Your Vice Is A Locked Room And Only I Have The Key (1972)

Could this be the longest movie title on this site? It's actually a line from a previous Ernesto Gastaldi - Sergio Martino collaboration, THE STRANGE VICE OF MRS WARDH. This time we find them collaborating on a story that is, according to the credits, based loosely on The Black Cat. If Edgar Allan Poe had a penchant for crates of J&B, attractive ladies wearing very little, and motorcycle racing this could have been the most faithful adaptation of the story yet. Somehow, though, I suspect that he didn’t, although he might have enjoyed the decadent party held by decadent writer Oliviero Rouvigny (Luigi Pistilli) that opens this rather decadent movie. 

      Luigi lives in a lovely old mansion in the country where he hosts bizarre soirees that allows Sergio Martino to cram in both nude dancing (a tiny part for FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN and PHENOMENA’s Dalila de Lazzarro) and a horrible hippy song into the first ten minutes. Luigi is married to Irene (Anita Strindberg). His heavy drinking and womanising ways have caused her hairstyle to take on the appearance of a cormorant’s nest, and not a very house proud cormorant at that. Luigi’s having an affair with one of his ex-students from his teaching past who now works in a local bookshop. Romantic old devil that he is, he arranges to meet her in the local quarry after dark. Those of us who have seen this sort of thing before know that the chap in the far distance wearing black gloves and wielding a machete isn’t there for a bit of chiselling and pretty soon we’re witness to the first of several gory murders, including  Luigi’s maid and a local prostitute. 

      During all this Luigi drinks J&B, strokes his black cat ‘Satan’, drinks more J&B, beats Irene, and drinks yet more J&B. In fact the stuff is delivered to his house by the crate load by motorcycle scrambling enthusiast Dario (Riccardo Salvino). Half an hour in and disgruntled Edwige Fenech fans may be wondering where the top billed actress has got to. She finally appears in short skirt and short hairstyle to show Anita how it's done, and sets about getting into bed with almost everyone in the cast, including Dario, who manages to charm her into his sleeping bag in a dusty old attic after one especially muddy escapade while Luigi watches from the shadows. 

      Ivan Rassimov, in black leather coat and grey wig, has been watching from the shadows occasionally throughout the picture as well, but it won't be until just before the end that we get to find out why he’s there. By then naughty old Satan the cat has eaten Irene’s doves and had his eye cut out in homage to Poe, and we’ve had the typical final giallo fifteen minutes of everything going completely crazy before almost everyone ends up dead. Of course I’m not going to tell you who the killer is because that would spoil half the fun, suffice to say that the climax is every bit as wonderfully mad as giallo fans the world over have come to love.

YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM isn’t the best of Martino’s gialli - that’s always going to be TORSO, with STRANGE VICE close behind and ALL THE COLOURS OF THE DARK a very creditable third, but it is worth watching for the ever lovely Edwige Fenech and one of Bruno Nicolai’s best scores. In an interview Martino has said that this is a movie about provincial Italy and the film certainly has a different, gloomier, less glamorous feel than more cosmopolitan fare such as ALL THE COLOURS OF THE DARK. The title doesn’t have any relevance to the story, the murders are horrible, the women are beautiful, the music is great and there are more shots of J&B in the first twenty minutes than in the whole running time of any other giallo (probably). What’s not to like? In fact, what’s not to love?

Dead Sushi (2012)

From Noburu Iguchi, director of ZOMBIE ASS: TOILET OF THE DEAD (yes I know - I haven’t seen it either and with a title like that I think it can probably wait) comes this Japanese horror comedy inspired by Alexandre Aja’s PIRANHA 3D (hooray!) and ATTACK OF THE KILLER TOMATOES. Those with lesser constitutions where comedy horror is concerned have probably already stopped reading, as well they might. In fact even people who love the early gore comedies of Peter Jackson such as BAD TASTE and BRAIN DEAD may come away from DEAD SUSHI with the opinion that it was all far, far too silly. Japanese horror comedies really are a subgenre to themselves, often characterised by ridiculous situations, over the top gore and almost non-stop screaming and shouting. In fact probably the best way to enjoy them is to consume a vast quantity of caffeine or other suitable stimulant and vibrate insanely along with all the principle players. At least you can be guaranteed to sleep well afterwards. Titles like VAMPIRE GIRL VS FRANKENSTEIN GIRL (which I found unbearable) and TOKYO GORE POLICE (I made it to the end of that one, but only just) can safely be avoided by all except the most avid enthusiasts of demented entertainment, and if you liked those, you’ll probably love DEAD SUSHI as well.

