Vengeance of the Zombies (1972)

Spain has given us some terrific zombie movies over the years, from Jorge Grau’s masterful and atmospheric LIVING DEAD AT THE MANCHESTER MORGUE to the more recent breathlessly thrilling [REC], with Amando de Ossorio’s BLIND DEAD series often seen as honorary Spanish horrors along the way.  Paul Naschy’s VENGEANCE OF THE ZOMBIES, however, is not like any of those. But to be honest it isn’t trying to be, having more in common with the dafter black and white B movies of the 1940s than the work of George Romero and his disciples.

In a London cemetery a naughty thieving couple are in a family crypt attempting to divest a female corpse of her jewellery. Before you can say ‘Daft Sticky End’ a man wearing a black cloak, hat and weird rubber mask has turned up outside, poured blood all over a wax effigy, and the corpse is rising, killing the couple, and going off for a wander as we get the main titles.

The music that plays over them is quite awful, by the way. And if you find it to be too much you may well have to plug your ears and concentrate on the subtitles, because there’s going to be a lot more of the most inappropriate music score for a horror film since Bill McGuffie decided that the best way to evoke the horror of Peter Cushing murdering prostitutes in CORRUPTION was to play a lot of loud sanity-challenging jazz. As if to prove my point, the establishing shot of London which follows is accompanied by the most horrendous frog-like burbling noise to be heard outside an amphibian theme park aimed at undemanding three year olds.

A blacked up Paul Naschy plays Krisna, an Indian mystic who has just bought a house in an isolated Welsh village. Young, pretty Elvire Irving goes to stay with him. I have to say the Welsh setting in this film isn’t entirely authentic. It was not so much the Spanish villa Elvire gets to stay in, nor the perfect Spanish spoken by all the locals that spoiled it for me, rather it was the fact that throughout the entire film not a drop of rain is to be seen in this so-called “Wales”. Elvire is presumably so shocked by the uncharacteristic weather that she promptly falls asleep and has a nightmare in which Paul Naschy As The Devil cuts her throat while assorted rejects from THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW, including a girl painted gold, look on.

Meanwhile, back in real, actual London, our chap in black is busy murdering the usual collection of topless Spanish ladies (unless you’re watching the clothed alternative scenes on the DVD for some strange reason) and bringing them back to life again. Every now and then yet another Naschy turns up, this time a horribly scarred one, but eventually everything in the plot is explained, sort of, as it turns out that Paul is in fact playing twins in this one, one of whom raped a woman in India many years ago and was burned alive by four English families for it. His rather complex plan for revenge has involved ‘learning the most diabolical voodoo of all’. He’s also going to get immortal life, presumably as part of some sort of voodoo loyalty card kill-four-girls-get-a-life-free deal - the kind that Tesco might offer if they dealt in Caribbean religions.

It all ends in typical EuroHorror style, with the police turning up to find most of the cast dead and shooting pretty Maria Kosty for good measure, which it turns out is just as well because she’s also on the verge of creating her own zombie army. Seriously.

Quite a lot of fun as these things go, VENGEANCE OF THE ZOMBIES features an interesting, if barking mad, revenge plot, a lot of really quite bloody murders (including a decapitation that hopefully got a round of applause in the grindhouses of the time), and some nice creepy scenes of zombies murdering people, especially at the start. Sadly most of the atmospherics is ruined by music that sounds as if it was rejected from CARRY ON UP THE SPANISH MAIN. I can’t remember ever seeing a film that features solely female zombies, nor one where they smile so much, nor, come to think of it, one where all their clothes are see-through to reveal they’ve taken the time and trouble to put on their panties but have forgotten their bras.

It’s unique. It’s Spanish. It’s Paul Naschy. And BCI’s DVD and Blu-ray of this are still available if you fancy checking out all the daftness for yourself.

The Hunchback of the Morgue (1973)

One of the plethora of delicious EuroHorrors served up by Spain in the 1970s, THE HUNCHBACK OF THE MORGUE  is genuinely surprising, possessing an outrageous approach that’s extreme even for a sub-sub genre not exactly known for its subtlety.

