SEVEN DEATHS IN THE CAT'S EYE (La morte negli occhi del gatto, 1973)

Like many an Italian giallo, Antonio "Anthony M. Dawson" Margheriti's film takes place in that hotbed of horror, the United Kingdom. The time is the early 20th century, a point when the theories of Sigmund Freud are still a novelty. The location is, more specifically, Scotland, where Corringa MacGrieff (Jane Birkin) is returning to the ancestral stead, Castle Dragonstone, to visit her mother. It's a tense reunion. There's a fight over whether or not to sell the castle, and the family eccentric, Lord James (Hiram Keller) is being an arrogant jerk as usual. Also, there's some sort of ape in the castle. It gets worse from there.

Corringa's return to Dragonstone Castle exposes her to menaces in many forms.

When Corringa's mother is killed, there are many suspects to choose from, from her bitter sister (Francoise Christophe) to her lover (Anton Diffring), who's two-timing her with the apparently bisexual French tutor Suzanna (Doris Kunstmann) to Lord James and the ape, also named James. Once more people start to die you have to add another suspect to the list: the mother herself, who if the family legends are true will have returned from the dead as a vampire. The family cat jumping on her coffin is one of the tip-offs, and as the title indicates, this grumpy cat is a malign presence most of the time and a witness to (if not a perpetrator of) most of the killings.

Margheriti's direction isn't really ambitious or audacious, but Carlo Carlini's cinematography has its moments.

More gothic than giallo -- the murders are rather simply staged -- Seven Deaths follows a whodunit formula only to blindside you with a final revelation that you most likely won't have anticipated while trying to separate the real suspects from the red herrings, yet is typically gothic itself. Generally more spooky than sleazy, Margheriti's film benefits from a genre-perfect location and appropriate cinematography by Carlo Carlini. The performances, including English dubbing, are what they are and seem right for the setting, even if some of the dialogue sounds even more stilted than is typical in translation. The versatlie Margheriti may do nothing special visually here, but nailing the mood the way he and Carlini do is most of the battle, and the rest is just a matter of having fun with the undemanding horrors and the extra bits of Euro weirdness that make this genre so endearing.

AN ANGEL FOR SATAN (1966)

Camillo Mastrocinque had a late-career transformation when he directed the Carmilla-inspired Crypt of the Vampire at the age of 63. Two years later he attempted to tap the same atmospheric gothic vein by making Un Angelo per Satana, the story of a legendary curse and its consequences centuries later. This film replicates some of the elements of Crypt, starting with a young scholar (of a sort) as a point-of-view character and pressing forward with hints of lesbianism from a female menace. Mastrocinque freshens up the package by trading in Christopher Lee for Barbara Steele, but his commitment to black-and-white resulted in this film never getting a proper theatrical release in the United States -- it ended up on television in the 1970s. Visually it is very reminiscent of Crypt and monochrome was arguably the right call despite the mid-60s stampede to color that rendered Angel almost instantly obsolete. What Angel lacks, arguably, is the courage of Crypt's supernatural convictions.

Roberto Merigi (Anthony Steffen) has been hired by Count Montebruno to restore an infamous statue recently recovered from a local lake. The statue of a beautiful woman has a curse attached that takes immediate effect when the boatmen who brought Merigi to the village drown on their return trip across the water. The statue is about 200 years old and portrays a beautiful female ancestor of the present count. She's also a spitting image of the count's daughter, the English-educated Harriet (Steele). The legend relates that the original model had an ugly sister, a failed rival for a man's affections, who placed a curse on the statue, which was originally mounted on a bridge, and promptly tumbled off the bridge with the statue, which remained submerged until the film's 19th century present.

Will Belinda's curse on the statue (above) doom its model's descendant (Barbara Steele, below)?

Before long, predictably enough to the superstitious, Harriet begins behaving strangely. She plays the sexual predator, seducing and flogging an imbecile gardener while simultaneously seducing her pretty maid (Ursula Davis, the vampire from Crypt) and compelling her to break off her engagement with the local schoolteacher. Her scheming has fatal consequences for many. She seems to be possessed, not by the spirit of her precursor but by Belinda, the wicked sister who cursed the statue. It's up to Merigi, who started to fall for Harriet before the curse kicked in, to get to the bottom of her strange, dangerous behavior and figure out what power has changed her so drastically.

