Devilman: The Birth (Umanosuke Iida, 1987)

"Until now, the Devil was thought to be a figment of man's imagination... Just like God."

It's OVA between us. Yes, it's time to take a deep devil may care dive down the Devil Gate Drive of daemonic anime, a world first opened up to me, like some parting curtains revealing the chthonic world of night, when i was around twelve years old and some schoolmate like a serpentine tempter lent me a VHS of legendary monster hentai fever dream Urotsukidoji and i began to wonder if cartoons could even do that kind of thing. Eager for more, like an adept tempted into an arcane library in search of some siren's call of revelatory mysteries, i got myself down to the video shop and rented what seemed to be the nearest thing (Japanese cartoon: check, demons: check, violence: check) to what i'd seen. This would prove to be the initial original to video animation based upon Go Nagai's manga Devilman, and my young self would sit rapt for fifty minutes of eldritch fun before being slightly baffled by the cliffhanger ending that he would not see the resolution of for the best part of thirty years.

"The primaeval dwellers of the Earth.  The demons.  The devils, to be precise."

Starting out by showing us tales of a primaeval Earth when the daemons dwelled (and they did dwell well) and death was but a dream, betwixt the sparkling rivers Acheron and Styx 'neath a starlit sky, we see the ancient days of old - of faerie folk dancing in the moonlight (and, yes, now that awful fucking Toploader song is stuck in my head and i hope it is in yours) whilst the wyrms of the Earth surge to the surface to devour with their unholy maws. Flash-forward about a billion years, and we arrive in the present day to join in with the daily trevails of young Akira Fudou. Akira (no, not that one - i saw that a few months later) is a teenage orphan whose day is just getting progressively worse as he goes about his routine of feeding the school's rabbits only to find their hutch starkly violated and the pets slaughtered by a gang of bicycle chain-wielding toughs who like to practice their maimings on mammals.

Rescued from his home time head-kicking by the quite kawaii Miki Makimura (try saying that three times fast while drunk) - the girl with whom he has found himself living after his parents' death - Akira finds himself in a more awkward struggle than a physical beating from goons as she tends to his wounds and the sexual/romantic tension becomes thick enough in the air to cut with a sai, as Miki makes her attraction to him plain and he bottles it and ruins the moment like a goon thus proving himself to be my spirit animal.

It is into this febrile situation that an interloper injects himself - this being Ryou Asuka, an old friend of Akira who comes from out of nowhere (my glance turns to a stare) to demand that Akira accompany him immediately. Cutting a bishonen figure with his Super Saiyan spiky blond hair and swishy trenchcoat (which contains a Kyle Reese style sawn-off shotgun - he's not just pleased to see you), Miki mistakes their intense closeness for a bit of yaoi zowie and watches forlorn as Akira is swept away by this charming stranger in his cool red hot car with suspected Squarepusher intentions. Ryou takes Akira to his home, a gated mansion that has fallen to ruin, and explains to him that his father recently took his own life after a period of instability which exhibited such mild signs as slaughtering a songbird in its cage (Freddy's Revenge style: as if things needed to get any more homoerotic round here) and decapitating a dog - though he did offer to replace it with an even bigger, jucier one that would be more worthy of slaughter in a mad Renfield like outburst that mistook lunacy for lucidity - before pouring petrol over himself and immolating like a protesting monk.

"The only way to fight demons is to become a demon yourself."

The rhyme behind the reason for this, Ryou explains, is that Asuka Senior had discovered the truth. On an expedition into the Mayan ruins of the Mesoamerican rainforests he uncovered evidence of a pre-human, antediluvian civilisation that walked the Earth long before the dawn of man like one of Graham Hancock's wildest masturbatory fantasies. The land of the demons glimpsed in the past prologue, a pre-Piri Reis mappa mundi, now lies beneath the Antarctic ice pickled in time like the justified ancients of Mu-Mu in a jar. Akira's parents had been killed on a polar expedition which encountered the fiends frozen like Frankenstein encased within glaciers, who then proved to be not as dormant as a dormouse as the sleeper must awaken.

"In the dreadful cold, Lucifer, the bat-winged King of Demons is buried up to his chest in ice suffering in motionless torment."

