Favorite Horror Scenes & Film Reviews

We Started a Podcast, As You Do

/ Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

If you ever wanted to listen to the God of Hellfire and I blathering away about various topics of interest to weirdos everywhere, you, my friends, are in luck. We have started a podcast called 13 O’Clock, which will feature subjects ranging from supposedly real paranormal cases to unsolved historical mysteries to bizarre religious cults to creepy serial killers to horror movies and everything in between. Some of the episodes will be just us, some of them will have awesome guests like parapsychologists, writers, musicians of a darker nature, and so forth.

On our inaugural episode, we discuss the tragic case of Doris Bither, whose alleged poltergeist attacks were the basis of the 1982 film The Entity; and on the second half, we delve into one of our favorite topics, conspiracy theories and hidden meanings in Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic The Shining.

Listen to the audio-only version right here, and if you want some relevant visuals to go along with our musings, then I also made a pretty YouTube video version, which you may watch right here.

Also, subscribe to our 13 O’Clock channel on YouTube, like the Facebook page, and follow us on Twitter. Thank you, and Goddess out.

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Karen Black at the Black House with the Black Fence: An Appreciation of “The Strange Possession of Mrs. Oliver”

/ Jenny Ashford / 3 Comments

You know how sometimes when you’re bored and kinda hung over on a Sunday, and you go poking around YouTube looking for some comforting 1970s horror to watch while you inhale your hearty lunch of homemade Swedish meatballs? And you know how every now and then, you fortuitously stumble across a made-for-TV movie from 1977 that you hadn’t heard of, and how sometimes that movie was written by Richard Matheson and starred Karen Black? Isn’t that fucking rad when that happens? I’m here to tell you that it is quite rad.

The Strange Possession of Mrs. Oliver is evidently something of a forgotten gem from the late 1970s, and despite its pedigree, hasn’t really gotten a great deal of attention; hell, I don’t think it’s ever even been released on DVD, at least in the U.S. The version I saw on YouTube had been transferred from a battered old VHS tape of the original telecast. It’s kind of a shame, because although this isn’t Matheson’s or Black’s best work, obviously, it’s still a really eerie mystery with a twist ending that totally blindsided me, which is not an easy thing for an ending to do.

Karen Black plays Miriam Oliver, an unhappy housewife straining under the controlling behavior of her buttplug husband Greg (George Hamilton), a hotshot lawyer who apparently wants nothing more than a wife who will dress like a Mormon schoolmarm, pump out babies at his command, and never leave the house or question his authority for any reason whatsoever.

As you might expect, Miriam is getting pretty resentful of the fact that she’s not allowed to work or go to college, and that Greg is pressuring her to have a child before she’s really ready (side note: Miriam’s character in the movie is supposed to be 26 years old, though Ms. Black was at least ten years older than that when this was filmed). She starts to rebel in little ways, like continuing to take her birth control pills on the sly; most significantly, she goes to the mall one day and is drawn to purchase a tight, low-cut red blouse, a blonde wig, some red lipstick, and some snazzy hoop earrings. She puts all the stuff on and is both enthralled and terrified by the fact that she looks like a completely different person. She even starts to act differently when she has her “costume” on, though of course Greg doesn’t really get it and thinks Miriam is losing her marbles. He does kinda try to be understanding, but it soon becomes apparent that Miriam is having a true identity crisis, and may in fact be “possessed,” just as the title of the movie suggests.

See, I neglected to mention that at the beginning of the film (and one other time subsequently), Miriam has been having these really creepy nightmares of attending a funeral and looking into the coffin, only to see herself lying there. She also has recurrent visions of fire, a small bouquet of dark purple or black flowers, and the sounds of a dog barking and a woman screaming. She also keeps seeing a dude with a gray sweatshirt and a sweet pornstache who drives a red pickup truck that inexplicably says “gasoline” on the side. Hmmmm.

On a whim, Miriam rents a cottage on the beach without asking her husband’s permission. He’s pissed, but after he sees how upset she is and how badly she wants it, he agrees that maybe they should rent a beach house so she can get away for a while, but of course he’s going to be the one to pick it out, because he can’t let her have one single thing. He also makes her an appointment to see a psychiatrist, and she seems relieved and compliant, though she tells him she wants to go to the appointment by herself, since he has to go out of town for a trial anyway.

Of course she skips out on the appointment, and instead puts on her slutted-up garb and heads for the beach house. A dog starts following her around, and seems to know her. She ducks into a bar in town, and as she does, she decides that because she has a new identity, she should have a new name. She sees a sign with the word “sandy” on it, and decides to call herself Sandy.

But oddly, as soon as she sits down at the bar, the surprised bartender addresses her as Sandy and asks where she’s been. Freaked out, she says her name is really not Sandy, but the bartender says she looks just like Sandy, a girl who always used to come in there. Even the drink she orders is the same one Sandy drank all the time. The bartender asks the two other shadowed figures at the bar whatever happened to Sandy, and one of them says that she moved away.

Then Miriam sits at a table near the dance floor to enjoy her drink, and who should sleaze up to her but Mr. Sweatshirt von Pornstache, the guy from her dream. She’s afraid of him, as well she should be, because he is crawling all up in her space, insisting she really is Sandy and she needs to stop lying about it. He won’t fuck off when she tells him to, but luckily Miriam is rescued by an extra from Saturday Night Fever, who asks her to dance. She tells him she can’t really dance, and indeed, at first she’s all awkward and shit, but then she finds her groove and starts disco-ing like a champ, just like those chicks on “Solid Gold.” Naturally, this makes Pornstache even more suspicious, because of course the way she dances is exactly the same way that Sandy used to.

So Miriam is getting more and more wigged out (pun very much intended) because Pornstache keeps stalking her around town, and she has the funeral dream again while she’s at the beach house, only this time the dream ends in a huge conflagration, through which Pornstache leers menacingly at her.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, because I was thinking the same thing, but I can assure you that what you are thinking is not actually what’s going on. And if you don’t want the ending spoiled, you might want to stop reading at this point. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

So, you are thinking, as I was, that Pornstache killed Sandy by burning her house down, and that Sandy’s ghost is possessing Miriam, right? I mean, the word “possession” is right there in the title.

