CREEPING DEATH (1972)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

CREEPING DEATH is certainly a better title for this unwieldy mix of spaghetti western and giallo than KILL THE POKER PLAYER. The odd thing about this failed fusion is that many of the more violent spaghettis sometimes show elements in common with equally violent giallos. However, westerns in general have a harder time dealing with "slow burn suspense"-- and despite DEATH's quota of saloon brawls, that seems to have been the intent of director/co-writer Mario Bianci, a prolific filmmaker though most of his works have not been translated into English.

Like many spaghettis DEATH begins with a double cross and centers upon a hunt for hidden riches. However, two-fisted federal agent John Pinkerton (Robert Woods) lacks the usual cynical motive of the spaghetti fortune-seeker. He seeks to locate a cache of bank money stolen by three outlaws, one of whom kills the other two. Pinkerton centers his investigation on a particular town where one or two persons have been killed by poisonous snakes. The same town plays host to a herpetologist, suggesting that some malcontent in the populace decided to weaponize the reptiles to eliminate witnesses.

The snakes, and the "bizarre crimes" for which they're used, aren't all that important to the story until the climax, and Pinkerton's detective work seems at best random. DEATH is generally boring and wastes the lovely Nieves Navarro in a purely decorative role. A better meld of western and murder-mystery appears in 1974's A KNIFE FOR THE LADIES.   

      

FIVE WOMEN FOR THE KILLER (1974)

 

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

KILLER was the third directorial film for Stelvio Massi. In Italy he would become known more for hardboiled crime films than for horror, but I suspect today English-speaking film-fans mostly know Massi for his second and last giallo movie: 1989's bizarre ARABELLA BLACK ANGEL.  

Next to ARABELLA, KILLER comes as a bit too conservative, though the cinematography is always good (particularly in the generously lingering female nude scenes) and the basic situation is compelling. Writer Giorgio (English actor Francis Matthews) returns to Italy, anticipating a reunion with his pregnant wife Erika. To his horror he finds her newly dead, the victim of a miscarriage. The baby survives at a local hospital, where Giorgio consults with his own doctor, one Lydia (Pasquale Rivault), an in-law to Erika. The writer then gets a double body-blow when he steals a look at his own file, and sees that Lydia diagnosed him as infertile, incapable of siring a child.  

Erika's death then precedes (unleashes?) a serial killer who begins knife-killing women-- often pregnant women who have some connection to Giorgio. In giallos, the trope of "gotta kill all the sexy women" usually focuses upon promiscuous females who usually are not in a family way. But since no woman can get pregnant naturally without SOME promiscuity, KILLER might have offered some psychological insights on the durable "woman as virgin or whore" trope. However, most of the time Massi's pace is slow and the (subbed) dialogue is mundane. Even though the victims are just tangentially connected to Giorgio, those associations are enough to interest the police.

The slow pace allows Massi to build a better supply of red herrings than one finds in many thrillers (including ARABELLA), and the complications regarding Giorgio's infertility and the killer's identity dovetail nicely. The murderer's obsession with pregnant victims is enough by itself to propel the film into the uncanny domain, though it helps that the murdered women have strange symbols carved into their flesh. And Massi does flout convention by making the killer's glove grey rather than black.  

THE MYSTERIOUS MAGICIAN (1964)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Opinions seem divided as to where DER HEXER, the "krimi" adaptation of Edgar Wallace's 1925 book THE RINGER, stands. Some reviews call it one of the worst of its ilk, others, one of the best. My take is somewhere in the middle: MAGICIAN is an enjoyable romp without a lot of substance.

A young woman is gruesomely murdered and her body gets tossed in the Thames. When Scotland Yard investigates, it's discovered that the victim possesses an indirect celebrity: she's the sister of a professional assassin, the Ringer-- whose name in German became "hexer," meaning magician or wizard. (The English dub uses the latter term, even though the movie's title uses the former.) He's called the Ringer because he's got an uncanny ability to assume many disguises in order to knock off his targets. The movie's vague about what the Yard knows about the Ringer: on one hand, they have the info that he was somehow exiled from Britain, yet no one knows what he looks like sans disguises. Perhaps the book's more consistent on that point.

I would guess that the book doesn't inject as many allusions to sex as MAGICIAN does. For instance, from Goodreads reviews I know that though the book-version of the story has the sister killed for discovering some skullduggery, MAGICIAN has her find out that her employer's involved in white slavery. Similarly, I'll bet the main character of the book isn't as much of a "player" as Joachim Fuchsberger's Inspector Higgins-- for all that the cop's engaged to a pert young miss named Elise (Sophie Hardy). The overall sexiness of the film stands in contrast to the comparatively higher quotient of violence in many krimis: only the opening murder and the Ringer's killing of the big boss-- with a sword-cane through his heart-- caught my attention.  

Edgar Wallace created a fair number of oddly named masterminds in his career, but the Ringer's only an "uncanny villain" by virtue of his power of disguise-mastery. It's suggested that the cops covertly admire the assassin because he's only targeted other criminals, and indeed the Ringer is really the star of the story, more than any of his pursuers. I can't speak for the book, but the movie ends with the assassin escaping after killing the last of the white slavers. I don't think Wallace usually resurrected his criminals for any encores, but Goodreads also informs me that the author also published a collection of stories, ALIAS THE RINGER.        

THE BLACK BELLY OF THE TARANTULA (1971)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Here we have another giallo with an animal-name, testifying to a minor Argento influence on director Paulo Cavara. Cavara's only well-known giallo (this being the better known of two) lacks Argento's focus upon seamy psychology and aesthetic murder-scenarios, and often Cavara's pace has more resemblance to fast-paced polizitteschis. 