After their conversation is interrupted by an arachnoid manse raider (no, not Ciaran Hinds from Game of Thrones), Ryou finally unfurls his plan to Akira: to find someone pure enough in heart to be able to bond with a demon in order to become... I want to say 'the Hybrid' but it's giving me serious Doctor Who series 9 flashbacks.... a creature who can take on the demons themselves. To this end, Ryou takes Akira down to the convenient basement nightclub that he has had installed wherein a Bacchanalian rave is taking place upon the Sabbath. Seizing a broken bottle and glassing a few revelers like it's a Saturday night in Newcastle's Bigg Market, Ryou unleashes the demons in the hopes that they will inhabit the bodies of all present and that either he or Akira will be pure of heart (with or without wolfsbane blooms) enough to absorb the daemonic energy and destroy all monsters.

Spoiler: it's Akira, who becomes one with the demon Amon and metamorphoses into the horned and goat-legged Devilman to tear all around asunder and stand alone, victorious yet bloodied, amid the ruins of myriad corpses.

"Truly a legacy of horror!"

His Satanic majesty, by request.

Within the Woods (Sam Raimi, 1978)

"You have violated the ancient ways, and so must DIE!!"

And so it came to pass that in that little corner of the globe known as Michigan in the late 1970s a group of college buddies decided to follow the home-made Three Stooges-inspired slapstick movies they'd made with an exploratory expedition into the realm of grueling terror.  This triumvirate of teen terrors consisted of Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell and Rob Tapert (credited in the film's opening legend as  'RIP TAPERT PRESENTS'), and they were following their feature length (70 minutes) movie debut of the previous year It's Murder! with a 30 minute short horror movie which they hoped to use  as a showcase for prospective investors in order to gain the funding to make a full length feature version (which, of course, would be 1981's epoch-making The Evil Dead).

Made for a grand budget of $1600 secured mostly from friends and family, Within the Woods is very much the prototypical Sam Raimi film, debuting many of the tricks and tics that would define his filmmaking style, as well as being the ur-Evil Dead, or Evil Dead 0 if you will.  Featuring co-producer Campbell alongside friend and co-star in the trio's earlier shorts Ellen Sandweiss in the not-the-most-imaginatively-named roles of 'Bruce' and 'Ellen', the story unfolds in a manner broadly familiar to any audience acquainted with its cinematic consequent as two couples take a vacation in a remote cabin in the woods.  The 'cabin' of Within the Woods is a more substantial structure than that of Evil Dead, more of a small farmhouse than the shanty shack to follow.  Bruce and Ellen are joined on this ill-fated trip by their friends Scotty (Scott Spiegel, who would later gain co-writing credit on 1987's Evil Dead II and make his directorial debut with 1989's supermarket slasher Intruder) and Shelly (Mary Valenti in her sole credited role, which isn't much of a surprise as she's absolutely fucking chronic).

Ellen and Bruce decide to spend the warm summer day outdoors having a picnic, leaving Scott and Shelly inside indulging in a game of Monopoly. After finding some flint arrowheads in the grass, Bruce chooses this moment to announce that their selected holiday destination is built on an old Indian burial ground (typical - isn't that just always the way?) which bears a medicine man's curse. He does continually say 'Indian' as well, rather than 'Native American', which is a bit non-PC this side of the Seventies. Deciding to build a fire to heat up their hot dogs, he uncovers yet more arrowheads and some potsherds. This impromptu edition of Tony Robinson's Time Team results in the discovery of a dagger which Bruce proclaims to be the property of the powerful shaman buried beneath them, which is almost enough to put Ellen off her wieners.

Waking from a postprandial nap a short time later, Ellen finds herself alone and ventures into the woods to search for the missing Bruce. It was at this point that the Nth-generation dub that i'm reviewing (the film having never been commercially released for reasons of copyright) skipped and glitched so badly that when Ellen stumbles upon something lying in the undergrowth and screams, i had absolutely no idea what she - or I - was supposed to be looking at. I must say, a pirated who knows how many times copy of a film shot on 8mm film before being blown up to 16mm is not the easiest viewing experience i've ever had. I think if it was longer than half an hour it may have induced glaucoma. Anyway, a terrified Ellen is chased through the trees by an unseen presence in a sequence that sees the debut of the soon to be famous 'Sam cam' technique (the camera secured to a wooden plank held between two running people), and reaches the supposed safety of the house only to find the door locked. Here we get a routine that would be replicated shot for shot in The Evil Dead as Ellen frantically scrabbles at the door lock with a series of keys on a keyring as the presence looms in ever closer behind her, only to drop the keys and have her hand grabbed by an occupant coming to her rescue (in this case Spiegel's Scotty).