This is not what is happening. Kinda close, but much weirder.

So Miriam gets back into her regular Mormon drag, realizing that hubby Greg is gonna be home from his trip soon and she’d better skedaddle back to the unhappy homestead. But the dog that’s been following her won’t get out of her car, and finally she gets exasperated and asks a neighbor who the dog belongs to. He says it’s Mrs. Dempsey’s dog, and that Mrs. Dempsey lives a couple blocks away in “a black house with a black fence.”

Again, I know what you’re thinking. It’s a black house because it’s all burned, right? And Mrs. Dempsey is Sandy, and Sandy’s dead, right? WRONG. We really need to quit trying to guess how this is going to end, you guys. When Miriam finds the house, it’s just a regular un-arsoned house that for some reason is entirely painted black.

An old woman answers the door and says that yeah, the dog belongs to Mrs. Dempsey, who is away until later that evening. This woman is just house-sitting, apparently. The old woman calls the dog Henry, which freaks Miriam out for some reason, and then she’s freaked out even more when she sees one of those pots of black flowers on the windowsill. Then, as she’s leaving, she glances through a window of the house and sees a painting of a girl who looks very much like her, with blonde hair, a tight red blouse, and hoop earrings. Miriam loses her shit and asks the housesitter woman who the girl in the painting is, but the old woman doesn’t know. She says that Miriam should come back after seven and talk to Mrs Dempsey, so Miriam resolves to do just that. By the way, Pornstache has been lurking around this whole time, so there’s also that.

Miriam then passes another neighbor, and asks if Mrs. Dempsey had a daughter. The guy doesn’t really remember at first, but then he says that he thinks he recalls someone mentioning that Mrs. Dempsey indeed had a daughter who died five years before. AHA!!! See, Sandy IS dead!!! WRONG AGAIN. I TOLD YOU TO STOP TRYING TO GUESS.

Meanwhile, back at the Greg Oliver Prison for Matronly Breeder Wives, hubby has returned from his business trip and is calling around to try to find out where his errant wife has gotten off to. He finds out that she skipped her shrink appointment, and surmises, correctly, that she probably went to her beach house. So he heads on over there in order to give her a good talking-to.

Miriam, still being tailed by Pornstache, returns to the Dempsey house, and here’s where the big bombshell finally comes to light. Mrs. Dempsey answers the door and sees Miriam there, her face partially in shadow. She seems REALLY cheesed off, accusing Miriam of playing a sick joke on her. Mrs. Dempsey asks who she is, and when Miriam says her name, Mrs. Dempsey is all FUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOOOOOOOOU. Then Mrs. Dempsey turns on the porch light, sees Miriam’s face properly, and calls Miriam Sandy. Miriam protests, and asks about Mrs. Dempsey’s dead daughter in the painting. Mrs. Dempsey says that the painting isn’t of her daughter, but is a portrait that her daughter painted of her best friend Sandy. “THIS IS MY DAUGHTER,” Mrs. Dempsey shrieks, thrusting a framed photograph at Miriam. “THIS WAS MY DAUGHTER MIRIAM.” And right there in the photo is matronly Miriam, complete with librarian bun and giant seventies glasses.

What in the Samuel Langhorne HELL is going on here, you may wonder? Okay, pay attention. Five years before, Pornstache (whose real name is Mark) was supposed to marry Sandy, but she broke up with his ass and he didn’t take it too well. One night when Sandy and Miriam were at Sandy’s house, Pornstache showed up and set Sandy’s car on fire. The fire spread to the house. Sandy got away, but Miriam and Sandy’s parents died in the blaze.

So basically, the Miriam we’ve been following through this whole movie really WAS Sandy the whole time. She just felt so guilty that Miriam had died because of her that she dissociated and took over Miriam’s identity. As Miriam, she met and married Greg, and only after several years did fragments of her actual identity start filtering back to her. That was why, at the beginning of the movie, that “Miriam” kept telling Greg that she felt suffocated and that she wanted to be her “real self,” though she couldn’t articulate to him who that was. Deep down she knew she was really party-girl Sandy, but Greg had only ever known her as staid, conservative Miriam. So there you have it. No possession, no ghosts, nothing supernatural at all.

At the very end, Pornstache tries to kill Miriam/Sandy, but she is saved when Greg arrives just in the nick of time. She tells him who she really is, and he seems surprisingly okay with it, unless he’s simply planning on calling the men with the butterfly nets after the credits roll. That seems like the kind of dick move he would pull.

Gotta say, I really enjoyed this quite a lot, and I don’t think that was just the remnants of last night’s alcohol talking. The funeral scenes in particular were eerily surreal and creepy as hell, and the whole thing, while rather slow-moving, was intriguingly spooky and mysterious. Karen Black was absolutely great as the unstable Miriam, and George Hamilton was appropriately assholish, without seeming like a cartoon villain. And as I said, the ending, when Mrs. Dempsey handed Miriam the picture of herself, literally made my jaw drop. I didn’t even care that the whole “possession” title was a misnomer; I was just so pleasantly shocked by this bizarre twist that I did not see coming in any way, shape, or form.

Fans of Karen Black, Richard Matheson, and eerie 70s mysteries would do well to give this a chance, and hopefully someday it will get a proper high-quality release, because it really is quite a good example of made-for-TV horror from that golden decade. It was a total accident that I came across it, but as Bob Ross would have said, sometimes there are happy accidents. 🙂

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends. Goddess out.

We All Mask Our Desperation As Best We Can: An Appreciation of “The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail”

/ Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

Buonasera, spaghetti horror aficionados! We’re delving back into the giallo pot for today’s delectable serving, so tie on your bib and chow down!

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The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail (La Coda dello Scorpione, 1971) was the second giallo film directed by Sergio Martino, who also helmed one of my previously featured films, All the Colors of the Dark. Scorpion’s Tail isn’t quite as groovy and fun as Colors, but it’s still a tightly plotted and entertaining little thriller with some nice cinematography, a script with lots of surprising twists and turns, and some satisfyingly bloody kills.