World-weary police inspector Tellini (Giancarlo Giannini) is thinking about a career change, maybe one that would allow him more time with his sexy wife Anna (Stefania Sandrelli). Then a serial killer with a unique murder-pattern gets dropped in Tellini's lap. Beautiful women with no known social connections begin dying at the hand of a madman who's unusually sadistic. The killer utilizes a special poison derived from that of a tarantula hawk-wasp: venom with which the wasp paralyzes a spider in order to lay its eggs in the spider's flesh. Used on the madman's victims, the venom paralyzes them so that they remain conscious as the killer eviscerates them.

Tellini isn't intellectually intrigued by the murders as some detectives might be, and indeed, despite his training he seems disgusted by the case. And after the maniac has preyed upon such victims as Barbara Bouchet and Barbara Bach-- he decides to go after the inspector's wife as well.

Though the killer's method is very inventive, and he's the star of the story as the murderer usually is in such dramas, TARANTULA is most noteworthy for the ambivalent ending (that's why the SPOILER warning is here). In short, Tellini finds the madman, and after a violent battle-- simply kills him. Cavara's last shot is of the guilty officer leaving the scene of the murder and disappearing into a crowd of regular citizens. The strong implication is that Tellini will get away with the crime, but whether he regrets playing executioner, the viewer can only guess. Not many ambivalent conclusions work well in the giallo subgenre, but Cavara's is one of the best.

 

AGAINST THE DRUNKEN CAT PAWS (1979)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

As distinctive as the title is, very little of the rambling storyline has to do with its heroine Lin (Chia Ling) using drunk-fu, or patterning her moves on those of felines. In fact, if the epithet "blind drunk" didn't mean something else, one could have credibly titled the movie "Against the Blind Drunken Cat Paws," since Lin spends roughly half the picture as a high-functioning, blind kung-fu artist.

Some time back, Lin was the martially-trained daughter of a prominent kung-fu master, who'd become famous for bringing bandits to justice-- specifically, 13 of the equally famed "14 Bandits." But the gang's leader Wolf Fang escapes, and he gathers a new mob, also called variously "14 Bandits," when the dub doesn't say "13" instead. Wolf Fang's forces-- including a blind female colossus (whose eyes are crossed) and a dwarf with a poisonous blowgun-- attack the master's domicile, killing him and many of the servants. Lin is blinded by the dwarf's poisons but gets away. Strangely, the film doesn't seek to get much emotional mileage out of this sad state of affairs. Director Shan Hsi-Ting-- who directed over 50 HK flicks, of which I've seen only a few-- merely has her holed up in some old temple with her little brother (also a kung-fu trainee) and her cat. It's not clear how Lin supports herself, much less gets all the booze she drinks (though sometimes she steals it).

However, the New 14 Bandits come to the town where Lin's hiding out, and their next intended target is some government official who also prosecuted Wolf Fang's earlier gang. The official has a kung-fu daughter named Wang (Sun Chia-Lin), and she and her unnamed female servant (also a "fu girl") seek to figure out a way to repel the villains. She makes common cause with Lu, a stalwart who had been engaged to Lin before she disappeared. Lu has recognized Lin despite her deshabille appearance, so he and Wang contrive a plan to make Lin admit her true identity. They tell Lin that the two of them are going to be married, and Lin can't tamp down her true feelings for Lu. Not only does she reveal her identity, she also cries so heavily, she weeps out the poison that has kept her blind for so long. 

Lin, Lu, Lin's brother and Wang are joined by a couple of other characters whose importance, frankly, escaped me. So they take on the 14 Bandits, who possess various talents, including Wolf Fang, who apparently has real fangs in his mouth. The various battles are decent, aside from those centered upon a supposedly "funny" character, but Chia Ling is the only performer worth watching. Her character's arc is compromised by these mostly uninteresting support-types, and so I can't say that CAT deserves to be on the list of the actress's best films. She would only make seven more movies before mostly retiring from the role of kung-fu diva.                   

MY DEAR KILLER (1972), WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS (1974)

 

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

Here are two police-thrillers that just barely make it into the domain of "the giallo" thanks to killers who sometimes employ unusual murder-methods.

KILLER's director/co-scripter Tonino Valerii had written a couple of scripts for metaphenomenal films in the 1960s, but this was his only giallo. He brings to the film decent but not outstanding visuals, and so the story seems far more concerned with the heroic policeman's mystery-solving and not with the nature of the serial killer.

KILLER certainly starts off with a bang. The first murder victim is seen standing beside a country swamp, one surrounded by excavation equipment. Some unseen person takes control of a "claw" machine and uses it to slice off the victim's head. Detective Peretti (George Hilton) is assigned to the case, and as he seeks to make sense of the peculiar killing, others begin dying as well. This leads Peretti to delve into a cold case that involved the kidnapping of the little daughter of a rich man. The kidnapper collected his ransom but killed off both the little girl and her father. 

I must confess here that for some reason I decided to read the summary on Wiki, as I usually do not, because I found it a little hard to follow who was who-- even though most of the possible suspects consisted of the rich man's family and their servants. It soon becomes evident that the unknown killer is assassinating everyone whom he thinks might possess a clue to his dastardly deed. Because I read the summary, it seemed to me like Valerii barely made an effort toward implicating the other suspects. But I can't claim this time that I pegged the killer in advance.

I liked Hilton and other members of the cast, which includes Helga Line (in a very brief role), William Berger, and Marilu Tolo (who has a brief upper-body nude scene). But even though the photography looks good the mise-en-scene is pretty slow. The killer's only other atypical weapon is a rotary saw, but in other scenes he just uses a knife or a club. No competition for Argento here.

