Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe adaptations always had a loose spirit about them, fleshing out the source material so it would flow nicely as a 90-minute feature. With The Raven, the tale of a tortured lover tormented by a bird rapping on his chamber door that was so hilariously lampooned in a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode ("Ever more! Ever more!"), Corman uses just a couple of Poe's 18 stanzas as inspiration to tell his own preposterous story of duelling wizards and a stolen love. The fifth in the so-called Corman-Poe cycle, Corman and script-writer Richard Matheson, bolstered by the success of Tales of Terror the year before, again opt for a comedic take on Poe's haunting text.
In the 15th century, powerful sorcerer Dr. Erasmus Craven (Vincent Price) broods in his study, mourning the loss of his wife Lenore (Hazel Court) two years earlier. Much to his surprise, he is visited by a talking, wine-guzzling raven who turns out to be fellow wizard Dr. Adolphus Bedlo (Peter Lorre), transformed after an altercation with the evil Dr. Scarabus (Boris Karloff). After Craven turns the boozy spell-caster back to his normal self using a concoction of bizarre ingredients, Bedlo sees a painting of the apparently-dead Lenore and swears he saw her in Scarabus's castle. As curiosity gets the better of him, Craven, along with his daughter Estelle (Olive Sturgess) and Bedlo's goofy son Rexford (Jack Nicholson), journey to Scarabus's caste in the hope of finding answers.
Although it is nowhere near the standards seen in the likes of The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964), The Raven has its moments, and the main strength is in the ingenious casting of Price, Lorre and Karloff, all legends of the genre. They are totally game and are bags of fun, particularly Karloff who, at the time, was being introduced to a whole new generation of horror fans. The comedy is hit-and-miss. Sometimes it's funny and charming, but often it is cringe-inducingly daft. The climax is well directed and impressive-looking, especially for such a low-budget feature, but it's also overwhelmingly silly, and not in a good way. While The Raven is a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, it feels like a 20-minute piece stretched out over 86 minutes, and may have worked better as part of a portmanteau piece.
The greatest of actors will always find themselves taking an unworthy role simply to pay the bills, but it is in their ability to carry these films on their own that truly establishes their greatness. Vincent Price, who starred in an endless array of crap (as well as the odd horror classic), had this ability. He was by no means the finest of actors, but his undeniable screen presence and often tongue-in-cheek approach has made him a gift to horror fans, and here he helps raise Diary of a Madman, one of his more obscure efforts, into the realms of the passable. Based on Guy de Maupassant's short story The Horla, Diary of a Madman is a very silly film indeed, but manages to retain a sort of camp charm.
Beginning with the funeral of magistrate Simon Cordier (Price), his pastor begins to read out his diary to various friends and old acquaintances. Flashing back, he visits the cell of a doomed inmate who has killed a number of people without a motive, and who informs Cordier that he has been possessed by an evil and invisible entity named the Horla. He attacks Cordier, but is killed in the struggle, and the spirit of the Horla moves into Cordier's body. From then on, Corider experiences strange murderous urges, and is tormented by frequent visits by the mysterious being. He rediscovers his love for sculpting, and meets vain and selfish model Odette (Nancy Kovack), who appears to fall in love with him.
The Horla itself is a ridiculous creation, flying in through Cordier's windows and announcing his presence in a voice reminiscent of the one you would put on when you have a bed sheet draped over your head. Better yet, the Horla's causes it's subjects eyes to glow green whenever they feel evil inside of them, here represented with some shoddy effects that looks like the director is simply flashing a light in the actor's eyes. But as previously stated, this raises some unintentional laughs and, with Price's presence, is quite charming. The Horla is a metaphor for the evil in every man, and the film at least manages to interpret de Maupassant's themes on a most basic level. I doubt it will ever get any home media release that will cause a cult rediscovery, but Madman is an enjoyable little oddity, and certainly a must-see for Price fans.
Fresh off the international success of his credited début, Black Sunday (1960), Italian horror icon Mario Bava was brought in to to direct this trio of horror tales. Opening with a tongue-in-cheek introduction from genre legend Boris Karloff, in which he stands amidst a bright orange and blue landscape, Black Sabbath delves into three unrelated stories, all of which seem to employ a different aspect of the horror genre. Typical with anthology films, the stories also vary in quality, which may have led to them being shuffled around and even altered with the American version (which also omitted Karloff's introduction), but this is a review for the original Italian version, which begins with the giallo 'The Telephone'.
Rosy (Michele Mercier) is a high-class call-girl in Paris, who gets home one night to be plagued with threatening phone calls by a man claiming to be watching everything she does. Believing it to be her former pimp Frank (Milo Quesada) who has just escaped from prison, Rosy confides in her lesbian lover Mary (Lidia Alfonsi). The Telephone is certainly the weakest of the trio, offering little in the visual department when compared to the other two, but is important due to the fact that it was one of the first giallo's ever made. Bava's patient approach certainly brings tension to the story, but it is relatively simplistic and somewhat predictable.
