Black Sabbath aka I Tre Volti Della Paura

A Wurdulak
In Your Ear

Black Sabbath
aka I Tre Volti Della Paura
Italy 1963
Directed by Mario Bava  
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B
From the Macabre Visions -
The Films Of Mario Bava Blu Ray box

Warning: Various spoilers in this review.

Black Sabbath, or I Tre Volti Della Paura to give its original title, is Mario Bava’s 7th film where he’s actually credited as director (although followers of his work will know he helped out on a lot more uncredited directing jobs throughout his career). It’s the third film presented in Arrows ‘blink and you missed it’ Macabre Visions - The Films Of Mario Bava Blu Ray boxed edition and it’s a film which has been released in two, very different versions over the years. The I Tre Volti Della Paura version in Italy which, for the record, is the version I watched for this review and the Black Sabbath US version, retitled to cash in on Bava’s success with Black Sunday (reviewed here). Both versions are included in the Arrow disc, with an additionally interesting, half hour long visual essay of side by side comparisons on some of the many differences between the two versions.

The film is one of those portmanteau horror movies which became so popular in the 1960s and early 1970s especially. The Italian version is bookended with two scenes where Boris Karloff, who is also in one of the three segments, talks to the audience. The opening on the Italian one has him standing on some other-worldly precipice with a blue background until, by the end, his features in close up are purely lit in red against the blue, making for a very vibrant, trademark use of colour by Bava. The US edition merely has a floating head close up of Karloff and is far less interesting visually. The bookend scene, where Karloff is still dressed as the character from his segment and riding a horse, is a wonderful piece where the artifice of the production is deliberately shown... the camera pulling out to show the half horse mechanism Karloff is riding with the background going by and men holding branches running around the camera for the foreground scenery. This was completely excised from the US version.

So we have three stories... The Telephone, The Wurdulak and A Drop Of Water. At least that’s the order of them in the Italian version... in the US print they kind of shuffled them around.

The Telephone is set in the apartment of a woman, Rosy, played by Michèle Mercier, who is told she will die that night. It’s strongly intimated to her that it’s er ex-lover Frank, who has escaped from jail and coming to kill her for revenge. However, half way through, when she calls on her ex-girlfriend Mary (played by Lidia Alfonsi) for help, it’s revealed that it’s really her former lesbian lover who has been making the calls to try and get back with her. And then, since the former boyfriend escape was also true, it turns out... Frank arrives and kills Mary before being stabbed to death by Rosy.

The Wurdulack features Mark Damon as a young count who falls in with a family worried by a vampire creature called a Wurdulak. Karloff went to hunt down and kill the one who was terrorising the local area but, in the process, became one himself and, as the segment progresses and Damon falls in love with a character played by the truly beautiful Susy Andersen, the whole family are eventually turned into the creatures. It’s actually not the twist ending I was expecting but it works well enough.

The third segment, A Drop Of Water, is my favourite of the three and, after a trained nurse is called to a home to dress the body of an old woman who has died while holding a seance, she steals her ring. The eerie sounds in her apartment such as the drop of water and the sound of a fly which was on the cadaver's ring finger follow the nurse home and she is slowly terrorised by these various sounds before the corpse shows up and the nurse ends up strangling herself due to its supernatural dominance over her.

The film is, of course, jam packed with various Bava signatures such as use of various shapes and details in the foreground of the camera, used to split different sections of the shots. There’s also that propensity to shoot from a bit above the characters or, often, from just below their eye line.

And then there’s his use of colour lighting, of course. Almost the whole of The Telephone takes place in Rosy’s flat and it’s all filtered through a pale lilac lighting scheme. It’s interesting that, for the most part, Bava’s colour use is still big washes of specific hues but, in these three segments they’re mostly much more subdued than in many of the movies he’s known for. The Wurdulak goes from the blues of night to kind of subdued pinks of a family home and A Drop Of Water uses pale blues and reds with the odd bit of orange. Everything is a bit less overt but no less ‘Bavaesque’ but it’s interesting to note that, on the US version the colours were still further muted, perhaps because they just weren’t used to seeing colour manipulated as strongly and expressively as when the great Mario Bava brought them out to play.