Either not believing or not comprehending the hysterical Ellen (given Spiegel and Valenti's 'performances' it's hard to tell), Scotty leaves Shelly to look after her while he goes outside to search for Bruce. After growing anxious waiting for either of the boys to return, Shelly decides to ignore Ellen's frantic pleas and investigate ("I'm just going to step outside. And shine a light into the woods" she intones non-grammatically) but barely makes it onto the porch when she opens the door to be confronted by a lurker at the threshold. This particular thing on the doorstep is a demonically cadaverous Bruce, possessed by the vengeful Indian's spirit. Boy is his face red. He stabs Shelly in the neck with the dagger, ending her reign of thespian terror forever, and a relieved bereaved Ellen barricades the door and arms herself with kitchen knives. This new Rambo attitude leads to a bit of a misunderstanding as a figure enters the back door to be greeted with a knife to the gut, only for it to be revealed as a returning Scotty - a gag that Raimi repeated with Dan Hicks' Jake in Evil Dead II). Choking on his own corn syrup, Scotty uses his dying gurgles to tell Ellen to go into the cellar where the gun is. Obvious place, really.

In another eerily familiar sequence, Ellen braves the rickety steps down into the cellar and probes its dark depths to arm herself (with a handgun, rather than the Evil Dead shotgun) and thankfully there's nobody buried in this fruit cellar but zom-Bruce decides to enter 'intruder window' (arf!) and for some reason instead of shooting him Ellen manages to partially sever his dagger-wielding hand which he then chews through to remove completely in a scene that would be transferred to the possessed Shelly in the movie. Stabbed with the enchanted Amerind blade (still gripped by his own disembodied hand), Bruce departs this plane of existence with a series of echoing moans - but not before grasping Ellen's ankle in a fake out "Psyche!" moment which provokes her into taking the advice of Richard E. Grant's Withnail and take the bastard axe to him! The act of bodily dismemberment dutifully done, Ellen sits shattered amidst the entrails and remains as a victorious final girl until the last second "Gotcha!" as Scotty's reanimated cadaver suddenly sits up into shot - another shot that would be recycled.

As a fan of The Evil Dead and its subsequent sequels and series for most of my life, i'm not sure why i left it so long before actually getting round to watching Within the Woods. Sure it's very rough around the edges, but it's fascinating to see so much that is familiar actually being incepted and i'd eagerly urge any fellow fans to set aside a half hour and give it a go. Come into the woods.

Join us.

Creepozoids (David DeCoteau, 1987)

Remember that time back in 1992 when the word ended and we all survived in an acid rain-lashed post-holocaust wasteland? No, neither do i, but here we are just six years after the apocalypse in the far-flung future space year of 1998 following a ragtag team of deserters from a crack commando squadron being pursued for a crime (mutiny and desertion) that they most assuredly did commit.
The B-Team here includes everybody's favourite (actually my own third favourite, after Brinke Stevens and Michelle Bauer) clothes-allergic '80s scream queen Linnea Quigley. La Quigs is playing the role of Blanca, and unlike the big green guy from Street Fighter II you might not actually be averse to this one leaping on you, wrapping her legs around your waist and getting a little bitey. With her are leader Jake (Richard Hawkins), meathead Butch (Ken Abraham), bookish Jesse (Michael Aranda) and Kate, 34C-22-33 (Kim McKamy, who a mere three years later would reinvent herself as porn starlet and AVN and XRCO Hall of Famer Ashlyn Gere).

The gang take time out from stalking moodily along abandoned train tracks to a pulsing sub-John Carpenter and oh-so-brilliantly-'80s synth score to take refuge from an oncoming acid rain storm in some ruins. Surrounded, like the Monty Python gang, by film (in this case stock footage of stormclouds and rain) they decide to explore their new temporary accommodation further and discover an underground bunker consisting of a network of tunnels and rooms. This rabbit warren is a deserted scientific facility belonging to the Research For A Better Tomorrow project, and even ill omens such as a severed head in the laboratory and obvious signs that something has escaped from one of the experimental cages can't deter the crew from making use of such amenities as a working hot shower. Because did you really think we'd get more than fifteen minutes in before Linnea took her clothes off?