The central piece, The Wurdalak, is the finest (and longest) segment in the film, with a story so rooted in gothic, fairytale ideals, that Bava goes to town with it. Set in 19th century Russia, Vladimir (Mark Damon) comes across a headless corpse with a knife in its back. He takes the lavishly decorated blade and rides on, eventually coming to a small cottage. On the wall of the cottage is a set of swords with a vacant space that matches the shape of the one Vladimir pulled from the corpse. Giorgio (Glauco Onorato) explains that the knife belongs to his father, who has been missing for five days in the hunt for the deadly outlaw - and suspected Wurdalak - Ali Beg. The father, Gorca (Karloff), arrives home, carrying the head of Beg, but his increasingly erratic behaviour cause the family to believe that he himself is now a Wurdalak.
Similar to Black Sunday, The Wurdalak is rooted in gothic and fairytale sensibilities, so Bava is naturally at home. But this isn't shot in the black-and-white of Sunday, but in full lavish colour, and Bava injects some truly beautiful moments into this story, especially the night-time horse ride with Karloff as he laughs manically after having kidnapped his grandson. Also similar to Sunday, the creature of the Wurdalak is as ominous as Sunday's 'vampires', but that is beside the point. This is seeped in atmosphere and anchored by a terrific performance from Karloff, one of the finest of his career.
The final film, The Drop of Water, features one of a precious few moments in cinema that have genuinely terrified me. English nurse Helen (Jacqueline Pierreux) is called out to a house to dispose of the body of an elderly lady. While dressing the body, she notices a sapphire ring on her finger which she steals, and is suddenly plagued by a buzzing fly. When she gets back to her apartment, Helen notices the fly again, and the old woman's corpse starts appearing to her. This is again a very basic concept that follows the traditions of a standard ghost story, and it is the face of the corpse that will stay in your memory. Twisted with death, whoever created the prosthetics deserves a medal for creating one of the most genuinely unsettling moments in horror history.
The Drop of Water also continues The Wurdalak's beautiful visuals, employing red and blues in places where they don't belong, but instead blurring the reality of the proceedings and creating a kind of warped insight into Helen's torment. It's the visuals that will no doubt stay with you after watching Black Sabbath, but Bava injects a moment of pure madness with his final scene. Apparently he was told by Italian producers to end on a happy note, but what drove Bava to film what he did is beyond me. I won't ruin it for those who haven't seen it, but personally, I liked it, as it cements Bava's reputation as a true visionary and gives us an insight into the man's sense of humour. Whether you love it or hate it, you can't say you saw it coming. All in all, one of the most beautiful horror films ever made.
Back in the early 1960's, when drive-in theaters were still all the rage and the place to go for some haunted house and alien invasion B-movie thrills, producers were completely oblivious to a colossal gap in the market. That is until 1963, when producer David F. Friedman and director Herschell Gordon Lewis came up with a 'script' called Egyptian Blood Feast, a film that would be designed to not only show gratuitous violence, but to have the explicit gore as its main selling point. So Friedman hyped up publicity by handing out 'vomit bags' at screenings, and going as far as taking out an injunction on its own film so kick up a fuss. The film was pants, but the legacy is history, and so was born gore cinema, a sub-genre that horny teenagers still flock to in order to get their cheap thrills.
The film follows the exploits of Muad Ramses (Mal Arnold), an exotic caterer and author of 'Ancient Weird Religious Rights'. Socialite Dorothy Freemont (Lyn Bolton) enters his store and asks Ramses to create a party to remember for her daughter Suzette (Connie Mason), to which Ramses obliges, hoping to create an Egyptian feast that will re-awaken his god Ishtar. The town is beset by gruesome murders, with bodies being butchered and dismembered, puzzling Detective Pete Thornton (William Kerwin), who is co-incidentally studying Egyptian history with, co-incidentally (there's a pattern emerging!) Suzette. Will the detectives be able to unravel the mystery? Will Ramses create his feast, causing the re-birth of Ishtar? Will anyone point out how ridiculous Ramses' fake eyebrows are?
It is easy to make fun of this film - this is H.G. Lewis after all. Yet while every conceivable factor of Blood Feast's production is of the lowest standard, you can't argue with the film's importance. Ramses is an instantly forgettable madman, but he is the original machete-wielding maniac, paving the way for countless slasher imitators, from Michael Myers to Jason Voorhees. Lewis himself said it best - "I've often referred to Blood Feast as a Walt Whitman poem. It's no good, but it was the first of its type." Shockingly, this is arguably Lewis' most gruesome, with the gore factors dropping noticeably with follow-ups Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964) and Color Me Blood Red (1965) (now dubbed The Gore Trilogy). At only 67 minutes, this still tries the patience, and has more plot holes than I care to mention (maybe to stop the killings, someone should have told Ramses that Ishtar is a Babylonian goddess!), but its historical significance has cemented it's place in horror history.
In the 15th century, powerful sorcerer Dr. Erasmus Craven (Vincent Price) broods in his study, mourning the loss of his wife Lenore (Hazel Court) two years earlier. Much to his surprise, he is visited by a talking, wine-guzzling raven who turns out to be fellow wizard Dr. Adolphus Bedlo (Peter Lorre), transformed after an altercation with the evil Dr. Scarabus (Boris Karloff). After Craven turns the boozy spell-caster back to his normal self using a concoction of bizarre ingredients, Bedlo sees a painting of the apparently-dead Lenore and swears he saw her in Scarabus's castle. As curiosity gets the better of him, Craven, along with his daughter Estelle (Olive Sturgess) and Bedlo's goofy son Rexford (Jack Nicholson), journey to Scarabus's caste in the hope of finding answers.