An Angel for Satan is provocative adult entertainment!

Angel reunites Mastrocinque with his Crypt cinematographer, Giuseppe Aquari, and the team again milks an atmospheric location for all it's worth. If anything, Angel has even more gothic sweep than Crypt, thanks to moody shots of boats on the lake and Barbara Steele riding her horse through the landscape. Going black-and-white was probably a good idea, since it makes the film less the Pop Art anachronism it could have been and more of an honest evocation of the 19th century we know from photographs. Barbara Steele is as good as you could want in her split-personality role, which sort of merges her two Black Sunday characters in one body. No matter how often she played depraved women, she could always convince you that her character at least starts out innocent.

What disappoints a little is the film's ultimate resolution, which undercuts Steele by reducing her character to little more than a puppet. Somehow the way she changes becomes less plausible once you eliminate the supernatural element, and it becomes hard to believe that the real villain of the piece could manipulate all the victims (the motive being hatred for "all who love") so effectively and so indirectly. You can still believe in the curse when all is said and done, but the story complicates things in a manner that doesn't necessarily enhance the horror of the piece. Angel isn't as effective or impressive as the still-underrated Crypt. but it's still an attractive and interesting effort that probably looks older now than it actually is. That seems appropriate somehow.

LES FELINS (Joy House, 1964)

Blame the hard-boiled author Day Keene for the American title of Rene Clement's proto-erotic thriller: that's what he called the book it's based on. It pretty convincingly fails to convey the sinister mood of the piece; despite the hothouse hype M-G-M applied to selling the picture, that title can't help but make you expect something happy, or perhaps something musical. And with Lalo Schifrin composing the score it is a pretty musical picture, but that telltale harpsichord should tell all but the most obtuse that something decadent is going on here.

Alain Delon plays Marc, a crook caught sleeping with the wrong woman, the property of a big man in the Mob. Taken out to the Mediterranean coast of France to be whacked, Marc manages to escape by commandeering a car and driving it over a cliff, then hopping across some railroad tracks just before a train roars by. Ragged and bruised, he hitchhikes into the nearest city and hides among the homeless in a mission shelter. Meals are provided by a glamorous pair of American women: Barbara (Lola Albright), a widow who owns a mysterious mansion, and her cousin Melinda (Jane Fonda). They just happen to be looking for a new chauffeur, too, ideally a guy who looks good in a Kato uniform.

Delon: from frying pan to fire

It's a good deal for Marc since it keeps him out of town, where the mobsters are still looking for him. He doesn't want to stay for long, though; once he earns enough money he wants to reunite with the girlfriend with whom he started all the trouble. That doesn't fit with Barbara's plans or Melinda's -- it develops that they are not the same. Both women want to keep Marc on the estate, but Melinda's motivated by possessive lust, while Barbara has an ulterior motive. It's up to Marc to figure that out -- it may have to do with the secret wing of the "neo-gothic" mansion -- before it's too late for him. That means playing the women against each other if necessary, with sex as a weapon, but Marc is not the only player on the premises, and his isn't the only game. It may have been too late for him the moment he took the job....

Jane Fonda as Melinda

Lola Albright as Barbara

"Neo-gothic" is right, right down to the gimmick of the secret room and its possible occupant. It's only fitting, too, since film noir is arguably crime cinema with a gothic tinge, while Clement's film of Keene's story is a "neo-gothic" way station from noir to something else, something closer to the "swinging gothic" style of the giallo. It puts Delon in an extreme noir situation, caught between two rival femmes fatales, on top of an ultimately familiar noir plot. It ends up feeling like a cross between His Kind of Woman and The Beguiled, and in cocky gigolo mode Delon makes the perfect mark for the story, confident of his manly power to master the situation while someone is almost always a step ahead of him. As the femmes (the felins tag extends to Delon's character, described as a "wildcat"), Albright (best known as Peter Gunn's love interest) and Fonda control the tension between them quite nicely, letting it build gradually as you wonder which will backstab the other first. Also worthy of note is Sorrell "Boss Hogg" Brooke as a picturesque mobster shutterbug stalking Delon.

