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.

Scared to Death (William Malone, 1980)

"They wanted to create a new form of human life... They failed."

Michigander (yes, that is an actual word.  As are Michiganite [boring] and the frankly wonderful Michigine) William Malone has carved out a smallish but perfectly formed corpus in the horror genre over his sadly sporadic career with a limited number of movies in the forty five years since 1980 - a period of mere months longer than my entire lifespan.  They may, like love, come in short spurts (of ten CCs, I'm led to believe) but they're great when they do.  The five feature films Malone has helmed over that time (not counting made for TV movies and episodes of series) include 1985's superior Alien clone Creature (a.k.a. The Titan Find) - a film in which guest star Klaus Kinski is a far more terrifying presence than Robert and Dennis Skotak's animatronic xenomorph (a test run for the work they would do a year later on James Cameron's Aliens, in a pleasing symmetry) could hope to be - as well as the 1999 House on Haunted Hill (one of those oh-so-rare things: a remake that is better than the original), 2002's interwebs-based thriller FeardotCom (bizarrely originally an erotic vehicle for Zalman King of Two Moon Junction, Wild Orchid and Delta of Venus [whatever happened to Audie England, by the way?] fame) and 2008's Parasomnia; a film that features Kathryn Leigh Scott as a character named Margaret Evans and is therefore canon in the Dark Shadows universe.  I insist.  I truly do.

.

More so than that fucking Burton / Depp abomination, anyway.  I'm still a bit annoyed about that, even though it had Alice Cooper's 'The Ballad of Dwight Fry' [sic] on the soundtrack.

But it all started with Scared to Death, also known by sundry other titles including Scared to Death: Syngenor (on its eventual DVD release, presumably to link it with the belated and not good [despite the lovely Starr Andreef being in it] 1990 sequel Syngenor) and The Aberdeen Experiment (though there is no granite or Doric to be found within).  Made fresh out of film school (Malone studied at U.C.L.A. after being obsessed with genre cinema from a young age, crafting his own home-made monster masks as a kid before working at the renowned Don Post studio where he came up with the idea of adapting one of Post's William Shatner Captain Kirk masks into the white-painted visage of Michael Myers / The Shape for John Carpenter's classic 1978 Halloween) on a scraped-together budget of circa $74,000 raised from Malone mortgaging his house and selling his car, the film was already in profit before release due to securing a $90,000 deal for the East Asian market through distribution company Lone Star (who had put up $40,000 towards the movie's four-week shoot).

Beginning with a ludicrously portentous attempt at grounding the phantasy we are about to see with the text caption "PROLOGUE: The events portrayed in this film, although fictional, are based on scientific fact.  If they have not already happened, they soon could.  Genetic engineering is real.  And soon we may all have to deal with new values and definitions of life and death.", we move with a P.O.V. tracking shot through the sewers as a clue to us dealing with a C.H.U.D. four years earlier than Douglas Cheek's seminal subterranean shlocker before moving overground wombling free to a shot prowling around a house and peering (and perving) upon the young woman within that could make Dean Cundey sue cinematographer Patrick Prince, so reminiscent of the opening of Carpenter's '78 Halloween is it.  Except this time we don't just get Judith Myers' sideboob, as our opening victim Janie Richter (Pamela Bowman, who IMDb informs had a part as a 'Fleshette' in the same year's Ultra Flesh alongside Seka, Jamie Gillis and Lisa De Leeuw - there's one to add to the watchlist - and who I recently saw in an episode of HBO's extremely '80s T&A filled anthology series The Hitchhiker) treats us to a brief bit of full-frontal nudity before slipping into her scarlet satin scanties while chatting on the phone to her boyfriend, all the while illuminated by crimson Suspiria-esque lamplight.

Going to investigate the prowler who's been point-of-viewing around her property, armed only with a solitary candle like Deborah Kerr from The Innocents - if she'd been American and dressed in her underwear - Janie meets her end at the hands of a pretty impressive monster; it manages to resemble both a post-Alien H. R. Giger xenomorph (or, possibly, a decade and a half early Species one) and a 1950s Roger Corman man in a rubber suit creature feature antagonist at the same time depending on the lighting and camera setup.  The cops are swiftly on the scene - finding an unknown and unidentifiable sticky substance strewn around (not surprised really, she was a bonny lass) - to investigate this tragedy, the latest in a string of murders, and Detective Lou Capell (David Moses) turns to ex-cop turned pulp novelist-cum-private investigator - and possibly also part-time gentleman, scholar and acrobat on the side - Ted Londergan (John Stinson, substituting for rock singer Rick Springfield - the future original incarnation of Nick Knight having signed up and then dropped out of the role at the last minute).  Londergan, our corduroy-clad hero, is introduced as a loose cannon; the kind of protagonist beloved of cop shows that have the character of 'the Chief' growing ever more apoplectic and exasperated with his off-the-books antics but gets the job done.  He's also a bit of a knob to be honest, as evidenced by his attitude when he is asked by Capell, his ex-partner, to come on board the case.  He's also a BOAK (bit of a knob) during the meet-cute - more like meet-infuriating - with the film's female lead and love interest Jennifer Stanton (the lovely Diana Davidson in sadly her only screen role aside from an uncredited part in Dirty Harry almost a decade earlier).  I get the feeling that we're supposed to find Londergan's antics quirky and endearing, but it really isn't working for me.  Others' mileage will invariably vary, I may just not have been in the right mood - like Tommy Lee Jones on the set of Batman Forever - to sanction his buffoonery.

