70's Italian Horror Part Thirteen

FRANKENSTEIN '80

(1972)

Dir - Mario Mancini

Overall: WOOF

 

It is not every day that one comes across a movie taking "inspiration" from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein which features the monster raping and murdering a prostitute and then choking out a stripper, but that is where Frankenstein '80, (Midnight Horror), unfortunately comes in.  A textbook bit of Euro-horror sleaze that is heavy on the sleaze and all around awfulness, it checks off most of the necessary components that the worst of low-budget Italian grindhouse garbage has to offer.  As the lone directorial effort from cinematographer Mario Mancini, it is alarming how hilariously inept the film looks with awkward framing, no atmospheric lighting, (or sometimes no lighting at all), crude gore effects, and slap-dash editing that literally cuts characters off in mid sentence.  The dubbing is of the melodramatic variety that bottom-barrel, foreign exports were all too often given, with whoever did Renato Romano's police inspector deserves particular "props" for his ridiculously over the top line readings.  While this is certainly horrible enough to garnish laugh out loud responses here or there, it is of course mostly an painful, ugly bore that would be better enjoyed as a gag-reel than as an unforgiving, eighty-nine minute viewing experience.

 

DEATH SMILES ON A MURDERER

(1973)

Dir - Joe D'Amato

Overall: MEH

 

Notable as the first film that Euro-trash exemplar Joe D'Amato was credited as the director on, (though he had unofficially made a handful of others beforehand), Death Smiles on a Murder, (La morte ha sorriso all'assassino, Death Smiles at Murder), finds him sort of lazily reworking several Gothic horror tropes with both Klaus Kinski and Ewa Aulin on board.  Kinski is only partially present as a mostly useless doctor whose small handful of scenes almost come off as if they are taken from a different movie, though Aulin is appropriately top-billed as a beautiful woman who was raped by her hunchback brother, married Giacomo Rossi Stuart, suffered amnesia, got walled into a locked room Edgar Allan Poe style by her lesbian love interest, and then haunts everyone else on screen with hilariously awful corpse makeup on for the rest of the film.  It is all silly business that by D'Amato's own account was the result of inexperience as a screenwriter as well as him being unable to successfully collaborate with enough people to help flesh-out his rather desperate number of ideas.  His directing chops are not all that impressive either as it drags quite a bit and adheres to the same soft-focus, by-the-books aesthetic of every other low-budget genre film of the era, with plenty of zooms and repeated musical cues to boot.  A waste all around, but not an insulting one at least.

 

THE KILLER RESERVED NINE SEATS

(1974)

Dir - Giuseppe Bennati

Overall: MEH

 

Though it goes for some eerie atmosphere and has a killer with a jarring mask on, too many unlikable, interchangeable characters ultimately doom the final film from director Giuseppe Bennati, The Killer Reserved Nine Seats, (L'assassino ha riservato nove poltrone).  People and their spouses, ex-spouses, boyfriends, girlfriends, and daughters all hold up in an abandoned, family theater for no decipherable reason, (likely bourgeois boredom), before they start getting slowly, very slowly picked off in accordance with some series of events that took place a century earlier.  No one likes each other until they admit to being madly in love with each other, everyone talks in one part of a room only to walk to another part of the room to talk some more, women get slapped around when they get upset, one of them dances around naked only moments after discovering a dead body, and the dubbing is made up exclusively of pompous, cartoon character British accents.  Equal parts melodramatic and exhaustively boring, the lackluster story is wasted on the excellent, foreboding setting.  If it was not so overly talky and meandering, then Bennati's frequent, silent detours down dilapidated hallways and stage sets would be appropriately chilling.