31 DAYS OF HORROR 2023 - Day 6: CAGED VIRGINS (1971)

Scooby-Doo this ain't. 

After committing a murder (that we are told of in retrospect) while dressed as party clowns (don't ask), we meet our two lesbian protagonists (Marie-Pierre Castel and Mireille Dargent) as they, and a male accomplice, flee the authorities along the rural back roads of France. A gun battle ensues and the male is killed, so the girls leave the body in the car, which they then set ablaze, after which they set off into the desolate rural fields with no idea where they are. Their wanderings eventually lead them to a remote and apparently abandoned chateau that turns out to be the home of a cabal of vampires, their slaves, and several chained-up and naked women whom the slaves merrily molest, torture, and violate. After being bitten and mind-controlled by vampire bats, the girls witness the considerable debauchery perpetrated upon the prisoners in the dungeon only to awaken the next morning, themselves unharmed. When they attempt to escape, no matter which direction they may run, all paths lead back to the chateau. What horrible fate will befall our heroines, and why is the influence of the chateau keeping them there? Can they make it out alive, or is there a more sinister purpose at play? 

Originally released in its native France as REQUIEM POUR UN VAMPIRE, CAGED VIRGINS plays like a modern day Grimm's fairy tale for adults, as its story is a simple tale of two girls lost in the middle of nowhere and menaced by baleful forces. It has very little dialogue and allows the audience to witness the events without too much unneeded exposition, which renders roughly the first third of the film to be a very slow burn with the girls endlessly and silently wandering until they run into the vampires. But once the vampires show up, whoo-BOY, it's off to the races as the slaves avail themselves to the shackled nubiles. There's an extended sequence of softcore groping of damned near every inch of the prisoners' bodies, which are rendered naked as the slaves gleefully tear the meager clothing from the women. I can't speak for the rest of you, but I always find it comforting to see displays of Euro armpit hair and shaggy '70's bush, and this film is not stingy with those elements. Short of graphic closeups of genitals or penetration, anything goes, including flagellation and torment with lit candles, so keep that in mind if your tolerance runs more toward the vanilla. 

I should also mention a now-infamous shot of one of the captive being orally pleasured by a vampire bat, which brings up a number of ideas that even this film saw fit not to explore further. My first exposure to this film was seeing an image of the cunning linguist bat going to work in a coffee table book on Euro horror owned by a friend — an image his parents had no clue about, I can assure you — and it blew my mind. It took nearly fifty years for me to finally witness the movie for myself, and that image remains indelible. Hell, they even saw fit to include it in the trailers shown in U.S. grindhouses back in the days, and the sight of it must have gone over a treat with the regulars.

Shaggy '70's bush and a friendly vampire bat. Just another evening in the Gallic countryside.

Dripping with atmosphere and very European in its flavor and frank approach to sex and nudity, CAGED VIRGINS is definitely worth a look for the curious, but don't go into it expecting any scares or gore. All that's on its mind is its eerie dreamlike vibe and getting away with as female nudity and sex as possible. I have nothing against prurient material, but when I'm given what's supposed to be a horror film, I expect at least a bit of dark frisson.  Then again, this is reportedly typical of the output of director Jean Rollin, for whom this is but one of his forays into blending the nighttime world of the undead suckface with that of the softcore tenderloin cinema. Prior to this I had seen only one of Rollin's other vampire films, namely LA VAMPIRE NUE (THE NAKED VAMPIRE, 1970), which I found to be a crushing bore, but Rollin redeemed himself to me with this effort, and I now look forward to seeing where else he goes when exploring this niche of fetishistic horror. I mean, how do you top a pussy-eating vampire bat? I, for one, am quite curious to find out.

Poster for the U.S. release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2023 - Day 5: THE DEAD DON'T DIE (2019)

 

Just another day for Iggy Pop.

 So... THE DEAD DON'T DIE, a film that's very much the baby of its singular director, Jim Jarmusch. It's basically "NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) set during a time of environmental science denial in the Trump landscape," so it's more political than one might think after seeing the trailers. It also references the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and DAWN OF THE DEAD in a number of ways (in-jokes and zombie rules), and though a comedy, it's about as played-straight and dryly delivered as a comedy can possibly be. It has just enough gore to please the more sanguinary/offal-minded audience members and Adam Driver and Tilda Swinton steal the move, but the film is a VERY slow burn that may not be for all tastes. Lastly, I cannot really go into plot details as that would spoil some major plot surprises — and I do mean MAJOR — so I'll just say that I recommend it, but mostly for Jarmusch groupies and horror comedy completists.