After initially refusing Capell's plea to aid with the investigation Ted has a change of heart when, after belying her seemingly sensible and head screwed on image by sleeping with this obvious sociopath with narcissistic personality disorder, Jennifer becomes one of the beast's victims - after a series of attacks including rending a teen asunder inside her car after only tearing the bloody doors off and squeezing a sewage worker's skull ("I crush your head - I pinch your face") - and left comatose.  And not the kinda coma you wake up from with Johnny Smith style psychic powers.

Teaming up with disgruntled - did you ever meet a gruntled one? - ex-laboratory employee at the Amberdine Research Facility Sherry Carpenter (Toni Jannotta) to stop the monster's reign of terror which includes such antisocial behaviour as homing in on a gang of roller skating youths and doing what we're all thinking by using its lethal tongue on Joleen Porcaro's lovely brunette Kelly (thoughts and prayers for the rollergirl to go along with Rick King's 1990 Prayer of the Rollerboys), he - and through him, we - find that that the Syngenor (synthetic genetic organism) is an engineered life form that feeds on the spinal fluid of its victims.  I'm more into GILFs than GELFs myself, but Ted is very eager to get his hands on this slippery sucker with a thirst for bodily fluids.  Jeez. your girlfriend's been hospitalised for a few hours and you're already out scouring the sewers for a replacement. 

I couldn't help thinking that the sight of our protagonist clad in corduroy descending into the sewers is quite reminiscent of the teacher-cum-rodent fighter lead in Deadly Eyes, the disappointing 1982 adaptation of James Herbert's 1974 pulp horror classic 'when nature attacks' rodent rampage The Rats in all of its disappointing glory.  At least this has a well-realised monster rather than little dogs in vermin maquillage; plus one for the Syngenor.

First escaping onto the silver screen of dreams and screams in France in November of 1980 with its domestic release in March of 1981,  wasn't initially sure whether to have this down as a 1980 flick or a 1981 one.  Josh Spiegel opts for the latter, having its entry in the '81 volume of his ongoing and quite magnificent The 80's Project, but I figured that I'd go with the former date just because I'm different.  And it just feels like a 1980 film to me for whatever that's worth.

Originally released on home video by Media Home Entertainment, a company established by Charles Band later of Empire Pictures and Full Moon Entertainment legend, Scared to Death would also make its DVD debut under its modified title of Scared to Death: Syngenor to connect it with the aforementioned semi-sequel (I call it that not just because aside from the creatures themselves there's zero narrative or character connective tissue between the two films, but also because Starr Andreef never failed to give me at least a semi-on).

Not exactly a well-remember genre classic etched into the formative memories of a generation of fright fans like many of its contemporaries, Scared to Death nevertheless is a well-made debut from a director who would go on to make more memorable movies that boasts at the very least a good atmosphere and a striking central creature that registers high on the H. R. Giger counter and would become a mainstay of Halloween monster masks.  Given Malone's start working for Don Post and making such hideous visages, surely that's a satisfying legacy in anyone's book. 

A Very Adult Wednesday Addams (Joanna Angel, 2015) [NSFW]

Being most of the way through the second season of the glorious gothic phantasmagoria of Wednesday and eagerly waiting finishing it by the end of September (yes, it can take me a while with current series, there's only so many hours in the say and so much film and television that needs watching.  Spoiler-dodging his become something of an art at this point) my idling thoughts about Jenna Ortega and goth chic and goth chicks wander, as is their wont, to the dirty end of the dark side.

For the longest time I've been trying to find a reason to extol my longtime obsession with Joanna Angel and her prolific litany of works that have brought me much intense joy over the years (in fact, I honestly thought I had done years ago when I meant to write a review of her superb Evil Dead parody - titled, appropriately, Evil Head - but apparently that was just another in the long, long line of things that I meant to get round to doing but either got distracted or just never bothered; though I did scribble down my thoughts on Doug Sakmann's 2004 Re-Penetrator [HERE], a skit on the classic Re-Animator that starred the divine Ms Angel and her Evil Head co-star Tommy Pistol).

In any case, I have very much enjoyed her works including her musical output.  I can't decide between 'Ay Lay Un' and 'Fish Food' as the song I like best to be honest: the former is about aliens so naturally it should claim my love, but the later has a really fun music video so maybe wins on that score ("To the bottom of the pool, of course / Of course!  (GIGGLE)").  But they're both slices of '60s inflected punk-pop heaven in my opinion.  She may not have the greatest voice in the annals - I mean, she's more used to anals right? - of music history, but it works for me in a kawaii kewpie doll vocalising sort of way.  With guitars.  And buttfucking, probably.

For any uninitiated out there who may have stumbled naively into this piece, the artiste known to the world as Joanna Angel was born Joanna Mostov in Brooklyn, New York in 1980 (which makes her a year younger than me, which wouldn't be a problem apart from the fact that she has resided in the 'MILF' categories of porn for quite a while and that makes me feel old) and grew up in New Jersey - working in a kosher restaurant in Teaneck and graduating from Rutgers University before founding the alt-porn Burning Angel website in 2002.  Which I may have come across whilst I was myself at uni, now that my aged memory struggles to think about it.  Thereabouts or very shortly thereafter, anyway.