At the beginning of the movie, we’re introduced to beautiful blonde Lisa Baumer (Evelyn Stewart), two-timing wife of jet-setting rich dude Kurt Baumer. While Lisa is busily banging her scruffy side-piece, she receives a phone call that informs her that her presumably Lego-sized husband has tragically perished in the explosion of his teeny toy plane (you’ll know what I mean when you see the effect, you guys). Into the phone, she’s all, “Yeah, I know all about thaaaaa…I mean, oh man, that’s a damn shame. I loved that guy more than life itself, yes indeedy.” Helping her through her terrible grief is the fact that poor ‘sploded Kurt had an insurance policy that will make Lisa a million dollars richer; all she has to do is fly to Athens, Greece to pick up the check, and cha-ching: baby you’re a rich man.

Since insurance companies are generally no chumps, they suspect that maaaaybe Lisa had something to do with the plastic plane explosion that shuffled off Kurt’s mortal coil, so they hire insurance investigator and rakishly suave motherfucker Peter Lynch (George Hilton) to follow Lisa’s tight ass around and measure the exact proportion of fatale to her femme.

Lisa groks to his game right away, but she’s got bigger problems than him to deal with, because it turns out that Kurt’s ogre-faced mistress Lara (Janine Reynaud) and her lawyer/one-man brute squad Sharif (Luis Barboo) want to get their hands on some of Kurt’s sweet death-cash as well, and try to kill the conniving Lisa after she refuses to buckle under their (admittedly pretty lame) threats of blackmail.

Planning on getting her money as quickly as possible and getting the fuck out of Dodge, Lisa cashes her million-dollar check and makes arrangements to meet current homme de commodité Scruffy D. Adulterer in Tokyo. Unfortunately, the security at her hotel isn’t quite up to snuff, and she is summarily sliced into ribbons and relieved of her ill-gotten gains before she can even finish stowing her slain-spouse money-bundles into her fetching carry-on valise.

There then follows your standard giallo murder mystery, replete with world-weary, shit-talking investigators, a budding love story between two of the characters involved in the case, and a whole fisherman’s platter of red herrings. People who are suspected of some of the murders start to turn up dead themselves, and it becomes very clear that whatever it is that’s going on, it’s far more complicated than it seemed at first blush. Who is bumping off all these seemingly unrelated people? Is it the sketchy Interpol officer with the mysteriously injured hand? How about Lisa’s heroin-shootin’ and Mac Davis-resemblin’ ex-boyfriend? Did Kurt Baumer fake his own death to collect on his own insurance policy? Or is something even more convoluted and sinister going on? And why on earth do female characters in every single one of these movies insist on standing there and helplessly staring at the door while a murderer is busting it down? Honestly, ladies, you can run away; just because some dude goes to the trouble of breaking into your house doesn’t give you some kind of social obligation to allow him to stab you. You’re welcome for that tidbit of advice, by the way.

All in all, this was a serviceable giallo with enough plot curveballs to keep you guessing, and though I won’t spoil the ending, I will say that this film features an enjoyable subversion of some of the most common tropes of the genre vis-a-vis the resolution of the mystery. There’s also some added spice in the form of a fairly graphic eye gouging and the frequent appearance of two of Anita Strindberg’s boisterously bouncing…acting chops. Enjoy with a cappuccino and a nice biscotti, and call me in the morning.

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Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends. Goddess out.

Even Those Representing God Must Rely on Advertising: An Appreciation of “Seven Blood Stained Orchids”

/ Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

It’s a stormy Saturday afternoon here in central Florida, and as I often like to do on wet weekends such as these, I decided to while away a couple of hours with a strangely comforting European cult flick from the 1970s and then tell the internet how I felt about it, whether the internet wants to hear it or not. Did I mention I’m back on the giallo kick? No? Okay, consider it mentioned.

Anyway, I’ve obviously written about a few gialli before, and the funny thing about the genre is that you don’t have to see too many of them before you start getting into what I call “endless giallo recursion,” or alternately, “The Giallo Small World Hypothesis.” To wit, the movie we’re discussing today is another one with bloody flowers prominent in the title and the plot (just like the subject of my older post, The Case of the Bloody Iris), and another one featuring Marina Malfatti (who was also in a couple of other gialli I wrote about, The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave and All the Colors of the Dark), albeit in a fairly small role.

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Seven Blood Stained Orchids (Sette orchidee macchiate di rosso) was released in 1972 and was the last of a series of four Italian/German co-productions (fun fact: in Germany, the equivalent of gialli is “Krimi”) based upon the works of prolific British crime writer Edgar Wallace. It was directed by Umberto Lenzi, probably most infamous (at least in the U.S. and U.K.) as the director of a couple of the most notorious “video nasties,” Eaten Alive and Cannibal Ferox. Now, before you go getting any ideas, Seven Blood Stained Orchids is pretty much a textbook giallo and has very little in common with Lenzi’s gore films; in fact, the violence here is exceptionally tame, with the bloodiest scene probably being a relatively mild murder with a whirring drill (and you know you’re a horror junkie when a grisly drill-through-the-heart scene barely raises an interested eyebrow). So whether that makes you more or less likely to want to watch it is entirely up to you.

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NEEDS MOAR NEEDLES TAPED UNDER EYEBALLS.

 

As I said, this movie ticks pretty much all the blood-spattered little giallo boxes: there’s a black-gloved killer stalking and killing scantily-clothed women with a knife, there’s a strange calling card left at the murder scenes (in this case, an occult-looking silver half-moon pendant), there is an investigation undertaken by one of the target victims when police prove less than useful, and there is the standard parade of shifty motherfuckers who drift through the story and serve as red herrings until the mystery slowly becomes resolved. Could the killer be the enigmatic old man babbling in German in the cemetery? The heroin-shooting Jimi Hendrix fan who does nothing but host open-door naked orgy parties at his zebra-print hippie pad? Or perhaps it’s his blouse-wearing boyfriend, who is a dead ringer for Rufus Wainwright? Or how about that hard-faced old battle-axe in the lunatic asylum who gives one of the potential victims a whole faceful of stinkeye and keeps a thermometer under her chair cushion, the way you do?

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“I DON’T CARE WHO IT IS, AS LONG AS THE STAB WOUNDS DON’T MAR MY CHESTICULAR PERKINESS.”