The prisoner of "Joy House"

Les Felins is slick and sleek throughout, thanks to Schifrin's moody music and Henri Decae's sharp cinematography. Clement keeps things moving with the occasional burst of action while slowly building the tension in the main triangle. There's nothing profound here but it'll keep you entertained and perhaps a little chilled by the end. I recommend it most for fans of Fonda and Delon and Euro-thriller enthusiasts in general.



Here's a French "Les Felins" trailer with English subtitles, uploaded to YouTube by icsprks.

THE DEVIL'S POSSESSED (El Mariscal del infierno, 1974)

Paul Naschy, the thespian alter ego of writer-director Jacinto Molina, is often called "the Lon Chaney of Spain." There's an appropriate ambiguity to that label. In his most popular character, the tormented werewolf Waldemar Daninsky, Naschy clearly walks in the thorny footsteps of Lon Chaney Jr. In other films, like The Hunchback of the Morgue, his pathetic grotesques are more in the tradition of Chaney Sr. The more Molina took Naschy beyond the conceptual realm of the Universal classic monster mythos, the more his complete body of work came to resemble the broader range of roles of the elder Chaney. Molina wrote the script for director Leon Klimovsky's medieval adventure, crafting for himself the sort of role Chaney Sr. might have played in silent days, albeit with a more modern emphasis on Satanic sleaze, and for extra measure throws in a subtle homage to the great man's most famous role at the end.

An American distributor retitled El Mariscal del infierno to cash in on Seventies Satan fever in the aftermath of The Exorcist, and to pre-empt any assumption that "The Marshall of Hell" was a Spaghetti Western. In medieval Europe, a marshall/mariscal was a high ranking military official and part of the royal household. Such a man was Gilles de Lancre (Naschy), a fictional amalgam of Macbeth and Gilles de Rais, who opens the film by retiring to private life as the lord of his castle and the nearby countryside. He's somewhat disgruntled over failing to get the recognition he feels he deserved, or failing to achieve the greatness he considers his destiny. In retirement, he hopes to win fame as a man of science.

Toward that end, his wife Georgelle (Norma Sebre) has brought "the greatest alchemist ever" into the Lancre household. Playing the Lady Macbeth role, the apparently bamboozled Georgelle encourages Gilles to indulge the alchemist's every demand toward the great project of synthesizing the ars magnus, aka the Philosopher's Stone -- the Sorcerer's Stone to you American muggles. Achieving that will make Gilles, whose greatness is heralded by his falling sickness, worthy to rule all of France. Such a project demands immense and costly resources, including the blood of human sacrifices to Satan. Gilles balks at that idea for about thirty seconds before wifey cajoles him into ordaining murder. From that point, de Lancre becomes the Marshall of Hell and the terror of his land.

Enter the hero, Gaston de Malebrache (Guillermo Bredeston), one part Banquo (Gilles's old comrade-in-arms) and one part Robin Hood (the noble-turned-rebel version), retiring in his turn from the wars. He rebuffs an attack by rustics, only to learn that they aren't bandits hunting the rich but rebels who mistook him for the tyrant de Lancre. That doesn't sound like his old pal Gilles, so Gaston sets out to investigate after fending off a gang of Gilles's goons in a tavern that seems to have a trampoline hidden somewhere for our hero to bounce on, Fairbanks style. Gilles himself welcomes his old buddy as a dinner guest, but Georgelle urges him to assassinate the "peril" in their midst. Gaston escapes the attempt and flees, joining the rebels who happen now to be lead, following the death of their original head, by Gaston's attractive cousin Graciela (Graciela Nilson), who helps him overcome the rustics' natural suspicion of another noble.