When it came (and so did I, of course) to deciding which of her Burning Angel movies to scribble a review about I was hard pressed to choose.  So many great titles to choose from, including the rather magnificent As Above, So Below from 2018, which is certainly the best no holds barred (and indeed no holes barred) gangbang that takes its title from the Emerald Tablet of Hermeticism that I've ever seen - if you know of any others, please let me know.  The shortlist also included not only but also the amusingly titled Fuck This Couch (a favourite of smoky-eyed Vice President and connoisseur of upholstery J.D. 'Just Dance' Vance, no doubt) as well as rather wonderfully self-explanatory Goth Anal Whores 2, the prospect of which had me not only foaming at the mouth and glans but also was enough to make me abandon my generally de rigueur rule of never watching a sequel without having first viewed the original; a cast including lady Joanna herself (also on writing and directing duties such are her skills as auteur as well as star) plus queens of the nightside Aiden Ashley (wearing a collar and leash in a wonderfully ball-emptying sweaty scene of ass 'n' vag-munching, fingering and buttplugs with Joanna), Charlotte Sartre (playing with a ouija... sorry.. orgy board before taking a big schlong up the wrong 'un) and the lovely Marley Brinx (in a threeway with the aforementioned Tommy Pistol and Small Hands - the very jammy real life Mr Angel - that ends with her gorgeous face plastered with cum).  Wonderful film, extremely highly recommended.  Alas, I don't think my vas deferens would survive another viewing so for the purposes of a review I went with this prophetic 2015 vision of a hot Wednesday's exploits.

Or should that be sexploits?  Yes.  We'll go with that.

Taking its inspiration - though this one both has and causes a whole lot more perspiration I can tell ya - from the title of the 2013 to 2015 Youtube series Adult Wednesday Addams by Melissa Hunter and having the extended title of A Very Very Very Adult Wednesday Addams in the opening credits, we kick off with a house-hunting Wednesday (Draven Star) being interviewed by dudes Xander Corvus (Peter Parker / Spider-Man in all those Axel Braun XXX Marvel parodies where he continually fires out a white sticky fluid almost but not entirely unlike 'web') and Mr Pete as a prospective new housemate for their shared apartment.

"There comes a time in every ghoul's life when she has to leave the family plot and find her own mausoleum" says the groovy ghoulette, who has no time to waste on wastemen and wants to skip the smalltalk of the digs being a "4/20 kind of place" and get down to smoking something fleshier than a fat chronic blunt.  You know what I mean.

The guys naturally don't much encouragement; when a girl says "Gentlemen, please remove your pants and we can proceed as the Darkness taught us" she tends to mean it.  Unless she's talking about Justin Hawkins' '70s metal tribute band.  Fortunately for both them and out eardrums, the type of wanking she has in mind involves frenulums rather than fretboards and she's swiftly on her knees taking mouthfuls of man meat and putting those tongue piercings to proper use.  "How's your gag reflex?" asks Xander as she demonstrates how to have your tonsils ticked with a todger in various positions: standing bent over, reverse cowgirl (always a fave) and mish as she takes it from both ends before a great and very loudly enthusiastic D.P. - she certainly seems to love both those holes getting rammed - and her face bedecked with sticky spaff as they discuss the house rules concerning cleaning the dishes. 

The second scene features Ophelia Rain with Xander Corvus and begins with Corvis awaking in his bed not, like Gregor Samsa, that he's been transformed into a monstrous insect whilst somnolent but to find that his sexual partner is now a different actress.  At least, that's how I read the scene at first: we have one of the performers upon which we've just perved in the previous scene waking up in an obvious post-coital situation but the female protagonist whist still a Wednesday has seemingly regenerated into a newer form.  That's very probably not meant to be the case, though, and it's just the way my brain does things.

Ophelia!Wednesday acknowledges that she may have had fun the previous evening and makes ready to leave, giving the number 666 - because "Satan is real", obvs. - when he asks if he can at least get her number.  She soon decides to remain and do the sexing again, though, because "Your penis was like rigor mortis, and I want to have it again before I die".  None more goth.  Maybe not a sparkle goth, but she'll get some sparkle soon.  Maybe some glitter up her shitter if she asks nicely.

Gasping with delight throughout a preliminary fingering, she responds equally affirmatively to a tongue in the pussy and a finger probing her arsehole before submitting to a vigorous face fucking with her pigtails held like handlebars as he uses her mouth like a cunt.  Flipped and fucked doggy-style for a while, she eagerly receives it in the rectum ("Up my hole, yeah!") spreading her pink for us as her arse is hammered to the hilt to a pretty convincing screaming orgasm.  Which kind of makes sense, that being the name of a cocktail and she having a cock up her tail.  

And so on to the highlight of the film for me, which serves us Joanna herself with Mark Wood.  And believe me, wood shall be achieved.

In the words of the late Macho Man Randy Savage (or was it Yello?  It's so easy to get those guys mixed up): Ohhh yeah.

Mr Wood knocks at the door of stately Angel Manor in the guise of a worker for the gas company and asking for "Mr Small Hands", which rather begs the question as to whether the lady who's answered the door in the Spirit Halloween Wednesday cosplay is meant to be Joanna Angel in character as Wednesday Addams - or, rather, a Wednesday Addams - or as a fictionalised version of herself.  Either way, Mr Hands is not available possibly due to a gas leak, and the baffled gas man is directed to use the rear entrance to gain access; this is definitely not the last time he will obey this instruction over the coming (cumming?) minutes.

