(1960)
Dir - Renato Polselli
Overall: MEH
The gimmicky, mildly exploitative The Vampire and the Ballerina, (L'amante del vampiro), was the first of several horror outings from writer/director Renato Polselli. Not altogether a remarkable one, it manages to feature a handful of somewhat sexually charged and astonishingly boring dance sequences in a small living room where a troupe of leggy ballerinas flay their limbs about while swinging jazz music plays on the soundtrack. Enough other opportunities are taken to show scantily clad women without going full frontal, giving it a deliberately sleazy feel for its day, if not an explicit one. Polselli makes a few commendable attempts at creating a tense atmosphere, playing most of the scenes of characters walking around creepy places to no dramatic music. These scenes go on for ages though and nothing exciting ends up happening anywhere else as the awful script is full of stock, lazy reasons for characters to venture into deserted castles, go off on their own, and become vampires in the first place. The Gothic locations are well used and it is photographed acceptably, but the lead, caped undead baddie, (who is also given the worst dialog), wears a mask that a six year old would be embarrassed to don on Halloween, so it inevitably comes off more ridiculous than probably intended.
(1966)
Dir - Lionello De Felice/Elio Scardamaglia
Overal: MEH
Lionello De Felice, (who only directed a small handful of films over less than a two decade period), was unofficially behind the lens here as producer Elio Scardamaglia ultimately took credit for what may have been just a few days shooting near the end. To confuse matters worse, Scardamaglia used the Americanized alias Michael Hamilton anyway. Regardless of who is responsible, The Murder Clinic, (La lama nel corpo, The Knife in the Body), is in many ways an oddity that is certainly rooted in Gothic horror, but stylistically on the cusp of the newly emerging giallo. A killer with a switch-blade wearing black gloves whose identity is only revealed at the very end certainly hits all the giallo check marks. Likewise, the colors are striking, but cinematographer Marcello Masciocchi's use of shadow is formulaic for the creepy castle setting that would have worked just as well had the movie been in black and white. The film is easily strongest from a visual standpoint and even features a grotesquely deformed woman in a black hood. Violence wise, it is tame by the standards that Mario Bava would popularize at the same time, but still relatively jarring when it occurs. It is the script that ends up sinking the ship though not so much by being laughable, but by being so mundane as to barely be worth paying attention to in the first place.
(1969)
Dir - Ferruccio Casapinta
Overall: MEH
A torture chamber, a woman suffering hallucinations, a mysterious figure wearing black gloves, a conniving governess, day for night scenes galore, a Scooby Doo-worthy, faux-ghost conspiracy to gain ownership of a property, and even the stock howling sound that Deep Purple used at the beginning of "Hush", La bambola di Satana, (Satan's Doll), certainly pulls no punches in embellishing in as many horror trappings as it sees fit. The only cinematic effort of any kind attributed to writer/director Gerruccio Casapinta and one that was never released in the US or dubbed into English, it is not an awful excursion into Gothic horror by any means. Yet it is assuredly not a very unique one either. By 1969, flashy giallo thrillers were gaining much momentum and a handful of Italian directors had already done, (and were doing), more visually compelling works in the genre, making Casapinta's rather flat, uninspired presentation here stick out in an unremarkable fashion even more. The shots are all static and in lackluster lighting, plus roughly eighty-five percent of the movie is characters sitting around in chairs talking anyway. A random fist fight, a random sword fight, some mild nudity, and a couple would-be nightmare sequences are not really enough to propel it over its mediocre status.
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