70's Spanish Horror Part Ten

THE HORRIBLE SEXY VAMPIRE

(1971)

Dir - José Luis Madrid

Overall: WOOF

 

An obvious joke to make with The Horrible Sexy Vampire, (El vampiro de la autopista), is that it is far more horrible than it is sexy.  The only supernatural horror film from director José Luis Madrid, (who immediately followed it up with two crime thrillers with Paul Naschy), there are indeed several shots of women taking off their clothes and occasionally bathing and/or engaging in a few seconds of foreplay with a man, but the ridiculous title still proves to be misleading as the main blood-sucker does nothing remotely tantalizing.  Instead, the decades old count resurrects himself every handful of years and chokes people while being invisible, if for no other reason than because the preposterous script tells him to.  Speaking of the script, Madrid is as lazy of a screenwriter as he is a director, throwing random crap into the mix as if any old cliche will do.  The plotting is atrocious and filled with absolute idiots running around engaging in monotonous behavior, which is not helped by the typically sloppy editing common in most Euro-horror movies with a noticeably minuscule amount of funds to work with.  On that note, they could only afford two pieces of music which are played continuously whenever characters are not wasting screen time prattling on about whether or not vampires are real.

MURDER IN A BLUE WORLD

(1973)

Dir - Eloy de la Iglesia

Overall: MEH

 

The Spanish A Clockwork Orange, Eloy de la Iglesia's Murder in a Blue World, (Una gota de sangre para morir amando, A Drop of Blood to Die Loving, Le bal du vaudou, The Voodoo Ball, Clockwork Terror, To Love, Perhaps to Die), is an interesting if uneven fusing of dystopian science fiction and giallo.  Set in the near future, it takes its cue directly enough from Anthony Burgess' unofficial source material where youth gangs dress up in matching outfits and go about raping, robbing, and murdering people while the Fascist government enlists scientists and doctors to perform unwilling psychological experiments on captured criminals in order to reform them back into society.  Some of the thematic elements are broad enough to come off as afterthoughts like how various commercials are shown which allude to a type of totalitarian consumerism that is only vaguely in tune with everything else going on.  As a foreign knock-off, it is fun to spot the obvious similarities between this and Stanley Kubrick's much more famous work and the addition of Sue Lyon's beautiful and deranged, murdering nurse give it an extra, B-movie slant.  The story is hardly through-provoking though and falls into the typical Euro-trash faux pas of meandering with repetitive scenes, but even as a messy hybrid of sorts, it breaks the mold more than most.

 

LA CRUZ DEL DIABLO

(1975)

Dir - John Gilling

Overall: MEH

Hammer filmmaker John Gilling came out of retirement for his final cinematic work of any kind, the Spanish production La cruz del diablo, (The Devil's Cross, Cross of the Devil).  Yet another take on the Knights Templar that is unrelated to Amando de Ossoria's Blind Dead series, the script was originally written by Paul Naschy as a starring vehicle for himself based on the works of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer.  The project was ultimately taken out of his control though, sold without his knowledge, re-written, and then re-cast.  Even without Naschy's involvement, there are some redeeming qualities to an otherwise mediocre Euro-horror vehicle.  For one, Gilling has a noticeably better eye for macabre visuals and a keener sense of pacing than most other Spanish directors of the era, so the movie has a polished aesthetic that is understandably akin to the Gothic horror that Hammer established a decade or so earlier.  Also, the music is appropriately used for once which is a miracle in and of itself.  Unfortunately though, the story is too thin to maintain interest and it meanders aimlessly where characters seem to take absolutely forever to get to the bottom of anything.  As was all too often the case with such movies, we mostly just watch them suspect each other while exchanging niceties while standing and sitting in rooms repeating the same information ad nauseam.  The climactic finish is underwhelming as well, though at least the evil Templar move with a sense of urgency here as opposed to the laughable snails pace that they do in Ossoria's films.