  Massimo Dallamano's DAUGHTERS is much more effective, for all that the killer is really just a mob-enforcer (mostly seen in a motorcycle-outfit) who occasionally uses very bloody methods of rubbing out targets. He's also working to eliminate all potential witnesses to a crime that involves an older range of victims: high-school age girls who, overconfident of their own abilities to suss things out, get pulled into a sex ring. 

The story centers upon two investigators: Inspector Silvestre (Claudio Cassinelli) and female district attorney Stori (Giovanna Ralli). Though there are one or two moments where Stori's gender is raised as a dramatic problem, both characters are seen to be forthright and conscientious in the efforts to expose the conspiracy. Dallamano, who had previously contributed a decent giallo in WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO SOLANGE?, focuses almost exclusively on the "police-thriller" aspects of the story. I found Dallamano's narrative drive far more compelling that it was in SOLANGE, as well as the way the script (co-written by Dallamano) develops the insidious operations of the corrupt sex ring, run by ambitious men who get off on their ability to control their underage victims absolutely. If it weren't for the presence of the bloody-handed assassin, DAUGHTERS wouldn't be a giallo at all.

NOTE: KILLER's eminence is its monster, but that of DAUGHTERS is its two heroes.

         

THE RED QUEEN KILLS SEVEN TIMES (1972)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Given that great title, and QUEEN's ability to spotlight the charms (albeit never naked ones) of Barbara Bouchet, I wanted this film to reach the heights of the classic giallos. But the second and last giallo-movie of director Emilio Miraglia doesn't have anything underlying all the pretty pictures-- and to understand why, I have to do my usual thing of talking about the ending. 

Part of QUEEN's problem lies in the "family curse" with which the story begins, in that said curse never seems like anything but a laundry list of plot-points. We see Bouchet's character Kitty as a child, quarreling with her similarly aged sister Evelyn. They take their quarrel to their rich grandfather, who just happens to have a grotesque painting on the wall of his study. This painting depicts two sisters from some medieval portion of the family tree, with one, the Black Queen, stabbing her nasty sister The Red Queen to death. Grandpa not only keeps this testament to sibling hatred out in the open, he tells the two girls an involved story about how the Red Queen came back to life, killed six innocents, and then murdered her sister as well. Also, the Red Queen supposedly repeats this curse in subsequent generations. Wow, it's a medieval legend that sounds just like the plot of a giallo!

Fast forward to the siblings' teen years: they quarrel again, fight by the side of a river, and when Kitty knocks Evelyn into the water, she's swept away and never seen again. To spare Kitty, her cousin Franziska (Marina Malfatti) and her husband concoct a story for the public: that Evelyn simply emigrated to the US. Kitty feels very guilty but gets on with her life, working for a fashion house that allows the writers to bring in many more hot women, not least Sybil Danning (who does have a really cool nude scene). Then Kitty's grandpa dies, and the question of inheritance comes up. And it's only then that a red-cloaked female killer starts randomly attacking the friends of Kitty and of her boyfriend Martin.

Once the motive of inheritance comes up, though, no one's going to believe that Evelyn is back, fulfilling the Red Queen curse by knocking off random innocents while building up to the main target. Of course's it's a hoax designed to put the whole inheritance in the hands of Franziska and her husband. The hoariness of the plot would be excusable if the characters had been interesting within the bounds of a hyperbolic murder mystery. But despite all the potential psychological conflicts that can arise from sibling rivalry, QUEEN comes off as just a bunch of random characters going through the motions. And though the violence quotient is high, the menace of The Red Queen doesn't come close to the visual impact of the most memorable giallo grotesques.   

     

THE MAN FROM UNCLE (2015)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological* 

When I saw MAN FROM UNCLE in a first-run theater, I must not have read any contemporaneous reviews of it. I tend to assume that many if not all reviews would have led with, "don't watch this movie if you want entertainment akin to that of the loopy 1960s superspy-teleseries." In addition to being bored, I seem to remember being astonished that director/co-writer Guy Ritchie-- best known for some crime films and two high-tech Sherlock Holmes movies-- had made almost no attempt to emulate the series, except for setting UNCLE's action in the same era of the swinging 1960s. Most of the time, big-screen adaptations of small-screen successes are if anything too reverential toward their source material.

Watching the same film years later with my amateur reviewers' hat on, I must admit that I could cite dozens if not hundreds of movies more boring than Ritchie's UNCLE. But this mostly mundane espionage-film, even with a few uncanny gimmicks thrown in to put some "super" in the spy-jinks, is still very pedestrian. In contrast to the series, in which Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin were introduced as partners in crimefighting for the secret organization UNCLE. the movie insists on giving audiences a dreary account of "how they first met." The heroes' recruitment to UNCLE is brought in only at the story's end, as if to allow sentimental old-timers to imagine the film as a real-world prequel to the fantasy-series.

Since the Cold War was still at its most frigid in 1963, Solo (Henry Cavill) works for the CIA while Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) is some sort of an agent for the USSR. Because the CIA becomes aware of a plot by a Neo-Nazi organization-- loosely covalent with the TV show's "Thrush" group-- seeks to gain control of a nuclear weapon. This project, led by rich magnate Victoria Vinciguerra (Elizabeth Debicki), has obtained the services of a major scientific talent with the telling name of Teller. With an eye to luring Teller away from the bad actors, Solo goes to East Berlin to engage the services of Teller's daughter (Alicia Vikander). Gaby accepts the mission, but during her extraction from East Germany, Solo has a eye-raising (and fender-crunching) encounter with Agent Kuryakin. As played by Hammer, this Kuryakin is a Samson-like powerhouse, though no particular explanation appears for his being able to grab a car by the bumper and hold the vehicle back. Despite this hostile first meeting, the Kremlin wants to eliminate a new nuclear threat as much as the CIA does, so Solo and Kuryakin are assigned to work together, still using Gaby as a means of entrance into the social circle of Victoria and her allies.