From the back garden, he witnesses the spectacular sight through the window of Joanna sliding off her panties on the black-sheeted bed and sliding an ebony dildo into her pussy with the rather appropriate salutation "Hail to the darkness!  The void is opening!".   It surely is.  Summoned into the boudoir by the power of her sex magicks, how can our hapless helper do ought but obey when ordered to "put that clipboard down and stick that dildo inside of me"?  Once she's nicely lubricated with a thorough tongue lashing and stripped down to her black high heels, she feasts on man flesh like a hungry orc taking that johnson deep down her throat.  Some rigorous choke-fucking serves as the warm-up to her spreading her cheeks to have her ass reamed out.

Hnnggg.  I'm pretty sure that was the exact sound I made as my nuts emptied at this point, which as pretty much as high a recommendation as  can make for this type of thing, really.  Still, we must soldier on I suppose.  After some energetic cowgirl riding, we get some more enthusiastically-received rimming before some orgasmic (both her and me; the fact that I'd already gone five minutes earlier didn't stop me and my poor testes are like raisins) anal.  "I can take it!" she shrieks, but I don't know if I can.  There's still at least one scene to go.

I don't know if I'm going to be able to walk after this.

The fourth and final scene of this titillating tetraptych brings us sexy suicide girls Judas (as Monday Addams) and Necro Nicki (as Tuesday Addams) who meet the palindrome-tastic Ramon Nomar on the street as he's handing out leaflets and perhaps naively asks them whether they'd like to party.  These girls are up for semen.

"Fuck our brains out - the Abyss is waiting!"

Nice girls being nice, getting nasty.  To be honest, I'd all but checked out by this point despite both ladies' enthusiasm during a lovely sloppy double blowjob with ball sucking and some of the best ATM action seen on screen since the late Chandler Bing got stuck in a vestibule with Jill Goodacre.

I really should give this segment another go after a little lie down when I can give it the attention it deserves.

So there we have it.  Incidentally, I watched this film in order to write this here review or whatever this is on a Saturday morning.  I have no idea how traditional (I almost said 'hardcore', but that would have been absurd wouldn't it?) Ms Angel is in her beliefs and whether or not I'd be castigated by her for wanking on the Sabbath - after all, it could certainly fall under the classification of manual work, and I certainly worked up a sweat - but maybe I want to be castigated by her.  Really, really hard.

Right.  That's it - you can fuck off now while I wait for my balls to regenerate.  There I scene I need to get my breath back and rewatch...

Doctor Who: The Masters of Luxor (Frank Smialek, 2001)

 

Oh look, he's talking about Doctor Who again.  Must be a day with 'day' in it, I guess.  This year's season is over and as of the time of writing we seem to be in a sort of Zero Room of "pathways to continuation" and the whole enterprise (the series, not the starship; wrong franchise mate) seems to be in a state of stasis as to when the show will return and I'm jonesing for my Who fix - I desperately need new, or even "new" (to me) old Doctor Who to watch!

And waffle about, of course.

I don't do it on this blog all that often though, not as a review anyway - I'm aware that the show does get referenced a bit, that's just how it goes when you've been immersed in a fictional (how dare you, sir?  It's real, I tells thee!) universe since the age of three (that'd be 1982, fact fans: my earliest memory of television is Peter Davison's Doctor and Adric in the woods, which would probably be 'The Visitation' rather than 'Kinda' - I like to think I could discern a real life location from a studio set even at that age but I'm kidding myself of course.  I thought that Biggins really was in the jungle in On Safari) it's just second nature.  It's just how my brain works.

Or doesn't, depending upon your point of view.  

I think the first time I encountered the word 'periwig' I assumed it was a hairpiece cut into a brunette bob a la 1984-vintage Nicola Bryant.   This isn't true of course, it's a joke, but you get my meaning.  I'm actually slightly surprised at how much I've restrained myself over the years from constantly rambling on about Who - I think the last time was my review of the first story featuring the Barbara Benedetti incarnation of the Doctor, 'The Wrath of Eukor'* (see HERE if curious), and I do intend to watch the other three entries in her oeuvre at some point, as well as the Projection Room flicks featuring the Chris Hoyle embodiment of telly's titular Time Lord and to rewatch Krystal Moore's groovy Doctor Who Velocity (the Tron crossover [yes, you read that right and it's as glorious as it sounds] especially) - gosh, the expanded universe of fan films is big - but for now I'd like to turn to something I've wanted to watch for a long time.

[*Wrong, you fool!  You've forgotten your rambling, probably drunken maunderings about last year's season - Ed.]

Anyway, as many will know the history of Doctor Who like every television show encompasses as many storyline routes not taken as were - fictive forks in the road unexplored as scripts were rejected or abandoned for sundry reasons, mostly ones of sheer practicality.  The earliest comes with just the second ever story, as Terry Nation's 'The Daleks' was not originally scheduled for that place.  Odd though it may seem from the distance of more than sixty years of cultural history that includes the Skaroine pepperpots, the show's four-part debut 'An Unearthly Child' (or '100,000 B.C.' if you're one of the contrarian elitist editors of DWM, or even 'The Tribe of Gum' if you go by the Titan script books  - and more thereon soon) was originally to be followed by another story from the same author: Anthony Coburn.  Though now probably best known to Who fandom for fathering a rather problematic man, Coburn was also the progenitor of many of Doctor Who's iconic staples such as the outer form of the TARDIS as a British Metropolitan MacKenzie Trench police box and the character of schoolgirl 'Suzanne' being reformatted as the Doctor's unearthly grandchild Susan.  Having delivered these initial four scripts, Coburn embarked upon a second serial - variously titled as the rather prosaic 'The Robots' but later settled on as the much more evocative 'The Masters of Luxor' - comprising of six episodes and set on an alien world to contrast with prehistoric earth setting of the bulk of the opening story (apart from the present day 1963 of the opening instalment), and having a much more science fiction bent.