Jesse manages to access the lab's computer files (which bear such personnel in-joke names as Forrest Ackerman, Roger Corman and Charles Band) and discovers that the absent eggheads had been working on the synthesis and recombination of amino acids (primordial soup, from which all life springs). The results of this particular folly of hubristic science include mutant rats the size of small dogs and a mutant creature resembling a betusked Giger xenomorph. Cue some very familiar Ridley Scott-esque creeping around ventilation shafts as the male members (tee hee) of the squad meet successive gory demises, leaving Blanca and Kate as the last girls standing. After Kate succumbs to the mutagenic effects of a giant rat bite which reduces the star of Put It In Gere from a perfect 10 to "nice body, butterface", Blanca has to tangle with her friend - now a prosthetics covered zombie mutant (whenever i think of "Ashlyn Gere in latex", this isn't it) - in a girl fight to the death. It's less sexy than you might imagine.

Having been set up as the surviving 'final girl' of the movie, we are thrown a sudden curve ball by director DeCoteau as Blanca finds that Jake isn't dead but has been stashed away in the creature's nest-cum-larder before she is suddenly and ignominiously feasted upon by the monster. Waking Jake understandably exits, pursued by beast, until he is cornered in the complex's supplies store where he is tossed around like ragdoll physics until he injects the thing with a handy hypodermic of... bleach? Acid? Something. Then as he crawls away from the scene of battle, we get a Zilla-style swerve as a baby mutant resembling a cross between the fertility drug frightmare of Larry Cohen's 1974 It's Alive and the demonic Selwyn of Peter Jackson's Braindead (1992) crawls from the creatures corpse dragging its dripping umbilical cord behind it. This fanged hellspawn mounts a frenzied assault but fails to reach it's five minute birth anniversary before Jake garrottes it with its umbilicus.

But of course it's not dead, because final shot cliffhanger.

Relatively well-shot in twelve days on a meagre budget by DeCoteau - who would go on to other such genre delights as Nightmare Sisters (1988), Dr Alien (1989) and Puppet Master III: Toulon's Revenge (1991) as well as hardcore homosexual hot stuff like Men of Action II (1989) - Creepozoids is a breezy 70 minutes of lightweight fun with a bit of T&A and a splash of gore. Certainly not the peak of the genre but not a waste of its brisk runtime, any aficionados of the low budget end of the VHS era should find something to enjoy.

The Mad Love Life of a Hot Vampire (Ray Dennis Steckler, 1971)

"I am Elaina, the wife of Count Dracula, and the film you are about to see took place a very short time ago."

"Do you like vampires?  Do you like grainy '70s porn loops?"

Perhaps these are not questions that other people ask themselves on a regular basis,  but at least for me the answer is an assured yes - all these Jean Rollin and Jess Franco DVDs aren't just for decoration, you know.  But it turns out that taking the obvious sex and death metaphor inherent to the vampire legend (both le petit and le grand morts irrevocably intertwined) was not the sole province of those European masters of the macabre: in the faraway US of A Ray Dennis Steckler was crafting his own answer in the form of The Mad Love Life of a Hot Vampire.  Yes, the pseudonymous 'Cash Flagg' himself of The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964) and Rat Pfink a Boo Boo (1966) infamy had within the scant space of a few years found himself directing hardcore filth.  Such a falling off was there.  Or was there?

"Dracula decides to make love, not war."

Under one of his more common noms de plume, Sven Christian, Steckler helmed this 50-minute slice of filmic eternity in '71, a couple of years before such delights as 1974's The Sexorcist or 1981's Debbie Does Las Vegas.    Also here is the then Mrs Steckler, Carolyn Brandt (Cee Cee Beaumont herself from Rat Pfink), though sadly she isn't participating in the mucky stuff but is relegated to the sidelines spouting gnomic and impenetrable (fnarr!) gibberish as the Bride of Dracula.  The Count himself is played by Shock Theater television horror host Jim Parker aka 'the Vegas Vampire', who spends much of his screen time mugging at the camera and making extravagant Bela Lugosi-style hand movements.  The Count and his hunchbacked servant (a performer going under the great name of 'Rock Heinrich') are in the midst of a masterplan which entails sending out three vampiric hookers to harvest "the blood of the innocent" for Dracula - but not before commanding the trio to engage in some girl-on-girl orgy action for his devilish delectation, and the hunchback getting involved.  There's something about watching a crooked-spined henchman gurning gleefully in the throes of fellatio from a disinterested-looking naked vampire girl that's a strange combination of intriguing and disengaging.  I haven't been simultaneously pulled in and pushed away so much this side of a Hitchcockian zoom.  But kudos to Mr Heinrich on managing to distractingly overact whilst getting his cock hitched.