Poster for the theatrical release.
 

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2023 - Day 4: LOOK WHAT'S HAPPENED TO ROSEMARY'S BABY (1976)

"Arise, o mime of Satan... ARISE!!!"

 

1968's ROSEMARY'S BABY is about as close to perfection as a movie can get, and it's been hailed as a masterpiece of the horror genre for just shy of fifty years. Its open ending left the audience wanting more, but what we got was immensely satisfying, so it was best left where it was. But then came the 1970's and the era of cheap and sleazy made-for-TV movies that provided exploitation and horror thrills without the viewer having to leave their home and shell out the price of a movie ticket. There were a few memorable examples of the trend, but the majority of made-for-TV flicks were utter schlock, an estimation that is rather more kind than the wretched lot deserves. So who in their right mind would think it was a good idea to craft a sequel to a genuine classic as a product of a sausage factory of bad 1970's network TV fare? Surely, nothing good could come of that, and sure enough, nothing did.

The film is divided into three sections: 

The Book of Rosemary.  

Oscar-winner Patty Duke steps in for Mia Farrow (who had the good sense not to get involved with this).

 We open eight years after the climax of ROSEMARY'S BABY, and we find Rosemary (now played by Oscar-winner Patty Duke) and devil-spawn Adrian living within the smothering clutches of the original film's old fogey satanic coven. Ruth Gordon returns as Minnie Castevet, while Ray Milland replaces Sidney Blackmer as Roman Castevet, and the talents of both are utterly wasted as their coven leader characters are reduced to cartoonish caricatures who would have fit in well in any given installment of SCOOBY-DOO...WHERE ARE YOU? Anyway, a downtrodden Rosemary escapes from the coven's enclave, promising to take Adrian (whom she calls Andy) away to someplace nice, where it's always sunny and never dark. THe coven, however, ain't having that, so Roman calls up Guy Woodhouse (George Maharis, replacing John Cassavetes), the rat bastard who sold Rosemary out as Satan's broodmare in the first place, and tells him to expect his estranged wife to drop in with the child. Fleeing by charter bus, mother and son take the opportunity to call Guy during a roadside rest stop, and while Rosemary demands money from Guy (whose wealth and success is due to him pimping Rosemary out to the Devil), threatening to kill her son if she does not get the cash, the boy is bullied by a group of asshole kids, so he snaps and attacks them in a fit of red-eyed demonic fury. Rosemary and the boy are herded away from the mayhem by Marjean (Tina Louise), a hooker who plies her trade at the bus station, but Marjean is immediately taken over and controlled by the coven, and through her efforts Rosemary ends up on a one-way bus ride (in a bus with no driver) to what one can guess is Hell. Adrian is then dropped into Marjean's car and the pair make their way back to the coven. Roman decides that living in dark seclusion like a mushroom is no good for Adrian, so from then on he must live as part of the light as well.

The Book of Adrian.  

We skip ahead by over 20 years, and the now adult Adrian (Stephen McHattie) lives as Marjean's ward at a casino that she runs on some barren roadside. As he nears his 30th birthday, Roman and Minnie show up again to note that Jesus didn't get his powers until he turned 30, so now it's time for Adrian to be "blooded" — translation: he must kill an innocent — in order for his diabolical powers to manifest. Roman plans to make a big thing out of it, inviting Guy and the rest of the coven for the ritual, and on the big night, Minnie drugs Adrian and has him prepared with ritual face paint and jazz dance unitard that makes him look like he escaped from a roadshow production of GODSPELL, and soon makes his way onto the casino's dance floor, where a stereotypical '70's psychedelic band plays a hypnotic rhythm. All of this builds to what we think will be Adrian going full-on Devilman, but instead all he does is flail about among the dance floor revelers and eventually go outside to pass out in the dirt after Guy electrocutes Adrian's wholesome best friend. In other words, the ritual is a failure and fuck all happens.

The Book of Andrew.

Ride 'em, cowgirl!!!

