EUROTRASH DVDS
THE AWFUL DR. ORLOF
Image Entertainment
Movie: 2.5; Disc: 3.0Just as the modern Italian horror genre began with Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava in 1956, the Spanish horror movie began with Jess Franco's debut horror film, The Awful Dr. Orlof, made in 1961, but released to America in 1964, becoming his first international success.
While Jess Franco, though prolific, is no Mario Bava or Dario Argento, he does incorporate an ominous, moody style into his early movies and The Awful Dr. Orlof is a film of merit and style.
First of all Howard Vernon's star turn as Dr. Orlof is always interesting, Orlof is a man living in a castle that can only be reached by row boats navigating dark, threatening waters. There, he barely keeps alive his formerly beautiful but now disfigured daughter. Becoming a serial killer of young, beautiful women, we first meet Orlof fondling the face of a young woman in a nightclub and seemingly more interested in her skin than anything else. Of course, he is the evil doctor that claims victims to restore the beauty of his daughter. Orlof does not commit the ghastly deeds; instead, he has a bestial accompanist, Morpho, whom he helped escape from prison after he was arrested for the murder of his father. Morpho, now scared and blinded with pop-out eyeballs, becomes the fiend who both molests and then bits the necks of the pretty young victims. Always present to orchestrate the mayhem, once the victim lies dead or at least unconscious, Dr. Orlof taps on the floor with his cane to give direction to his brute manservant.
However, the movie's best sequences involve those creepy sequences leading up to the appearance of both Orlof and Morpho, when terrified beauties panic, breath heavily, look frantically around their darkened surroundings and suddenly walk directly into the arms of danger. During one interesting sequence, after Orlof places his unknowing victim into a house of dread, the girl wanders upstairs calling out Orlof's name, expecting the rich sugar-daddy to join her, but instead, she finds Morpho, blindly lashing out to grab her. Remaining virtually motionless and noiseless near the edge of the large hallway area, the victim expects Morpho to venture on down the stairs, but with rapid speed and virtual eyesight, the maniac zones right in on the cowering victim whose neck is ripped open with munching teeth. Logically, both the victim and the audience feel the girl has outsmarted the fiend because of his very apparent blindness and her "quiet as a mouse" stance. But when Morpho runs right up to her, everyone is surprised.
Suspense is incorporated into the plot when the lead detective's fiancee, now going undercover as a cabaret singer to attract the serial killer's attention, cleverly learns that the rich gentleman Orlof has poured a drug into her drink (visible from the mirror's reflection) and she hastily writes a lip-stick note to be given to the policeman on the corner. The policeman dutifully delivers the note to the detective, but as the girl is overpowered and taken to Orlof's castle by boat, the detective decides upon two or three separate occasions to open and read the note later. When the detective finally reads the note while in his pajamas in bed, the young victim is on the operating table ready for Orlof's knife. The detective gets moving and solves the case in less than six minutes.
Unfortunately, both a French and American print is offered, but no subtitles, so the viewer has to tolerate American dubbing. Other than scene sequence selection, no extras are available. The original 35mm print is nicely letterboxed, and while a few lines and glitches appear, the print is generally dense and sharp. The Awful Dr. Orlof is not a classic, but for the European horror cinema, it remains a pivotal movie and showcases the talents of Jess Franco which were to deteriorate over the course of the next three decades.
Hercules in the Haunted World
Fantoma Films
Movie: 2.0; Disc: 3.0Generally movie fans credit Mario Bava's 1960 production of Black Sunday with creating, for mainstream audiences, the black-and-white look of Euro Horror, a visual style that blends the Gothic denseness of 1930s Universal with Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast. The cinematography of Black Sunday is well worth the price of admission, but the film offers much more. Three years later Bava returned with Black Sabbath , a movie that demonstrated what Bava could concoct with color photography.
What most fans of Mario Bava forget is that the Italian director's second movie, Hercules in the Center of the Earth (released in America as Hercules in the Haunted World ), produced in 1961, featured intense color photography that Black Sabbath would be credited for introducing. While Black Sabbath is the superior production by far, Hercules in the Haunted World is dazzling visually, highlighting CinemaScope photography dripping with deeply saturated Technicolor. Added to the mix is Christopher Lee's villainous turn as Lyco, an additional treat for horror movie fans.