In addition to Kuryakin's strength and the THUNDERBALL-like plot of a private entity gaining control of an atom bomb, there's one moment where one agent uses a laser-device to cut through a wire fence, but that's it for the fantasy-content in UNCLE. The relationship of the two heroes is thoroughly predictable: they don't like each other and bait one another, though by the conclusion they've become bound as danger-buddies. Gaby is a little more interesting than either character, for she's in the position of a vital young woman who finds herself playing den-mother to two handsome hunks while also pretending to be the fiancee of Kuryakin's fake character. Vikander and Elizabeth Debicki are allowed to channel a bit of sixties glamor through their attire, and one late development gives Gaby a little semblance of a "Girl from UNCLE." But Ritchie's main focus follows the pattern of a mundane action-thriller, and there's nothing memorable on that score. The film flopped, barely making more than its original cost, so this movie stands as one of the least successful adaptations of a small-screen show.        

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.   

AWESOME LOTUS (1983)

                                   PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 

MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological* 

                                                

           

AWESOME LOTUS looks to be the equivalent of a standup comic trying to hone his talents in dunghole comedy-clubs where, as the saying goes, "no one sees you being bad." I assume most of the participants were amateurs, given that hardly any of them did anything beyond this movie. However, though the director David O'Malley didn't score with this attempt to execute the anarchic comedy of 1980's AIRPLANE, he did end up working as writer and/or director from the eighties to the 2010s. In fact, he wrote and directed (probably with some input from Sam Raimi) the underrated biker-comedy EASY WHEELS.                                                                                               

 The scattershot script is just one problem, co-written by one of the main actors, Peter Schuyler. But none of the actors do anything more than speak their lines correctly. Lorraine Masterson starts out the film as simple farm-girl Emily Anne. She gets torqued at her three older brothers, takes a kung-fu correspondence course (complete with instructional record), beats up her siblings, and leaves the farm. (Silly as it is, this is the strongest scene in the form.) When the viewer next sees her, apparently several years later, she's wearing a Chinese robe and a matching hairdo, and is calling herself "Awesome Lotus." Somehow she's become a master assassin, as well as a trainer of assassins, and her whole philosophy seems to be about confronting death, which would be fine if the script got any humor out of the subject. (She does have one decent line: "There's nothing like death to start your day.") The representative of a silk company (whose company name is the anagram SISSI) claims that his models are under attack by an evil organization, FART. There's some talk of it being a conspiracy to advance the fortunes of rayon in the fashion industry, but later the truth comes out: the evil mastermind Basset (made up to slightly resemble Hitler) resents the silk industry because vicious silkworms killed his beloved basset hound. Yeah, there's a lot of jokes like that one.                                                           

Aside from the opening scene, the script just barely finds energy in the film's middle to have Lotus lead her two allies-- her blind mentor Tofu Caca (Schuyler) and a blonde guy who hits his foes with a tennis racket-- against Bassett's compound, where they have comic fights with ninja guards. This looks like something that should have happened as the movie's climax, because the one they filmed really blows, even in comparison to all the other bad scenes. But to pursue my comedy-club analogy to the bitter end, since arguably at least one graduate of this "club" got better, I guess AWESOME LOTUS served a purpose.                                                                                                                                                                                                

THE MARK OF ZORRO (1974)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*, 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*                                                                                                                          Director Don McDougall, whose long list of TV episodes includes some very nice work for shows like RAWHIDE and Classic TREK, probably had to make the best of things when he drew this assignment. He had to take the script for the 1940 MARK OF ZORRO, one of the most sumptuous swashbucklers of the Classical Hollywood era and squish its plot and action down into about 75 minutes. Still, enough of the mythic aspects of the 20th-Century Fox version of Zorro come through that I can give this 1974 MARK a fair rating.                                                                                                       

 The telefilm's best asset is star Frank Langella in the dual role of Zorro and his foppish civilian ID Diego Vega. The actor had to follow closely in the shoes of Tyrone Power, but I thought he gave both characters as much mojo as anyone could under the circumstances. Ricardo Montalban is in a similar position, playing Esteban, the military power behind the corrupt alcalde's rule, but in some ways he's better off, since his normal acting-style was more florid than that of his predecessor, and thus his Esteban doesn't seem too derivative. The rest of the cast deliver decent perfs, from Gilbert Roland and Yvonne deCarlo as Diego's dad and mom, to Robert Middleton and Louise Sorel as the alcalde and his perhaps unfaithful wife. Anne Archer gets one good scene as the romantic interest Teresa-- the one taking place in the church, where Zorro's pretending to be a priest-- but her character doesn't get nearly as much attention as the Linda Darnell version did. She doesn't even get a final clinch with the hero at the conclusion. Her casting in terms of her age is a bit odd too. In the 1940 film, Gale Sondergaard, then a little over forty, played the aunt of Teresa, and that role was played by Linda Darnell, who was then seventeen. In contrast, Anne Archer was only seven years younger than Louise Sorel. There's an odd remark by Middleton's character about how some figure akin to Zorro may have been observed in "The Pyrenees" of Spain, which was perhaps meant to address where Diego got the idea of Zorro. Possibly this remark was in the 1940 film too, but I'm not inspired to find out.