However, as we know, this was destined not to be and the story went unproduced in favour of Nation's less philosophical and more pulp action serial influenced 'The Daleks' seven parter and the course of history flowed in the direction that we all know.  Coburn's second story (and final one, he never wrote for Doctor Who again) was forgotten - indeed his first one went unremembered to the extent of Trivial Pursuit citing Terry Nation as the actual instigator of the show.  But in the early 1990s, during the series' wilderness years away from the screen, Titan Books produced a sadly short-lived range of published script books and astoundingly to my young self included 'Luxor' among their number.  In fact, so astounded was I that I dropped the book in the bath at one point (in the interests of accuracy, this may have been more to do with falling asleep than astonishment) and the cover and pages are still all crinkly.  Much like the pages of the magazines under your bed, only not with the 'good pages' stuck together with your special glue.  That probably isn't a thing these days, what with the internet and everything.  But it wasn't just me reading it and imagining what might have been had this story have been made - across the ocean in Chicago in the space year 2001, some crazy college kids went as far as actually realising it.  Manifesting it into reality, if you like - only by actually getting off their arses and doing it rather than the power of hope or whatever.

Director Frank Smialek and his Doctor actor Anthony Sarlo decided to edit the originally scripted six parts ('The Cannibal Flower', 'The Mockery of a Man', 'A Light on the Dead Planet', 'Tabon of Luxor', 'An Infinity of Surprises' and 'The Flower Blooms') down into the more traditional - at least by the standard of the '70s and '80s - Doctor Who shape of four twenty five-ish minute episodes.  Another alteration was to make Susan the Doctor's niece rather than granddaughter, which both better suited Sarlo's more youthful Doctor than William Hartnell and - probably completely coincidentally - echoes Jill Curzon's Louise and her relationship to the Peter Cushing Doctor in the 1966 Amicus/Aaru feature Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.  Which is canon as fuck and totally amazing, I insist.  I really do.

Episode One: The Cannibal Flower

Opening evocatively with the classic original Hartnell era title sequence of unfurling strands of howlround and Delia Derbyshire's never bettered rendition of Ron Grainer's theme, the story begins with the Doctor (Sarlo), Susan (Samantha Eaton) and her erstwhile teachers Ian Chesterton (Clyde Scott Goble) and Barbara Wright (Stephanie Gloeckler) in the TARDIS console room - a very well constructed one for a low budget fan film - ostensibly following on from the events of 'An Unearthly Child' or at least a very close parallel universe version thereof.  As I adjust to the strange dissonance - as any traveller betwixt universes always must - of the familiar Year One TARDIS crew with American accents (which has never been a deal-breaker for me with Who leads honestly; unlike fandom's more conservative contingent [which includes, bizarrely at it seems, many American fans who first came to the show for it's perceived quirky 'Britishness'] I've never been opposed in principle to actors from North America playing the Doctor - cast Gillian Anderson, you fools!  It was just slightly jarring to have the original '60s ensemble of the First Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara conversing in USAian), the temporal ship is temporarily rocked by some strange time turbulence and a quick look on the scanner screen shows that they're hovering above a desolate and rocky celestial body (speaking of heavenly bodies, Eaton's Susan is hot) quite akin to the moon.  Dismissing Chatterton's... sorry, Chesterton's assessment that that's where they are with the factoid that there are many planetoids fitting the same description, the Doctor spots a structure upon the dead world and divines that this is the source of the broadcast signal that disturbed their flight.

After a brief pause for a very Sixties conversation with Barbara about her feelings of foreboding about the alien structure, prompting the Doctor to opine of 'women's intuition' as being akin to the energy that powers the TARDIS itself (Bad Wolf girl confirmed!), our titular time traveller decides to manoeuvre the ship around the edifice ("Like a helicopter!"); this causes the erection to tremble - I know the feeling - and open up like the eponymous zoophagous plant and draw the craft within itself.  

As more adventurous (to reference a great Rilo Kiley album, and why not?) teacher Ian heads outside to explore with unearthly child Susan, his erstwhile staff room compatriot Barbara remains in the ship to aid the Doctor in detecting the sudden and mysterious power drain of the TARDIS' systems.  Ian and Susan come across an empty space age banqueting hall replete with  long table bedecked with a feast, a scenario that puts me in mind of something out of an Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson Fighting Fantasy roleplay novel (roll the dice to decide what happens next: will Susan give in to her hunger and tuck into the feast only to find it poisonous, or will Ian have a Skill and Stamina score high enough to stop her?) but the Sixties schoolmaster references the Grimm tale of 'Hansel and Gretel' being fattened up for the witch's dinner instead.  Curiosity the cat killer - maybe that's what wiped out Gallifrey's native Killer Cats of Geng Singh!  ZOMG, it suddenly all makes sense and must indeed be canon - overcomes Ian and he presses a switch which causes some robotic automatons to emerge from concealed recesses in the walls (Coburn's original and less evocative title for this story of course being the rather prosaic and perfunctory 'The Robots') which of course causes Susan to emit a shrill scream though at least she doesn't find a way to twist her ankle.  These silver bacofoil '50s space adventure-style robots appear to be inert and totally lifeless and thus presumably mostly harmless; Ian and Susan rejoin Barbara and the Doctor in the feasting hall just as the automatons twitch into life and follow them...

