70's Foreign Horror Part Twenty-Two

THE LADY KILLS

(1971)

Dir - Jean-Louis van Belle

Overall: WOOF

For his follow-up to the vampire comedy Le sadique aux dents rouges, French writer/director Jean-Louis van Belle made the plodding, wretchedly monotonous The Lady Kills, (Perverse et docile); an early rape and revenge film with no style or purpose.  Carole Lebel sleepwalks through a movie that seems to be on tranquilizers in the first place, playing a woman who witnessed her sister's rape at a young age and then sets out in adulthood to murder all of the scumbag parties involved.  Episodic in nature, she travels across Europe, locates all of her victims easily, and then toys with them to fill out the running time until the perfect opportunity presents itself to do them in.  At no point are we ever given any insight into Lebel's character and nothing changes structurally the whole way through, which would not be a problem if it was not so dingily made.  The movie merely presents one unnecessarily elongated sequence after the other, with stock music replaying over and over again, only stopping for roughly five seconds or less at a time.  Excessive as far as nudity is concerned, its minimal-effort-attempts at being exploitative are pathetic at best and anyone unfortunate to come across it can merely watch the first fifteen minutes in fast forward to get the whole gist.

 

DRACULA AND SON

(1976)

Dir - Édouard Molinaro

Overall: MEH

 

Notable for containing Christopher Lee's tenth and final screen performance as the titular Count, Dracula and Son, (Dracula père et fils), exists in more than one version with different jokes thrown in depending.  Lee's voice is thankfully intact in both French and English cuts, though Bernard Ménez' dub was done by someone doing an effeminate Don Adams via Kermit the Frog impression that is persistently annoying, if still fitting to his weaselly character.  Such is the father/son dynamic between he and Lee, the latter as a noble, aristocratic, and stone-faced Count and the former as a pathetic dweeb who cannot even murder his own victims for nourishment.  The script by director Édouard Molinaro, Jean-Marie Poiré, and Alain Godard has only a small handful of clever bits at its disposal and it also uses some lazy plot devices like Ménez turning human for no decipherable reason as well as he and Lee caught in a love triangle between a woman who is the spitting image of the former's mother.  So, eeewww.  Some of the Hammer atmosphere is appreciated even if it fails to be sent-up as humorously as one would prefer and though it is refreshing to see Lee taking a lighthearted stab at his most famous on-screen persona, the movie is more awkwardly dull than funny.

 

BORN FOR HELL

(1976)

Dir - Denis Héroux

Overall: MEH

Inspired by the mass murder of eight nurses in Chicago by Richard Speck, Born for Hell, (Die Hinrichtung, The Execution, Naked Massacre), is a dour co-production between West Germany, France, Italy, and Canada that was shot on location in both Dublin and Belfast, Ireland.  While Mathieu Carrière's disturbed Vietnam vet is almost entirely historically inaccurate from Speck, some of the details of the killing spree are intact such as him holding up his victims merely with a knife and as the film's title would suggest, the "Born for Hell" tattoo on his arm directly alludes to the "Born to raise hell" ink that Speck sported.  Set during the Northern Ireland Conflict, the movie's bleak backdrop is fitting for such an ugly story where Carrière's character is left to roam around a grungy, bomb-torn Belfast in a downtrodden daze that leads him to a nursing school out of a combination of self-destruction and boredom.  Some of the sequences are jarring such as him forcing two naked women to perform fellatio on each other as well as the penultimate scene of him slicing his wrists open over a disgusting public toilet.  French-Canadian director Denis Héroux maintains a gritty, uncomfortable tone, but the soundtrack choices are often odd as if somebody is playing random classical music records at full blast during arbitrary moments.