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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leon Klimovsky will return.