We then skip forward by three years and find Adrian in a mental institution. After the failure of the ritual, he becomes comatose and is only just starting to come out of it. Plagued by dim memories of his mother and being called "Andrew" when he was little, he is befriended by one of the staff's doctors (Donna Mills), who helps him escape. Convinced the coven still has plans for him despite being a washout in the son of Satan department, Adrian and the doctor hole up in a motel, where she drugs him and reveals herself as a member of the cult. They do indeed have plans for him, specifically having the doctor impregnate herself with Adrian's seed, thus ensuring the birth of a girl child who will hopefully succeed where Adrian failed. Once the deed is done, Adrian staggers outside and is nearly run over by guy, who has been pressured by the coven to kill our protagonist. Instead, guy strikes the doctor, crashing his car and killing himself in the process. Adrian then runs off into the night along a highway, off to who knows what fate. The last thing we see is Roman and Minnie again, passing themselves off as the doctor's grandparents and being told by an ER physician that the doctor survived the car crash and she will have a perfectly healthy pregnancy. The credits roll over images of the baby being born, thus portending a sequel that thankfully never came.

Oooooh, scary... NOT.

LOOK WHAT'S HAPPENED TO ROSEMARY'S BABY is an utterly unmemorable dud that's not even so bad it's good. It's stupid, boring, not scary in the least, and it utterly squanders its potential. All the buildup of Adrian ultimately manifesting into a world-ending entity amounts to absolutely nothing, with him looking like any random '70's-era burnout who's staggering home along along a highway after eight tabs of acid at an Allman brothers festival show. Roman and Minnie are now mustache-twirling caricatures of themselves, possessing none of the extremely effective and subtle menace that they wielded in the original film. Plus, exactly how fucking old are they? They were at least in their seventies in the first film, so by the end of this sequel they would have to be around one-hundred years old, and they are still going strong at the end. Diabolically-granted delayed aging? Whatever the case, they just came off as ridiculous.

The script does none of the actors any favors, especially not Oscar-winners Patty Duke, Ray Milland, and Ruth Gordon, and the whole thing looks and feels like any one of the legion of cheapjack '70's teevee shows filled with fast cars, dusty Californian back roads, and point-and-shoot pedestrian direction. There is no artistry to be had here — admittedly, Roman Polanski is a hard act to follow — and all that we get is a colossal bore and a waste of time. ROSEMARY'S BABY was my favorite horror movie for a long time, and this film is a mockery of its excellence. I had not seen this since its original network airing in 1976, and man, what a stinker. It is to ROSEMARY'S BABY what EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC is to THE EXORCIST, only nowhere near as unintentionally hilarious or entertaining. It's a disappointment in every way that just lays there like a dead cat. Skip this one. Don't even watch it out of morbid curiosity. Stay home and mine your own buttcrack instead.

TV GUIDE ad from the original television airing.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2023 - Day 3: FRIGHT NIGHT (1985)

 

There goes the neighborhood: When an undead suckface moves in next door.

Teenage horror movie addict Charlie Brewster (William Ragsdale) notes unusual goings-on at the house next door when handsome Jerry Dandridge (Chris Sarandon), such as a coffin being loaded into the house in the middle of the night, and the studly new neighbor bringing home random women who are never seen again. Charlie observes his neighbor from afar, but one night he notes Dandridge luring a hot morsel to the house and into his bedroom. Charlie settles in for some good ol' voyeurism, but instead of getting to creepily watch his neighbor shagging the nubile woman, Charlie gets an eyeful of Dandridge's unnaturally long fingers and pronounced canine as he closes in for the kill. Yes, Jerry Dandridge is a straight-up vampire, and Dandridge notices Charlie peeping on him. His vampire nature revealed, Dandridge locks eyes with Charlie and lowers the shade. Knowing that an actual vampire resides right next door, a terrified Charlie struggles to make his best friend (Stephen Geoffreys) and girlfriend (a pre-MARRIED...WITH CHILDREN Amanda Bearse) believe that there's a bloodthirsty monster next door, but when his raving falls on deaf ears, Charlie enlists the aid of Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall), once an actor renowned  for his roles as a stalwart vampire hunter but now a washed-up has-been who hosts a horror movie showcase at a local TV station. As all of this is going on, Jerry begins terrorizing Charlie and threatening his loved ones, with Charlie's girlfriend catching his attention. It's only a matter of time until all hell breaks loose, and when it does, will Charlie be up to the challenge?