The Fantoma DVD source material is exceptional, featuring the original uncut European version. Generally, when Technicolor prints are released to DVD they look slightly washed out and lose their intense dark hues. However, Hercules in the Haunted World comes very close to approximating the theatrical Technicolor look. The print can be viewed in both the Italian language version with English subtitles or as an American dubbed version. Neither version seems to be superior to the other as the plot is silly and the dubbing no more obtrusive than the subtitles.
Muscleman Reg Park plays a marvelous Hercules and his reliance on the gods returns the character to his mythological roots. The production, mostly setbound, was photographed by Bava as well as directed by him, so the studio-crafted world is totally Bavaesque and the cinematography and mood became the major (only?) strengths of the production. The movie's dominant visual sequences all command the audience's attention. In the beginning we have Lyco's treasure room where one man thinks he is going to be rewarded with twisted gold. However, the devious Lyco rewards the man with spring-triggered swords that burst from the walls impaling his unfortunate victim within the treasure chamber. Once Hercules and friend go to Hades, the visuals become mesmerizing with a gigantic rock man threatening to crush our hero, so Hercules boldly lifts the rock man over his head and smashes him against a wall of stone. Hercules' friend hangs by a thread over a river of molten lava until his strength gives out and he falls in. However, in Bava's vision of Hades, the man is rescued before his soul can be claimed, so he survives to live and love another day (and he may well be the most over-sexed second banana in movie history). But things get incredibly Bavaesque in Lyco's underground crypt during the movie's climax when demons and vampires rise from their tombs and horrify audiences until Lyco, who will gain immortality if he drinks the blood of Deianira, is finally laid to rest.
Hercules in the Haunted World doesn't make much sense, its plot is by the numbers sword-and-sandal, but the film becomes artistically audacious by the participation of Mario Bava as photographer and director. The creation of creatures of the night all set within the framework of Hades and underground catacombs makes this movie one of the most artistic examples of sword-and-sandal cinema. Perhaps Hercules in the Haunted World is minor Bava, but in the case of style becoming substance, the movie warrants a viewing or two.
THE NIGHT HEAVEN FELL
Home Vision Entertainment
Movie: 2.5; Disc: 3.5DON JUAN (OR IF DON JUAN WERE A WOMAN)
Movie: 2.5; Disc: 3.5
During the 1950s, there existed a sex kitten icon who wasn't Marilyn Monroe. She never become a Hollywood studio-manipulated package; instead, she was a product of the European cinema appearing in a lower-budgeted and less mainstream movies. Her name was Brigitte Bardot and between the early 1950s and the mid-1970s she represented to Europe what Marilyn Monroe meant to us.
Home Vision Entertainment, in connection with Janus Films, has released four movies (besides the two movies reviewed here, Spirits of the Dead and Plucking the Daisy ) from the Bardot filmography with state-of-the-art restored, re-subtitled letterbox prints. Each DVD contains extras including trailers, 16x9 enhanced digital transfers and a Bardot filmography. While the Bardot films are not classic movies, these European melodramas and fantasy productions capture a specific European flavor for their time.
