70's Foreign Horror Part Eighteen

SHOCK TREATMENT

(1973)

Dir - Alain Jessua

Overall: GOOD

The hypocrisy concerning the length in which certain individuals will go to uphold their vanity is the central theme in Alain Jessua's Shock Treatment, (Traitement de choc, Doctor in the Nude, Shock!), a standard yet effective health spa thriller.  The set-up where nothing can quite be as jovial as it seems has been used before, in this case involving Annie Girardot's recently dumped business owner who retreats to a swanky clinic on the Brittany coast in France, run by the dashingly handsome Dr. Devilers, (hardly a sly name there), played by Alain Delon who looks every bit as darkly tanned as his posh guests and foreign employees.  Jessua presents everything unambiguously as there is no doubt that Girardot's fears are justified that something sinister is afoot, especially once the reveal spells everything out that the audience has long comprehended.  Even with such a lack of psychological tension or much of a mind-blowing finale, it remains an intriguing essay on a familiar concept of the wealthy justifying their existence at the expense of those less fortunate or who simply get in the way of their prolonged enhancement of an artificial, youthful existence.

 

THE CORPSE EATERS

(1974)

Dir - Donald R. Passmore/Klaus Vetter

Overall: WOOF

 

Serving as a pathetic, inaugural gore movie from Canada, it is hilarious that The Corpse Eaters, (i.e. the only film of any kind made by Donald R. Passmore and Klaus Vetter), opens with a warning to the squeamish ala 1931's Frankenstein which promises to flash a clip of an old man throwing up whenever anything gross happens.  The reason that this is hilarious is because nothing of any interest occurs at all for the first thirty-minutes besides people talking in a funeral home, a water jet skiing montage, an orgy set to a rerecorded version of Led Zeppelin's "How Many More Times" except with horns, and several unphotogenic, local theater actors summoning Satan for a hoot.  Considering that the only surviving print of the film runs a mere fifty-seven minutes long, it is a grievous faux pas that half of it is so amateurishly sluggish.  While the blood and guts do eventually rear their ugly head once the zombies show up to occasionally gorge on some people, things do not get much better and still regularly detour into horrendously shot, acted, recorded, and paced nonsense that even the most forgiving of no-budget filmmaking fans will find unwatchable.

BLOODLUST

(1976)

Dir - Marijan David Vajda

Overall: MEH

 

Though it boasts a deranged enough premise to garnish the interest of rabid Euro-trash hounds, Marijan David Vajda's Bloodlust, (Mosquito der Schänder, Bloodlust: The Black Forest Vampire, Mosquito), is a catastrophically boring slog with little going for it besides its sick, squandered potential.  Falling into the "crazy loner" camp of story, Werner Pochath plays a deaf and dumb mute with a vaguely disturbing childhood involving broken dolls, spilled red ink, and witnessing his father molest his sister.  With such traumatic ingredients in place, he carries about his day innocently enough with some people even considering him a harmless young man, including prostitutes who he visits on more than one occasion.  Yet of course his already wrecked psyche begins to crack which leads to him mutilating corpses and drinking their blood through a straw.  There are plenty of elements to be applauded at here then, (as was obviously the intention), but Vajda's skills behind the lens are severely lacking.  Aside from the troubled flashbacks which are front and center, it takes a long time for Pochath's behavior to start becoming truly alarming and once it does, the movie turns into a series of tedious sequences that could easily be interchanged as nothing progresses, there is no mystery for the viewer to be invested in, and zero suspense is mustered up until the police just nonchalantly arrest our wackadoo Norman Bates stand-in while he is at work, one second before the credits roll.