DEATH WALKS AT MIDNIGHT (1972)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*                                                                                                                                              Even many of the best-regarded giallo movies are best prized not for being solid mysteries or character studies, but just for being well-crafted exercises in delirium. However, producer-director Luciano Ercoli collaborated on two noteworthy thrillers with esteemed writer Ernesto Gastaldi and starring Spanish actress Nieves Navarro (billed as "Susan Scott.") The first collaboration was the decent crime-story DEATH WALKS IN HIGH HEELS. However, the follow-up DEATH WALKS AT MIDNIGHT is not only a solid horror-mystery, but a good inquiry into the stability of the waking world.                                                               

                                                                                                                                                                                                          MIDNIGHT's main character Valentina (Navarro) is a model, but she's not one of the easily condemned stereotypes propounded by, say, TOO BEAUTIFUL TO DIE. She's reasonably well-off, but even she can be deceived even by some of the people she likes and works with, like the conniving photographer Gio (Simon Andreu). One fine day, Gio talks Valentina into doing an exploitative story for his newspaper, in which a famous (but unnamed) model is photographed while experiencing the hallucinations of a powerful experimental drug, HDS. Gio uses the photos all right, but when they appear in the newspaper her name is all over the place. Though Gio likes Valentina and would like to get naked with her, he's all about selling himself first.                                                                                           

This piddling publicity stunt takes on fatal overtones because, during her bad trip, Valentina images that she witnesses a killer in sunglasses using a spiked metal glove on his hand to murder a young woman. Gio thinks she just made up her vision, and thinks she based her hallucination on a real murder, with the same modus operandi, committed six months ago. The alleged killer was confined to an asylum-- but then why does Valentina find herself stalked by the figure from her dream?                                                                         

  An investigating detective thinks that Valentina's performing some publicity stunt as well, but other strangers dog Valentina's tracks as a result of the model's bad publicity. One is a bearded man who claims that the fellow in the asylum was his mate in a band, and that he was not the true killer. A young woman claims to be the sister of the murdered woman and talks Valentina into visiting the asylum-- but then she deserts Valentina's side, which puts the poor girl once more in the sunglasses-clad sights of the potential mystery killer. Gio still doesn't believe any of Valentina's conspiracy stories, but he takes advantage of her distracted state to talk her into bed. Yet he's not a total reprobate either, since he comes through for her when he's finally convinced of the real situation.           

I'm not going to try to cover all the twists and turns of this excellent giallo. Poor Valentina is put through so many ordeals that she comes close to being one of Sade's eternal victims. However, despite not being a heroic figure, Valentina has a will to defy the many forces arrayed against her, so that MIDNIGHT is properly more of a drama than an irony. Her brief psychic episode is also open to question, since what she envisions of the six-months-ago murder isn't the whole truth. The true architect of Valentina's troubles isn't precisely a "perilous psycho," though Sunglasses Guy doesn't seem to be entirely well-balanced. This was Ercoli's last trip to the giallo well, though Gastaldi would continue to distinguish himself in the genre.

            

TOO BEAUTIFUL TO DIE (1988)

                                  

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

                                                                                                               TOO BEAUTIFUL TO DIE, called a "sequel in name only" to the 1985 giallo NOTHING UNDERNEATH, picks up the earlier film's trope of "the world of modeling is empty of morals and/or intelligence."      

I gave the 1985 film a rating of "fair" because I thought the writers came up with a novel way to motivate an ordinary fellow (albeit one with an extraordinary talent) into finding the murderer of his sister. But this time, director/co-writer Dario Piana (in his only horror movie) shows a young woman being abused by the representatives of the modeling culture and then slain. Though there is a character investigating her death (apart from the usual dogged cop assigned to the case), that civilian investigator doesn't "come out" until near the movie's end. So the main thrust of the story is that of "ten little Indians," as each of the persons who participated in the abuse gets knocked off in turn. Since the abuse is heinous-- a rich man wants to rape a particular model, and her manager and three other women facilitate the crime-- the viewer certainly won't mind seeing each of the guilty parties die-- though ironically the rich guy is murdered offstage. But then, he's not "too beautiful to die," and so Piana concentrates on the lovely ladies falling victim to the mystery killer. 

Aside from the opening rape-scene, Piana doesn't deliver any memorable cinematic murders, and there's not a lot of nudity. However, the director, formerly involved in producing music videos, delivers a lot of footage of gorgeous females, such as Giola Scola (as the victim), Randi Ingerman and Florence Guerin. The script tosses out a couple of clues about the murderer's identity and his modus operandi but then doesn't really deliver a payoff for said clues. The killer is revealed in the end and is good enough to explain all of his motivations to his intended victim, but though the rant is diverting it's never compelling. In other words, it's just another giallo with a lot of murders and pretty women, which may be all a given viewer really expects for his entertainment.

                                                              

RAPTUS: THE SECRET OF DOCTOR HICHCOCK (1962)

 

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

I saw the U.S. cut of this film some fifty years ago and was not moved to watch it again until coming across this DVD release. RAPTUS, though dubbed in English, seems to be the full-length Italian film, written by one of the most prolific Italian horror screenwriters, Ernesto Gastaldi. Direction was provided by Riccardo Freda, whose 1957 I VAMPIRI made Italy a major player in the international market for horror film-production, and though Freda used horror elements in other works between 1957 and 1962, RAPTUS is the second "pure" horror movie in Freda's repertoire. However, my re-watch didn't uncover any hidden complexities in RAPTUS, even with the extra footage.  

Bernard Hichcock (Robert Flemyng) is a rich doctor in Victorian England, living in a mansion with his wife Margaretha (Teresa Fitzgerald). After a few minutes of situational setup, the audience learns Hichcock's naughty little secret. At night he likes to dose his wife with a soporific so strong she appears dead, at which point he makes love to her. The script only loosely implies this, since in 1962 a mainstream movie couldn't do more than imply sex of any kind. However, though Hichcock and Margaretha have obviously done this role-playing game before, the doc makes a mistake and overdoses his wife, causing her to die. The script doesn't spend too much more time in this time-period-- we don't even see whether or not there's an official inquiry into Margaretha's death-- and soon the bereaved physician buries his lost love in a family vault on the property, and leaves his estate for twelve years, allowing the servants to manage the house.

