Burl reviews Edge of the Axe! (1987)

 

¡Hoy! ¡Hoy! It’s Burl here to review an Iberian/Californian co-production slasher picture from the venerable Spanio-English director José Ramón Larraz, who of course also brought us Scream…and Die! His pictures from the 1970s had a certain sleazy something, but by the late 80s he was taking a different approach, and that’s all too evident in his slasher picture Edge of the Axe!

The action is set in the woods of California, though some of the killing scenes were clearly shot later, probably back in Spain, because they involve characters and locations that are never part of the main action! But the first murder is set in a car wash, and I have to say that one is not badly done, though it’s competently shot enough that you can easily see how it might have been done better still! Ha ha, is that churlish? I hope not! But the scene serves to show us what the deal is in this picture: a white-masked axeman giving the chop to seemingly random ladies!

From there we meet our two main characters, who also serve as our two main suspects! We’ve got computer nerd Gerald, played by Barton Faulks from Future-Kill, and Page Mosely from Girls Nite Out as an exterminator called Richard Simmons! He’s married to an older wealthy lady named Laura, played by Patty Shepard from The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman, and she’s worried, quite rightly, that her vermin-killing husband might be playing bohankie with other ladies on the side!

In fact he is carrying on with another lady, and taking her on motorboat rides in fact, while meanwhile Gerald has met Lillian, played by Christina Marie Lane from The Allnighter! He presents her with a computer, upon which she immediately pastes a picture of Dudley Do-Right, and hooks her up to a proto-Internet so they can play games together and communicate in a sort of email system that reads aloud all their messages in a hollow, echoing, affectless voice! During all this the chop crimes continue, and law enforcement in the town is represented by the crustiest, least helpful sheriff in slasher movie history, played by Fred Holliday from Airport, who, after four or five axe murders, remarks that this could develop into an ugly situation! Ha ha, this fellow is like the angry Far Side version of Chief Newby from My Bloody Valentine!

While the exterminator and his new girlfriend sort of fade from the story, faces familiar from Iberian horror pop up throughout the film: Alicia Moro from Slugs, Jack Taylor from Pieces, and Conrado San Martín from The Awful Dr. Orloff all make appearances, and more often than not get the chop! As more and more townsfolk are forced to undergo the major barbarisms, and corpses pop up everywhere, sometimes literally, it’s easy to forget that this axe murderer also counts among his victims a pig, a dog, and a fish! The dog in particular made me sad – he looked like a nice little guy!

The end has more twists than a chimp’s beanbucket, or anyway seems to, and I’ll confess that between the muddy VHS sound and the forced air furnace of my home some of the dialogue was lost, and I didn’t always follow what was what and who was who in that climax! But I know that Lane’s performance as Lillian was a pretty good one, and that’s maybe in part a testament to Larraz’s years of experience too! But apparently he thinks of this one as his worst picture, and ha ha, I’m in no rush to challenge him on that! I'll commend him, though, for including a few actual Special Makeup Effects in his movie, mostly in the form of corpses discovered later, but there are a few chopped fingers and such too! All in all, I give Edge of the Axe one and a half Color of Money posters!

Burl reviews Night of the Howling Beast! (1975)

 

With a Spanish aroooo, it’s Burl, here to review some Iberian lycanthropy! Yes, ha ha, it’s our good and great friend Paul Naschy again, and here’s he’s playing his most beloved character, Waldemar Daninsky, just as he did in The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman, but didn’t in House of Psychotic Women! Poor Waldemar just can’t catch a break, and such is the case again in this picture, Night of the Howling Beast!

After an opening in which a gang of explorers in the Himalayas is attacked by a yeti who looks, sounds, and acts just like a werewolf, Waldemar is called in by The Professor to lead a follow-up expedition! He’s happy to do it, and happier still that The Professor’s comely daughter, and another beautiful science lady as well, will be participating! There are a few others in the party, including one fellow whose name is Lawrence Talbot, but who never comes close to becoming a werewolf himself, ha ha! No, he has to settle for merely being vertically impaled by Tatars midway through the picture!

On arriving in Nepal (played here by the Pyrénées), the party is split up, with Waldemar and the sketchy, perennially frightened local guide Joel heading off to find a pass through the snowy mountains! Joel runs off and Waldemar ends up in a cave inhabited by ladies who might be vampires or might be werewolves, but in any case they can’t keep their hands off the refrigerator physique of our hero, and this occasions much bum-wiggling sex! Once Waldemar realizes they’re flesh-eating creatures from beyond reality, he goes on an impaling jag; but before he can dispatch both ladies, one of them puts a chomping on his left tit! Ha ha, uh oh!