The sides properly formed, the de Lancres and Malebraches go to war, Gaston scoring first blood by entering the lists in disguise against Gilles in a joust and lancing an eye out. Things go downhill mentally from there for de Lancre. He hears the wailing of his victims in a delirium, resolves to repent his evil, only to order the massacre a party of monks when one of them dares call him out for his crimes. Frustrated at the alchemist's repeated failures, and perhaps finally realizing that the old man's a fraud, he kills the crank but carries on the regimen of torture and sacrifice, convinced that he can attain the ars magnus without wizardly expertise. By the time he faces Gaston for the final showdown, he's convinced that the prize is his, making him immortal and invincible.

Molina's script and Klimovsky's direction suffer from an imbalance that's inevitable when the star elects to play the villain. Their blend of Macbeth and Robin Hood is awkward, since one or the other must be the dominant character. In the end, the film's Robin Hood, Gaston, is a dull if energetic goody-two-shoes, the rebellious appeal of the archetype undercut by the villain's transgressive charisma. The creators probably recognized this by the end and were determined that Gaston should not defeat Gilles in single combat.

Instead, Gilles strikes a decisive blow and is poised to finish his foe when the rest of the rebels appear. As soon as he was surrounded I knew to expect a Throne of Blood homage with Naschy as a Mifunian human pincushion. But the fun thing about Naschy is that his homages are often multilayered, riffing on more than one influence. Molina was a meta-auteur, and spotting the homages adds to the entertainment value of his films. Here he did not disappoint. Gilles defies his enemies, warning them that he has the ars magnus in his clenched fist, with which he can destroy them all and conquer the world. He unclenches his fist -- and there's nothing there. That's Phantom of the Opera all over the place, when Erik is trapped on the bridge and threatens his pursuers with a mini-bomb, only to open his empty hand and laugh, as if his last word will be, "Psyche!" Unlike Erik, Gilles in his final madness actually thinks he has a super-weapon, but the moment and the gesture are Naschy's bow to Lon Chaney Sr. and Rupert Julian across the decades. At least I saw them that way.

Like Dr. Jekyll and the Werewolf, my copy of The Devil's Possessed comes from Mill Creek Entertainment's Pure Terror box set. This time Mill Creek comes closer to the actual thing. IMDB lists the running time of El Mariscal as 95 minutes, while Devil's Possessed comes in at a respectable 89 minutes. Whether that's the difference between a "clothed" and "unclothed" version I can't say, but there is a notable lack of nudity in my copy of a film full of sacrifices to Satan and attractive Euro actresses. Overall, the film has an appropriately grungy look typical of the more realistic, unromanticized portrayal of medieval Europe dating back at least to The Lion in Winter, enhanced by actual ruined locations. I wouldn't be surprised if more money was spent on costumes than on extras, but everybody looks good, and the eyepatch-sporting Gilles of the final section deserves a place in the Naschy Hall of Fame. Even the cinematography comes off respectably in an admittedly compromised presentation; you can see where they were aiming for something like a Caravaggio look in some of the scenes in the bandits' lair.

It sometimes seems as if Naschy was obliged to drool some substance in every picture. Below: Whatever you say to Gilles, don't mention the eyepatch!

The Devil's Possessed is ultimately a little less than the sum of its parts because of the imbalance of power between Naschy and his co-stars. If you have him as a villain but want audiences to root for the hero, you need one made of stronger stuff than Guillermo Bredeston, I'm afraid, and you should probably change the script to introduce the hero first. The emphasis on Naschy, not to mention on sacrifice and torture, marks El Mariscal as a horror film rather than a swashbuckler in the final analysis; it's closest analogue might well be Rowland V. Lee's Tower of London in its volatile genre mix. In any event, this film is admirable for its ambition, even if that ambition isn't fully achieved.

This is my second and final contribution to the Naschy memorial blogathon organized by Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies to mark the anniversary this week of Jacinto Molina's death. I'm just the tip of an iceberg of terrific tributes and reviews all over the blogosphere. To learn more about the man and his work, just follow the links listed at viceducal headquarters. Happy browsing!