"You most immediately bend over - forward and backward - all of you, your entire parts... of your body... MAKE LOVE!  LOVE!!  LOVE!!!  Yes: do it!  Do it!  Enjoy!"

Meanwhile, a pipe-smoking Professor Van Helsing who resembles a Lucio Fulci cameo as a middle-management level businessman is visiting the home of his favourite pupil the barbigerous Bill (who continually refers to him as "Professor Van Hersing" for reasons known only to the great archons of the beyond), along with Bill's blonde beehive sporting and vapid girlfriend Janet.  Bill has summoned the Prof via a letter expressing his concern over his late sister Camille, who perished in a car accident before her body went mysteriously missing from the mortuary.  This piques the vampire slayer's interest, and he links this incident to the recent cases of bodies found in local motels drained of all their blood.

"You know, i'm thinking that, uh... maybe Dracula went to the mortuary, and cursed Camille's non-living corpse with a taint of vampirism.  And if this IS the work of Dracula, then wherever he is we must find him.  And we must destroy him."

And so Dracula dispatches his three ladies of the night (what music they make - wait, what?) with a command of "I want you to fill this vial with blood.  Vile blood!" to sexily exsanguinate some suckers.  We follow two of them as they pick up a john each and take them back to respective sleazy motel rooms to engage in some hairy pre-waxing '70s style sleaze.  The film grain and aspect ratio lend a level of nostalgic grime that quite entrancingly enhances the mood as the ladies engage in their sucking 'n' fucking, plus a spot of flagellation - girl on boy for a change, and man were that guy's buttocks redder than a baboon's by the end! - before "finishing off" in a manner familiar to anyone who's seen Lina Romay in Female Vampire (Jess Franco, 1973).  If Steckler's intention was to make the male members of the audience wince as his actresses chowed down on male members wearing joke shop vampire fangs, then he's just played right into my fetishes.

"Dracula is groovy."

It was at this point that i'd given up wondering what had become of the third vampiress, and just assumed that her scenes had got lost in the editing or something.  Oh me of little faith.  The plot strands dovetail masterfully when Janet decides she's had enough of Bill and Van Helsing's interminable conversation and goes for a piss, only to find herself under attack from the rogue vampire in the bathroom - upon which happenstance the two fools rush in and Bill emits a flat and monotone "Oh my God, it's my sister Carmille".  Clearly the shock of the situation has robbed the poor man of both his capacity to express emotional feeling, and the knowledge of his sister's actual name.

"Run, Dracula, run!!"

This pair of brave vampire hunters, after destroying Camille/Carmille/Carmilla/Mircalla, locate Dracula's hideout and attempt to destroy the Count and his other underlings.  Dracula flees the scene, only to find both himself and the hunchback (who performs a baffling but impressive flip whilst the run across wasteland in slow motion) in the rays of the rising sun 'neath which the Count disintegrates laving only his cape behind in a powerful and moving sequence of which F. W. Murnau would be proud.  This opus ends with a shot of a tearful angry hunchback clutching his departed master's cloak and flipping the bird to the blazing and uncaring sun.  Magnificent.

I knew i'd enjoy this film from the second the opening credits included 'Art Direction by De Sade', to be honest.

Nice and sleazy does it.  Does it every time.

Bram Stoker's Burial of the Rats (Dan Golden, 1995)

There was but little water, and the bottom of the drain was raised with brick, rubbish, and much matter of the kind.  He had made a fight for it, even when his torch had gone out.  But they were too many for him!  They had not been long about it!  The bones were still warm; but they were picked clean.  They had even eaten their own dead ones and there were bones of rats as well as the man.

It seems fitting, somehow, that in the week when Dame Helen Mirren arrives on screen playing a Russian monarch in Catherine the Great I found myself watching one of my own personal favourite Queens of Scream, Adrienne Barbeau, portraying a a slightly more sordid sovereign in a production filmed in Russia. I speak of course of nothing other than 1995's Bram Stoker's Burial of the Rats, a film which deserves prejudice of place alongside Bram Stoker's Dracula in the "taking the author's name in vain" stakes.

