The Book of Lists: Horror

by Wallace, Amy

  12. Flavia the Heretic (1974)

  Director: Gianfranco Mingozzi

  Stars: Florinda Bolkan, Claudio Cassinelli

  Not a horror film so much as one of the “nunsploitation” movies that followed hot on the habit of Ken Russell’s The Devils, this zoned-out feminist epic contains enough distinguishing characteristics to rise above its febrile peers. Set in fifteenth-century Italy, Mingozzi’s Gothic potboiler concerns a typically “frustrated” nun incarcerated in a Byzantine monastery that’s decorated by weirdly eroticized images of Saint Michael. Flavia (Florinda Bolkan, star of Don’tTortureaDuckling and Lizard in aWoman’s Skin) finds temptation in the unlikely form of hunky Jewish handyman Claudio Cassinelli (TheScorpionwithTwo Tails), leading to a series of visions and her eventual defection to the Muslim cause. Along the way, a tarantula cult shows up to inspire a pagan bacchanal, a black Madonna arrives by boat as a cover for a Muslim sneak attack, a naked nun emerges from the carcass of a dead cow, and people get impaled before the rebel nun is finally recaptured and skinned alive for her sins by resurgent Christians, thus restoring a patriarchal order of sorts to the beleaguered community. While fascinating, seductive, and thought-provoking by turns, Mingozzi’s fractured polemic is not exactly a date movie, but then if boys will be boys, why can’t girls be girls just once in a while?

  13. “Toby Dammit” from Histoires Extraordinaire (Spirits of the Dead) (1968)

  Director: Federico Fellini

  Stars: Terence Stamp, Toto

  The finest hour in Italian horror turns out to be exactly that, a short clocking in at just under sixty minutes and making up the final segment of an otherwise undistinguished anthology based on the works of Poe—Spirits of the Dead. Terence Stamp embodies the titular character as a failing, whiskey-sodden actor brought to Rome to star in the “first Catholic western,” who succumbs to temptation when he accepts a coveted Ferrari in return for appearing at the Golden She-Wolf awards. It is as if the director’s customary self-indulgence is held in check by the running time, and to my mind, Fellini delivers the best work of his career, with his usual supporting cast of grotesques being lent a cutting edge by the darker than usual material. The final passage, in which Stamp attempts to flee, only to become increasingly lost in the winding Neapolitan streets, is marvellously sustained. It becomes increasingly clear that on many levels the film is an homage to Mario Bava, a fact driven home by the reappearance of the irrationally terrifying ghost from Kill Baby. . . Kill (1967) at the Grand Guignol finale.

  Which, like the unfortunate Signor Dammit, brings us neatly in a circle.

  ALTERNATE INTERNATIONAL TITLES FOR

  EIGHT ITALIAN HORROR MOVIES

  1. Original Title: Cannibal Ferox (1981)

  Alternate Titles: Make Them Die Slowly; Woman from Deep River

  Director: Umberto Lenzi

  2. Original Title: Zombi 2 (1979)

  Alternate Titles: Zombie; Zombie Flesh-Eaters

  Director: Lucio Fulci

  3. Original Title: The Beyond (1981)

  Alternate Title: Seven Doors of Death

  Director: Lucio Fulci

  4. Original Title: Nightmare City (1980)

  Alternate Title: City of the Walking Dead

  Director: Umberto Lenzi

  5. Original Title: City of theLivingDead (1980)

  Alternate Title: The Gates of Hell

  Director: Lucio Fulci

  6. Original Title: Cannibal Apocalypse (1980)

  Alternate Titles: Cannibals in the Streets; Invasion of the Flesh Eaters

  Director: Antonio Margheriti

  7. Original Title: Tenebre (1982)

  Alternate Title: Unsane

  Director: Dario Argento

  8. Original Title: Phenomena (1985)

  Alternate Title: Creepers

  Director: Dario Argento

  — Compiled by S.B.