Now of course he’s a werewolf, and meanwhile the rest of the expedition is beset by the above-mentioned Tatars, who kill or kidnap everybody! Their leader, the Khan, has a skin condition on his back, and the witch in his employ is trying to remedy the ailment by peeling off other people’s backs and sticking it on the Khan’s! Yowch! Meanwhile there’s still a yeti, or yetis, running around, and Waldemar is periodically wolfing out, and what to do about these darn Tatars and their evil witch?

There’s a bit of a lull in the action around the middle of the picture while Waldemar and The Professor’s daughter hang out with a monk and his pal, but it’s nothing serious! There’s plenty going on at the Khan’s castle once Waldemar and the daughter arrive there, though! And the long-heralded battle between the yeti and the werewolf finally happens at the end, and it’s sometimes hard to tell one from the other!

As well, there’s time taken to give a happy ending in which the mystical flower is discovered by The Professor’s daughter right after the monster fight! Once she pushes a magic flower-blood combo into the werewolf’s toothy mouth, carefully, as you would, he reverse-pixilates into his Waldemar form and what’s more his wound seems to have healed! The last we see is the pair of them tromping off through the Himalayas in their leisurewear! Ha ha!

It’s pretty gnashy Naschy when all is said and done, and I enjoyed the picture, even if it gets a little sadistic here and there! Naschy didn’t himself direct this one, the better perhaps to direct his thespian attentions to the various ladies that want to “go ‘pon his bones for a touch of bohankie,” as they say! Yes, it’s solid Naschy, as solid as his own chest appears to be, and there's no doubt he knew just what his audience wanted to see, and gave it to them! Night of the Howling Beast is also known as The Werewolf and the Yeti, and by the end it earns that title, so I’ll give the picture two chomp marks!

Burl reviews Tombs of the Blind Dead! (1971)

Hola friends, it’s Burl here with a taste of Iberian horror for you! Yes, I’m here to review the very first installment in the four-film Blind Dead series, Tombs of the Blind Dead! I’d never seen any of these pictures and had always been curious about them; now that I have lived to tell the tale, I can pass on my findings to you!

I knew going in that these were essentially zombie pictures, with the twist being that the zombies are blind! Ha ha, they also ride horses, which I think is a pretty marvelous variation on the theme! They seem to have some kind of an agenda over and above that of the usual zombie, but it remains obscure! Finally, like most zombies these fellows enjoy putting a biting on their victims, but ingestion doesn’t seem to be a part of the program! In other words, these guys don’t bite to eat, they bite for the sheer pleasure of biting! Ha ha!

Well I’ll tell you! I watched the full-length Spanish version of the movie, and I can tell you that there’s a good deal of telenovela about it! It starts with two old school chums, Betty and Virginia, reuniting by chance at a fabulous seaside swimming bath in Lisbon! It seems they used to be very very close with one another, but now Virginia has a muttonchop boyfriend named Roger; or at least he appears to be her boyfriend, though there is much talk about them being “just friends!”

Anyway, all of them end up on the world’s slowest-moving train, and Virginia ends up jumping off and walking to an abandoned medieval town with a lot of its real estate occupied by graveyards! Ha ha! Virginia beds down for the night, but bearded, skeletal monk zombies pop up from their tombs, chase poor Virginia around and put a dreadful biting on her!

She herself is briefly zombified, until a conflagration in a mannequin factory that is; and then the rest of the characters, along with a couple of new ones, end up back in the town; zombie monks; bitings and choppings; Betty is chased back to that slowbones little train, and after an eternity of trying to get her onto the darn choo choo, the old beardos climb on too and put pokings and bitings on everyone! Ha ha, and there’s a definite feeling of apocalypto at the end, as so often in European zombie movies!

The soap opera drags it down a bit, but the zombies are great, and actually pretty scary! They ride horses who can only run in slow motion, and that works pretty well too, even if it looks a bit silly when Betty’s riding one, as she briefly does! It gets a bit rapey, unfortunately, so that interrupted my enjoyment! But there was enjoyment, plenty of it, right from the great swimming pool seen at the beginning! I give Tombs of the Blind Dead two and a half flaming backsides!

Burl reviews The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman! (1970)

El lobo fantastic, it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to review another effort from Paul Naschy, the Iberian Chaney Jr., who of course also starred in House of Psychotic Women! This picture is called The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman (though I saw it under the title Blood Moon), and it’s one of the many movies in which old Naschy plays his tragic continuing character Count Waldemar Daninsky!