All in all, Black Sabbath is a pretty fun watch and it’s nice seeing the consummate acting of Boris Karloff in the middle segment. The visual essay about the differences in the US version, with different sound mixes, alternate footage in some sequences and some unsubtle musical stingers on Les Baxter’s strident musical score on the US version (it’s a more appropriate score by Roberto Nicolosi on the Italian version, I think) is an eye opener. Especially when the one giallo segment, The Telephone, has been completely changed on the US version. The implication that Rosy and Mary were once lovers is completely obliterated. As is the plot about Frank escaping from prison. In the US version, he’s dead and it’s actually Frank’s ghost who is coming for Rosy... from mystery giallo to supernatural horror with just a few ommissions and inserts. So, yeah, I still don’t trust the US versions of other countries’ movies, for sure. So, if you’re going to watch this movie, my best advice would be to make sure whatever version you own has the original Italian print on it. It’s worth the trade off against Karloff’s own voice being dubbed over in Italian because it’s a much stronger film in its original incarnation. Definitely one to have a look at if you are in the mood for something spooky and colourful, for sure.

The Girl Who Knew Too Much

Román Holiday

The Girl Who Knew Too Much
aka La ragazza che sapeva troppo
Italy 1963
Directed by Mario Bava
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B
As part of Arrow’s
Macabre Visions Blu Ray Set

First of all, I’d like to point out that for this re-watch of the classic giallo, I watched the Italian version of The Girl Who Knew Too Much and not the version re-dubbed and re-cut for the American market as The Evil Eye. The main reason being that there aren’t enough hours in the day to cover everything I want to cover on this blog but I mention this because the American cut is very different from the Italian version. Both have scenes exclusive of the others and additional differences, like the identity of the voice over narrative, give each film a slightly different feel, as does the extra emphasis on humour in the US version but, possibly, also a more organic version in The Evil Eye with regards to how the characters relate and bond. Both have slightly different endings too but I honestly can’t remember the last time I watched these... it was well over a decade ago so forgive me for not remembering more thoroughly.

And, I will get around to revisiting the US cut one day and, when I do, I’ll probably tack it onto the end of this review and republish it. I’m not sure I’d advise that the US version is better (as some people do) but, anyway, I’ve plumped for the version which would have been shown in Italian cinemas. This transfer of the film is from the barely released Arrow Blu Ray box set from a couple of years ago called Macabre Visions - The Films Of Mario Bava. I say barely released because this was so limited it sold out before it hit physical shops, just before Arrow’s licence for the films in it expired (from what I can tell, please enlighten me further if you know differently) and the shop I’d pre-ordered it from and paid a significant deposit with, informed me on the day that they couldn’t get it in after all and could only offer me a refund. I quickly jumped on the internet and grabbed what I believed was one of the very last copies on Amazon, which sold out later in the same release day, if memory serves. For people who missed out on this set, all I can say is that it’s probably not the last time we’ll see these on Blu and my gut tells me there will be a much more comprehensive (and costly) Blu Ray edition of Bava films from somewhere else at some point, possibly from one of the ‘usual suspects’ labels in the US like Severin or Vinegar Syndrome.

The Girl Who Knew Too Much is considered by many to be the first Italian giallo and, well, there’s certainly an argument to be made for it being the first famously remembered one at any rate. It’s shot in black and white by the late, very great Mario Bava who continues to prove, along with his earlier black and white movies (I think this was his last monochrome film where he was actually credited as the director rather than cinematographer), that he was just as much of a visual genius with a chiaroscuro tonal palette as he was with his amazing colour films. The claim that he more or less invented (not quite I think) the Italian giallo would be further enhanced when he released the brilliant movie Blood And Black Lace a year later (reviewed by me here) which really strengthens the claim although, of course, it was Dario Argento’s borrowing of the format in The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (reviewed here) in 1969 which really opened the floodgates of the genre from that point on.

The plot of the film is very simple but proceeds with a very convoluted unravelling to get to the resolution of what is, to all intents and purposes, a standard whodunnit. The film started out as trying to be a simple, romantic comedy in the Roman Holiday vein but Bava wanted to take the slight thriller aspects of the earlier script and push them full on. I don’t know when famous director Sergio Corbucci jumped on to write one of the screenplays but I’m guessing he was at least partially responsible for the way the material changed.