Bram Stoker's short story 'The Burial of the Rats' is an eerie tone poem that was published alongside its perhaps more well-known stablemates 'The Squaw' and 'The Judge's House' in 1914's posthumous collection Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories. Bram Stoker's Burial of the Rats is a slightly bizarre slice of cinematic Skinemax exploitation that was filmed as part of the Roger Corman Presents strand (alongside such debacles as pointless remakes of The Wasp Woman and Not of This Earth [not the Traci Lords one - that's far from pointless, Heaven forfend: I speak of the useless third version]).

Ms Barbeau may have only taken the role because she'd never seen Moscow - and, apparently, needed a new roof on her house - but she does an expert job of maintaining a shred of dignity here as she portrays the Queen of the Rat Women, an exalted position which seems to mainly consist of Marie Antoinette cosplay whilst presiding over bacchanals of nubile young women dancing around in varicoloured diaphanous wisps of fabric like a Russ Meyer vision of Themiscyra. The queen proclaims herself to be "The Pied Piper's twisted sister" - explaining her ability to charm and summon hordes of vermin by tooting her flute, and also causing my brain to debate the 'fact' that in canon with The Sarah Jane Adventures this means that Adrienne Barbeau is playing the sibling of Bradley Walsh. Don't think about it. I think these things so you don't have to.

The Rat Women are a secretive sect of sexy ladies including the lovely Maria Ford, Olga Kabo, Nikki Fritz and Linnea Quigley (the latter two so briefly glimpsed that i'm fairly certain they were shot in inserts filmed in California rather than being with the rest of the cast in Russia) who live a life free from the shackles of the tyranny of men. These Women Going Their Own Way dress in a uniform that appears to consist mostly of leather bikinis, knee-high heeled boots, chokers and gloves. Because they are liberated and dressing for themselves and not your Male Gaze, okay? Fine. Did I direct this movie? Because it totally seems like something sixteen year old me would have done. Me, or Jim Wynorski. Or maybe Fred Olen Ray. But definitely one of the three.

(Checks) Nope, it's directed by Dan Golden, apparently (also helmer of 1995's Stripteaser and 2017's fairly self-explanatory T&A Time Travelers), who also has the prime role of Man Stabbed in Back. Okay then.

This murine matriarchy finds itself in possession of a mislaid Bram Stoker (Kevin Alber)), although the portrayal of the taciturn and bewhiskered Victorian Irish author of Dracula as some Fabio-haired Californian may be the biggest desecration of a legendary figure of these fair isles since Kevin Costner befouled Sherwood in his quest for the sheriff of "Notting Ham". Captured by the cult and facing the prospect of spending most his life living in a Sapphic paradise, Bram befriends Madeleine (Ford) much to the chagrin of her scissor sister Anna (Kabo). The sisterhood are dedicated to avenging themselves against priapic oppression, including the wandering-handed priests of St Cecile and the corrupt local dignitary Verlaine (Leonid Timtsunik) who possesses neither the wisdom of his original namesake nor the musical talent of Tom. As they continue to "claw at the rich and tear down the powerful" - a maxim I can certainly get behind - they raid the local brothel (within whose walls Verlaine has indentured a twelve year old local girl) to wipe out the oppressive male scum and liberate the sex workers. This goes slightly awry when the premises' madame takes exception and has her uppity swash truly buckled by the sword-wielding maidens for the crime of being a woman who enslaves women.

"Let all repressed women face the consequences!" is the rather problematic cry, which seems to me to be taking their liberation philosophy to the extreme. Perhaps if this was a Gregory Dark joint it would have been called Third Wave Hookers.

All of this infighting - combined with Madeleine's growing forbidden infatuation with Mr Stoker and his manly charms - leads us on the road to Rouen, or at least to St Cecile. When Verlaine and his gynophobic gendarmes ("Good moaning" indeed) storm the palace, Maddy helps Bram escape along with his injured father and confronts the jealous Anna in a rambunctious rattling of rapiers whilst the queen breaks her enchanted flute and allows her scurrying scabies subjects to rip her fleeeeaaasssshh. You know, like weasels.

Vapid and verminous visual Viagra. I feel violated.  But in a good way.