Having evidently been “killed” in the previous installment of the Daninsky saga, this picture opens with old Waldemar on a slab as a haughty coroner digs out the silver bullets from his chest! Ha ha, this proves an unwise gambit, as Waldemar soon sprouts a shaggy growth on his face and puts a biting on the coroner and his pal! Then the bulky lycanthrope moves into a large house in the country, the sort avoided by sensible villagers, especially around Walpurgis Night!

Ah yes, Walpurgis Night! It sits on the opposite side of the calendar as Halloween, but it’s apparently just as spooky, as Waldemar emphasizes to the two nubile young ladies who show up at his castle after they suffer car trouble while hunting for the resting place of a notorious witch! Waldemar is looking for the very same witch, so everyone gets along splendidly! Ha ha, one of the ladies even falls in love with Waldemar!

But of course there are complications! The witch is also a hemogobbler, and she’s resurrected easily enough when one of the ladies cuts herself over the grave! Isn’t that always the way, ha ha! Then for a while we get alternating werewolf and vampire attacks, some of them pretty bloody but not memorably so! The vampiress is often shown approaching her victims in slow motion and this produces a genuinely eerie effect – I think it’s more successful here than it was in those Blind Dead pictures, and this picture came first!

But for the most part it’s a pretty talky picture, and you have to wait a long time for the promised monster mash! The climax, when it comes, is a bit of a disappointment! Waldemar spends the whole picture worrying and warning about the horrors of Walpurgis Night, but not a whole lot seems to happen on that fateful evening! Nothing more out of the ordinary than has already been occurring, anyway!

So that’s too bad, but the matted werewolf makeup and Naschy’s committed performance from beneath it will certainly keep you interested! There are pretty ladies and spooky scenes, and a monster battle with a foamy disintegration at the end – ha ha, what more do you want! I’m going to give The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman two painted-on widow’s peaks!

Burl reviews Viridiana! (1961)

¡Hoy! It’s Burl! I’m here to review a picture for you, a Luis Buñuel picture in fact! I’m a big Buñuel fan, but I’d never seen this one! Ha ha, it reminded me an awful lot of another one of his movies that I’ve already reviewed, Simon of the Desert! That one was made in Mexico, though, and this one was made in fascist Spain! At this distance I suppose it doesn’t make much of a difference, but it certainly must have to Buñuel!

As a confirmed anticlerical, not to mention a well-known anti-fascist, you might think he’d have been under the microscope after his return to his Francofied homeland! And I guess he was, but he still just did his thing and made exactly the movie he wanted to make, which bolsters my opinion that old Luis might have been the Coolest Director In Cinema! Ha ha, if you haven’t read his fantastic autobiography My Last Sigh, get to it! It’s absolutely marvelous, ha ha!

Viridiana tells the tale of the title character, a young and pious nun! The Mother Superior, who seems to have been rented from the same outlet which provides all movie Mother Superiors, orders her to go spend some time with her uncle, whom she barely knows and would rather not visit! But she goes, and soon her reluctance proves well-founded, for the uncle harbors a maniacal love for Viridiana! He drugs and nearly rapes her, and then proposes! Ha ha, after her refusal and rejection of him, the poor tormented beardo heads to the nearest tree to string himself up with a skipping rope! (The skipping rope reappears throughout the film, always used for different purposes, but I must confess that its significance eluded me!)

After that, the uncle’s illegitimate son takes over the estate, and a shaken Viridiana gives up the nunnery, but gathers up a parade of hoboes as a new and more Christlike way of expressing her devotion! It works out okay for a little while, but the hoboes eventually go wild with a little hoboparty of their own! Then there’s a great ending which, like Simon of the Desert, involves a fantastic pop song! Somebody should put together a compilation of the pop songs in Buñuel movies! Ha ha, I’d buy it in a hot second!

It’s a terrific picture! It looks sharp, is frequently funny, and confirms my belief that Buñuel was a real cameramaster! It’s not as plainly enjoyable as some of his other pictures, like Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie I suppose, but it has a power and simplicity all its own! I give it three and a half dogs leashed to cart axles!

Burl reviews House of Psychotic Women! (1973)

Hi, Burl here with some Iberian horror for you! Ha ha, the Spaniards have a long tradition of spookshows, and one of their most famous monstermen was Paul Naschy, aka Jacinto Molina, who often played a troubled werewolf named Count Waldemar (as he did in The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman), or else he fought mummies, sorceresses or yetis! Monster trouble was a regular staple of his working life, and his refrigerator-like body was often pushed to its very limits by their incessant attacks, or by his own lycanthropic transformations!