Either way, the plot deals with an American girl, Nora Davis, played by the extraordinary beautiful and interesting... and subsequently somewhat wasted in her short movie career... Letícia Román. She flies in to stay with an older lady friend in Rome for a vacation but, when the old lady dies and she tries to get to the hospital, in a sequence I’ll detail a little later, she witnesses a murder which is covered up the next day. The old lady’s doctor, Marcello Bassi, played by the dependable John Saxon, then tries to help her solve the puzzle as the killer appears to be honing in on Nora to be the next victim in the ‘Alphabet Murders’, the last of which happened ten years prior. She goes to stay in a new but absent friend’s apartment  (played by Valentina Cortese) that looks out onto where she saw the murder and she uses that as her base for the rest of the movie. And that’s pretty much all the plot details I want to give as I don’t want to spoil this for you. Although I will say that this is so early in the giallo cycle that the portrayal of the police as either ridiculous or incompetent is not yet a thing here. Instead, while they’re just as ineffective in terms of coming up with a credible investigation, they’re not portrayed as being bad at their job, as they would often be shown in various gialli as the years went by.

Bava’s shot compositions are, as usual, extremely beautiful and a constant all the way through this good looking movie. He will often do things like pitch a figure in one half of the screen in close up and then have the depth of the shot a lot greater on the opposite side of the screen (say where the corner of a wall gives way into a bigger space) to show a background which ensures your eye is focused on the figure in the frame. Another nice piece of directing the audience eye occurs when Nora is lured to a room in an apartment and the view from an open door as we look out at her from within, has the doorway showing the only details of the shot placed in an upright vertical slat of the screen representing the door, with all the rest of the frame either side as just black space... with Bava effectively shrinking the frame for that one shot.

There are also some great and quite long camera movements in the piece. Sometimes he’ll start off on a detail of a shot which doesn’t mean much and then move the camera to focus on a person or group moving through a space and then start following them before suddenly stopping as the character(s) move on, as he takes note of another detail in the background of the shot, for instance. Asides from the gothic tinged atmosphere he manages to achieve in the well lit streets of Rome at night, he also makes good use of the interiors, especially in a sequence where Nora sets a trap for the killer by sprinkling the floor with talcum powder and running a cats cradle of interconnecting string all around the house... it’s almost like Bava came up with the string just so he could photograph it, as it doesn’t really add anything to the plot in this scene.

The film is quite fast paced and Bava uses a lot of short, visual stings (almost) in the sequence which starts off with the death of the old lady. While Nora is putting some drops into a glass for her, not realising she’s passed away as she’s doing this, we get the reveal of the death as a sequence of four beautiful shots when she goes to give the old girl her medicine as... a close up shot of Nora’s face, a close up shot of the old lady’s face, a close up shot of a cat against a mirror signalling fright and then a beautiful shot of Nora’s hand dropping the glass in profile.

As the sequence carries on after Nora can’t raise the nearby hospital on a telephone, Bava really piles on the assault on Nora’s senses with another little sequence of short shots (something I don’t usually think of in association with Bava). So we see her get mugged for her handbag and knocked unconscious, then she wakes up and sees a woman who has been stabbed with her possible murderer pulling the knife from the lady before dragging the body away... causing Nora to faint again, then someone trying to revive her the next morning by pouring alcohol down her throat before he runs off when a policeman finds her and she wakes up again. The next sequence begins with an amazing shot of white nuns’ hats pressed together and looking like the petals of a flower before the nun’s heads depart from their close huddle, like petals peeling away and revealing the shot of Nora in a hospital bed (and only then do you realise what the ‘giant petals’ were when we see the nuns in a reverse shot). It’s all good stuff and the pace is certainly dazzling.

The acting and chemistry between Román and Saxon is great too (much more so than in real life, from what I understand) and there are certainly some hangovers, even in the Italian version, where the comedy of what must have been the original script is seeping through and invading the thriller element (such as the slapstick conclusion to the ‘talcum powder and string’ sequence). Bava manages to pull it off and make the elements work together even when, in some cases, Roberto Nicolosi's wonderful score is perhaps playing to the comedy a little too much (I can’t remember what Les Baxter’s score for the US version is like). In short, the ‘first screen giallo’, The Girl Who Knew Too Much, is an absolutely brilliant and entertaining movie and is up there with the director’s best. Any fan of giallo or, indeed, Italian cinema in general, should definitely take a look at this one. An essential film among many essentials in the director’s body of work, for sure.