When FRIGHT NIGHT hit movie screens in late summer of 1985, it landed during the fifth year of the horror box office being deluged with endless slasher films cynically made in order to ride the lucrative returns of HALLOWEEN (1978) and FRIDAY THE 13th (1980). During that period the onslaught of slashers was relentless, and due to such films being cheap to make, they just kept on coming and most of them sucked out loud. Showers of blood and gore do not necessarily make for a scary night at the movies, but the filmmakers for the most part did not care, as long as the charnel house thrills brought in the bucks. So when FRIGHT NIGHT arrived, it was a breath of fresh air that harked back to the old school horror flicks of bygone decades. The script was solid, the performances were all on target, its eerie atmosphere was just right, and the practical effects were leagues better than anything found in most of the contemporary hack-'em-ups. It was just what we needed at the time, and I especially loved it for having the feel of the horror movies that first made me fall in love with the genre during my formative years.

I avoided going into more detail regarding the plot, as it's a movie best approached with as little knowledge of the particulars, so trust me when I steer you toward this one. In a decade in which horror films (along with testosterone-fueled action movies) reigned supreme at the box office, whether they were actually any good or not, FRIGHT NIGHT is a true gem of a throwback. There's minor nudity, a reasonable amount of profanity, and some scary and gory visuals, but it's nothing that kids ten and older couldn't handle, so sit the young 'uns through this one. My only suggestion is that they see some of Hammer's vampire flicks as a prerequisite.

Poster for the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2023 - Day 2: WEDNESDAY (2022 Netflix series)

Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) drops some friends in for a bite.

 

So, I watched WEDNESDAY and was entertained, but it had several issues.

If you are an Addams Family fan, this show focuses on Wednesday Addams and Thing (who's her literal right hand man), with periodic minor appearances from most of the other regular characters, with Lurch and Pugsley coming off with the least to do. 

 

The show's setup is a gene-splicing of Hogwarts and Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, with the teen angst one expects from a CW tweener drama series, and it cannot make up its mind if the overall tone is meant to be humorous or horrifying with the assorted shenanigans bearing potentially serious and even lethal consequences. (We are informed that Wednesday's revenge prank involving dumping hungry piranhas into her previous school's swimming pool costs the offending swim team jock a testicle, and there are several savage mutilations and murders.) 

 

If you ask me it's not quite sure what it wants to be, but I found the cast engaging — Jenna Ortega as Wednesday and Emma Myers as late-blooming werewolf Enid Sinclair are my favorites — and the "monster rally" aspect was a lot of fun, so I will be back for more when the second season drops. When that comes to pass, I hope more time is taken and more thought is put into really figuring out a cohesive flavor and tone for the proceedings.

Oh, and extra points for supporting actress Gwendoline Christie (aka GAME OF THRONES Brienne of Tarth — YUM!!!) as Principal Weems, and also for the superb deployment of the Cramps' classic "Goo-Goo Muck" during a school dance sequence. 

"'Cause I'm a goo-goo muck tiger and a teenage beast..."

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2023 - Day 1: SCARS OF DRACULA (1970)

During last year's run of 31 DAYS OF HORROR, one of my goals was to cover all of Hammer's Dracula series, but it turns out that I neglected one of them. I knew I had seen all of them, most quite recently at the time, but upon reviewing all of the entries I noted that SCARS OF DRACULA slipped my mind. I watched it again the other day by way of a refresher, and I now understand why I forgot about it. It's not bad by any means, but for what one expects from a Hammer Dracula film, it's well-mounted but utterly generic. It reads as a how-to guide for how to construct one of these shockers, with only a few elements being true highlights.

Count Dracula has been destroyed and his desiccated remains lay atop an altar in an impenetrable tower of his castle. A puppet bat arrives and pukes blood onto the pile of ashes where the Count's head would be, and in no time Christopher Lee is back as cinema's most majestic and imposing iteration of Bram Stoker's arch-villain. He of course immediately embarks on slaughtering hot, bosomy young women, so the local villages take up their torches, pitchforks, and a good amount of highly combustible fuel and storm the castle. There they encounter Dracula's slave, Klove (well-played by Patrick Troughton, best known as the second Doctor on DOCTOR WHO), who tries to keep the throng at bay, but his efforts are unsuccessful as the villagers torch the castle. Dracula, however, is untouched by the conflagration, and he immediately revenges himself upon the townsfolk by slaying all of the town's women, who thought they were safe by being sequestered in a church.