THE HANGING WOMAN (La Orgia de los Muertos, 1973)

The original Spanish title of Jose Luis Merino's movie translates to "Orgy of the Dead," but that title had already been used in the U.S. by Ed Wood and A. C. Stephen. Actually the American title is a better fit, since there is a prominent hanging woman in the film but not an orgy of the dead, unless you count the scene in which Igor the Gravedigger, reeling in guilt from an encounter with a manipulative living woman, nuzzles his three dead paramours in a crypt and begs forgiveness from them. And that is, inevitably, a rather passive affair for most of the participants.

Igor's a relatively minor character in this story about mysterious deaths and the struggle for control of an estate and the laboratory inside, but he's probably the main reason anyone will buy the newly-released Troma DVD. That's because he's played by the living icon of low-end Spanish horror, the now globally-beloved Paul Naschy. Born Jacinto Molina, Naschy had a Spirit of the Beehive-style epiphany when Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man played in his small town when he was still a child. Instead of projecting his horror fantasies on fugitive rebel soldiers, young Molina responded creatively, concocting his own monster stories and finally emerging as a horror star in the role of Waldemar Daninsky, the eternally recurring lycanthrope. Throughout the 1970s, Naschy played nearly every traditional horror archetype, and this supporting role, done as a favor to the director, takes him close to the territory of cinema's most famous gravedigger, Jose Mojica "Coffin Joe" Marins. But Naschy puts his own spin on the gravedigger character, which he was allowed to rewrite to his own satisfaction, by making him a passionate necrophiliac, one who can only be attracted to living women when they pretend to be dead, like the wicked widow Nadia, who has some use for poor Igor.

"Ick... You're alive!!!" A disgusted Paul Naschy recoils from life in The Hanging Woman.

Nadia was married to Count Mihaly, whose funeral opens the film. She got the shaft in the count's will, with most of the estate going to his daughter Mary, who we find invading his crypt in search of a mysterious document left on his person. A shadow overtakes her suddenly, and we cut to the arrival of Serge Chekov in the Macedonian town of Skopje. This may confuse purchasers of the DVD, which claims that Serge will arrive in a Scottish village. But Scotland, Skopje, what's the difference, right? Anyway, Serge grumps his way through town, fearful of robbers, until he hears suspicious noises in a cemetery. He then drops his bags and goes inside, gun in hand in search of danger. When he emerges, his bags are surprisingly where he left them, but there's also a Hanging Woman, who happens to be Mary.

As Paul Naschy helpfully explains in an interview, Stan Cooper (right) "was an Italian actor who called himself Stan Cooper." What more need be said?

Mary's demise actually puts Serge in line to control the estate, which makes him a focus of suspicion in her death. It also makes the people of the estate interested in his welfare. These include Nadia and Ivan the Butler, who has bedroom privileges with the mistress, as well as Prof. Leon Droila and his daughter Doris, another of Nadia's servants. Serge establishes his dominance by casting out Ivan and making him dance to a bullet beat, cowboy style. It develops that Nadia would like to make her fortune by selling the estate, while Prof. Leon wants the family to keep it so he can continue some experiments he'd collaborated on with Count Mihaly. The Prof. is the Herbert West of Macedonia, having managed to reanimate a dead frog by "plac[ing] it under a charge superior to what it had when it was alive." This intrigues Serge, who can't help wanting to see that frog at full power. He proves himself rather a prick by persuading poor Doris to strip for him as if she'd need to offer herself to him for her dad to keep his lab, but we see him growing a wee bit of conscience by making the tearful girl get dressed "before I begin to feel guilty over all this." From this point we are to accept him as the hero of the picture.