 

Briefly, the main plot revolves around a woman named Giulia (Uschi Glas) and her new husband, fashion designer and bossy-boots Mario (Antonio Sabato), as they attempt to get to the bottom of a mysterious series of killings, linked by the aforementioned half-moon pendant. After the murder of a prostitute (Lina Franchi) and an artist (Marina Malfatti), Giulia is targeted for death while she is on a train with Mario, heading toward their honeymoon destination. She survives, but because the killer beat cheeks before checking to make sure she was dead (rookie mistake), the police stage a mock funeral for her and keep her in hiding while they try to draw the murderer out. One of the repeated motifs of the film, though, is the general ineffectiveness of the cops, as they time and again fail to protect the marked women, even after Giulia and Mario have figured out the tenuous connection between the victims and helpfully provided a list of who is likely to meet the killer’s knife next. So fuck the police, the movie seems to be saying, since they apparently can’t manage to catch a cold even when all the legwork is done for them.

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“YEAH, THEY’RE STANDING RIGHT HERE…YEAH, THEY JUST ASKED ME TO WIPE THEIR ASSES FOR THEM TOO.”

 

During the course of the film, we learn a great number of interesting facts. Among these are that serial killers become infinitely less sympathetic when they stoop to poisoning a bunch of kittens; that “The American Hospital” actually refers to the name of a medical facility in Rome and is not an admission that the Italians think there is only a single hospital on the entire American continent; that confessional booths in Catholic churches really need a better security detail; that a drugged-up sex soiree can’t be complete without poorly-applied body paint and a poster of Marilyn Monroe somewhere in the mix; and that not wearing a kicky purple scarf with your mod ensemble will make everyone think you’re a straight-up hooker who deserves to be bludgeoned to death in a cornfield.

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All in all, this was a fairly solid example of the genre, not mind-blowingly awesome, but quite enjoyable, well-paced, and rather elegantly shot. The central plot device of the authority figures in the movie being powerless to protect the victims added a nice little undercurrent of dread to the entire affair. While the reveal of the killer was something of a surprise, the untangling of the murderer’s motive was not as splashy or madness-fueled as in other examples of the genre, so it frankly fell a little flat for me, since I’m more into the excesses of Argento. But I would still recommend this to giallo fans as a decent, middle-of-the-road entry into the annals of Italian crime thrillers.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends. Goddess out.

The Limit Has Finally Been Transgressed: An Appreciation of “Hour of the Wolf”

/ Jenny Ashford / 2 Comments

Hälsningar, minions! Today we’re delving into the surreal and arty waters of the Ingmar Bergman oeuvre, and even though I’m gonna try REALLY hard to not make any Swedish Chef jokes, I’m not going to promise anything, because y’all know how I roll.

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Hour of the Wolf (or Vargtimmen in Swedish) was released in 1968, and is probably the closest thing to a straight horror movie that Bergman ever did. That said, it’s still miles away from a traditional horror flick of the era, being more like an intensely eerie, psychological mindfuck with some really, really disturbing imagery; essentially, it’s film as wide-awake nightmare. Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my love of ambiguity and surrealism in horror, and here is one of the best examples I have yet seen; in execution and implication, it’s absolutely skin-crawling. It’s also fairly obvious that this film was a pretty big influence on David Lynch’s Eraserhead, and in its themes of spiraling madness it also bears something of a resemblance to Roman Polanski’s Repulsion.

The story concerns an artist, Johan Borg (Max von Sydow), who is vacationing at a remote island cottage with his pregnant wife Alma (Liv Ullman). At the beginning of the movie, Alma is talking directly to the camera about the disappearance of her husband, as if she is being interviewed for a documentary. The remainder of the film is told in flashback; we see the bizarre disintegration of Johan’s mental state, and wonder how much of what we’re seeing is real.

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What makes this film so unsettling is its resolute refusal to explain itself. Johan interacts with strange people as he walks around the island, and he seems to think that they are demons, even though Alma can see them too; and for most of the movie, they seem like real people, albeit really skeevy ones. Johan has drawn all of them in his sketchbook, though the viewer never sees the drawings, but only Alma’s horrified reactions to them. He also has names for them, like the Bird-Man, the Schoolmaster, and The Lady with a Hat (about whom Johan once tells Alma that you don’t want to be around when the lady takes the hat off, because the whole face comes off with it. NOPE).

At one stage, a man named Baron von Merkans invites Johan and Alma to his nearby castle for a party, and when they attend, it’s the trippiest get-together ever, as all the guests laugh bizarrely, yammer on about meaningless topics, and overpraise Johan’s art to a really uncomfortable degree. Everyone seems hostile and cruel, as though they’re mocking him, but no reason for this is apparent. One of the women at the party shows Johan and Alma her bedroom, in which hangs a huge portrait of a woman named Veronica Vogler, who was apparently Johan’s ex-lover, though it is never clarified if she was a real person, or another figment of Johan’s crumbling imagination.

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Johan suffers terribly from insomnia, and Alma often stays awake with him in support. During the long nights, they have some extremely disturbing discussions. In one very eerie scene, Johan tells Alma about a trauma from his childhood in which he was locked up in a closet with what he thought was a small person who wanted to gnaw his toes off. He also confesses to a possibly fictitious incident some time before whereby he murdered a little boy while out fishing. During this conversation, he clarifies the meaning of the phrase “hour of the wolf,” which according to folklore is the hour in the middle of the night when most deaths and births take place. Much of the horror in the movie is conveyed in these weird conversations, though there are plenty of uncanny visuals to highlight the nightmarish narrative, like a man suddenly walking up a wall and across a ceiling, or a woman pulling off her face and popping her eyeballs into a wine glass.

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If you’re getting the sense that this is a really bizarre, disjointed film, then you’re entirely correct, but its inexplicable strangeness is very, VERY effective in making this one of the most haunting and genuinely unnerving films I’ve ever seen (and that’s saying a lot). The underlying themes of the film seem to tie in with the fine line between artistic genius and madness, with the power of deep-seated fears and shameful desires to unhinge the mind, and with the possibility that insanity may be contagious, as Alma wonders at the end whether her love for Johan caused her to share in his delusions. There is also a repeating motif of eating or biting—the demonic people that Johan sees are portrayed as something akin to vampires or birds of prey, and during the flashback scene where Johan is recounting his murder of the boy at the seashore, the boy bites him several times during the struggle. Indeed, the working title of the manuscript was “The Maneaters,” so perhaps there is some reference here to the way that fears and traumas, whether real or imagined, can eat away at one’s sanity.