Meanwhile in another town, studly young rakehell Paul Carlson (Christopher Matthews) is falsely accused of rape by the mayor's nubile daughter when he opts to leave her very welcoming bed to attend his brother's fiancee's birthday party, so Paul flees the home of the irate mayor (which allows us generous glimpses of his daughter's juicy bare backside) with the constabulary hot on his heels. He drops in on the party, only for the fuzz to arrive, so he escapes out the window and into a convenient carriage. The carriage bolts off without a driver, eventually coming to a halt in the town plagued by the count. It's just after dusk so Paul seeks refuge at the tavern owned by the leader of the torch-wielding peasants. He is gruffly turned away, only to wander into the nearby woods and find a driverless coach. Paul boards the coach and falls asleep, but the coach is not driverless. It's driven by Dracula's slave, Klove, and upon arrival at the ruined castle, Paul is greeted by the Count and Tania (Anouska Hempel). He is shown to a room and given lodging for the night, but Paul is soon visited by a clearly terrified Tania, who states that she is both Dracula's mistress and a prisoner, and she begs Paul to "love" her. Paul, knowing a good thing when he sees one, obliges and eagerly puts the bone to Dracula's sex slave. When the rumpy-pumpy is over, Tania attempts to put the bite on Paul — I'm impressed that she enjoyed his attentions enough to wait until after to do the undead suckface thing — but Drac bursts in and, none too pleased, savagely stabs Tania repeatedly with a dagger. 

 

The Count gets uncharacteristically stabby.

While Paul is relegated in one of the tower's inescapable rooms, Klove dismembers Tania body and dissolves its components in a tub of acid.

Paul's utter stiff of a brother, Simon (Dennis Waterman), sets off in search of his ne'er-do-well sibling with chaste fiancee Sarah (Jenny Hanley) in tow, and in no time they make their way to the hostile pub from which Paul was turned away, and they make their way to the Count's castle. You can guess the rest.

Paul: Hanging around in Dracula's tower. 

Other than some very alluring women in the forms of the mayor's cheeky daughter, a very friendly tavern wench (who tried in vain to warn Paul away from going to the castle), and the horny vampiress, the film is very much by the numbers, though Paul makes for a fun quasi-protagonist. He's more lively than damned near any other mortal male who finds himself crossing paths with Dracula (Van Helsing notwithstanding, but he's not present for this one), and he gets extra points for being an unrepentant poon-hound who beds a hot vampire and survives (though he does meet a nasty fate later on). Tania the vampire is a blend of the eerie, the alluring, and the tragic, and I genuinely felt bad when she got done in so cruelly. Klove is by far the most interesting of Dracula's slaves throughout the series, enduring some horrific cruelty from the Count yet being helpless to do anything other than serve him faithfully. 

Klove receives punishment by way of a red hot sword blade.

Unlike some of the previous entries, Dracula actually speaks a good deal in this one, which is always welcome as Christopher Lee is far more than just an imposing visual. We also get a bit cribbed straight out of Stoker, specifically the bit where Dracula is see crawling up the castle walls like a bat making its way to its nest. It's creepy as hell and I wish there had been other such bits to be had.

Like I said, SCARS OF DRACULA is not bad, but rather a case of "here we go again" with little new being put on the table. I first saw it during a late-night airing on New York City's Channel 5 one weekend when I was twelve and I liked it quite a lot. It may have been my first Hammer Dracula, and it was definitely a breath of fresh air from the less-visceral Dracula flicks from the times before the advent of Hammer's specific style and flavor, but it's definitely a mid-level entry among the Christopher Lee era. When it comes to the studio's Christopher Lee-led undead suckface movies. 1968's DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE is by far the standout, with the non-Lee BRIDES OF DRACULA (1960) being perhaps the best of Hammer's Dracula franchise, so seek those out instead.

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2023 - INTRO

Well, it's that time of year again, when haints and ghouls roam the nighttime landscape. When hockey-masked embodiments of murder do their thing while werewolves stalk their prey. In short, it's the month of Halloween and once more I task myself with expounding upon the horror genre in all its dark and eerie glory. It has not been an easy year, as I am dealing with my 90-year-old mother's waning health as well as my own health issues, including the tedium of ongoing dialysis and getting used to proper ambulation in the wake of my left big toe being amputated due to an open wound and infection that just would not heal after months of treatment and surgery, so once more immersing myself into the darker realms of entertainment is just what I need. I hope you enjoy this year's round of movies, TV shows, and whatever else that falls within the purview of this annual project, and suggest that you use the essays as a springboard for further exploration of your own. A monster kid's quest for lore and knowledge is never-ending, so here's to all of our continuing education!