1980s Animated Czech Horror

KRVAVÁ PANI
(1980)
Dir - Viktor Kubal
Overall: MEH

The last of three films directed by animator/cartoonist Viktor Kubal, Krvavá pani, (Bloody Lady), is a more fairytale-esque retelling of the legend of Lady of Čachtice/Erzsébet Báthory as opposed to a particularly horrific one.  Besides some brief narration at the very beginning to set the scene, there is no dialog present and this makes some of the details going on a bit difficult to decipher.  At only seventy-one minutes, it is more of a problem how painstakingly slow the film is though.  There is very little bloodshed and no standard, vampiric components usually common with other cinematic interpretations of the same source material.  While that is all fine, the elemental animation frequently pauses and with nothing besides sound effects and clashing music to help further guide the story, it struggles regularly to be engaging.  The deliberately simple, largely unemotional style does benefit the material at times, but it still mostly makes it rather impenetrable. 

THE PIED PIPER
(1986)
Dir - Jiří Barta
Overall: GOOD

A largely superb work of stop-motion animation, Jiří Barta's The Pied Piper, (Krysař), is a heavily German Expressionist-inspired adaptation of the Pied Piper of Hamelin folktale.  Produced by Kratky Films, it took six months to research and a year to shoot.  The handmade puppets by Barta are intricately designed to appear almost monstrous, mirroring their gluttonous, unflattering nature.  It is no mistake then that the two characters who appear to have normal, more elegant features are a woman who ultimately suffers at the hands of the townsfolk and a small infant left behind which signifies their innocence.  The music by Michael Kocáb plays a major role as the "dialog" is an intentional jumble of indistinguishable sounds spoken only by the grotesque inhabitants to further paint them as unnaturally villainous.  It is mostly the visual design that steals the show though.  Utilizing real life rats and some lovely two-dimensional paintings with the highly stylized stop-motion animation, the film plays off this juxtaposition while presenting a foreign world that is as fantastical as it is dark.

ALICE
(1988)
Dir - Jan Švankmajer
Overall: GOOD

Possibly the most inventive of any Alice in Wonderland adaptation was by animator Jan Švankmajer, simply titled  Alice, (or Něco z Alenky in its native Czech).  Having made a hefty amount of shorts beforehand, Švankmajer chose the Lewis Carroll novel to interpret as his full-length debut.  The surreal landscape of the famous source material makes for an ideal backdrop for strange stop-motion creations to rather ingeniously come to life.  These are not limited to a gang of skeleton animals with sawdust for guts, possessed dollhouses, thick, fleshy frog tongues, and a comically repetitive tea party including a wooden puppet Mad Hatter getting buttered stopwatches attached to him.  The film is structured not at all like a fairytale, but instead as an avant-garde series of vignettes, none of which follow any particular logic or narrative.  It is further stylistically bizarre that there is no musical score and that all of the dialog, (no matter who authored it), is spoken by Alice who is systematically experiencing the story and reading it all at once.  While Kristýna Kohoutová is the only human actor on screen, puppets, meat, clay, drawings, and live animals all intermingle and Švankmajer's design work overall gives it an earthy, oddly-lived in look that is frequently unnerving.

1970s American Horror Part Fifteen

EQUINOX
(1970)
Dir - Jack Woods/Dennis Muren
Overall: MEH

This bizarre, quasi-precursor to Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead was the only full-length film from special effects artist and producer Dennis Muren.  Equinox was originally funded as a short titled The Equinox: Journey into the Supernatural before independent distribution company Tonylyn Productions came on board and extra footage was shot by Jack Woods to flush it out.  The result is four teenagers, (who look like they are pushing thirty-seven at times due to the several years between shooting schedules), venturing into the woods and finding a book about demons that ends up summoning stop-motion monsters and possessing random people to grow eye-shadow and start growling until someone shows them a holy symbol.  The movie never has a chance of creating an unsettling, moody atmosphere as its budgetary issues and borderline incompetent direction incessantly undermine it.  All of the dialog is not only dubbed, but in the most wordy lead, Edward Connell sounds like he is narrating an education film about sandpaper.  In one scene, he is literally just reading from the unholy tome for what seems like four-hundred and fifty years, filling up screen time in the most sleep-inducing way possible.  The cel animation and stop motion effects by Dave Allen and Jim Danforth are fun though as are the laughably bad, Z-grade schlocky qualities.

WESTWORLD
(1973)
Dir - Michael Crichton
Overall: GOOD

The first theatrically released film by author/filmmaker Michael Crichton features his patented, conceptual trademark of man's hampering with nature, (or in this case technology), backfiring in dangerous ways.  While Jurassic Park may be the comparatively more well known property that used such a backdrop of an amusement park overrun by its exhibits, the initial Westworld spawned a successful franchise of its own, culminating in the HBO series of the same name that debuted in 2016.  The film is an impressive production, combining period costumes and sets with slightly futuristic though contemporary ones.  As the cold, villainous gunslinger android with silver-gleaming pupils decked out in his Magnificent Seven outfit, Yul Brynner makes for a creepy antagonist and also one that sums up the movie's central merging of eras and the unrelenting nature of artificially sentient machinery.  While the film is fun in how it lovingly and narratively showcases its cliches, its dark turn is random and unexplained, though more in a half-baked way than a successfully chilling one.  Whether this is at the fault of Crichton and his relative inexperience behind the lens or not, it is still an enjoyable be it uneven affair with some unrealized potential.