Episode Two: The Mockery of a Man

Following straight on from the episode one cliffhanger - which, anachronistically, ended with the traditional cliffhanger 'scream' into the 1970s version of the closing title theme; odd for a production that otherwise strives for the verisimilitude of the time it would have been made but perhaps understandable from the point of view of what feels like classic Who - the second installment carries on after an opening establishing shot of the alien edifice with our heroes still being approached by the mechanical men (one of which is portrayed by the director Frank Smialek).  The Doctor steps forward with a Hartnellesque clutching of his lapels and adjudges that these droids were built by creatures akin to themselves (as he is referring to himself, Susan, Ian and Barbara we can deduce that he's just speaking of humanoids in general rather than a particular species, although at this early point in the series' development the Doctor and Susan may well have been humans from the future: witness Susan's line in the pilot version of the first episode, "I was born in the 49th century" before it was changed to "I was born in another time, another world").  Addressing the artificial beings, he informs them that he and his crewmates were drawn to this world by a malfunctioning signal and that they would very much like to meet the robots' 'Masters'.  The servitors, obviously confused as to the newcomers' identities, address Team TARDIS as "the masters of Luxor" - finally at least naming the world upon which they stand -     and seek assurance that they are pleased with the food and drink provided for them.

"The masters of Luxor have made us well, and we serve you."

Shown to their rooms to rest and provided with fresh and futuristic clothing (my sadness at Susan changing out of her school uniform is quickly alleviated by her and Barbara's new outfits consisting of form fitting white dresses with side splits and go go boots - it's like they're catering to all of the fetishes) the crew relax and enjoy themselves, Barbara relishing the use of the baths of Luxor to wash the cobwebs of the "caves of Za" right out of her hair in a nice continuity nod and both she and Susan mocking Ian's white leotard as looking like an acrobat about to attempt the high wire.  They come across a map of the city of Luxor, prompting the Doctor to muse "If that's Luxor, where's here?"

Another kind of  droid, one with glowing Jawa-esque eyes that calls itself a Derivatron, enters the room and tries to question the existence of the team.  Which seems needlessly existentialist to me, but important to the Derivatron who speaks of taking them to 'the Perfect One' and prompting the Doctor to demand "Take us to your Masters".  So close, Time Lord.  It's 'leader', you fool!  Spooked by the Derivatron's parting comment about the rather rude mechanicals of this world having destroyed the "living men" who created them, the time travellers decide to make a break for it.  Leaving the comfortable quarters-cum-cell that they were sealed inside, they make their way to an observation deck where they observe (well, duh) a weird experiment in which a captured man and another humanoid being (who we soon learn is the Perfect One, played by Matt Ellegood ) are strapped to elevated tables side by side and wired together in some sort of life force transfer.  Think Larry Talbot and the somnolent Monster in Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man and congratulations, you've got it.  But also commiserations because if that was your go-to mental reference then you've gt the same brain as me.

Mr Perfect (sadly, he doesn't perform a Perfect plex on anyone) explains that the 'Masters' first created the basic functional robots, and then the more advanced Derivatrons - for illustrative purposes he has models on tiers of differing height like the 'class' skit with the two Ronnies and John Cleese - before they dared to dream of him and he in his perfection destroyed the creators.  This backstory is pretty similar to Ruk in Star Trek's 'What Are Little Girls Made Of?', basically.  And without the power flowing through the City, which only operates when someone living arrives, the Perfect One is non-existent; making him pretty similar to the eponymous antagonist of the Red Dwarf episode 'Legion' too.  This mockery of a man ("It's in the title", as Josh Spiegel of Movie Timelines would say) now wishes to transcend his origins and become a real live boy by draining the travellers' life forces into himself.  He'd get on famously with Jano and the Elders from 'The Savages'.

And showing great taste, he is intent on feasting on Barbara and Susan...

Episode Three: Tabon of Luxor

As our knee-high boot wearing heroines are strapped down firmly (for the plot and not purely in order to cater to my fetishes I tell myself), Susie Who makes her move: tearing free from her bonds with some kind of usually-hidden Gallifreyan super strength, or maybe an extra-dimensional power inherited from the Timeless Child - hey, isn't headcanon fun? - she bops a robot and a Derivatron and swiftly frees Barbara.  Meanwhile, the Doctor and Ian spot a light through a window and the Doctor divines that someone out in the wilderness outside the city is flashing a beacon in the same one, one-two, one-two-three rhythm as the signal that brought the TARDIS to this benighted planetoid.  Resolving to get down there, they break through the window and the Doc (I do usually kindly refrain from addressing him as such) takes a gander through his handy-dandy collapsible telescope leading to a neat P.O.V. shot - complete with making to simulate the scope - of an era-appropriate model of ancient-looking ruins in the near distance, I suppose.  That's a little Puressence reference, for anyone counting my inevitably dated pop culture spots.  The Time Lord and the teacher decide to chance the climb down the outer wall of the city to get to that temple of secrets and find out what's going on.

Recaptured by the robots, "these women creatures" as the Perfect One refers to them and thus making his sound like a proto-incel and leading me to wonder if Luxorans Going Their Own Way was a movement that led to their seeming extinction are conveyed to the 'guest apartments' under order to rest and take food and wine.  I mean, it would be inhospitable to do otherwise.

"The order is registered."