All in all, not a film for everyone, obviously, but I found it an intense experience, so disquieting and ominous that it was sort of distressing to watch. Its slow pace and stark cinematography only added to the uncomfortable atmosphere. If you haven’t seen it, and are a fan of Bergman’s other films, or just like surrealistic horror in general, I would definitely recommend it, even though it legit creeped me the fuck out. In fact, I know I said I was gonna try not to, but I need a laugh after watching it, so here we go.

Sorry, Sweden.

Goddess out.

Strange Men Have Been Following Women Since the Stone Age: An Appreciation of “All the Colors of the Dark”

/ Jenny Ashford / 2 Comments

Welcome back to our regularly scheduled programming, horror hounds. We’re traveling back to Italy for this one, and back to the giallo genre; we’re also revisiting some familiar faces from previous blog posts, because today’s movie features Edwige Fenech and George Hilton (from The Case of the Bloody Iris), as well as Marina Malfatti (who starred in The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave). So, without further delay, let’s jump right into the psychedelic cauldron of Satan, shall we?

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All the Colors of the Dark (Tutti i colori del buio, 1972) was an Italian/Spanish co-production, but set in London, and directed by Sergio Martino. It’s essentially a groovier, less satirical, and WAY more surreal take on Rosemary’s Baby, with similar themes of black magic, ambiguous reality, and crushing paranoia.

Beautiful but mentally fragile protagonist Jane has been going through some shit; not only was her mother murdered when she was five years old, but a year before the events of the film, she was in a car accident in which she suffered a miscarriage. Her boyfriend, pharmaceutical rep and raging jackwad Richard, was driving the car, and sorta feels responsible for the whole losing the baby thing, although he still kinda treats Jane like crap anyway. Ever since the tragedy, Jane has been plagued with horrific, Fellini-esque nightmares in which toothless old ladies cackle in close-up and a mysterious man with ice-blue eyes repeatedly stabs women in their beds.

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DAVID LYNCH TO THE WHITE COURTESY PHONE.

In true “Yellow Wallpaper” fashion, Richard has been pooh-poohing Jane’s wishes to see a psychiatrist, insisting she just needs to keep ingesting the weird blue toilet-tablet vitamin concoction he’s giving her to flush away the crazy, since he clearly subscribes to the Tom Cruise School of Psychiatry Is Evil and Scientology Solves All the Things With Vitamins and OT Powers. But since playing with the Ty-D-Bol Man doesn’t seem to be doing her any damn good, Jane finally takes her sister Barbara’s advice and goes to see the psychiatrist Barbara works for, a kindly old man called Dr. Burton. Doc seems more understanding, but her nightmares are not going away, and what’s worse, she’s starting to see the blue-eyed man stalking her in real life, or so it would appear.

Fearing she might be going batshit insane, she finally confides in foxy new neighbor Mary, whose first suggestion, obviously, is for Jane to accompany her to a black magic ritual, which should clear that whole mental illness thing right up, with the well-known healing power of Beelzebub. Jane gives this course of action about ten seconds of thought before going, “Sounds like a plan,” and after a festive afternoon of dog-blood drinking and gang rape, she seems right as rain again.

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BLACK CANDLES AND WHITEFACE: THE CURE FOR WHAT AILS YOU.

 

But not so fast! In a stunning twist, it turns out that demonic cults headed by fey bearded men wearing fabulous gold Lee press-on nails may not actually be conducive to one’s overall well-being! Who’da thought? From here on out, the movie takes on the aspect of a fever dream, as we’re not really sure who we can trust and what is really happening. Is the blue-eyed psycho real or imaginary? Is everyone Jane knows conspiring with the cult to push her off her rocker for good? Has Richard fucked every woman in the immediate vicinity, including Jane’s sister? What’s the over/under on how long it would take to murder a couple of German senior citizens and prop them up at the breakfast table as though they’re still alive? Will Jane ever learn to cook bacon and eggs properly? The surrealistic touches come hard and fast, and the viewer will be left confused and on edge until the very end.

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WAKING UP ON THE LAWN OF A SATANIC MURDER MANSION; WE’VE ALL BEEN THERE.

 

I really dug this one a lot; I loved the psychedelic weirdness and the ambiguity, and it had a really unsettling undertone of claustrophobia, as the world seemed to close in around poor Jane, leaving her with no one to trust. The cinematography was also lovely and strange, if a little heavy on the wacky camera effects. Definitely one of the more unique gialli, and one I’d definitely recommend to fans of Satanic cult movies as well.

That’s all for this installment, so until next time, keep it creepy, my friends. Goddess out.

Revenge of the Deathless Guinea Pig: An Appreciation of “The Asphyx”

/ Jenny Ashford / 3 Comments

Cheerio, old chaps! Today’s movie is another kinda obscure 1970s flick from Europe, but we’ve temporarily travelled from Italy to Old Blighty. Bizarrely, and completely coincidentally, it also concerns a fucked up aristocratic family by the name of Cunningham, just like my last entry on The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave. I swear I did NOT do that on purpose. Clearly, mysterious cinematic forces are at work here.

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Directed by Peter Newbrook and released in 1972, The Asphyx was also known under the titles Spirit of the Dead and The Horror of Death. Set in 1875, it explores many of the same themes as Frankenstein, what with all the hubris about scientists tampering in God’s romaine and suchlike. Sir Hugo Cunningham (Robert Stephens) is a widower, a gentleman scientist, and a cheery, progressive sort of bloke, using his money and expertise in service of the betterment of mankind. At the beginning of the movie, he is bringing his fiancée Anna (Fiona Walker) back to the family estate to introduce her to his two grown children Clive (Ralph Arliss) and Christina (Jane Lapotaire), as well as a young fella named Giles (Robert Powell), who he introduces as his adopted son, but who also has a thing going with Christina, so…huh. Yeah, technically they’re not blood relatives, but still, eeeewwwww. Moving on.