An interesting angle to the story is Nadia's dabbling in spiritualism and the dark arts. She jabs needles into voodoo dolls and suggests a seance to contact the spirits of the recently killed to find out who offed them. As it happens, the late Count Mihaly accepts the invitation, but embraces Nadia a tad too enthusiastically, strangling her. He arrived, of course, not courtesy of spirits but through science! Things deteriorate from here. Igor, who'd seen it all from his peeping-tom nook, goes more nuts than normal and runs away before being overtaken by a shadow like the one that took care of Mary. He's found stuffed inside a stone wall, the message, "No 37" written in his own blood on a wall. Despite Doris's corroboration of the attack by the dead, and Serge's sighting of other walking dead (including Ivan, and who knew he'd even been killed?) Serge is blamed for both Nadia's demise and Igor's. He's held in his own house, handcuffed to a bed, pondering all the weirdness and the significance of "No 37" until he views it from the right angle and solves the mystery. Of course, he still has the dead to deal with, and their master....

I watched The Hanging Woman with a friend who likes horror movies but doesn't care for Euro-horror as a rule. He thought it did a good job of misdirection on the mystery side and he admired the atmosphere of the ruinous locations. That matched my own impression. It's on too small a scale to live up to its ballyhoo, but still manages modest entertainment. Naschy is often tangential to the main story, appearing as something of an added attraction who does his thing with the dead, attacks Serge every so often and gets chased around a lot before becoming one of the dead ones. He brings a barnstorming intensity to his scenes that most of the other actors lack, and he makes Igor a believably sick and almost sympathetic character. You can understand from this relatively small sample why the man has a following today. As Serge, Stan Cooper (a stage name for one Stelvio Rosi) does some scenery chewing of his own, coming across in looks and manner as if Chuck Norris circa 1979 were playing Basil Rathbone's part in Son of Frankenstein the way Rathbone played it. As the eventual villain, Gerard Tichy segues effectively from calm authority to calm menace even as he offers ludicrous explanations for the undead phenomena. It has less to do with the reanimation apparatus we saw earlier than with capsules inserted into moribund brains that respond to thought patterns. Maria Pia Conte as Nadia and Dyanik Zurakowska as Doris have an entertainingly bitchy relationship for a mistress and maid, adding to the somewhat campy fun of the film.

La Orgia de los Muertos isn't a major item in Spanish horror or Paul Naschy's filmography, but for people looking for fresh vintage horror this October it's hard to go wrong with Troma's bargain-basement DVD, which includes interviews with Naschy and the director, who also contributes a commentary track -- and a second Spanish feature, a black-and-white item called The Sweet Sound of Death that I'll review later. Naschy fans and Spanish horror buffs are sure to enjoy it, and more general Euro-horror enthusiasts may like it as well.

Here's a new trailer Troma put together to promote the DVD, which contains the original U.S. trailer in rather rough shape.

THE WHIP AND THE BODY (1963)

In 1963 you could be an English-speaking actor in Italy and not be slumming. Burt Lancaster was there to lend prestige and box-office power to Luchino Visconti's superproduction The Leopard. Rod Steiger was there to add his evocative presence to Francesco Rosi's political drama Hands Over the City. Christopher Lee, meanwhile, had been lurking around Italy for a while, exploiting his Dracula fame in silly comedies and first working for Mario Bava in Hercules in the Haunted World. La Frusta e il Corpo is Lee's second and last team-up with the master of color gothicism, and in his typical display of dedication to international cinema, Lee did not bother dubbing his own performance into English for the Anglo-American release. Fortunately, the film is good enough that you eventually don't miss his distinctive sound.

Lee is Kurt Menliff, the returning black sheep of an Eastern European family, someplace where the priests are Orthodox if not the family relations. He'd been engaged to Nevenka (Daliah Lavi) before his father cast him out. Dad then imposed Nevenka on the younger son, Christian (Tony Kendall), though the young man still carries a torch for cousin Katya. Things might actually work out for everyone once Kurt resumes his romantic ways with Nevenka. He definitely has a romantic way with a whip, though I guess you have to like that sort of thing. Nevenka does. "You've always had a love for violence" Kurt says as he lashes away, throwing off his cloak as the work gets harder and hotter. Once he's whipped her into a proper frenzy, it's lovin' time. For the occasion, Lee may look as handsome as he ever did on film, with a bit shaggier head of hair than usual that makes him look younger, more Byronic, and from some angles (I dare say) just a little like Frank Langella.

