton), Interpol agent John Stanley (de Mendoza) and police Inspector Stavros (Pistilli).  Lisa meets her early fate at the gloves hands of the eternal black-clad murderer - who alternates the requisite black hat with variations in jet such as what looks like biking leathers and even a diving wetsuit - who also goes after involved parties such as the late Kurt's Greek lover Lara Florakis (Reynaud) during whose murder the blade of the straight razor poking through the crack in the door to hitch open the latch is very similar to the scene where Stefania Cassini's Sara Simms ends up amidst the razor wire in Suspiria; her henchman Sharif (Luis Barboo, another Franco star as he'd go on to essay the mute assistant Morpho in Jesus's batshit blessing Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein as well as Redbeard - no relation to Al from Youtube - from the 1982 John Milius sword 'n' sorcery classic Conan the Barbarian) don't like it.  It's up to plucky girl reporter Cleo to untangle the threads of this web of mayhem and intrigue.  Scorpions don't spin webs of course, but they're arachnids so I feel it still works.

Inspired by the scene where George Hilton quite obviously turns a bottle of J&B whisky so that the label faces the camera for the gods of product placement, I issue the challenge: if you the viewer are feeling especially brave and/or foolish, you too could try the giallo J&B drinking game: simply take a shot every single time you spot a bottle of J&B - but only if you live within wheelbarrow distance of a hospital and/or have your own stomach pump, as there is as definite and real a risk of death as if you were a sex worker in a slasher film.  Attempt it at your own risk.

Cleo's deep dive discovery leads to the realisation that she is all at sea with the killer, and culminates in a Dead Calm-esque climactic sequence on the boat, with Peter suddenly code-switching from the Sam Neill to insane Billy Zane roles - if the flippers don't fit, you should probably quit.  Lynch's citation of a quote from "a famous Frenchman" shows that he has been reading Balzac, and should knock back some Prozac.

Linger on, Pale Blue Eyes.

All the Colours of the Dark (Tutti i colori del buio, or as on the version I have Todos los colores de la oscuridad), also known by the slightly ludicrous moniker of They're Coming to Get You! replete with Oliver!-esque exclamation mark making it look like a giallo musical (and wouldn't that be a hell of a thing, though I suppose it's already been done with Lucio Fulci's bizarro 1984 offering Murder Rock) emerged from the tenebrous shadows on February the 28th 1972 and once more featured the dream team of Edwige Fenech, George Hilton and Ivan Rassimov - the return of the (un)holy trinity amid other surface similarities prompting a fun comparison vid from Katie of the Night - with the addition of the lovely Nieves Navarro a.k.a. Susan Scott playing Fenech's sister.

With Fenech at possibly her most luminously alluring (a highly contested award, it must be said) as the psychologically fragile Jane Harrison, who is suffering from recurring nightmares and high anxiety due to the knockout combo of the childhood trauma of her and Barbara's mother's death and a recent car crash which caused a miscarriage,  For this trauma, she is prescribed drugs by her significant other, Richard Steele (Hilton) - wait, Dick Steele?!?  Definitely a porn name, right? - rather off the books.  He's not a doctor, he's a sales rep FFS.  Can't be legal.  Little blue pills?  I don't think Edwige needs 'em.  I certainly wouldn't.  Feeling isolated and abandoned due to often being alone in their swanky London flat in Putney's swanky Kenilworth Court with only shady recreational pharmacology for company, Jane turns to her mysterious and alluring neighbour Mary (Marina Malfatti) who also feels that she has the cure for all Jane's ills - prescribing a visit to a Sabbat.  Because, you know, why not.