Out in the wilderness, Chesterton and our hero are exploring the ruins and find what appears to be a stone sarcophagus bearing an elegiac eulogy in overtly religious language (something of which there was apparently a lot more in Coburn's original scripts, including presenting the usually rationalist Doctor as someone who balances science and faith equally, whilst quoting Karl Marx) including the legend "O Lord, please deliver them from flesh", which to me sounds almost Cronenbergian.  Alas, we aren't going to get my dreams of body horror realised here, but there is a smidge of Universal / Hammer style gothic as the hermetically-sealed tomb is opened - the Doctor wishing that he had "a sonic..." something to hand -  to release a cryogenically preserved man (Kirk Jackson) whose lowered lifesigns are rapidly on the rise as he returns to the land of the living.  As Tabon - for 'tis he - rises from his self-imposed grave like an Altered Beast and we find that 'twas he who was the original creator and onlie begetter of the Derivatrons and who conceived of the creation of the Perfect One only to retreat out here in the fields to preserve himself in his cryogenic crypt to hide in shame from his Promethean endeavours.

Did you know that an early, and now sadly lost, cinematic adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (to give her novel it's full and cool title) was Joseph Smiley's 1915 Life Without Soul?  The title wafted and wended through my mind as Tabon went on about how he created life, but without a soul.  Which makes him I suppose the Victor in the end, with the Perfect One his creature or demon (it's never referred to as 'the Monster' in the text as frustrated Karloff fans have discovered through the ages).

Episode Four: The Flower Blooms

The finale opens - like the titular blossom - with our heroes having thought of Susan and Barbara whilst squeezing themselves up a dark and dangerously tight shaft with the expectations of it all ending with a messy explosion, for Tabon has conveyed that the Perfect One has control of the Luxorians' atomic stockpile and it's almost never a good idea to let someone with dodgy motives who wants to prove themselves to be a real man have unfettered access to your arsenal.  Unfortunately, the unknowing Susie 'n' Babs have slightly damaged the saint of (im)Perfection with a jerry-rigged trip wire which risks the whole planetoid; if he/it dies then the nuclear magazine will detonate and take everyone and everything with them.  Hang on to your ego there, metal man.  Baffled by Barbara and Susan's recitations of "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers" and "Mary, Mary, quite contrary" and especially especially unnerved by the two women laughing at him (I'm telling you, definitely an incel-bot enraged by girlish giggles), the not so Perfect One declares that "the meaning of all this is that it has no meaning" and resolves to end their lives by absorbing them into himself as the Doctor, Ian and Tabon race to rescue them.

"And the last enemy that shall be destroyed is Death."

I really would encourage anyone interested in the history - including the alternate 'could have been' histories of short trips and side steps - of Doctor Who to check it out.  It's available to watch at time of writing as part of the Doctor Who Fan Film Database on Youtube.  Show it some love and prove that you are a human with a soul and not a robot.  Or don't, whatever.

Shot on colour digital videotape and then converted to monochrome with an authentic to the period electronic score composed by Smialek himself, 'The Masters of Luxor' is a pretty unique artefact: a fan film that's an adaptation of an actual official set of BBC-commissioned Doctor Who scripts, rather than the usual fan-penned fanwank (which I of course mean in the sense of fannish wallowing in continuity [I'm looking at you here, too, Big Finish; no, Nick, "What if Bellal met River Song?" is not a 'lovely idea' worthy of multiple box sets], rather than what happened to that lad who won the competition to have a sleepover at Mike Yates actor Richard Franklin's house [IYKYK]).  And that isn't a slam on all fan films at all - as I've said I do mean to dive into more in the future - it's just that this has a standing of it's own apart from the others, in my view at least.

A weird glimpse into a parallel timeline (ah, but is it a continuation of the 1970 Parallel Time dimension from Dark Shadows?  And was that itself the same continuum as 1841 Parallel Time?  ANSWER ME!  This is what goes on inside my head the whole entire time, you know - it's like Herman's Head if the voices contained within Charlie Brewster were constantly arguing over continuity and canonicity) where Anthony Coburn's second story followed his first instead of Terry Nation's 'The Daleks', it's certainly an interesting plane of reality to visit but I'm not sure that many would want to live there permanently.

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (David Lee Fisher, 2023)

"I'm a Nosferatu.  But probably not the one you're expecting."

These words are neither spoken by Graf Orlok in this film nor by Paul McGann in the 2013 anniversary minisode 'The Night of the Doctor', but they convey the sufficient level of surprise.  We're all - I think - aware that over the period Christmas 2024 and New Year 2025 (depending upon the release pattern wherever in the world one was, or 'regional variations' as they'd put it when I were a bairn and frustrated that my BBC or ITV station wasn't showing a programme or film that I wanted to see) a rather illustrious new reimagining (yes, I still harbour something of a hatred for that word but it seems to have infected common parlance, alack) of F. W. Murnau's 1922 vampire classic Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie des Grauens (see here) which had of course already been remade in 1979 by Werner Herzog as the sepuchrally majestic Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (see this sordid little incubus ), this time by feted director Robert Eggers of The VVitch and The Lighthouse renown was unleashed from its mouldering crypt, but the previous year had respawned the monster with a lesser known, but very worthwhile, version of the vampiric varlet.  Not to be confused with the vampiric Varney, antiheroic antagonistic protagonist of James Malcolm Rymer's Victorian penny dreadful Varney the Vampire; or The Feast of Blood.