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One of Sir Hugo’s main scientific pursuits involves working with a psychical research society, photographing people at the moment of their deaths. A few of their photographs seem to show a strange black smudge near the dying people, which the psychical society believes are the souls leaving the bodies. Sir Hugo is excited about the implications of this research, but his ward/assistant/daughter-banger Giles is all kinda meh, skeptical of the society’s conclusions and not really seeing the point of it all.

Things start going to shit about twenty minutes into the festivities. Clive and Anna are killed in a freak boating accident, and Sir Hugo happens to capture their deaths on his newfangled video camera. Beside himself with grief, he insists on watching the footage to see his beloved Anna and his only son Clive one final time. He is simultaneously horrified and ecstatic to find that he can clearly see that telltale black smudge appearing on the film right before Clive gets beaned with the fatal tree branch, but now that he can see it as a moving image instead of a static one, he can’t help but notice that the smudge is not moving away from Clive, as his soul presumably would, but toward him. Dun dun duuuuuun.

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This doesn’t seem like a great deal to go on, but from this single piece of evidence, Sir Hugo formulates a theory that obviously, this black thingamabob isn’t really a soul per se, but an entity from Greek mythology called an asphyx, something like a grim reaper deal that comes to claim your ass when you’re fixing to bite the big one. He’s eager to do more research into the matter, and fortuitously, an opportunity soon presents itself: the president of the psychical society, Sir Edward Barrett (Alex Scott) arrives at Sir Hugo’s house, all in a lather because the barbaric British government has decided to reinstate public executions in order to try to stem the tide of a supposed explosion of violent crime. Sir Edward and Sir Hugo are both vehemently anti-capital punishment, and Sir Edward wants Sir Hugo to film the first hanging, hoping that the horror of the images will rally the public to their cause. Sir Hugo pretends that he doesn’t really want to do it, but secretly he’s all like AWWWW YEAH and metaphorically rubbing his hands together in anticipatory glee. He finally agrees, though he doesn’t tell Sir Edward what his true intentions are, vis-á-vis recording dying people’s repo-demons.

During the hanging, Sir Hugo uses a “light booster,” essentially a spotlight using phosphorous crystals, to illuminate the gallows as the condemned man meets the noose; but to the surprise of himself and everyone assembled, the criminal’s asphyx is clearly visible to all, and seems to be trapped within the phosphorous beam. When Sir Hugo reviews the footage later, both he and Giles realize that if a person’s asphyx could be halted by the phosphorescent light, and further, if the asphyx could then be transferred to a purpose-made lock-box with a phosphorous beam shining indefinitely into it, then a person could, theoretically, never die, provided the asphyx is never released. They try the experiment on a guinea pig and meet with rousing success, so of course the next logical step is that Sir Hugo, growing increasingly mad with the potential power of everlasting life, decides to immortalize himself, because his awesomeness cannot be contained within a single lifetime, goddammit.

If you know anything about this type of movie, you’ll know that the situation is going to go drastically, horrifically sideways from that point forward, and you may find yourself asking the following questions: Is it ever morally justifiable to toy with immortality? What lengths will a man go to to preserve his family and his legacy? Is it really prudent to have to live forever when your noggin is hanging on by a single sinew like Nearly Headless Nick? Some pretty fucked up shit happens at the end of this, folks, and here is yet another example of a Cunningham family who really, desperately need some kind of psychiatric intervention. Happy Days this ain’t.

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As with a lot of British films from the early 70s, this one moves at a snail’s pace and is ridiculously talky, so it’s definitely not for all tastes. The characters, further, are all intensely twee, upper-class-twit types, but I found myself kinda liking them in spite of myself. Plus I was so interested to see what new, profanely impious schemes Sir Hugo was gonna come up with next that I was utterly transfixed through the entire two-hour running time. I also found the ending wonderfully cruel, ironic, and immensely satisfying.

That’s all for this installment, so until next time, keep it creepy, my friends. Goddess out.

It’s Not Uncommon for a Man to Want to Do Strange Things to Get His Kicks: An Appreciation of “The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave”

/ Jenny Ashford / 3 Comments

In the mood for more Italian? Excellent; let’s mangia. Our movie today is one I actually thought I hadn’t seen before, though when I got to one of the later scenes, I felt a definite tingle of recollection. See, when I was a kid, I saw a movie with this one scene that really stuck in my memory, of a guy going into a tomb and seeing a creepy skeleton woman sitting up in a coffin. For many years afterward, I thought of the scene often, but damned if I could remember what movie it came from. Initially I thought it might be Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, but I revisited that recently, and nope, no dice. Then I got it into my head that it might have been an episode of “Night Gallery,” so I watched the entire run of the series. And although the pilot episode with Roddy McDowall, “The Cemetery,” contained a scene that kinda reminded me of the one I was thinking of, it didn’t immediately smack me in the face with recognition.

But then, in all my wanderings through the giallo universe, I stumbled across a flick with the wonderfully outlandish title The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (aka La notte che Evelyn uscì dalla tomba), released in 1971. And bingo was his name-o — THERE was that elusive scene I remembered. Long story short (too late), I said all that to say that I actually thought I had never seen this movie, but I guess I did. Which then led me to think, holy crap, my parents let me watch this movie when I was naught but a nugget? Because yeah, it’s a little smutty.

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Anyway, The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (um…spoiler alert?) was directed by Emilio Miraglia, and it’s a pretty fun little gothic horror romp that features many of my favorite things. There’s a creepy old mansion with a family tomb! There’s a spooky portrait of an ostensibly dead first wife! There are dastardly double and triple crosses! There are red-headed strippers with perky boobies! There are ghosts and séances! There’s sadomasochism! Fabulous “I Dream of Jeannie” outfits! A disabled woman gets eaten by foxes! It really does have something for everybody.