Dr. Goldfoot And The Bikini Machine

Gold-Footing The Bill

Dr. Goldfoot And The Bikini Machine
USA 1965 MGM/AIP
Directed by Norman Taurog
DVD Region 1

Wow. I’ve been wanting to see Dr. Goldfoot And The Bikini Machine and, more importantly because of its director, the sequel (Dr. Goldfoot And The Girl Bombs) for a while now and... well... it’s certainly a corker. Not sure if I enjoyed it in quite the same way as the director, producer and writers would have wanted me to but... well, I certainly did appreciate the movie, to some extent and it was more than once during the running time when I thought to myself... they just don’t make movies like this anymore. Although, what I was really thinking, truth be told, was... yeah, they really couldn’t get away with making movies like this anymore.

So hot on the heels of the previous year’s hit British film, Goldfinger, the American International Pictures studio goldfooted the bill for a movie which could hopefully ride the same box office take by making the title slightly reminiscent of that film (and they were certainly not the only studio doing stuff like this... anyone remember Due Mafiosi Contro Goldginger nowadays?). Of course, if you’re going to have a film trying to ride the same kind of bandwagon then you need a title song with the same power right? Well yeah... kinda. The opening credit sequence, featuring bizarre claymation, stop motion animated models of the main cast driving around in Goldfoot’s trademark aladdin-style shoes (well not really, he only wears them in one scene that I could spot) is set against a song performed by The Supremes... yeah, as in Diana Ross and The Supremes... and it’s... hmm. Well it’s fun. In the absence of availability of an album containing Les Baxter’s score you can download the opening title song, at least, for 99p on iTunes. So there’s that.

After the credits close, the song still seems to be going on. It’s almost as if the opening credits sequence animators got bored or ran out of money (On an AIP picture? Well fancy that.) or, perhaps more likely, it was put together independently of the music. Either way, since the producers obviously didn’t want to waste any bang for their buck with The Supremes, the song continues on and we’re introduced to footage of the crazy streets of San Francisco as seen through a car windscreen as it makes its topsy turvy way around fast corners and eventually into a tram tunnel. I’m pretty certain that some of this footage must have originally been shot to be incorporated into the uproariously un-hilarious final chase scene, but didn’t make the cut so the film-makers just decided to edit it all together at the end of the title sequence. Other than that, it doesn’t seem to tie up to anything else in the movie either footage wise or, more expectedly, theme wise to any events that happen. Certainly, the next title card reading San Francisco - The Day After Tomorrow and the following scenes don’t even attempt to match the shots from the windscreen section.

Okay, after this the film has a fairly strong opening, with the beautiful Susan Hart playing Number 11, as she walks down the city streets wearing a fetching hat and grey raincoat. After she is shot at for accidentally interrupting an armed bank robbery, it becomes clear to the audience that she is not what she seems. When she enters a restaurant and inserts herself into the life of secret agent Craig Gamble, played by teenage, singing heart throb Frankie Avalon, she does the old sight gag of drinking a glass of milk and having the milk run out of all the bullet holes she took a hit with in the previous scene. After this, she whizzes Frankie back to his apartment until she finds out, from the ever watching Dr. Goldfoot and his assistant Egor, that she has the wrong man and leaves in search of her real intended victim Tod Armstrong, played by Dwayne Hickman.

Of course, the reason evil super-villain and mad scientist Dr. Goldfoot, played with a certain amount of hamminess by the irrepressible Vincent Price, and his assistant Egor, played by Jack Mullaney, can see what’s going on wherever they like is through that old 1950s -1970s super-villain trick of having some kind of magical camera which must fly around undetected to any spot in the world they choose to view on their viewing screen...

Honestly people! So many movies rely on these unlikely, alchemical devices with absolutely nobody in the audience... NOBODY!... questioning how the villains of the piece always seem to have a camera which can show them the exact view of the world at large at the flick of a switch. Blimey! What the heck were we on that we could be spoon fed this kind of utterly unconvincing claptrap and, more importantly, why have we stopped doing it now. Seriously, we are now living in a period where a bad guy could literally hack into all the many security cameras around the world and see pretty much any view of anything he liked once he’d sorted out a nefarious computer hack of some sorts... but you never see any main antagonists using this time honoured technique of the “unquestioned cam view” now when we’re actually, for once, living in a point in time where this could actually be feasible. But, hey, whatever... back then, these movies were doing it all the time. Were the audiences just filled up to the eyeballs with drugs all the way through these things? Don’t answer that.

Now, Dr, Goldfoot’s plan is to get his many robot girls he made with his titular Bikini Machine, all who wear gold bikinis for some reason, to marry various billionaires around the world and get them to sign off their property over to his mechanical ladies, making him into the sole beneficiary and a very wealthy man. Presumably so wealthy that he can afford to equip his evil lair with expensive camera feeds that can see every part of the world at the flick of a switch... oh wait, That’s right. He already has that, doesn’t he? What the-?

