(1960)
Dir - Anton Giulio Majano
Overall: MEH
For anyone hankering for a cheap, laughably, and remarkably dumb version of Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face, look no further than Atom Age Vampire, (Seddok, l'erede di Satana). The penultimate film that Anton Giulio Majano would make before undergoing a rather prolific television directing career, the premise is close enough to Franju's masterpiece as to be plagiarized. The mad scientist angle is revved-up though to include a monstrous transformation that is held together only by the flimsy logic of campy horror films. For an English-dubbed, foreign B-movie, it is as bad as can be expected with every line of dialog no matter how dramatically insignificant being delivered as if it is profound. Also, the film is primarily made up of drawn out scenes of characters talking that slows the whole thing down to a laborious crawl as well as exemplifying the melodramatic dialog in the first place. Another Euro-horror trademark is in the misleading title; there is no vampire in any frame. Though the movie at least poses the question of what psychological trauma befalls victims of nuclear deformity, it does not actually explore it past that.
(1963)
Dir - Alberto De Martino
Overall: WOOF
Out of the hoards of tired, Gothic, Italian horror films that spat-forth in the 1960s, one of the least remarkable and derivative was Alberto De Martino's The Blancheville Monster, (also released simply and amusingly as just Horror). Not the first or last film to haphazardly claim to be an Edgar Allan Poe adaptation by just barely if at all borrowing arbitrary, basic themes from the author's work, nothing here is remotely original let alone compelling. Another "returning to their creepy castle, there is a curse, shady house servants, guy in a mask, whatever" set up, several characters are in love, some are in cahoots, one gets hypnotized, and none of it matters. The dubbing and pacing is as ruinous as ever, but it is telling that De Martino himself paid the movie little to no attention after the fact, (or by the looks of it, even at the time), calling it "a little film of no importance". He ain't lying. If the script had any kind of clever components and if De Martino put forth any kind of effort to not lull his audience to almost immediate sleep, then there would at least be something to appreciate. Instead, it is a wasteful enterprise through and through and a bit of Euro-horror that assuredly deserves to be skipped.
(1965)
Dir - Massimo Pupillo
Overall: GOOD
For a single year, director Massimo Pupillo was prolific enough to make his first three horror films before never returning to the genre again. By his own admittance, he only went into horror in the first place to get out of making documentaries, but once he found himself immediately pigeonholed, he essentially gave up and only got behind the lens a small handful of times over the next decade and a half. His final horror effort then, La vendetta di Lady Morgan, (Lady Morgan's Vengeance), is a curious one that still drags and provides some unintentional chuckles do to its occasional clumsiness, but the structure is rather pleasantly bizarre. At first, the complete disregard for creating any kind of mystery seems lazy, but once it is revealed that this was all in service of getting to the increasingly oddball third act, the movie's fiendishly silly charm is rather enduring. Gianni Grimaldi's script cannot make up its mind what kind of supernatural rules it should abide by, so instead it just throws as many as it can into the mix at once. This includes ghosts that can turn wine into water or acid, water into blood, spontaneously blow up ceramic decor, be either transparent or flesh, also be vampires, and also be afraid of fire. Knowing Pupillo was hardly passionate about such a project to begin with, it is kind of a captivating film perhaps in an accidental sense, but it positively stands out at least amongst other vanilla flavored ones of the era.
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