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The plot revolves around main character/colossal fuckstick Lord Alan Cunningham (Anthony Steffen), a wealthy aristocrat who flipped his shit after the death of his (perhaps unfaithful) wife Evelyn in childbirth. He was institutionalized, but has been released back to his crumbling, palatial estate under the care of his family physician and close friend Dr. Richard Timberlane (Giacomo Rossi Stuart). It’s not made entirely clear whether the good doctor is aware of the…ahem…unconventional methods Alan has concocted to help him come to terms with his grief. Said methods include picking up carrot-topped prostitutes using slick come-ons like viciously yanking their hair and then saying, “Sorry, I thought it was a wig,” then taking the hapless whores back to his castle and engaging in a bit of Torquemada-style roleplay before killing them stone dead. “In other ages, prostitutes were branded with a hot iron. It was an excellent system,” he tells one victim, charmingly. If Dr. Timberlane does know about his patient’s itchy murder finger, he seems incredibly blasé about it, but hell, what’s a little strumpet slaying between friends? Also, Alan is a titled lord with boatloads of cash, so y’know, peasant laws don’t apply, obviously.

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One person who definitely does know about Alan’s extracurricular activities is dead wife Evelyn’s brother Albert (Roberto Maldera), who lives in a house on the grounds and often spies on Alan’s hooker extermination project. Every time a new floozy goes down for the count, Albert asks for hush money, at one point requesting the lavish sum of thirty pounds sterling. Albert: the budget blackmailer.

So Alan has apparently been on this murderous treatment program for nigh on a year, trolling for trollops with his only male relative, cousin George (Enzo Tarascio), who wears a giant hoop earring and swishes around like Paul Lynde, yet is shown banging luscious ladies on multiple occasions, because he is one hundred percent heterosexual, no doubt about it. Shockingly, all of this whorin’ and killin’ isn’t helping Alan’s mental state, since he is still haunted by visions of Evelyn, who’s always turning up in his head all naked and persistent. Dr. Timberlane suggests that if Alan were to marry again, then all of his violent urges would magically disappear, and I’m left wondering if this guy got his doctorate from some online diploma mill or something, because that is some really wack advice. But Alan is on board, all, no problemo, I’ll find a girl and get hitched, and then I can put all this pesky murder business behind me. Moments later, he goes to a party with George, where he meets an intriguing redhead with the unlikely name of Gladys (Marina Malfatti), and before he’s even given her a taste of his spicy Italian sausage, he’s proposing marriage. She’s all, “You’re trippin’, but…sure, sounds legit.” And thus Gladys becomes the second Lady Cunningham.

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There then follows a convoluted series of events typical of the gothic genre. Is Evelyn really haunting the castle, or has Alan jumped on the express train back to crazytown? What’s going on in the family tomb that Alan refuses to let his new wife see? Who keeps murdering Alan’s family members and worse, stealing the silverware? What’s the deal with the troop of identical maids who all wear the same blonde afro wigs? Will George ever come out of the closet? I won’t spoil any of the surprises, but suffice it to say that the Cunningham clan could do with some serious family counseling.

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I really enjoyed this one a lot; it had a great, Hammer-esque atmosphere and was pleasingly drenched in over-the-top campiness. It’s not really a traditional giallo, I guess, but it was an entertaining, creepy slice of early 70s sleaze-horror nonetheless. Recommended for those who like their gialli served up with a large side-dish of old-school gothic goodness.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends. Goddess out

To Buy Them Horror Tales, You Gotta Be Nuts: An Appreciation of “The Case of the Bloody Iris”

/ Jenny Ashford / 4 Comments

Happy hangover Sunday, fellow horror hos and bros. I’m dipping back into the giallo well for today’s post, and while our subject today leans slightly more toward erotica than horror, it was still fairly bloody and a lot of fun, so we’re just gonna roll with it. That cool with everybody? Good.

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1972’s The Case of the Bloody Iris (also known by the ridiculously convoluted title Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer?, or Why Are Those Strange Drops of Blood on Jennifer’s Body?) was directed by Giuliano Carnimeo under the pseudonym Anthony Ascott. It stars the gorgeous Edwige Fenech, who was in tons of European sex comedies and gialli back in the day, and it also boasts a pretty much nonstop cavalcade of perky, bouncing boobage, if you’re into that kind of thing (and who isn’t?).

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In fairly standard giallo fashion, the plot revolves around a killer with a black trenchcoat and hat, a black mask completely obscuring the face, and a wicked, scalpel-type knife which slices through pretty ladies with deadly efficiency and much spilling of garish crimson tempera paint. There is also the standard parade of red herrings, where almost anyone could be the murderer; is it main character Jennifer’s creepy ex-husband, who wants to draw her back into their nekkid orgy sex-cult days and keeps stalking her, leaving torn-up irises in her path? Is it her new beau/landlord, who has a strange aversion to blood and at one point tells her, “Wait until you find out what a bastard I am”? Is it the über-fey, walking-gay-stereotype photographer, who drinks like Dylan Thomas and has some of the movie’s most hilarious lines? Or how about that lecherous lesbian in the apartment next door? Or the busybody old bat in the building who rants about “whores” and buys piles of horror magazines from the newsstand every morning? Hell, what about the dismissive police inspector who gives more of a shit about collecting rare stamps from the crime scenes than he does actually solving the murders? The finger of suspicion falls on each one of them in turn, and the viewer doesn’t see the killer unmasked until the final five minutes, in what is actually a pretty fantastic, tense scene.

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As I implied earlier, this film is actually more like a mystery/sex farce with horror elements thrown into the mix than it is a traditional horror film. Yes, there are bloody murders aplenty, and there are creepy scenes of the victims being stalked in darkened streets and boiler rooms, but there are also psychedelic montages of the aforementioned nekkid orgies, topless blonde bimbos making light of shocking crimes while covered in soap bubbles, modeling sessions involving strategic body paint, and some good old fashioned erotic nightclub wrestling. There is also some patented early-70s misogyny (purported good guys smacking girls around and everyone being all NBD about it) and homophobia (personified in photographer Arthur, who is the gayest gay who ever gayed), plus a really bizarre, laissez-faire attitude that nearly all of the characters manifest toward the series of murders at the center of the plot. For example, at the beginning of the film, when a nameless call girl is stabbed in the elevator of the apartment building where the bulk of the action takes place, the residents who find her are all, “Eh, she doesn’t live here, so whatevs,” and that includes the first-on-the-scene, exotic dancer Mizar, who sees the bloody dead body and is all, “Huh, shame about that. Well, gotta split, got shit to do. Guess I’ll take the stairs.” Of course, she’s the next one to get offed, but still…kinda odd. Maybe the director was trying to make a statement about the modern world and its uncaring attitude toward others or something. Backing up this hypothesis is the scene where Jennifer’s goofball roommate Marilyn is stabbed to death on a crowded city street, and walks around bleeding and crying for help while pedestrians walk uncaringly around her. So yeah, could be a message there.