EATEN ALIVE
(1976)
Dir - Tobe Hooper
Overall: MEH

As a follow-up to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tobe Hooper's Eaten Alive, (Death Trap, Starlight Slaughter, Horror Hotel), is a technically slicker production, but a relentlessly annoying and unpleasant one as well.  Two different men attempt to rape the same woman within the first eleven minutes, we see a dog get chomped on by a live alligator, an incessantly rambling-to-himself Nazi hillbilly licks cocaine out of his palm, another woman is beaten and hogtied while her daughter screams in horror watching, and that is all before it even hits the halfway point.  More odd is how eccentric behavior carries over beyond the film's psychotic, reptilian enthusiast motel owner who is clearly meant to be the crazy, horror movie bad guy.  A redneck bar patron does a weird slapping ritual before picking a fight and after that family dog becomes alligator breakfast, its dad starts pointing, screaming, and raving about fuck knows what to his wife before busting out a shotgun in a rage.  The rest of it becomes monotonous as it is mostly foaming at the mouth, yee-haw perverts everywhere and incoherent, Nazi cocaine man wielding a sickle and yelling at people.  Whereas Chainsaw went for the jugular and eventually off the rails with its unforgiving disturbingness and crude production values, the results here are straight exploitative, B-movie schlock.  The film is not scary, it is just loud, messy, and stupid.

1970s American Horror Part Fourteen

SCHLOCK
(1973)
Dir - John Landis
Overall: MEH

John Landis' ultra-cheap, $60,000 budgeted Schlock is unsurprisingly an ultra-cheap, well, schlocky filmmaking debut.  Besides being the first movie a then twenty-three year old Landis ever made, it is also noteworthy as one of the very first that legendary monster maker Rick Baker ever worked on.  Both of these historical tidbits aside, the movie itself is a rough watch.  Working within the confines of pure Loony Tunes logic, it rarely achieves the hysterics it sets out for.  People are either running away screaming from the title character, (Landis in an ape costume), staring blindly at him in disbelief, or nonchalantly carrying on as if there is absolutely nothing abnormal about his presence in the first place.  Like many first time, inexperienced directors with a barely adequate budget at their disposal for a feature length product, the pacing is arduous. The experience then is waiting for something actually funny to happen and sadly, nothing ever really does.  Coming from a filmmaker who would later achieve iconic results in horror and comedy, (not to mention parody, specifically which this movie qualifies as), this primarily chalks up to "Well, gotta start somewhere".  For completists only.

GOD TOLD ME TO
(1976)
Dir - Larry Cohen
Overall: GOOD

The follow-up to It's Alive, God Told Me To, (Demon), is probably the most compelling if not altogether best horror movie in Larry Cohen's odd, often frustrating filmography.  The bizarre story which fuses theology, alien abduction, and police procedurals together is only matched in its weirdness by the cinematic presentation.  The director's eccentric leanings, (or those of his cast), were usually too annoying to bare, but the results are successfully nerve-wracking here.  Feeling both hugely ambitious and underwritten all at once, the film moves so fast with an unrelentingly dramatic soundtrack that it never has a second to create any kind of at least conventionally eerie mood.  This would seem the work of a total amateur then if not for the fact that its disorienting nature seems to intentionally mirror the chaotic story where confusion seems to be bursting from the seams everywhere you look in Manhattan.  Giving Cohen the benefit of the doubt then, we are left to take the unorthodox approach at face value and it is sort of commendable how uniquely disturbing the film becomes at various intervals. 

THE MANITOU
(1978)
Dir - William Girdler
Overall: GOOD

Directing nine movies in a mere six year period, Kentucky-born William Girdler died in a helicopter accident while scouting locations for his next film before The Manitou, (which would therefor end up being his last), was released.  This was an adaptation of Graham Masterson's novel of the same name and is one of several occult-themed devil baby-adjacent horror movies from the 1970s.  The origin of such malevolent forces and the means to combat them does end up being a bit interesting, but it also grows comically ridiculous in the process.  This is not necessarily a bad thing though as the random, Native American-tinged supernatural occurrences completely fail to be creepy, yet are also so quirky and random that they provide the film with a hokey, frivolous charm.  Tony Curtis as a sleazy, faux-mystic with a fake mustache and wizard robe who occasionally stumbles his lines is a pure highlight, though as the main protagonist who quickly becomes seriously concerned with the plot, he does not get to camp it up too much beyond the first act.  The movie has camp elsewhere in spades though, particularly once the cosmic, medicine mad showdown gets underway and the weirdness gloves come flying off.  Whether its absurdness is accidental or intended, it is anything but boring.