So, anyway, I was waiting for a long while to see if Dr. Goldfoot’s plan got any bigger or more ambitious than this... rubbing my hands in glee at the prospect of a more sophisticated and ingenious plot befitting the time and attention of a super-villain but, after a while it dawned on me that nothing further would be forthcoming. Instead, I had to watch the blatantly unfunny comic antics of Frankie Avalon and Dwayne Hickman as they attempted to solve the mystery of this questionably ingenious plot. And, frankly, it felt like I was watching a Walt Disney Herbie film for adults but without the sophistication or charm that a "grown up" might likely expect for the price of a cinema ticket.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are entertainments and distractions in this movie galore. What with cameos by various other actors who, like this one, share credits on the Beach Blanket style films AIP was putting out at the time. People like Annette Funicelli, for instance, popping up in one of the dungeon sets used by AIP for the famous Roger Corman Poe films starring Vincent Price. Or other kinds of cameos such as some of the portraits of Price as Dr. Goldfoot’s “ancestors”, which are also from films like Fall Of The House Of Usher and Tomb Of Ligeia too. There are some nice little jokes from the time as well, such as Price and a talking skeleton doing the old Señor Wences “S’alright?” “S’alright.” catchphrase routine.

That being said, though, this film is not exactly a laugh a minute... no matter how much it’s trying to be in some places. Frankie Avalon’s character is Agent Double Oh and a Half. He’s not allowed to carry a gun around until he becomes a digit, not a fraction. If you find these kinds of lines funny then you’ve got a more tolerant sense of humour than I have, I think.

There is, though, a lot of inventive stuff going on including a disintegrating beam lipstick, a briefcase with an arm with a boxing glove that pops up when opened (due to the miracle of movie magic) and the entrance to Goldfoot’s lair via a slide at the bottom of a coffin in his mortuary. There’s even an appearance of the binoculars which, when you turn the dials to change the focus, have deadly spikes which pop out and into your eyes. Actually, this is the third film I know of to contain this concept. The first being the 1959 Horrors Of The Black Museum which, I sadly haven’t seen yet (don’t worry... it’s on the other side of the room as I type, in one of my “to watch” piles) and the other one being the 1996 version of the exploits of the comic book character The Phantom. 

And then, just so we don’t forget who the producers snagged for their title song, they repeat it again over an end credits sequence of Dr. Goldfoot’s go-go dancing girl-bots. Which is at least entertaining in some ways.

However. for all the inventiveness and hard work on display here, the cleanly designed but not interesting enough to hold the attention style shots don't amount to a heck of a lot and it never feels like there’s anything truly remarkable or noteworthy going on in this one. I certainly wasn’t bored but, I think, my attitude throughout most of this one was of interest rather than enjoyment... although, that being said, I think it’s true to say that I’d watch it again. I would strongly suspect though, that this was definitely, with its constant slapstick routines and knowing winks to the target audience, a movie which was probably far more fun for the actors to be involved with than it is for an audience to actually have to endure. On the other hand... what do I know? They did make a sequel, after all. Talking of which, the sequel is directed by one of my favourite directors, Mario Bava... so I am really looking forward to seeing what he did with the title character. Frankly, with Bava in charge, the one thing I’m pretty sure of is that it will certainly be colourful.

When all is said and done, I can’t really recommend Dr. Goldfoot And The Bikini Machine to anyone unless they’re very much into that era of cinema and would be as interested in this kind of “only in the sixties” movie as I am. I can't quite bring myself to write it off either, though. Vincent Price once commented that the film would have been a lot better if the original song and dance numbers had been left in. Whaaaaaaat? The mind boggles but... that’s a version I’d definitely like to see. At the end of the day, I think you’d know if this kind of movie is going ot appeal to you or not and, if you decide to give it a go, then I wish you luck and hope you enjoy it just a little better than I did. And you can be sure, I’ll be reporting on just how good or bad the sequel is, at my earliest opportunity (it’s on the pile).

Blood Sabbath

The Blood, The Bad

and the Jiggly!

Blood Sabbath

US 1972

Directed by Brianne Murphy

Pegasus Region 0

SEXIST PIG WARNING! This is probably one of the most blatantly sexist reviews I’ve ever written. In my defence, however, I would like to point out that it’s the most appropriate response I could come up with to this movie.