The film begins with Keiko (Rina Takeda) being taught how to be a sushi chef by her father who explains that apparently the art of preparing raw fish is just like practising martial arts, with similar levels of violence. Unable to satisfy her father’s high demands Keiko leaves home & gets a job working in an inn as a waitress. On her first day the establishment is visited by a party from Komatsu Pharmaceuticals. Unbeknownst to everyone the tramp lurking outside the building is actually an ex-Komatsu scientist employed to find ways of reanimating dead tissue. He was successful but the goat he reanimated ran amok and he was blamed for the carnage it caused. By way of revenge he shoots up the sushi in the restaurant with his serum and pretty soon everyone is getting attacked by tiny pieces of flying fish that have grown teeth and are basically little finger puppets. The rest of the film is a combination of outrageous situations, over the top gore and enough bra, breast and nudity gags to make the unwary wonder if they’ve wandered into CARRY ON SUSHI. Whether or not you will enjoy this will depend a lot on whether or not you find any of the following funny, including naked Japanese men being spun round by something attached to their penis while they scream ‘This is so utterly embarrassing’, talking egg sushi that gets bullied by the other sushi, the previously mentioned rogue employee dying and being reincarnated as a massive tuna (i.e. a bloke in a costume) or a battleship made of California roll that flies through the air attacking people. The presence of blood drenched naked Japanese girls will be mentioned here because it’s possible there may be someone out there who might benefit from that knowledge. There’s no point in telling you the climax because as well as possibly spoiling the film it makes absolutely no sense at all anyway. To get the best effect from DEAD SUSHI it’s probably best watched after something like MARTYRS to really appreciate the total unsubtle insanity of the entire enterprise. Strictly for people who like this sort of thing, and for those who’ve never tried, by about two minutes in you’ll know if it’s the thing for you.

The Raven (1935)

There are a lot of movies around that have used the title of Poe’s famous poem to go off at tangents, be a bit mental, and in fact do anything but adapt the literary work in question. Probably the earliest version of note (and certainly the earliest worth a look) is this smashing 1935 Universal picture. It bears no relation to the poem at all, but it does star Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff in a mashup of the lurid conte cruele and an old dark house mystery. 

Lugosi is brilliant surgeon Dr Richard Vollin, who has forsaken his practice to live in a big house with an organ, rooms that can move about and a dungeon filled with torture devices from Poe’s stories. He’s a Poe obsessive, you see, which means he gets to recite a bit of the poem itself at the beginning while explaining to the nervous chap who has dared to suggest he might like to sell his Poe collection that the large stuffed bird on his desk that’s casting the most splendid shadow on the wall is his good luck charm. This chatty little introduction is interrupted by Judge Thatcher (Samuel S Hinds). It turns out his daughter Jean (Irene Ware) has been involved in a car accident and Vollin is the only man who can save her brain-damaged dancer’s life. Vollin agrees, saves Jean, and then gets a bit obsessed about her being his ‘Lenore’. In true mad doctor fashion he decides that the only way he can make her his is by inviting her and her friends including fiance Jerry Halden (Lester Matthews) to a dinner party where afterwards he’s going to torture and kill them. His plan is helped along by the arrival at his house of Edmond Bateman (Karloff), a convicted murderer who wants his face changed so the police won’t recognise but also in the hope that if he’s made less ugly he may not ‘do ugly things anymore’. Vollin agrees but instead does something naughty to Bateman’s right facial nerve, turning that side of his face into a wrinkled monstrosity that’s revealed in the cruellest and most dramatic way possible before a wall of mirrors. Karloff shoots at the glass while Lugosi does a lot of silent film-style mugging from his observation window well away from the enraged criminal. Vollin promises to restore Karloff’s face if he will serve him. 