  MARK SAVAGE’S TEN FAVORITE

  AUSTRALIAN HORROR FILMS

  Mark Savage is an Australian director/writer whose most recent film, Defenceless, finds its horrors along Australia’s isolated southern coast. A lifelong horror fanatic (books and films), Savage maintains that his endless diet of international horror has made him a more balanced individual. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

  1. Mad Max (George Miller): This seminal exploitation classic plays like a futuristic Death Wish. Its fetishistic treatment of the automobile has echoes in David Cronenberg’s film of J. G. Ballard’s Crash.

  2. Razorback (Russell Mulcahy): A visually stunning, highly stylized “Jaws on land” that captures the stunning Australian landscape and boasts some truly surreal sequences.

  3. The Last Wave (Peter Weir): Weir’s subtle brand of mystical horror is a fascinating, dreamlike experience. Heavy on suggestion, and not keen to provide easy answers for the viewer.

  4. Bad Boy Bubby (Rolf de Heer): A grotesque and totally original fable with parallels to Hal Ashby’s Being There. The sequences involving cat suffocation and incest are worth the price of admission.

  5. Shame (Steve Jodrell): A criminally underrated, emotionally wrenching tale of a lawyer who goes to war with small-town elders harboring packs of teenage rapists. A modern western about a horrific situation.

  6. Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir): A subtle, ambiguous, and enigmatic ghost story that earned Weir worldwide acclaim. A beautifully photographed, extremely erotic tale of schoolgirls who disappear into a canyon. It leaves the viewer in a state of high anxiety.

  7. Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff): A schoolteacher’s terrifying experience in Australia’s hellish Outback. This is the most realistic depiction of the country’s darkest corners ever burned to film. The Canadian director captures the horror of absolute isolation and hopelessness, cleverly contrasted with beauty. A true classic.

  8. Vicious (Karl Zwicky): An obscure, nasty, home-invasion low budgeter that recalls aspects of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. Extremely well acted and directed with ice-cold efficiency.

  9. The Cars that Ate Paris (Peter Weir): An oddball drama about people living in isolation who prey on travelers. One of Weir’s earliest films, it focuses on the dangers of small-town bigotry and, like Mad Max, explores Australia’s fetishistic relationship with the automobile.

  10. Road Games (Richard Franklin): The wide-open spaces are put to good use by director Franklin, who was a student of Hitchcock’s and went on to direct Psycho 2. A creepy slasher in the Halloween vein that finds its horrors under the desert’s harsh sun.

  DAN MADIGAN’S TEN MOST INSANE, OUT-OF-THIS-WORLD

  MEXICAN HORROR MOVIES

  (IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER OF NUTTINESS)

  Dan Madigan is the author of Mondo Lucha A Go-Go: The Bizarre and Honorable World of Wild Mexican Wrestling, and screenwriter of the 2006 horror film See No Evil (starring wrestling superstar Kane). He’s worked behind the scenes in professional wrestling, as well as in the movie industry and rock ’n’roll. In other words, he has done everything parents warn their children not to do.

  1. The Brainiac (aka El Barón del Terror): Wow . . . how else would you describe a film that has a reincarnated warlock who was burned at the stake three hundred years ago coming back to take revenge on the descendants of his accusers (echoes of Mario Bava’s Black Sunday)? And not just a vengeful spirit, but a large-nosed, wiggly hook-handed, hairy forked-tongued demon that sucks the brains and souls from the back of its victim’s necks. Just good ol’ clean, wholesome fun. And director Chano Urueta had a role in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch! How’s that for badass trivia?

  2. The Living Coffin: Sometimes known as El Grito De La Muerte (The Cry of Death) in its native Mexico, this film has haunted haciendas, heroic cowboys and lazy sidekicks, hidden gold mines, ghosts . . . all the fixings of an old Monogram oater, something that fell out of the Sinister Cinema catalog. But it is a lot of fun. It’s atmospheric and never tries to pull away from its B-movie status for what it is and what we want from it. Real-life matador G
astón Santos plays the hero in this moody set piece picture. You have to give them credit for trying to combine two popular genres, horror and western, which doesn’t tend to work, but this is a gem from director Fernando Méndez, who could be called the Latino Terence Fisher.