"Taste the lash of Dra--, I mean Menliff. Taste the lash of the Menliffs! You know you like it."

How to explain this to Christian and Dad -- not that Kurt feels like he has to answer to either of them? Not to worry; the next thing you know, Kurt appears to be attacked by a curtain, which stabs him with a dagger with which he had once ill-used the maid's daughter, in whose memory the maid had set up a shrine before which she regularly vowed vengeance on Kurt. So there's a suspect, and given how Christian and his dad don't like Kurt, there are two more. Ruling out the supernatural intervention of an indignant drapery, we now find ourselves in the middle of a whodunit.

It's curtains for Kurt all too early into the story of Whip and the Body.

On the other hand, it may be a wuzitdun. You may think the situation is cut and dried what with the red-hooded Inquisition types tossing Kurt's body and coffin into a crypt, but Nevenka starts seeing her old flame tromping about the estate, always after having stomped through some local mud field first. Kurt's boots are a mud magnet, leaving an obvious trail except for the apparent fact that only Nevenka can see the boots or the mud. There, there: in her grief over the sudden death of her serial abuser, she must be hallucinating. If so, though, who just killed the paterfamilias with that dagger? And can a hallucination wield a whip with such welt-raising authority as our Kurt? We see the proof on Nevenka's back, after all....

"It came at me like a green spider." Daliah Lavi does well as a woman cracking under the constant assault of Mario Bava's colorful spook effects.

While the content of the whipping episodes was certainly extreme for 1963 audiences, Whip and the Body gets by today on pure atmosphere, and nobody does gothic atmosphere in color like Mario Bava. This is a film I wish I could have seen on a big screen in a darkened theater. Everything from Bava's own cinematography (in collaboration with Ubaldo Terzano) to the production design of Riccardo Domenici to Carlo Rustichelli's lush romantic score has exactly the overripe-bordering-on-corruption flavor that this kind of romantic horror needs. Bava used light like paint and his use of color for mood as well as balanced composition is masterful. This is a type of film that wouldn't be made for much longer, arguably because Bava and Roger Corman, between them, would cover all the bases of widescreen color gothic. Later films might be set in similar periods or places, but those would only be platforms for different kinds of entertaining decadence. Whip is a definitive film of its moment in cinema history.

There's a whip, and there's a body. What more could you want? A trailer, maybe? Here's one uploaded by giantfish2. It's in Italian, but if you've read the above you'll get the gist and then some.

MILL OF THE STONE WOMEN (1960)

1960 was an annus mirabilis for global horror cinema. The U.S. produced Psycho and Corman's House of Usher. Great Britain contributed Peeping Tom and a host of Hammers. Italy gave us The Mask of Satan (Black Sunday). Japan issued Jigoku. The Witch's Mirror from Mexico is also worthy of mention. A French film from the previous year, Eyes Without a Face, was making its way around the world. The French and Italians got together during this remarkable year to shoot a film set in the Netherlands, with Giorgio Ferroni directing a cast of French, German and Italian actors in a story that seems like a mash-up of American horror concepts with rich European flavor.

Hans Van Arnim arrives in a Dutch town to research a paper about a windmill that Professor Wahl has turned into a kind of museum of infamy. The mill no longer turns grain, but operates a mechanical parade of doomed women of history: Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Mary Queen of Scots and others of more regional interest. It's not a very informative exhibit from what I can tell. The figures zoom across the stage as sinister carnival music plays, without any commentary or narration that I noticed. But the figures are exquisitely done, as Wahl is an expert sculptor and an instructor at the local university, where Hans's childhood sweetheart Liselotte is a student. It's a small enough town that the art school model Annelore also sings at the local tavern. She's quite the conspicuous young lady, and not a good choice if you're looking to kidnap girls off the streets, but that's what's in store for her.