Wow. I don’t often go for Twitter recommendations but when Hypnogoria brought this one to my attention with a bit of “live tweeting”... I knew I couldn’t resist. Actually... another important factor in my decision to purchase this film was the fact that Amazon were selling it for under £2... so the price was right too (although only a couple of months later, I see, they have put the price up to £9.99. What up with that?).

I have to say though... after having seen this movie, which is truly terrible but, you know, in that good way... I am somewhat at a loss to have much of anything to say about it, other than it’s a really bizarre little movie, so expect this one to be a really short review.

If I had to summarise what this movie is about I’d say it’s about an ex-vietnam soldier trekking through Mexico who is attacked by large chested hippy gals for no obvious reasons... who also like to be running about naked and jiggling their aforementioned large chests... also for no obvious reasons. The man is knocked unconscious and left for dead but is revived by some kind of river dwelling dead gorgeous (and also just “dead” as it happens) babe who also seems to favour attire that is either downright skimpy or non-existent.

Our hero, the heroically named David, wants to see more of her so he stays with a local who also happens to take a child to be sacrificed to witches every year so the local village can have good crops. The witches also, it would seem, have a penchant for dancing and running about in their birthday suits and have equally humongous bosoms as the hippy ladies at the start of the movie. They might even, for the most part, be those same ladies but, if they were (and I’m guessing yes) then I certainly didn’t remember any of their faces from the start of the movie... might have got distracted by something else I reckon. Anyway, the head witch is the arch enemy (well, maybe that’s a bit strong, just a rival shall we say) of the cute babe of the river... who Dave wants to settle down and have lots of sex with.

The rivalry progresses and lots of naked dancing, naked cavorting, naked running and generally naked ritualistic posturing is on hand to throw confusion over an already confusing lack of plot which can only, it seems, have a happy conclusion if the lead character dies. Think I’ve got that right... I think the ending of this one may be a little open to interpretation.

Anyway... this film has exactly two things going for it as far as I can see. Well, that’s apart from the two things that seem to be attached and bouncing around naked on practically every female character in this movie, that is.

Thing one is that the lead villain-witch is played by Dyanne Thorne. Yes, that Dyanne Thorne... she who is perhaps best known for notoriously playing Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS and also for appearing in the classic Star Trek episode A Piece Of The Action. It’s long been my professional opinion that the buxom Ms. Thorne has easily “the best bosoms in the business” and my head starts spinning when I realise the name of the character she is playing is called “Alotta”. Well, all I can say to that is she sure has Alotta large assets on display in this movie (I’m so sorry, I couldn’t resist... but can you blame me?). I actually have a bit of a soft spot for Dyanne Thorne so I can’t complain about this in any way, shape or form.

The second thing this movie has going for it is a score by Bax... which is a pseudonym for Les Baxter (who provided scores for lots of movies like the majority of the Corman “Poe” films... to name but a few). The scoring seems mostly appropriate to the movie but, only in as much as it’s almost impossible not to be inappropriate with the scoring on a movie like this. In the words of Hypnogoria... bongos and bosoms!

There’s a cheesy opening credits song and a cheesy end credits song... I didn’t think much of the first but the second song kinda stuck in my head and I would love to get a hold of it if I could. Sadly, there’s been no score released for this movie and most likely won’t be... although it’s not impossible as their have been some totally unexpected limited edition soundtracks released in small runs over the last five years or so and Les Baxter does tend to sell out (except in the one single solitary case where I bought a second copy in an introductory attempt to play the speculation game on e-bay... oh yes... this would be the one Les Baxter album that didn’t sell out! Curse you Ray Milland!).

The only other thing the movie has going for it (What? A third thing? Nobody expects The Spanish Inquisition!), as I’ve already mentioned but will repeat at the risk of labouring the point, is a large collection of jiggling breasts which seem to get exposed constantly at the drop of a hat... and their must have been a lot of metaphorical hats dropped in this movie because, as I noted at the time, there are more breasts on display in this “horror” movie than I’ve seen in some porn movies (not that I’ve ever watched any of those, of course).

So, in summary...

Is this movie any good? No.

Would I watch it again and would I recommend it to anyone? Yes, of course I would. It’s a comically bad excuse for nakedness starring Dyanne Thorne and with a Les Baxter soundtrack. What’s not to like? Trash lovers will get a kick out of it I reckon. Be warned though, the special effects aren’t so special and even the script seems a bit low tech (if such a thing is possible).

Have fun!