But there weren’t always monsters in his pictures! This one, for instance, as promised by the title, features a dwelling inhabited by neurotic ladies, and is informed by the then-popular giallo black-gloved killer films being produced in Italy! (The movie is better known these days under its original, more giallo-esque title Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll!) Old Jacinto plays an ex-con with a history of violent behaviour who, in his quest for employment, finds himself working as a handyman in the titular structure! The ladies in question are three sisters who each have their own dire problems, which are not necessarily solved by Jacinto’s arrival! However, as in movies like Forbidden World, we find that his janitorial duties include quite a bit of, ha ha, “troubleshooting!”

But there are also murders afoot of course, all enacted to the strains of Frère Jacques, which is a song I had to sing a lot in school when I was but a young sprout! That added a strange aura to the proceedings, I must say! The murders are all of pretty young blonde ladies, and involve the gruesome post-mortem removal of the victims’ eyes! Ha ha, yikes! But who could be behind this killing frenzy? Could be Jacinto, or one of the psychotic women, or any of a number of other characters! The final answer is slightly convoluted, as always in these pictures, but also entertainingly goofy!

And of course the fireplug presence of Paul Naschy is always a boon to any picture! He helped write the screenplay too, so of course there are numerous scenes where he takes off his shirt and makes love to the beautiful but damaged ladies of the house! But I do have to say I was surprised at his fate in the movie! It’s always nice when something genuinely unexpected happens in an otherwise fairly prescriptive outing! And as it all comes to a climax, so too do the haunting strains of Frère Jacques!

As for the rest of the movie, well, it’s a bit of a daffodil and could really have used a bit more Eurocool style, that being the currency in which your typical giallo prefers to trade! But more often House of Psychotic Women seems to prefer the rather cheap-looking, gritty and zoom-lens happy techniques we see in Jess Franco films and suchlike! Oh well, it makes for an interesting pudding at the very least, and I give this picture two unsafely utilized garden harrows!

Burl reviews Slugs: The Movie! (1987)

Hi, Burl here with a pretty gross movie to review! Slugs: The Movie still isn’t the grossest Juan Piquer Simon movie though – that title would have to go to Pieces! I’ll review that one sometime soon, rest assured my friends!

But now let’s look at Slugs! Ew, right? Ugly little guys! It seems that the town of Ashton, somewhere on the border between New York State and the Spanish province of Castile la Mancha, has an invertebrate problem – a bunch of toxic waste everybody forgot about has caused mutations in the local slugs, and they’ve grown little Muppet mouths filled with tiny vampire teeth! Oh, and an insatiable lust for meat!

A few citizens are filleted by the critters, and then Mike, the public health guy, becomes concerned! He joins forces with the town sewer-meister, who has an elderly wife, and a nerdy Spanish/British scientist, and they spend the rest of the movie trying to figure out how to outdo the slugs in property damage and casualties! They get it sorted in the last few minutes of the movie, blowing half the town to flinders with their efforts! Also, one of them gets slugged, and in the end they don’t even manage to get rid of all the slimy pests! Ha ha, some heroes!

Mike simply isn’t the swiftest boat in the fleet! He spends much of the movie trying to persuade the officials to turn off the water so the slugs can’t bite people on the bum by coming up out of their toilets, and they’re with him as long as he’s talking about contamination, but once he gets to the slug part, they laugh at him and declare him a loony! “You don’t have the authority to declare happy birthday,” he’s told! Hey Mike, why not just say it’s contaminated and leave it at that? You might get results that way, or at least be allowed to declare happy birthday! Mike also has a strangely halting, emphatic way of speaking that doesn’t help his powers of persuasion!

But between all these scenes are some pretty tasty slug attacks! An old guy gets one in his gardening glove, then for some reason can’t get it off when the slug starts biting! To fix his gastropod problem he ends up having to blow himself and his wife up in a spectacular greenhouse conflagration! Ha ha, he and Mike are just peas in a pod I guess! Explains why he liked that old couple so much!

There’s also a young couple, quite an objectionable pair actually, who make sweet love and then find out the hard way that their bed is surrounded by slugs! Ha ha, that one gets pretty gruesome! Another slug attack is less direct: a guy eats some of them chopped up in a salad prepared by his drunken, oblivious wife, and then the next day his head explodes as veteran actress Silvana Magnano, of Dune, watches from the corner! Ha ha!

Altogether this is a pretty enjoyable exercise in gruetology! It’s certainly not of a very high quality, but it’s compelling and goofy and fairly fast-paced, and it delivers the goods! I give it two and a half banging toilet lids!