This iteration of the already twice-told tale (not including the 1988 sequel Nosferatu in Venice, once again starring Klaus Kinski reprising his role as the revenant [I really do need to rewatch that one, I haven't seen it in years], or 2000's Shadow of the Vampire with Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck/Orlok two and a half-ish decades before he would take on the role of Professor von Franz in the Eggers edition - making him a rarity as an actor to have essayed both the Dracula and Van Helsing roles) comes courtesy of director David Lee Fisher, who had already helmed a remake of the German Expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr Caligari in 2005, and brought much the same approach here of hewing extremely closely to the monochrome silent source material to the point a recreating sets and shot compositions to the letter - even superimposing actual original shots into the background (these Fisher editions being all shot against a green screen) with the addition of dialogue, sound effects and an original soundtrack from composer Eban Schletter who in addition to working with Fisher on Caligari has a resume sporting credits for the music on the unasked-for 2003 prequel Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry met Lloyd and the long-awaited (be me, anyway) 2023 belated sequel History of the World Part II.

We begin proceedings, as per, in the Teutonic town of Wisborg with a very familiar shot of the conurbation from above with the church spire centred - though this time 'tis a 3-D CGI rendering of the steeple that we pan round and down to the people and the streets below and meet our new couple of Hutters, Thomas (Emrhys Cooper, perhaps best known the British audiences as Corrie's cult villain Rowan Cunliffe) and Ellen (Sarah Carter, super-powered bunny boiler Alicia Baker in interminable Superman prequel series Smallville as well as the second Cicada in the fifth season of its DC stablemate The Flash).  The couple have apparently been married for almost a year, but their relationship shows few signs of intimacy - and now I've got the voice of Tommy Wiseau in my head saying "Hey, Hutter, how's your sex life?" - as Thomas seems more into his job of shifting property than showing much interest in his beautiful bride.  If he isn't interested in taking her up the aisle then I'll happily volunteer.  And yes, that is an euphemism.  Neglecting his nuptials, he wanders off to work, encountering Dr Bulwer (George Maguire, no relation as far as I know to Spider-Man Tobey) along the way who gives him the same sage philosophical advice that Alan Ruck's Cameron Frye gives to the viewers of Ferris Bueller's Day Off: "Life moves pretty fast; if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you'll miss it".  I'm paraphrasing slightly of course.

Arriving at the office of his eerie and eccentric employer Herr Knock (Eddie Allen, trading as 'Edgar Allen Poe'), Herr Hutter receives his instructions to traverse the highways and byways that lead to that strange land beyond the forest to arrange a property conveyance for one Graf Orlok and... look, I really don't need to go through the plot point by point at this... point, do I?  Not after having done it twice already.  But I'll make a note of any innovations or additions to the previous versions that stand out to me.  Okay?  Good, good.

He places Ellen in the charge of their friends, ship's captain Wolfram Harding (Jack Turner) and his spinsterish spiritualist sister Ruth (Joely Fisher, real life half-sister of Princess Leia herself) before leaving on an animated train to the land of phantoms; sort of Eugenio Martin's Panic on the Polar Express.  As Hutter hurtles toward his hellish destination, Ruth reassures Ellen by not so subtly putting the moves on her and chatting her up about the different kinds of love including the kind that dare not speak its name.  After the Sapphic overtones going on here I assumed that we were leaning right into the homoeroticism barely bubbling beneath the surface in the Murnau version, and so Hutter making eyes, and later making the sex, with the comely dirndl-dressed Transylvanian bar wench (Sara Montez) at the inn did take me somewhat by surprise.  If he isn't closeted, why the emphasis on him and Ellen not consummating their year-old marriage?  Well, aside from keeping her a pure unicorn for Orlok to feast on of course: I mean an in-universe reason.  If randy Tom is willing to shag any sultry bit of skirt that smiles at him, what on Earth's going on at home?  It's not like Ellen isn't gorgeous and wanting deflowering.  She's gagging for a shagging, you buffoon!  Sigh.

We have the addition of the character of the Blind Man, a harbinger like Friday the 13's Crazy Ralph, played by Thomas Ian Nicholas - Kevin from the American Pie films - who claims to have lost his eyes, perhaps voluntarily removed them, after seeing evil up in the mountains.  No striped hyenas masquerading as werewolves this time, though, alas.

Doug Jones, purveyor of lanky gangling characters such as fishman Abe Sapien from Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy duology and Commander - later Captain - Saru in Star Trek: Discovery and who had essayed the Conrad Veidt role of Cesare the somnabulator in David Lee Fisher's Caligari plays the daemonic Count Orlok with make-up that takes the original Max Schreck look and adds something like a pinch of Mr Punch, or possibly Guy Henry's most memorable genre role.  No, not his Tarknologically-assisted Grand Moff in Rogue One though his Peter Cushing impersonation is quite uncanny; I refer of course to his horror host persona Dr Terror from the sadly short-lived Dr Terror's Vault of Horror.  Or perhaps his fellow early '90s horror protagonist Funny Man.  Either way, any way I turned my early teens were haunted by a Man with a Long Chin.  I chiefly blame Paul Rose's Teletext-based Digitiser for warping my fragile little mind.

Lengthy delays in this one getting crowdfunded and finished and timing - either bad or good, you be the judge - lends the feel of an Asylum mockbuster hastily-made to be rush-released at the same time as a bigger budget movie, despite the fact that this one was gestating for far longer than the Eggers take on the same material.  I'm not too much of a cinema snob to say that on balance I might have actually found a bit more to enjoy in this version, whether that be down to lowered expectations (certainly lower than I had for the one from the director of The VVitch and The Northman) I just don't rightly know.