  3. The Man and the Monster (aka El Hombre y el Monstruo): Here’s a great refried version of the Faustian metaphor with enough chilling atmosphere to cool down a jar of habañeros. It seems this guy Samuel wants to be the greatest piano player in the world, so much so that he is willing to sell his soul to Old Scratch himself. (I guess hard work and practice were too much to ask of him.) Anyway, things look rosy for good ol’ Sammy-boy until that demonic loophole makes its way into the picture; it seems every time he plays his signature song, he turns into a monster, and of course a bloody rampage follows. With more than a passing nod to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, this neat little tale is doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. Forget the fact that the makeup may not be up to par with what the great Jack Pierce used to produce; this is a fun film that should be enjoyed over a few cold cervezas.

  4. Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy: Sometimes known by the more musical moniker Rock ’n’RollWrestling Womenvs. the Aztec Mummy. Whatever you want to call it, this movie is out there, flying somewhere beyond the stratosphere. Any movie that gives you two female wrestlers in the buxom figures of Lorena Velázquez and Elizabeth Campbell in lieu of plot is okay in my book. In-ring action and wild fisticuffs with an ancient Aztec mummy and an Oriental villain named “Black Dragon” (whose evil epithet is out of a Doc Savage story) just adds to the surreal mulligan stew of this flick. Just sit back, switch your brain to off, and have a nice steamy bowl of wildness.

  5. Night of the Bloody Apes: Come on . . . if the title alone doesn’t get you, think about having that stick removed from your ass. . . . Director René Cardona not only remade his own 1962 deliciously demented film Doctor of Doom, he adds a nice amount of gratuitous gore and visceral nastiness (plus a hot Latina babe in a hot devil wrestling costume), actual footage of a graphic open heart surgery spliced in for good measure, and a crazed killer hybrid that is part leukemia-stricken boy and part crazed, murderous, woman-hating ape (read that last line again). This one is worth seeking out. You can keep your English Patients and your Brokeback Mountains. . . . I’ll take this pinnacle of Mexican exploitation.

  6. Santo in The Treasure of Dracula (Santo en El Tesoro de Drácula): Any way you put it, you have the greatest masked wrestler (enmascarado) in the world against the greatest undead bloodsucker of all time, a classic match of Ali-Frazier proportions. Plus, some more hot chicks (a lucha movie staple), hidden treasure, a Wayback time machine so cool that it would make Mr. Peabody sell Sherman into white slavery to get a crack at it, and a heap of “wrasslin’ ” make this one a winner. This film has El Santo inventing a time-machine (I guess he has time to do all his scientific stuff between working out and wrestling matches) with the most obnoxious sidekick this side of Joe Besser—Perico (Alberto Rojas), who is a combination irksome Jerry Lewis and annoying Arnold Stang. There is a more “adult” version floating around (featuring more female flesh), which I am dying to see, but the idea of Dracula going a few rounds with El Santo is what makes this film a classic in any version.

  7. Frankenstein, the Vampire, and Company: A Mexican version of Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein. Although stars Manuel “Loco” Valdez and Jose “Ojon” Jasso, of course, never come near the comic brilliance of Bud and Lou, this is a fun romp in south-of-the-border comedy and horror. The plot is virtually the same as the Abbott and Costello classic it apes, and there is a lot of fun in watching Frankenstein, the Vampire, and Wolfman envisioned through a Latino lens. This one is rarer than an honest man in a whorehouse; if you find even a half-decent copy, cherish it like the Shroud of Turin.

  8. El Vampiro and El Ataúd del Vampiro: You might as well count these two films as one. The Vampire and its sequel The Vampire’s Coffin are fun and moody journeys into the Dracula mythos. Although there is no Transylvanian count named Dracula, you get what the filmmakers were going for with German Robles reprising his role as Count Karol de Lavud in both films and star/producer Abel Salazar once again portraying the hero. You can tell that everyone behind the camera (including our old pal Fernando Méndez assuming the directorial duties again) had a real fondness for the Golden Age of Horror films that Universal released in the thirties. Grave robbers, stolen corpses, wax museums with the usual rogues’ gallery of waxen figures, large and empty hospitals dripping with atmosphere, vampires turning into large, obviously rubber, bats, and some unintentionally funny dialogue make these two worth adding to your international vampiric collection.