The dinner party ensues, Karloff kidnaps the judge and Lugosi traps him beneath a swinging pendulum blade. The film is only an hour long and in the last ten minutes Jean and Jerry get trapped in a room with crushing walls, Bateman rebels, gets shot for his efforts, Jean and Jerry and the Judge are saved, Lugosi gets to say ‘Poe - you are avenged!’ before laughing maniacally and then being dragged into the crusher by Karloff who then drops dead form the bullet wounds inflicted on him by the mad doctor.

Universal’s THE RAVEN is barking mad and absolutely worth watching, if only for the performances by the two leads - Karloff the consummate professional actor and Lugosi the unique presence that even in this film seems to be out of touch with modern cinema. Louis Friedlander (later Lew Landers) directs the proceedings pretty well, with the previously mentioned mirror scene a standout. What prevents it from being considered one of the best Universal horrors is its descent into cliched old dark house shenanigans near the end, but it should still be on the must see list of any discerning horror film fan, even after nearly eighty years.

The Night Child (1975)

We’ve been having a bit of a Massimo Dallamano season here at Probert Towers. His WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE is a classic, and his 1970 remake of DORIAN GRAY for Harry Alan Towers isn’t half bad, either. SUPER BITCH is as daft a EuroCrimes thriller as you could hope for and while I’ve yet to get round to VENUS IN FURS, he’s further solidified his reputation as a film-maker of note for me with THE NIGHT CHILD. Misleadingly advertised as an Italian EXORCIST / OMEN rip off, THE CURSED MEDALLION (as it was otherwise known) comes across more like a weird Italian version of DON”T LOOK NOW that doesn’t quite make sense, but then it isn’t supposed to.

Richard Johnson, who apparently loved making films in Italy, at least until he worked for Lucio Fulci, plays Michael Williams, a fine art documentary film maker who works for the BBC. He sets off for the Italian town of Spoleto where apparently an unusual painting of the devil and a little girl has been uncovered. His daughter Emily (Nicoletta Elmi, the go-to child for every Italian horror of the time period) goes with him. Mum isn’t around as she perished mysteriously in a fire, but Emily’s nanny accompanies them. Williams gives his daughter a medallion and after that the child starts to act strangely as deaths begin to occur around her that may or may not be influenced by the painting.

THE NIGHT CHILD is a real curio from Italian film land. Beautifully shot, well acted, and with a few scenes that are deliciously, atmospherically scary, it’s well worth catching up with if you like your horror languid and slow-building. There’s not a lot of action, and not a lot of murders either, but the film slowly develops such an atmosphere of oddness that by the time you get to the end you’re not questioning the strange things that have happened. Indeed, like quite a bit of Italian horror THE NIGHT CHILD doesn’t make a lot of sense or offer any explanations, but the difference here is that it does all these things in the right way, such that you feel the ambiguities and weirdness are all intentional. As well as some gorgeous cinematography and good performances, Stelvio Cipriani’s score is very good as well. The booklet that comes with Arrow’s DVD suggests it’s a film that lies between Mario Bava’s LISA AND THE DEVIL and the weird nightmare landscape of Fulci’s THE BEYOND (although without the ultra-violence) and I would go along with that. A neglected piece of quality EuroHorror cinema that’s definitely worth a look.

Super Bitch (1973)

      Proof, as if it were ever needed on this site, that a film doesn’t have to make a whole lot of sense to be a whole lot of fun, here’s a 1973 EuroCrimes exploitation flick that originally went under the title "Si può essere più bastardi dell'ispettore Cliff?" I can’t find a decent translation of that online anywhere but it has the words ‘Bastard’ and ‘Inspector Cliff’ in there somewhere that suggests it might be a DIRTY HARRY ripoff but with Inspector ‘Bastard’ Cliff instead. Certainly the film takes pains to call the title character (played very much in Clint mode by Ivan Rassimov) a bastard as often as possible so that might have been the intention. Other titles for this Massimo Dallamano directed little crime opus include BLUE MOVIE BLACKMAIL (which makes sense), MAFIA JUNCTION (which kind of makes sense) and the title it goes under on its DVD release from Arrow Films, SUPER BITCH, which makes no sense at all until you realise it’s the film’s re-release title from when it was shovelled out onto VHS for the delectation of Stephanie Beacham fans everywhere after she’d just made it big in TV spin-off series DYNASTY: THE COLBYS. The series also starred Charlton Heston, but a slew of obscure Heston re-releases did not occur at the same time, partly because of rights issues but mainly because Mr Heston did not end up nude in any of them.