We open in a German village where either the beer seems to be served in gallon-sized glasses or the inhabitants are very very small. Walking home young student Ugo gets a bad attack of the tummy cramps and falls down dead in the street. Gotho, the hunchback of the title (Naschy in a bad wig but no ugly makeup – he’s the star, remember?) just happens to be nearby and finds a photograph of Ugo’s girlfriend Ilse while innocently searching the dead man’s pockets. We suspect Ilse isn’t going to last very long as she’s played by the same actress who was the first to get killed by the zombie Templar Knights in Amando de Ossorio’s TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD. Sure enough, after taking Ugo’s body to the morgue (and sawing his hands and feet off for no reason other than to up the yuk content – and why not) we see Gotho visiting Ilse in hospital. She’s a terminal case as according to Doctor Vic Winner “her lungs are all gone”. At least he actually sees some patients as opposed to his four colleagues who seem to spend their time taking the piss out of our hunchbacked hero and getting into fights with him. In fact these naughty medics give Gotho such a good kicking he ends up being taken home by local doctor Elke to heal his wounds. Whether it was his house or hers I’m still not sure but there was what looked like half a garden fence in the lounge as well as Ugo’s severed hands lurking in the bottom right hand corner of the frame. Still, seeing as Elke works up at the local women’s prison where cell-sharing seems to be on a ‘as long as you don’t flog the living daylights out of your room-mate’ basis it’s always possible they’re someone else’s hands that she picked up on the way home.

Ilse dies, which is too much for poor old Gotho as by now he’s hopelessly in love with her, so he does what anyone lovesick hunchback in one of these films would do and carries her off to the vast and labyrinthine catacombs beneath the town that no-one else seems to know about, even though the Spanish Inquisition seem to have left a lot of their torture instruments lying around. And some of their skeletons too, by the look of it.

And the movie’s only just getting started. Ilse’s corpse starts to get gnawed by rats which then get set on fire by Gotho (animal / rat lovers beware this bit as it’s obviously real) but just as things are starting to look bleak for the hunchback up pops mad doctor Alberto Dalbes who has just had funding for his research at the university refused, which is just as well once we find out what it is.

But first he has to build his laboratory in Gotho’s torture chamber, complete with acid bath to dispose of ‘unwanted flesh’. All that Gotho asks in return is that Dr Alberto brings back to life Gotho’s dear dead Ilse. “No problem,” says the rather optimistic mad scientist. Oh but there is a problem – the workman who have helped build the aforementioned underground “secret” laboratory, distracted from their game of ‘Snap’ by the odours emanating from the dead girl, decide to dump her in the acid.

Dr Alberto tries to console Gotho by getting him to bring him a corpse’s head, which he proceeds to cram into a large jar already filled to the brim with blancmange and lungs.  This appear to do the trick as regards the doctor’s creation, however, as the resulting transformation is so terrifying and so beyond the limits of the budget that we aren’t even allowed to see it. The creation, living behind one of those heavily bolted wooden doors with a tiny window in it so the doctor can peek in and tell us just how terrible it is from time to time, needs girls to eat, so off goes hunchbacked Paul to pinch a few, taking time out to exercise the part his contract that says that no matter what part he plays he gets to go to bed with at least one naked Eurohorror actress.

The end is fast approaching and yes, we do eventually get to see the monster, which looks like more blancmange but more man-shaped this time. Nearly everyone dies except Dr Vic Winner (who doesn’t deserve to as he has done absolutely nothing throughout this entire film) and his girlfriend Maria Perschy, who ran the ladies loony bin but now gets to escape to face the blind dead herself in their third outing THE GHOST GALLEON. A lot of Paul Naschy’s films have finally seen release on DVD over the last couple of years. Some are great, some are middling, and some are downright awful, but if you are as yet unfamiliar with the work of one of the greatest stars of Spanish exploitation cinema THE HUNCHBACK OF THE MORGUE is a fine place to start.