I'm not sure if twelve years was a correct translation. It tutrns out to be an important plot point that Margaretha, like Madeleine Usher before her, did not die but survived and somehow started wandering the grounds, possibly being fed by the servants. However long Hichcock's away, he comes back with a new bride twenty years his junior, Cynthia (Barbara Steele). There's a brief mention that Cynthia recently lost her beloved father and became rather unstable, and under these dubious circumstances she became the second wife of an arguable father-substitute.

I was never sure how much Hichcock knew about his first wife's survival, if indeed he was gone from the estate for over a decade. Yet, as soon as the new couple enter the mansion-- decorated with assorted mementos of Margaretha and supervised by a forbidding maid right out of REBECCA-- Hichcock instructs Cynthia that she must not enter a particular room in the house. Later the doctor tells the young woman that the room holds the old laboratory where he brewed the sedative that accidentally killed his first wife, but this BLUEBEARD-like taboo doesn't have great consequence for the plot.

Though Cynthia gets spooked by the musty mansion and sees a specter that is probably Margaretha, her real peril is not her imagination. At some point Hichcock starts gaslighting Cynthia, at one point wearing a grotesque face-mask to drive her mad. He also imprisons her in a coffin, though in Steele's best scene, the tormented wife escapes captivity. Fortunately for Cynthia, she charms a young medical colleague named Kurt, and he ends up coming to her rescue at the climax. 

Just as the sequence of events is unclear, Hichcock's plan doesn't hold much water. He wants to use Cynthia's blood to restore Margaretha somehow, but it's never clear what's happened to her. RAPTUS possibly enjoys a strong reputation because it was Freda's second horror film and the third one for Barbara Steele, who had made her mark in 1960 with Bava's BLACK SUNDAY and followed that up with Corman's PIT AND THE PENDULUM. Steele is beautiful and the setting of the supposed Victorian house is convincing, but the script tosses out standard Gothic tropes without rooting them in narrative logic (for one thing, the minatory maid just disappears from the movie's latter half). RAPTUS isn't a direct adaptation of any Poe tale, though an USHER influence seems likely. Poe uses a lot of death-imagery in his stories and poems, though I don't recall his sexualizing such imagery in any work except the very early BERENICE. I wouldn't have expected such an early Italian horror film to be that daring. Yet RAPTUS still seems overly tame, even for the early sixties.

THE HOUSE OF USHER (1989)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

In my review of this film, I noted that it was one of three 1989 collaborations between producer Harry Alan Towers and director Alan Birkenshaw, and that two of those three were fake adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories. So I decided to look at HOUSE OF USHER, which slightly preceded Birkenshaw's MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH.

My re-watch confirmed that the 1989 USHER was as bad as I remembered, as well as a much worse take on Poe than MASQUE. Whereas Birkenshaw's direction on the later film is at least competent, the visuals for USHER are ugly and dispiriting, and the plot-action is just one lumbering grossout scene after the other.

The plot, such as it is, starts with an engaged couple, Ryan and Molly (Rufus Swart, Romy Windsor). They're driving through the English countryside, trying to find the castle of Ryan's uncle Roderick Usher (the same name as the protagonist of the titular Poe story). Two weird children appear in the road, and the driver has to crash the car to avoid hitting the kids-- who are not seen again until the film's end. Molly is largely unhurt, but Ryan suffers injuries. As it happens, though, the butler who works for Roderick happens to be in the area.

Molly passes out, and when she wakes up, she's at the Usher Castle. She meets Roderick (Oliver Reed), who tells her that Ryan was taken to an English hospital, but that Molly can't go visit him until he's better. Having no means of transportation, Molly accepts the situation, though the elder Usher and his servants all seem eccentric. Roughly like the Poe character, Roderick has unusually sharp senses, though the film mostly forgets about this element when it's convenient.

It takes this plodding movie forever to get to the heart of the matter: Roderick's got Ryan squirreled away in the castle, to use him as a threat against Molly. Because the Ushers suffer from a "blood taint," Roderick wants Molly to wed him so that he can produce a line of healthy children. I can't resist mentioning that this part resembles the plot of the original Gothic novel, THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO, though I doubt either the writer or director were aware of that book. I can only guess that the writer picked up on the arguable incest-elements of the original story, in which Roderick has his sister buried alive for some transgressive reason, and he reworked that into a "bad father" drama. So most of the film is about Molly trying to win free of Roderick's tyranny, like a lot of mainstream Gothics.

For good measure, halfway through the movie the audience learns that Roderick has a brother named Walter (Donald Pleasance), who's lived for years in the castle as a virtual prisoner. But Walter, who wears a drill-bit glove on one hand, may be crazier than Roderick. After a lot of blundering attempts at shock, there's a big fight between Ryan and the psycho brothers, and the house catches on fire as Roderick chases Molly--

And suddenly, with no explanation, or even a dream-transition, Molly and Ryan are back in their car, on the English highway, looking for Roderick's castle. But this time, Molly, guided by "women's intuition," suggests they drive back the way they came. As they do so, the same two kids from the opening are seen walking along the highway, but they merely watch as the car implicitly drives away from its encounter with the Gothic patriarch.