There was a big 'black magic in suburbia' craze of the late '60s and early '70s (as detailed pretty well by Al Redbeard on videos such as this on his channel), akin to the weirdo heavy metal meets Dungeons & Dragons Satanic Panic of the mid '80s. Devil worshippers in an apartment block (I know, I know it's serious) a la Roman Polanski's 1968 adaptation of Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby, and Paul Wendkos' 1971 The Mephisto Waltz starring future Hawkeye from M*A*S*H Alan Alda and the lovely Barbara Parkins - a still of whom from said film leading a human headed dog on a leash stuck in my mind and haunted my dreams as a child.  Jane didn't sign up for a greedy girls party - certainly not one where the liquid required to be greedy for is puppy's blood - at yet another recognisable location: the Satanic house was obviously typecast as a devilish edifice as West Sussex's Wykehurst Park would play the legendary Hell House itself the following year John Hough's wonderful adaptation of Richard Matheson's novel.  Also, the mysterious man with unnaturally pale blue eyes (it's Ivan Rassimov again) who has been haunting Jane's steps makes an appearance and the cult's Satanist leader (D.B. McBride?!?  What a name for a Temu Mocata.  Sounds more like the kind of guy that would pull off a daring heist, leap out of a plane and disappear than someone who'd conjure the goat of Mendes) played by Julian Ugarte of Paul Naschy's werewolf debut La marca del hombre lobo with shiny metallic Fu Manchu talons looks like a cross between Mike Raven and Aslan Tennant - which was my little brother's nickname for Small from Big Chef, Little Chef as he thought he looked like David Tennant's Tenth Doctor but with a mane.  We're getting into the deepest of deep cut references here when I'm dropping jokes only one other person on the planet would appreciate, and he doesn't even read my blog.   The git.

There's also the recognisable autumnal environs of Putney's Bishop's Park, a menacing aura of dread belying the bucolic mise en scene, where Pegory Greck met Troughton's Father Wossface in The Omen.  Clearly that area of London was rife with Satan in the Seventies.  "Not all black magic is mumbo jumbo" as Rutger Hauer so rightly said in the Guinness ads.  And who are we to argue with Roy Batty?  It being the swinging early Seventies, nobody seems too fussed about using protection at the Sabbat gangbangs.  One would think that winding up with a bun in the oven from all that coven lovin' would be a hazard to best be avoided.  Oneiric. psychedelic and atmosphere-drenched, accentuated by an excellent Bruno Nicolai score, All the Colours of the Dark is a beautiful nightmare of paranoia and suburban Satanic swinger's shindigs that leaves an impression on the memory like a half-remembered dream or vitreous opacities dancing at the edges of the waking mind's field of vision.  What's that in the corner of your eye?

He's coming to get you, Barbara.

"Hello there, Satan!"

The as has by this time become de rigueur unwieldy yet still wonderful title Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (Il tuo vizio e una stanza chiusa e solo io ne ho la chiave, unlocked and unleashed from its solitary chamber on August 18th 1972) was an enigmatic variation upon Edgar Allan Poe's oft-retold tale 'The Black Cat'; one of the many alternative release titles for the picture was Eye of the Black Cat, which is prosaic but appropriate - another was apparently Excite Me, which isn't but can at least be read in the voice of Tom Atkins from Night of the Creeps saying "Thrill me".  So there's that.

We are here introduced to the struggling writer Oliviero Rouvigny and his much put-upon wife Irina (Luigi Pistilli and Anita Strindberg respectively, returning to the Martino fold after The Case of the Scorpion's Tail); the past his prime alcoholic author routinely holds drunken orgies in his picturesque countryside villa, inviting all sorts of hippy riff raff round for a gangbang and subjecting his tormented spouse to emotional and physical abuse.  We also have the awful Oliviero's Oedipal obsession with his late mother, whose portrait hangs upon the wall overlooking these Bacchanalian proceedings.  Forget the Freudian frolics of Julie Wardh - pertinent though they were to that film's Viennese setting - Siggy (as we Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure alumni know him) would have a field day with his guy.  He may harbour a sublimated desire to mate with his mater, but he's soon going to meet his maker.