Whatever its title, the plot of SUPER BITCH (let’s call it that shall we as it’s quicker to type) does take a fair old bit of following. Patricia Hayes, player of a million Cockney tea ladies, cleaning ladies, and bag ladies in British sitcoms not worth revisiting unless you have some kind of masochistic taste streak, is cast here as a Turkish drug Lord who is trying to get a consignment of drugs shifted from Beirut to New York. A London-based escort agency is trying to do the same thing. In the middle of all of this is Cliff (Ivan Rassimov) an undercover policeman and complete bastard who isn’t above arranging for villains to be machine-gunned to death in out of the way English farms if they’re in his way. Cliff’s having it off with the escort agency’s star attraction Joanne (Stephanie Beacham) who is also involved in the drug trafficking. 

I’ll leave it there for plot because most of this film is taken up with double and triple crossing, extremely violent murders that outdo movies like THE SWEENEY, and Stephanie Beacham naked, when she’s not wearing a sexy skimpy bunny costume with rabbit ears. Yes a bunny costume. With rabbit ears. For anyone interested (and I bet there are quite a few out there) this occurs very early on in the proceedings presumably to helpfully suggest that if you’re taking any of this film seriously you really should stop now. If that’s not enough Miss Beacham’s hair changes length and style from virtually scene to scene, suggesting that this film was made in at least two and possibly three different time periods but seeing as no-one making this seems to be bothered about that, then neither should you. Finally there’s the cast. Look out for Camille Keaton, Michael Sheard getting his head blown off graphically in a park, Gareth Thomas getting pushed by Bastard Cliff, and Cec Linder (the original Dr Roney from the BBC’s QUATERMASS AND THE PIT) in another bunny costume. For fans of Euro daftness SUPER BITCH is worth every penny of what Arrow Video is currently asking for it, and to top it all you get a Graham Humphreys cover as well. Marvellous.

The Cell 2 (2009)

      The Cell 2 is one of those 'pseudosequels' so staggeringly unrelated to its original that the only reason it bears the title is to part you from your hard-earned cash, merely to leave you with that vague and slightly depressing sense of despondency that you will never learn.

      When is an eighty nine minute film not an eighty nine minute film? When it lasts for seventy eight minutes and then pads out the remaining eleven by means of an endless credit crawl interspersed with shots of mountains, a behind the scenes shot of a car stunt that wasn’t very interesting to begin with, and a decidedly minor helicopter stunt where the gentleman concerned half-heartedly high-fives a random member of the crew afterwards once he remembers that he’s being filmed.

      The Cell 2 is a travesty of a movie in every sense of the word, but just in case you can’t quite grasp how terrible the implication of my use of that description is, here are a few well chosen words to illustrate just what I mean.

      There’s a killer on the loose who kidnaps young girls, then flatlines them and then brings them back to life. Repeatedly. Quite exactly why we are never told, but that’s okay – the only reason I know that’s his modus operandi is because I read it on the back of the box – the film never makes it very clear. Neither is it explained why he has been given the nickname ‘The Cusp’. Perhaps he was a dentist in a past life. He certainly wasn’t a doctor, because despite the film taking pains to make out he has medical training he can’t take a pulse properly and when he defibrillates his victims he puts the paddles in the wrong place.

      On his trail is a hunky testicle-squeezing alpha male sheriff whose niece is the latest kidnap victim, and ‘Beautiful psychic investigator’ (it says on the box) Maya Catenada. Maya was a previous victim who escaped but whose ordeal left her with psychic powers. It also must have made her so painfully shy that she went and hid under a sunlamp for six months when she wasn’t at the ‘Excess Blush ‘N’ Gloss’ beauticians. Maya’s not very good at saving victims. In fact at the start of the film most of them seemed to have died before the police could intervene, so quite why they let her carry on ‘helping’ them I have no idea. 