This ending is probably the most interesting thing about this dismal movie. Possibly Birkenshaw thought this "arty" touch would grab the horror-audience. I've discussed the idea of the "movie as premonitory dream" in my review of INVADERS FROM MARS. But that film plays fair in showing the viewpoint character having dreams that may or may not come true, and USHER utterly fails to understand how the dream-trope works when well done. Next to this massive misfire, Birkenshaw's follow-up MASQUE proved refreshingly ordinary.

DELINQUENT SCHOOLGIRLS (1975)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

One online review of this 1975 sleaze-fest was that it offered viewers a sampling of different erotic fantasies. But as it happens, writer-director Greg Corarito made one male fantasy constant to almost all of those presented here: the fantasy of hot women being not just as horny as men, but just as indiscriminate.

I haven't seen three of the five films Corarito directed in his short career, but SCHOOLGIRLS seems to recycle, and expand upon, an incident in 1969's WANDA THE SADISTIC HYPNOTIST. That psuedo-arty grindhouse item concerned two rich lesbians who had the habit of capturing wayward men and using hypnotism to subject them to various indignities. As I noted in my review, there's a very brief "male revolt" in that an escapee from an asylum invades the lesbians' mansion and gets the upper hand-- although the revolt is short-lived and the film ends with the women back in control of their project.

SCHOOLGIRLS centers upon three "psychotics" who escape from a madhouse, which is where the film gets its alternate title of CARNAL MADNESS. However, since the film's theme concerns the aforementioned fantasy of female concupiscence, SCHOOLGIRLS remains the better title. A lot of films depict helpless women being held captive by marauding males, but these schoolgirls are in their way just as dangerous as the mesmerizing lesbians of WANDA.

The school in question is a correctional institution for wayward young women, where the majority of enrollees are about to leave the campus for an unspecified holiday. But about fifteen or so hot young women are not allowed to leave due to "delinquent" behavior, and those fifteen-- though only about six have speaking roles-- continue to have classes with a skeleton crew of instructors. Not all of the young ladies are horny, though the least lust-filled, Greta the Ardent Feminist (XXX actress Sharon Kelly), ends up serving the male audience by persuading other females not to wear their bras. Penny is the most man-hungry, while naive young Betsy forms a curious attachment to her fifty-something sex-ed teacher Mister Miller, because she says he reminds her of her uncle. (Insert "bad uncle joke" here.) Though the institution seems to be secular, often the girls are seen in approximations of Catholic schoolgirl outfits.

Into this largely feminine domain, where only two male professionals are in attendance, barge the three wild and crazy guys. The de facto leader is Carl (Michael Pataki), who does celebrity impressions at the drop of a hat. The second fellow is Bruce (Steven Stucker), a swishy homosexual. The third is Dick (Bob Minor), a randy guy who ends up pulling the other two into his desires for satisfaction. That satisfaction could potentially allow for rape, though the three malcontents are such goofs that it's impossible to take them seriously.

After escaping the nuthouse, the dumbbells stumble across a farmhouse, occupied by a grizzled farmer and his frustrated young wife. The trio pick up a couple of weapons here, while Dick gets to vent his passion on a woman who only pretends "maidenly resistance."

Then the threesome stop at the school, raiding the kitchen for food. Two busty female cooks catch them, but do the two young women run to get the authorities? No, they attack the three guys with such weapons as rolls of salami, so of course the ladies get overwhelmed pretty quickly. But probably they don't suffer anything more than a little groping, since they're later seen playing cards with the goofs. (Aren't the guys supposed to be trying to escape the law as expeditiously as possible?)

Slightly before the advent of the nutsies, Betsy visited her secret crush Mister Miller. It turned out that he's got a thing for her too, but he has a weird way of showing it, that of putting her under full hypnosis (more on this later). During Betsy's second visit to Miller, all unaware of what he does with her, the three bozos witness Miller's peccadillo. They break in, perhaps hoping to get in on Miller's action. However, in his capacity as a biology teacher Miller has a tankful of (non-poisonous) snakes to hand, and he drives the psychos away with his serpents, just before Miller himself suffers a heart attack. 

The two non-gay bozos chat up a couple of girls smoking MJ, and both ladies seem amenable to some fun with complete strangers, until Carl and Dick honk them off. The females try to run, but Bruce cows them with his rifle-- and presumably they get tied up and left somewhere, because they aren't seen again. While Carl and Bruce try to find transportation, Dick comes across another two busty beauties playing polo-- at night, no less-- and tries to get grabby. The girls beat him with their mallets but get caught by Carl and Bruce, and Carl threatens the two women into fighting one another. (Just to keep things comic, he admits to Dick that he had no intention of killing either of them.)

Then there's the big finisher, when the psychos barge in on a karate class, where a male karate instructor is teaching about 12 girls. Penny is there and seems more than willing to be abducted and ravished by Big Dick. Carl, though, has an itch to play director, and he wants all the girls to perform a chorus line, but without a certain item of feminine protection. This sparks a fight between Dick and Feminist Greta (and Sharon Kelly seems to have done a fair amount of training to perform things like a stomach-throw). In no time, all the girls and the one male teacher swarm the goofballs and beat them down, sending them back to the bughouse-- though a coda claims that they escaped again.

None of the alleged madmen shows any real madness; they just seem like big, stupid teenagers out for sex wherever they can find it-- so none of them are "perilous psychos" in more than a naturalistic sense. Only Mister Miller's little hypnosis experiment elevates the movie into the uncanny domain, and then only because his experiment with Betsy involves using one of his non-poisonous snakes to go (one assumes) where he can't go anymore. Corarito passes over this fetishistic experiment very quickly, but both the experiment itself and the hypnosis used to achieve it constitute a bizarre crime of the uncanny kind.