So sick, so perverse (oh wait, that's another film) we discover that in addition to degrading his spouse as well as their housemaid Brenda (Angela La Vorgna), whom he also routinely subjects to racial verbal abuse, the oh so odious Oliviero is also indulging in a fling with the feisty but fated Fausta (Daniela Giordano, who would go on to star in Paul Naschy's Spanish Inquisition - I bet nobody expected that), an ex-student whose bookshop the dissolute writer has been visiting to put his bookmark between her inviting pages if you know what I mean. 

Making her entrance thirty three minutes into a ninety five minute movie we finally find Fenech, her raven locks cut into a stylish bob making her resemble a somehow even more sizzlingly sexy Phryne Fisher - should such a thing be humanly possible - as Floriana she's able to play a much more vivacious and outgoing character with more agency than her vulnerable star turns in Strange Vice and All the Colours.  Arriving at this house of mortal sin (no, that's another film) as Oliviero's visiting niece, the cunning coquette quickly seduces both her uncle and aunt amply able as she is to utilise her sexuality and weaponise her feminine wiles.  Another deadly pussy loose aboot this hoose is of course the aptly-named Satan, the black cat that used to belong to Oliviero's late mother who constantly stalks and persecutes Irina - or is that just in her increasingly paranoid mind? - to the extent that the downtrodden woman turn like a proverbial violent vermis and gouge out the feline's eye in an attempt to annihilate that pussy (no, we're not back to talking about her sex scene with Floriana, gutterbrains).

When bookshop doxy Fausta is offed, implicating Oliviero, and Brenda is killed rather nastily with a billhook rending her nice and tender flesh the shadowy mansion increasingly becoming a house of internecine intrigue and counter-plotting, like Gormenghast with gore.  Gormenghastly?  This is a house with secrets just waiting to be uncovered, some of them literally buried beneath the bowels of the building; "somebody's in my fruit cellar", as Evil Dead II's Henrietta would say but it doesn't want to stay there especially if the spectral Satanic cat has any say in the matter.

Seriously sleazy with a cast comprised of a cadre of thoroughly unlikeable and reprehensible characters doing - or planning to do - awful things to one another, Your Vice is like being dunked into the murky depths and taken on a tour of a Gothic sewer by Martino's masterful mounting of tension through the cinematography enhanced by another great Bruno Nicolai score; all anchored by an intense performance from Anita Strindberg that's a complete 180 degrees remove from her portrayal of Cleo in Scorpion's Tail.

Where WHORES meets SAWS!

Martino's next opus Torso was released under its original nomenclature of I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale (the rather literal The Bodies Bear Traces of Carnal Violence - vestiges of which made its way to the DVD release title of Torso - Carnal Violence) on January 4th 1973.  The aforesaid DVD release also bore the legend "Where WHORES meet SAWS!" in lurid lettering on the front of the box, which as I recall earned me a suspicious look from the rather attractive girl behind the counter.  Thanks a lot, Shameless releasing.  Bad enough that the girl in the record shop doesn't think that I'm avant-garde enough without the lass in HMV thinking I'm some kind of a deviant.  Alright, knowing I'm some kind of a deviant.  I did buy The Beast in Space (and see here for more on that little gem) at the same time.  Odd that it was Torso that earned me the glare, honestly.  Maybe for a hot sparkle goth she was really conservative and vanilla and dull and I wouldn't have wanted to ask her out on a date anyway.

Yes, this is me coping.  Anyway...

We open with a lecture on art at Perugia's university for foreign students, the specific artwork being the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, being delivered by professor Franz (John Richardson, as in the romancer of fur bikini-clad Raquel Welch in Hammer's One Million Years B.C. rather than the comedy panelist and ex Mr Lucy Beaumont) to a hall of students including honey blonde Jane (Suzy Kendall, Dario Argento's premier giallo The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) and the lovely brunette Dani (Tina Aumont).  We also have the lovely Flo (Patrizia Adiutori) enticing us to go with the Flo (I'd love to, even risking the hazardous consequences of this particular date.  Well worth it, I reckon) who meets a sadly early tragic end at the hands of the faceless killer in a Toolbox Murders-style balaclava/ski mask who's offing the campus's cuties.