      The original ‘The Cell’ starred Jennifer Lopez as a psychologist who spent most of the time in the dream world of a serial killer. In The Cell 2 the rich dream reality created by Tarsem Singh is replaced by a narrow corridor of the electrical department of the local John Lewis, with our acting-challenged heroine picking up different sized television screens to try and work out what’s going on. And while we’re on the subject of electrical goods, our killer has somehow managed to equip an entire hideout with electrical generators and cardiac bypass gear the size of a fridge freezer which he must have somehow obtained, transported to his hideout, and installed without anyone noticing. In the cheap and cheerful exploitation movies of the seventies this wouldn’t have been a problem because one just did not need to explain such things, but like so many movies today The Cell 2 tries to be so earnest about its intentions to be a thriller that it just can’t get away with such contrivances. Mind you that’s not the worst. At one point a black clad bouffante-haired medallion wearing FBI agent gets murdered with the most obviously fake rubber axe since Christopher Lee did in Anoushka Hempel with a fake rubber knife in Hammer’s Scars of Dracula. That, coupled with the seriously short running time means that while it’s over quickly, it’s never quickly enough. Don’t just avoid this, run away from it. And if it comes after you hit it. With a real axe.

The ABCs of Death (2013)

Shocking, controversial, hilarious, touching, horrible, stylish, clever -   there are probably as many complimentary adjectives to describe ambitious anthology movie THE ABCS OF DEATH as there are segments to it. What can be said about the movie as a whole is that, unbelievably, it works, both as a compendium picture, and as a fascinating snapshot of the current state of contemporary horror cinema. Parts of it may be too much for some people, parts of it may be too silly, parts of it may be too obscene, and in quite a few segments there is a worrying obsession with the toilet that works better in some stories than others, but overall the movie is well worth sticking with to the end.

ABCs OF DEATH consists of 26 short films, by 26 different directors,  crammed into a running time of just over two hours. The remit by the producers was simple: each director was allocated a letter of the alphabet and asked to make a short film related to that letter with a budget of not more than £5000. Taking this into account, ABCS OF DEATH could quite easily have been an uneven disaster of staggering proportions. That it has turned out to be the exact opposite is as delightful as it is surprising, with the standard of the shorts being very high indeed. Indeed, only a couple of segments fail to move you in some way, which is no small achievement. Each episode begins and ends with the colour red, with the ending also telling you the title of the short and the director responsible, so you get to learn straight away whose work you’ve just been watching. There is neither the space nor the time here to go into all the individual stories in detail, and I’m not going to reveal any of the titles because finding out what each letter stands for in the context of each story is part of the fun, but special mentions must go to to Jake West, Simon Rumley, Xavier Gens, Ben Wheatley, Adam Wingard, Ti West, Nacho Vigalondo, Marcel Sarmiento and Banjong Pisanthanakun, all of whom produced entries I absolutely loved. Lee Hardcastle’s claymation piece is probably the best use of the worryingly recurring toilet and toilet habits theme and manages to be both hilarious and terrifying while also being the only successful horror film I’m aware of to finish with a close up of a potty. A SERBIAN FILM’s Srdjan Spasojevic supplies my absolute favourite segment of the lot, and his is the one I’m most looking forward to seeing again when I give this movie another look. There are also a number of contributions from Japanese film-makers, quite a few of whom seem to be obsessed with young ladies breaking wind or young men engaged in other habits that might be described as rather less than tasteful, all to a point of excess that exceeds ludicrousness, and the final segment of the film, once seen, is not easily forgotten.

I was genuinely and pleasantly surprised by ABCS OF DEATH. I expected the film to have a couple of highlights at best, but it turned out to be quite a tour de force by a collective of exciting film-makers, almost all of whose visions were never less than interesting. I can highly recommend it, and I'm going to keep my fingers crossed that if the promised MORE ABCS OF DEATH materialises, it will keep up the very high standard set by the original.