DOCTOR JUSTICE (1975)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

I stumbled across DOCTOR JUSTICE while looking for a Eurospy title. But though the evildoers in the film are comparable to high-level conspirators, the hero, whose name is literally "Justice," is not an operative. The doctor (John Philip Law) is an athletic, karate-chopping WHO physician who accidentally witnesses a murder of a gangster by the criminal's superior. This draws the good doctor into a wild, larger-than-life adventure against a criminal plotter named Max (Gert Frobe) -- unless Max is really a lookalike named Orwall (also Frobe), who seems to be an eminent scientist testifying at a WHO conference. To compensate slightly for Max and his gang, Justice gains a resourceful romantic interest in Karine (Nathalie Delon) who joins him in his forays throughout most of the narrative.

To get the phenomenality out of the way, the story begins with a formidable "bizarre crime," in which an oil tanker arrives at its port and finds that all its stores of oil have vanished, replaced by seawater. The explanation for this clever crime isn't unveiled until the last half-hour, and it involves some diabolical drugs, but the mastermind behind the crime has a even deeper and more ambitious scheme, to which the oil-theft is a means to an end.

The director/co-writer is Christian-Jaque, known for other flamboyant entertainments of the period, my favorite being the raucous comedy LEGEND OF FRENCHIE KING. The movie seems to have had a better budget than the majority of Eurospy films, given a fair number of splashy, swashbuckling scenes. John Philip Law had done other action-roles, but I think this is the only one where he had to emulate martial arts, and he does well there. His general upbeat attitude, so different from the various gloomy Bond imitations, has been compared to Doc Savage, albeit one with a French "je ne sais quoi." Delon has to support Law in many scenes, in contrast to the usual subordinate role of the lead female actor, and Frobe seems to have fun with his two disparate parts. Paul Naschy and Eduardo Fajardo appear in small roles, but I didn't spot them. It's not a great film but is worth a look.

As it happens, DOCTOR JUSTICE began as a French comic book, and an early bit of dialogue acknowledges this when the doctor jokes to Karine that he's "a comic book hero."  

WANDA THE SADISTIC HYPNOTIST (1969)

 

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

Even by the late 1960s, apparently the grindhouse audience was still so starved for female nudity that the patrons would sit through any kind of pseudo-artsy stuff as long as it had T&A. Writer-director Gregory Corarito, though he only worked on four feature films in his career, certainly didn't render anything resembling genuine art. But WANDA THE SADISTIC HYPNOTIST is a engaging, albeit simultaneously confusing, sex romp that merges T&A with S&M.

A guy wearing sunglasses (whom I'll call Sunglasses) takes some dope and then wanders down a city-street, glancing at mannequins in a store window and imagining that they're live nude girls. Sunglasses-- according to one review, played by the director-- then stops in a grindhouse to see a movie. The movie he watches-- whose title claims that it stars a "Miss Dikey Diketon"-- ends up providing most of WANDA's narrative, though occasionally the focus shifts back to the grindhouse theater, just to remind the viewer that Sunglasses is still there, watching, just like one of the intended filmgoers.

In the film proper, an ordinary fellow, Sylvester, is driving down a country road in his car, when he blows a tire and crashes. As if anticipating his advent, two hot women appear and transport Sylvester to their mansion. Once the injured man awakens, they introduce themselves as Wanda and Greta (Katharine Shubeck, Janine Sweet). At least one of those names seems to be an in-joke, for in VENUS IN FURS, Sacher-Masoch's best known celebration of the paraphilia named after him, the woman who torments the pain-loving POV character is named-- Wanda. I'm not sure the name "Greta" has similar significance. However, Corarito uses the name again in his 1975 DELINQUENT SCHOOLGIRLS, but for a much nastier female.

Of the two probably lesbian ladies, Greta's the nice one, showing some degree of concern for Sylvester's condition. Wanda, however, clearly nurtures some grudge against the male of the species. Not only does she maintain the mansion, where Sylvester's the only male amid numerous often-nude females, she's apparently learned hypnosis, in that she can mesmerize her male captive into doing anything she desires. She establishes Sylvester's lowly status by whipping him with a riding-crop, and then forces him to wander about the estate while the women mock him. Not that Wanda's entirely averse to messing with her acolytes. She hypnotizes one Zelda, explicitly said to be lesbian, and tells her that she's a nympho, which leads to Zelda raping the bound Sylvester.

So far, WANDA sounds like it's made for viewers who were not content with simple ogling and who were into at least light sadomasochism. However, there's a small "revolt of the male" when a "funeee farm" escapee shows up at the mansion and intimidates the women with displays of masculine temper. He releases Sylvester, but the two men don't really take any major revenge, even for a softcore film, except that the guys force the women to raid Wanda's supply of LSD. After some very boring psychedelic visuals, mostly just repeating scenes already shown, Wanda manages to place both men under her hypnotic sway. The girls then send the maniac back to the asylum and cause Sylvester to forget everything that happened. He gets in his presumably repaired car and drives away.

Then, just to show that Corarito didn't forget his self-insert back in the grindhouse, Sunglasses leaves the theater, gets in a car, and drives down a country road. His tires hit a nail-trap, his car crashes, and up pop Wanda and Greta, ready for more fun.

It's because of this "film turns into reality" schtick that I label WANDA an "irony," since this term best describes stories in which all logic and morality has vanished from the world. Of Corarito's other three films, I have seen his 1970s T&A-fest, DELINQUENT SCHOOL GIRLS. This is more of a straight comedy with similar elements, wherein three fugitives from a nuthouse take over a girls' school. These demented fellows terrorize the ladies in a very comical manner, until the ending. Then there's a "revolt of the female," in which a class of judo-girls rebels and kicks all the guys' asses. Say what you like about this writer-director, at least he was consistent.