First, let's explore 1958's The Night Heaven Fell , directed and co-written by Roger Vadim (at different times married to Bardot and Jane Fonda), produced only two years after Bardot's international break-out hit And God Created Woman . The Panavision and Eastmancolor print is pristine featuring Tech-nicolor-style hues. The crime melodrama touches upon every cliché possible, but still entertains. Bardot herself has never appeared more sensual and innocent, transforming from a young woman just out of the convent with prim and proper dress, to a bra and panty-clad young lady who sprawls herself out in front of the fan in the household living room. She soon becomes the sex kitten persona who wears a slinky, tight black dress with no shoes. Into this mix come her guardians, her aunt (a youthful Alida Valli) and perverted uncle, who immediately hits upon his virginal ward. As she suns herself, sleeping with a big hat over her head on the rocky bluff overlooking the sea, the uncle literally jumps on her. The young thing throws her uncle off, to chants of "a fine guardian you are!" Stephen Boyd, one year away from portraying the major villain in Ben-Hur , here plays the young stud Lamberto who blames the uncle for the suicide of his sister and goes to his home to beat the living tar out of the hated creep. However, a servant intervenes with a huge stone statue and instead Lamberto is beaten to a pulp. Bardot's Ursula immediately falls in love with the young man, lust at first sight. Soon Lamberto, in self-defense, kills the uncle with his knife and becomes a fugitive, heading off to the mountains with Ursula, leading to an interesting sequence where Lamberto wants to slaughter a baby pig for food and Ursula attacks him for even thinking such a vile thought (the sequence reflects Bardot's life-long dedication to the animal rights cause). But once the stud confesses his unending love to Bardot, she purrs, hugs him, drops her dress and makes passionate love to him for the first and final time (a quick glance of the nude Bardot from the waist up is all the skin we got back in 1958).
The next day, Lamberto arranges a rendezvous with Ursula's aunt to take her back to safety, Lamberto planning to turn himself in. Instead the smitten Ursula comes between Lamberto and a policeman's barrage of bullets and dies, expiring in an upright position leaning against a wall, suddenly collapsing into her lover's arms in death. This mediocre melodrama is made bearable by the sizzle of Bardot, the beefy presence of Boyd and some fine supporting acting and location photography.
In 1973, at the end of her cinematic career, the still-beautiful and sexually charged Bardot almost lampoons her predatory nature in director Roger Vadim's Don Juan (Or If Don Juan Were a Woman). Again featuring a pristine letter-boxed print with superb color, Don Juan illustrates the more pretentious and overly artistic Vadim, and the supernatural overtones to the film make it interestingly bizarre. The film opens with Bardot descending upon a church to speak candidly to her cousin the youthful priest, to whom she admits she committed murder. She then abruptly leaves, hoping the priest will stop her, but he doesn't, allowing Bardot's Jeanne to leave (but he visits her later on, coming to her futuristic mod-era pad housed within the bowels of a submarine). It seems Bardot is attracted to men for a quickie conquest, to seduce men of prominence and power simply because she can. Literally, she becomes a female Don Juan, a sexual predator who destroys all the men she comes in contact with. By the end of the movie she has seduced her cousin the priest, and in the film's major sequence of nudity, we see the writhing Bardot mainly from the back, showing off her hour-glass posterior and her breasts, cinema very sedate and sanitary compared to today's soft-core "Skinemax" movies. And in the grand finale, Bardot goes to a furniture-less house surrounded by sand and meets a man who doses the home in gasoline, hoping to destroy Jeanne once and for all. Of course, Jeanne announces she smells the gasoline upon entering the room to confront the male, who slowly takes out a box of matches and attempts to ignite the home, the first few matches failing. However, once the gasoline is ignited and a ring of flame engulfs the house, Jeanne, who runs free of the flames, returns whem she sees the man trapped and slowly dying. Swiftly opening a window near the stricken man, she tosses him to safety outside while she becomes engulfed in the flames, her body sputtering and coughing and slowly growing weak and succumbing to the flames of her allegorical Don Juan in Hell. Outside, the man watches this slow destruction as mechanical monsters tumble sand down the dunes toward him, threatening to cover him up, not knowing he's even there. Overly dramatic music swells up as the credits come on, focused on the disappearance of Bardot in the flames.
Don Juan is quite interesting in that it establishes Brigitte Bardot very much in the male pattern of seducer and destroyer, the insidious power she wields through her sexuality an instrument of destruction and evil, an evil purged in the almost self-destructive yet cleansing flames at film's conclusion.
It has been far too long since the Bardot oeuvre has been available on home video in such shimmering presentation. The Bardot films might not be everyone's cup of tea, but the films have a charm and presence and undeniably answer the question of why Bardot took Europe (and America) by storm in the 1950s and 1960s. Home Vision Entertainment is to be commended for restoring the sizzle to these early exotic cult classics.