Next up: Carol (Conchita Airoldi, Carol from Strange Vice... in this film as another killed Carol!), heartbroken after being dumped by her sugar daddy, takes off with a couple of biker guys to a very listless and un-happening orgy with terrible dancing.  The complete opposite of the very happening happening that opens Mario Bava's Five Dolls for an August Moon which had Edwige Fenech disco dancing like the video for Saint Motel's 'Just My Type'.  Speaking of dolls as a metaphor for gialli victims, this film has the antagonist actually spell it out clear as day:

"They were only dolls... stupid dolls made out of flesh and blood... I hacked them to pieces like dolls."

Carol plodges through the muddy forest in her bare feet, and likely would catch her death from pneumonia if the masked killer didn't deliver it to her sooner

Wanting to get away from the slayings in Perugia (grimly amusing  from today's point of view for those of us who are twisted is the realisation that the setting is the same, as well as 'foreign' Anglophone victim[s], as the notorious Amanda "Foxy Knoxy" Knox case) the girls head off to the countryside villa of Dani's slightly dodgy Uncle Nino (Carlo Alighiero), who likes to watch his nubile niece and her girlfriends when they're freshly showered and moist.  And good for him, I'm not here to kink-shame.  Also along for the trip are Ursula (Carla Brait) and her special friend Katya (Angela Covello) - Katya with her head nestled in Ursula's lap during the train trip, an openly Sapphic relationship that only becomes more explicit after they arrive at the mansion on a mountain top - as neither Shocking Blue nor Bananarana sang - and we get Ursula's Salome-esque dance of the veils and more lesbic canoodling.  It's still representation even if it's exploitative is my take on it.  And so all the young dudettes wind up riding to the villa on a tractor through the village at the foot of the mountain, ordering provisions to be delivered by the local yokels Withnail & I style.  "Eggs and things", in the words of McGann's Marwood.

After Jane takes a rather nasty spill down the staircase, Luc Merenda's Doctor Roberto - which is almost a Beatles song, but not quite - prescribes painkillers for her busted ankle.  Let's hope it doesn't wind up feeding... heh... Jane's addiction.  Confined to bed and sleeping off the tablets for a while, Jane awakens from her somnolence to find the still unseen killer taking the corpses of the girls apart with a hacksaw, inspiring the DVD box strapline that I utilised above and was judged for so harshly.  Still not over it.

Trapped alone in the villa, barred windows above a sheer cliff - like Jonathan Harker ensnared in Castle Dracula - Jane finds herself in the perilous predicament of having to deal with the killer while coping with a busted ankle like Laurie in Carpenter's '78 Halloween.  Not that I necessarily think that Carpenter's Shape jape was consciously influences by this film; if it were then it wouldn't be so clear that Jamie Lee was the protagonist 'til near the end - here it really feels like Aumont's Dani will be the focus until Jane wakes up to find herself, to her surprise as much as ours, to be the Final Girl.

I'm tellin' y'all, it's sabotage.

The Suspicious Death of a Minor (Morte sospetta di una minorenne, also trading under the name Too Young to Die) was released through Titanus on August 12th 1975 and takes something of a left turn to the previous dark entries in Martino's giallo canon, being as it is something of a hybrid of giallo and the poliziotteschi genre - a sort of hard-boiled police procedural generally featuring a loose cannon cop who gets the job done despite a reckless disregard for normal procedure and breaking all the rules (usually much to the chagrin of an over-stressed boss) to crack the case.  A sort of Milanese Dirty Harry, if you like.  