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Karma’s a bitch.

This is actually a decent giallo if you’re more into the softcore porn aspects of the genre, and if you don’t mind a copious amount of silliness and overdone seventies stereotypes. It’s a tad slow to get started, but the mystery is intriguing, and it’s unlikely that you’ll guess who the murderer is until the end (or at least I didn’t guess until right before the mask came off, but that might just be because I’m a big dummy). Of course it’s not up there with, say, Deep Red or Blood and Black Lace, but if you’re a giallo fan, it’s a pretty enjoyable little trifle.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends. Goddess out.

Insane People Seem to be Graced with Incredible Powers: An Appreciation of “God Told Me To”

/ Jenny Ashford / 1 Comment

A horrorific Monday to all of you fiends out there! I’ve returned once again to my favorite horror decade for today’s post, though I’m putting the gialli down for a brief rest so that I can discuss one of the weirder American horror flicks from the 1970s, one that I’d seen pop up on a lot of people’s “best underrated 70s horror” lists but had only just got around to seeing.

God Told Me To (1976) aka Demon Directed by Larry Cohen Shown: Poster Art

Larry Cohen is probably best known to horrorphiles as the director of the It’s Alive killer baby series, as well as a few other cult classics like The Stuff and Q: The Winged Serpent (and, it must be said, one of the better episodes of Mick Garris’s “Masters of Horror” series, the Fairuza Balk-starring “Pick Me Up”). But the film I want to discuss today is one of his stranger and more subversive ones, a film that actually had some pretty complex things to say about religious belief, violence, racial tensions, and gender fluidity. I’m speaking, of course, of 1976’s God Told Me To (also known as Demon, for some unfathomable reason).

The movie centers around New York City police detective Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco), who is investigating a bizarre series of crimes in which seemingly random people suddenly snap and go on mass killing sprees around the city, always giving the excuse that “God told me to,” right before they meet their own ends. You would think that this film, then, would progress something like a thriller or police procedural, and you’d be partially right, but honestly, if you’ve never seen it, I don’t think you could ever imagine the batshit directions this thing wanders off into. If you’d like to approach this movie cold, though, I suggest you not read any further here, as I’m inevitably going to spoil some key aspects of the plot. You have been warned.

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Detective Nicholas lives with his girlfriend Casey (Deborah Raffin), telling her that his devout wife Martha (Sandy Dennis) will not let him divorce her, even though in reality it’s his own Catholic guilt that prevents him. It is his very conflicted faith that causes him to obsess about the ostensibly religion-motivated mass murders occurring regularly around New York, but as he delves deeper into the crimes, he discovers some mightily disturbing facts about the motives of the killers, and also that he himself might somehow be involved in what appears to be some mass hysteria or conspiracy.

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And yes, that is indeed Andy Kaufman in his first film role!

It turns out that all of the murderers had fallen under the spell of a mysterious, androgynous cult figure known as Bernard Phillips (Richard Lynch), who seems to have the power of mind control over his subjects. As Nicholas digs into Phillips’ murky past, he finds that Phillips’ mother was supposedly a virgin when she bore him, and further, that she had reported being abducted by a ball of light and subsequently impregnated by what amounted to extraterrestrials. After Nicholas locates the elusive Phillips in a dark basement ringed with flames (obviously a stand-in for Hell), he finds that Phillips wants to control him most of all, but cannot do it, for some reason he can’t fathom.

As the investigation goes on, Nicholas finds that Phillips’s history mirrors his own; the detective’s own mother was also knocked up by visitors from beyond the stars, and the only reason that Nicholas wasn’t aware of it was that his human genes turned out to be more dominant than the alien ones. In the final battle between the half-alien “siblings,” Phillips attempts to persuade Nicholas to impregnate him via a pulsating vagina in his abdomen, but Nicholas ain’t having none of that freaky extraterrestrial action and kills the being, repeating the mantra that “God told me to” when he is later arrested for murder.

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I have to say that this is probably the strangest of all the religion-themed horror flicks of the decade, and I haven’t even really scratched the surface of all the insane shit that goes on in this movie. The weirdest thing about it is that it isn’t lurid or funny at all; it’s played completely straight and serious, and is all the more unsettling because of it. God Told Me To is almost like a whacked-out mashup of Dog Day Afternoon, Rosemary’s Baby, Xtro, and the book Chariots of the Gods, and as such, it has many layers of satirical social commentary that are just as relevant today as they were in the 1970s. For example, what is the nature of religious belief, and is it detrimental to the individual and to society as a whole? What is God, and if God supposedly speaks to someone, who’s to say that what God says is right or moral? Where is the line between male and female, and does it even matter? These may seem pretty heavy questions for a little B-horror movie to be tackling, but God Told Me To does so with a surprisingly deft hand. The entire feeling the film evokes is one of a society teetering on the edge of chaos as conflicting forces—of good and evil, masculine and feminine, black and white—all clash in one enormous and yet insidious paroxysm of violence.

It also has some wonderfully frightening scenes, from the fantastic opener as a lone sniper atop a water tower calmly picks off random pedestrians on a city street; to Nicholas’ harrowing visit to Phillips’ mother, who suddenly attacks him in a knife-wielding frenzy; to the movie’s best and most chilling sequence, where Nicholas questions a man who has just massacred his entire family in cold blood at Phillips’ psychic behest. The lucid, almost beatific way the man describes the murders is disturbing in the extreme.

So if you’re a fan of religion-themed and/or gritty urban horror from the 1970s that’s cross-pollinated with a hint of sci-fi, then God Told Me To should definitely be added to your must-see list. Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends. Goddess out.