NIGHT OF THE SKULL (1974)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological* 

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

This movie, currently streaming as NIGHT OF THE SKULL, is one of the rare Jesus Franco directorial efforts not marred by his free-form wackiness.  At the same time, it's no more than a decent time-killer.

The film starts off introducing us to an English lord, Archibald Marian. For some reason he's torqued off at his relations, because he's reading aloud some faux-Biblical gobbledygook about God avenging himself upon a "perverse generation."  Archibald seems to have some fascination with the Classic "four elements" of Greek belief, and he rants about the elements being used to kill his enemies. However, there's a mysterious figure in a skull-mask lurking nearby, and this specter apparently takes inspiration from the Lord's yammerings. He knocks out the Lord and buries him alive, thus fulfilling the "earth" symbolism.

 Also living in the Lord's manor are his wife Cecilia, his illegitimate daughter Rita (Lina Romay), and two married servants, Rufus and Deborah. Though Rita has been allowed to live at the manor, she's been forced to accept the role of a servant. Later she will tell a constable that both Archibald and Cecilia used to beat her, and eventually this testimony is borne out. Other potential heirs to Archibald's fortune descend upon the manor for the reading of his will: his cousin Simon (William Berger) and his wife Marta, and somewhat later, his legitimate son Alfred (though possibly by another wife than Cecilia). During the reading, the lawyer reveals that Archibald left two wills: one in case he died a normal death, the other in case he was murdered. The first one divides the estate between everyone except for Rita, the second one leaves everything to Rita alone.                                                                                       

Cecilia doesn't take her disinheriting well: she comes into Rita's room and whips her just a few times (rather restrained for the often torture-happy Franco). The killer knocks out Cecilia and ties her up on the shoreline, where we're later told she was killed not by the waters but by exposure to the high winds, making this the "air death." Despite this second fatality, most of the characters continue to hang out around the manor while they're being interviewed by police or are bouncing off one another. A fire-death for Deborah ensues, but this doesn't keep Alfred and Rita from enjoying a possibly incestuous affair. The killer targets them too but doesn't leave either of them dead. Then Simon seems to give the game away to the audience, providing a "water death" by drowning his wife Marta in a bathhouse. But wait, then Simon is confronted by the Skull Killer, who takes off his mask and reveals that-- he's Archibald, who at some earlier time was assaulted by Simon and survived that attempt at murder but lost his memory. Then Archibald got back his memory and went through police training under the name "Brooks," so that he could enter the manor when he pleased. So then-- who's the Archibald who got buried alive at the outset, whose body was taken into custody by the officials?                               

I checked a few online reviews to see if anyone had commented on this lunacy but didn't see anything. However, it's possible that unlike me most of the reviewers won't give away endings even if they show that the director was just goofing around with no intention of delivering a basic formula effort, even if that's what SKULL appeared to be from the start. Crazy-ass Franco's normal methods of off-the-wall storytelling are signaled before the big ending, though, with a sequence in which a lady psychic tries to talk the dead patriarch but gets killed and has zero effect on the plot. Though the fragmented screenplay suggests that more than one murderer appears in the story, NIGHT OF THE SKULL is still a better title than the original NIGHT OF THE KILLERS. This is not in any way a giallo film despite the era in which it appears; it's an old dark house that includes a masked killer like the original CAT AND THE CANARY movie. Franco also may have been joking when he had the credits claim that SKULL was based on a CANARY all right, but one written by Edgar Allan Poe, which is of course nonsense. A comment on IMDB claims that at some point Franco confessed that he stole the plot from Edgar Wallace, but if so, that wild and crazy Spaniard must have put that Wallace work through his own personal mixmaster.