Opening with a plangent and percussive theme from Luciano Michelini, which I think it's fair to say and the very least 'homages' Goblin, we are swiftly introduced to the young Marisa Pesce (Patrizia Castaldi) and her shifty businessman and upper-class deviant uncle Gaudenzio Pesce (Massimo Girotti) who is certainly up to something fishy.  Pesce, you see?  Never mind.  The script, once again from Ernesto Gastaldi, gives us our dishevelled and decidedly anti-heroic protagonist Paolo Germi (Claudio Casinelli) - at first we don't know if he's acting in any kind of official capacity, or is he some kind of lone wolf rogue agent like Simon Templar (the original Leslie Charteris pulp version, rather than Roger Moore, Ian Ogilvy or - God forbid - Val Kilmer, whom Casinelli slightly resembles in the artwork on the reversible Arrow Blu-ray cover) taking matters and the law into his own hands?  Germi encounters Marisa in what might be called a 'meet-strange' at a public dance where she is being followed by a menacing man in mirrored sunglasses (Roberto Posse, which sounds like the name of some Milanese gang or militia to me - "We think it's the work of the Roberto posse again") and briefly flirts and dances with Paolo in an effort to shed this unwanted tail, leaving Germi blue-balled and baffled with his spectacles shattered on the cement floor setting up a running broken glasses gag.  The effort is all in vain, though, as her pursuer catches up with her in her flat and takes her out by slashing her throat and repeatedly plunging his blade into her in the way that Germi was interested in doing more metaphorically.

Taking up the cause of investigating Marisa's murky murder, Germi - with the aid of his new-found young hustler sidekick Giannino (Adolfo Caruso) - begins to uncover the shadowy world of an under-age call girl ring whose number includes student Floriana (ah, there's a recurring name) Gori, who meets a gory end at the hands of pimp Raimondo 'Menga' Menghini when he shoots and fatally wounds her in the side, is played by the striking French-Italian actress Barbara Magnolfi, Olga the sibilant student from Suspiria (who hisses "the names of snakessss!") before Menga himself suffers the same fate when Germi delivers the same kind of injury to him.  Only fair, really.

Much mayhem ensues with thrills, kills and hilarious set pieces such as the attempted killer on the Big Dipper - as Ronan Keating told us, life is a rollercoaster, so I suppose death can be, too.  Suddenly splatted by a train like the agent following Ned Beatty's Otis in Richard Donner's Superman, in quite a severe case of tonal whiplash.  There's also Casinelli's car chase with his rickety car incrementally coming to bits in a way reminiscent of the 1984 Amy Heckerling knockabout action-com Johnny Dangerously

A more minor Martino is still a movie worth watching, crafted by a well-oiled machine of a team of professionals operating at the peak of their powers including Gastaldi on script duties (alongside Martino himself) and a score heavy on the prog-rock influences like the iconic Goblin soundtrack for Argento's iconic Profundo rosso from the same year courtesy of composer Luciano Michelini.  It's an uneven and slightly schizophrenic film held together by a fascinating central performance from Casinelli, who would sadly meet a premature end when he was killed in a helicopter accident on the set of Martino's 1985 science fictioner Hands of Steel (which reunited Martino. Casinelli and John Saxon - Nancy's Dad himself - after The Scorpion with Two Tails in 1982), crashing into Colorado's Navajo Bridge.  Man, the '80s were a rough time for chopper incidents on the set of genre movies, weren't they?  At least we can't blame John Landis for that one.

Martino would go on to direct a number of entertaining genre movies, ranging from 1978's infamous video nasty entry in the grubby Italian cannibal subgenre Mountain of the Cannibal God (La montagna del dio cannibale) which pitted Bond girl Ursula Andress against the type of hungry jungle denizens first seen in Umberto Lenzi's Man From Deep River and sundry other less palatable even than longpig) fare, the 1979 Island of the Fishmen (L'isola degli uomini pesce, also released as Screamers) in which her fellow former Bond girl Barbara Bach tangled with unfriendly Gill Men on an Atlantean island, and Mad Max meets Escape from New York two for one mash-up 2019, After the Fall of New York (2019 - Dopo la caduta di New York) from 1983 with former Hollywood matinee star Edmund Purdom slumming it with elusive cult star Michael Sopkiw in the Children of Men-style infertile nuclear irradiated wastelands.  None of these new adventures in genre cinema though, not even the aforementioned giallo at the tail end of the giallo wave The Scorpion with Two Tails (alias the more evocative or more prosaic [you pays your money, you takes your choice] Assassinio al cimaterio etrusco; or Murder in the Etruscan Cemetery) in '82 could compete with his early flurry of activity in the subgenre: a six flick stint of giallo goodness that in your humble correspondent's opinion is up there with the great pioneering works of Mario Bava and Dario Argento.  Yes, I'm totally serious - they're that good.  Check 'em out if you haven't already.  Once you dive in, you may never want to leave.