Hans has the run of the mill, where Wahl also lives, and the situation is perhaps too intimate. Our hero hears the occasional wail and gets hints of a female presence that are finally confirmed by the appearance of the Professor's mysterious daughter Elfy. She's known of but not known well in the town, where it's rumored that she's a recluse because of unbearable ugliness. Hans finds out otherwise; she is strikingly beautiful in that haunted Gothic way. He learns that once Elfy makes relationships she can be quite possessive and jealous, and we can see the eye daggers Elfy aims at Liselotte when she visits Hans at the mill. Liselotte seems a frail girl, the kind that faints at something as innocuous by our jaded modern standards as the parade of statues, which has earned the little museum the "Mill of the Stone Women" name. Maybe it's just a tribute to Wahl's artistry that those statues can frighten someone so. They are pretty realistic as such things go.

Scilla Gabel as Elfy wishes you ill, like she is most of the time.

Elfy never leaves the mill because she's sickly herself. She has 24 hour on-site care from Dr. Bolem, who has a crush on the girl that is neither reciprocated by Elfy or really welcomed by her father. Details like these make work uncomfortable for Hans. You wonder whether this is one of those cons where the doctor is keeping the girl sickly so he can dominate her and live of the professor, but any doubts of her ill health are dispelled when she seems to drop dead before Hans's eyes in the middle of a jealous fit.

Hans takes it hard because he'd been warned not to agitate Elfy. He enters a self-induced delirium in which he seems to see Elfy in a coffin, then alive again, and in between those sightings, a familiar young woman tied to a chair. But the professor and the doctor assure Hans that his delirium was deeper than he thought. What's all this about Elfy dying, after all, when here she is alive and well?

Wolfgang Preiss, Fritz Lang's final incarnation of Dr. Mabuse, glowers as a secondary villain in Mill of the Stone Women.

All right, what is going on here? We want to share Hans's doubts, but once he leaves the mill we get straightened out pretty fast. Elfy suffers from a really bad blood disease that requires her to receive total transfusions to purge her system. Between them, the professor and the doctor can't figure a better way to go about this than to kidnap women of like age (like Annelore, we learn)and exsanguinate them to replenish Elfy. Their creativity went into the disposal method for the bodies: Mill of the "Stone Women," indeed! Bolem isn't thrilled about the arrangement, but he accepts it as long as it keeps Elfy alive. Even better, however, is the chance to permanently cure her through one more transfusion using the blood of a perfect donor, none other than Liselotte....

Herbert Boehme as Professor Wahl wishes to shield your eyes from the horrors to come. He went on to play a "Policemeister" on a long-running German cop show.

In some respects, Mill of the Stone Women is about twenty years behind American horror. What we have here, after all, is a cross between Mystery of the Wax Museum/House of Wax and any random Poverty Row horror where Bela or Boris has to kill women in order to keep his beloved alive. Eyes Without a Face may be an influence here as well, though I don't know if that was filmed early enough before to influence Ferroni and his writers. A key difference between that film and Mill, however, is that while Edith Scob's character in Eyes repudiates her father's ruthless attempts to kill her, Elfy is fully complicit in what her father and Dr. Bolem are up to. In one nasty scene she gloats over a strapped-down Liselotte at the thought of taking her life and her love away. My Gothic sensors initially registered Elfy as a victim, but she ends up just as much a villain as her father and the doctor. Selfishness is the undoing of all three characters, the professor's refusal to let Bolem have his daughter triggering the final catastrophe.

"No, Liselotte, I don't expect you to enjoy it. I expect you to die!"

I'm not sure if Mill is better described as a romantic Gothic or a Gothic romance: both elements are there. The direction, Arrigo Equini's production design and Pier Ludovico Pavoni's cinematography give the creaky plot a strong romantic tint; the Mondo Macabro DVD is simply beautiful to watch. Carlo Innocenzi's music is also very effective, proving again that the Italian composers could bring it before Morricone came along. Especially during the fiery finale, which is marred by a bad model of the windmill, the overall impression of sight, sound and story reminded me of Tim Burton and Danny Elfman's collaborations. Influenced strongly by past films, Mill may have had influence of its own later on. It may not have been as innovative as some of its Class of 1960 mates, but I think it's worthy of modest mention in their august company.

Here's the American trailer, uploaded to YouTube by Awoly.