  9. El Violador Infernal aka The Hellish Rapist (must have taken a team of Class-A writers to come up with that title): What a deranged movie, I mean deranged. I saw this beauty without subtitles and was still blown away by the insanity of it all. A career criminal on the electric chair is given another chance at a life of crime by the Queen of Hell. This miscreant is no prince to begin with, but with a new lease on life, he becomes the Hispanic “No More Mr. Nice Guy.” The guy is an equal-opportunity rapist, buggering his dying gay boyfriend while carving “666” into the poor schmuck’s behind, and violating women like it was going out of style. Sodomy and Satanism have never gone so well together, the peanut butter and jelly of antisocial behavior. Watch it with a loved one.

  10. La Vengaza de los Punks: Bad hair, sub-substandard production values, an insane storyline, and enough eighties leather to outfit ten Krokus videos—how could you not want to see this one? Not so much a horror film as just plain horrific (as in, so horrifically bad that it is a must-see), this features a group of punks (hence the title) on a rape-murder-rape rampage (did I mention rape, the group’s pastime?). This posse of juvenile delinquents (the youngest of whom is probably in his early thirties) is comprised of some outcasts from a Surf Nazis Must Die convention. The flick’s ripoff of Mad Max’s visuals only shows how incredibly awesome The Road Warrior really is. With a Mexican Lord Humongous (who changes from one dreadful costume to the next, practically scene by scene); his pudgy (no, excuse me, fat) leather-clad hellwench; his gang of inept miscreants drenched in peroxide, studded leather wristbands, and magnificently god-awful makeup (if the Village People gang-raped Liberace, this group would be the offspring of that unholy union); anal impalements, death by scorpion-bites, bodies burned with a flamethrower, eyes gouged out—this is one for the books . . . if your books are geared towards bad taste bordering on trash.

  MATTEO MOLINARI’S TEN FAVORITE

  HORROR MOVIE BLOOPERS

  Matteo Molinari was born in Genoa, Italy. Among his talents is Movie Watching, an activity at which he excels. After watching movies over and over again, Matteo has developed the uncanny ability of noticing things. Wrong things, mainly. That’s why he’s become one of the leading experts, if there is such a thing, on Movie Bloopers. After four books (two in Italy and two in the United States), Matteo is still searching for bloopers, even as he contemplates finding a real job just to pay some bills.

  1. Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein: After a tug-o-war between the Wolfman and Count Dracula has left him spinning on a gurney in the lab, Chick (Bud Abbott) yells so loudly as to awaken the Frankenstein monster. Menacingly, the monster slowly turns his head . . . and the bolt on the right rips away from his neck! (01:16)

  2. Aliens (also Director’s Cut): When Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) opens the space door in order to expel the queen, little Newt (Carrie Henn) is sucked like everything else toward the shaft and she slides across the floor. The remaining half of Bishop (Lance Henriksen) reaches to grab the girl, and in doing so, reveals the hole on the floor where the still-in-one-piece actor is hiding. (02:11 / DC 02:28)

  3. Halloween: Little Michael Myers spies on his sister and her boyfriend. They go in her room to make out, and the following Panaglide shot happens in real time. So, since the lights go off and then the boyfriend gets dressed a
nd leaves, they make out for 65 seconds. Talk about a quickie! (00:03, 00:04)

  4. Jaws: Brody (Roy Scheider) types the report on Chrissie’s death: it states, “Date/Time Original III./Inc. 7–1–74, 11:50 PM” and “Date/Time Deceased Discovered 7–2–74, 10:20 PM.” Later on, by the council chamber, a sign offers a reward to capture the shark that killed Alex M. Kintner on Sunday, June 29. But Alex was killed after Chrissie. Hmm . . . And, while we’re at it, June 29, 1974, was a Saturday—not a Sunday. (00:09, 00:18)