The Last of the Famous Universal Monsters: June Lockhart (1925 - 2025)

And here's to you, Mrs Robinson.

That title I've given this piece is a bit Smiths, isn't it?  May as well get some Simon and Garfunkel in there too.

And so I woke in the early hours of the 26th of October to discover that the last Famous Monster of Filmland had departed this earthly plane at a grand century.  June Lockhart may be better known to many for her motherly roles in the likes of Lassie and of course for the iconic role of Maureen Robinson in Lost in Space, but to us horror fans and monster kids she was - and remains forever, of course, such is the immortality of the celluloid ribbon of dreams that is cinema - the titular heroine of the 1946 Universal horror film She-Wolf of London.

Of the pantheon of the Universal Monsters Lon Chaney Senior left us first at the age of just 47 in 1930, Bela Lugosi proved Bauhaus right at 73 in 1956, Boris Karloff aged 81 in 1969, Lon Chaney Junior was 67 when he went away in 1973 and John Carradine 82 in 1988.  Most recently and until now the most elderly / long-lasting was the Black Lagoon's Gill-Man Ricou Browning who reached 93 before going in 2023.  June Lockhart's death truly closes that chapter.

Born on the 25th of June 1925 and leaving us on the 23rd of October 2025 at just under one hundred years and four months, Ms Lockhart was only twenty years old when She-Wolf was shot in December 1945.  She would later hazily and self-deprecatingly recall of the film "If I'm remembering right, I was just submitted for it by my agent.  I did it - and I was not very good in it.  But the following year I was the hot young ingenue on Broadway in a wonderful comedy.  So I guess what I needed was a good direction."  Which I feel it's fair to say she did.  Whatever the film's flaws, the direction from Jean Yarbrough (helmer of five Abbott and Costello entries [sadly none of the 'meet the monsters' dark entries, but Here Come the Co-Eds did co-star Lon Chaney Junior and Martha O'Driscoll who would make penultimate monster rally House of Dracula the same year] as well as genre entries The Devil Bat, King of the Zombies, Rondo Hatton's Creeper duology House of Horrors and The Brute Man, the unrelated The Creeper, the Bowery Boys' Meet Frankenstein knockoff Master Minds and ending his cinema career with the bathetic thud of Hillbillys in a Haunted House) isn't one of them, bringing quite a bit of atmosphere to a latter-day entry in the Universal cycle that many seem to disregard due it's "cheat" ending which is to be fair more Scooby-Doo than horror and perhaps calls Lockhart's status as Last Monster Standing into question.  Phyllis Allenby may turn out not to be yer genuine lycanthrope like Wilfred Glendon and Larry Talbot, but she still counts as far as I'm concerned.

It does feel odd to be writing a post on this blog that isn't a review of something, and normally of course the obvious thing to do would be to rewatch and review She-Wolf of London properly as a tribute but seeing as a) I'm already in the middle of about five not so easy pieces to complete (how and why I constantly let myself get into these situations I don't know) and b) I was already planning on a marathon runthrough series of reviews of the Universal Monsters movies for next year (so at my current forever stymied rate of progress expect them sometime around the Space Year 2035 or thereabouts) I thought I'd say a little something to mark her passing.  It would have felt odd to do nothing to mark the occasion, and I'm not going to try to pretend this is the greatest panegyric in the history of the world - this is just my little tribute.  There we are: as well as The Smiths and Simon and Garfunkel, we've added Tenacious D to the musical roster.  Quite the festival we've got going here.

God bless you, please, Mrs Robinson.