1970s American Horror Part Thirteen

LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH
(1971)
Dir - John D. Hancock
Overall: GOOD

The debut from American filmmaker John D. Hancock with the misleadingly near-schlocky title of Let's Scare Jessica to Death is a patchy yet interesting psychological horror work.  The project was originally offered to Hancock as a satirical B-movie called It Drinks Hippie Blood, but the director insisted on making it a legit, solemn affair and retained very little from that initial script.  Using a small cast on a tight budget and filmed in central Connecticut, the end product has some amateurish shortcomings such as unconvincing improvisational dialog, jumpy editing, and a bit of a flimsily unfocused story.  It overcomes most of these issues with an excellent, committed performance from Zohra Lampert as the mentally ill title character fighting for her sanity in an isolated farmhouse, a consistently eerie tone, and some memorably hair-raising set pieces.  Taking all of the components as a whole, it is definitely messy, but there is an understated, imaginative quality to it that increases as it goes on.  The film may get more frustratingly confusing as it goes on as well, but there is enough here to interest fans of more unorthodox, subdued, though-provoking horror all the same.

JAWS
(1975)
Dir - Steven Spielberg
Overall: GOOD

One of the most wildly profitable and influential horror-esque films ever made, Steven Spielberg's seminal Jaws may not have the same visceral impact it did decades ago, but it is still as enjoyable as anything from arguably the medium's most famous director.  Decades after its commercial and artistic influence has long become the stuff of Hollywood legend, watching it now is more like either a celebration in nostalgia or a film history lesson.  Neither of these things are unfortunate, but a couple jump scares notwithstanding, John William's iconic music accompanying doomed tourists on a beach, the quintessential idiot mayor, Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfuss arguing shark theories, and the inevitable shots of Bruce the Great White are less heart-racing and more sentimentally pleasing.  As a horror film, it has some of the necessary goods, but a relatively young Spielberg would mount even more successfully tense scenes in Jurassic Park eighteen years later and that one qualifies as even less as a horror film in most movie-goers eyes.  Genre labels aside, Jaws is still as entertaining as they come and practically essential viewing for fully appreciating the very first recognized financial blockbuster as well as probably the best nature horror film ever made.

AUDREY ROSE
(1977)
Dir - Robert Wise
Overall: MEH

Written by author and occasional director Frank De Felitta, (and based off of his novel of the same name), Audrey Rose also doubles as the last proper horror movie that Robert Wise ever directed.  While there may be an interesting idea lurking here about reincarnation veiled through an Exorcist-esque set up of an eleven year old girl "possessed", there are some major issues at play.  Most prominently of all, De Felitta's wordy script asks way too much of the viewer.  How Anthony Hopkins' character is even given the time of day by the family whose daughter he is obsessing over is illogical enough.  Yet when the concept of reincarnation becomes the subject of a high profile criminal trial, it is just preposterous from there and any attempts to take the movie seriously anymore are utterly vanquished.  Focusing on a number of sequences where a girl has waking nightmares while screaming over and over and over again, it grows incredibly monotonous and throughout the whole thing, Wise conducts everything in a very weighty matter.  The performances are rather melodramatic, from Marsha Mason in the lead down to bit parts, though Hopkins keeps his wits about him more or less considering the material.  It is a shame that the movie ultimately ends up being a pile of ridiculous and ultimately tedious hoopla though.

1970s American Horror Part Twelve

SEASON OF THE WITCH
(1972)
Dir - George A. Romero
Overall: GOOD

Released a month before The Crazies, Season of the Witch, (initially put out as Hungry Wives by the insistence of producer Jack H. Harris who promoted it incorrectly as a soft-core porn film), acts in part as George Romero's second be it quasi-horror film after Night of the Living Dead.  Romero's ambitions here clearly go beyond making a standard, genre-pandering supernatural yarn.  In typical fashion for the independent filmmaker, it was shot locally on an ultra-modest budget with mostly low-caliber actors.  Romero's story of an anxiety-ridden middle-class housewife slowly unraveling and turning to witchcraft is less about Rosemary's Baby-inspired, occult freakiness though and more a cinematic essay on feminism and female conformity in the wake of late 60s counterculture.  It uses spooky music and nightmare sequences liberally yet effectively, but the macabre, unnatural tone is more meant to enhance the frustration, boredom, and confusion of its main protagonist than cause chills for the viewer.  Moments of dated, improvisational, drunk John Cassavetes dialog, some clunky editing, and a lifeless flow makes it a less rewarding watch than it was probably intended to be, but its aspirations still keep it afloat for the most part.

THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN
(1976)
Dir - Charles B. Pierce
Overall: MEH

Charles B. Pierce's follow-up to the atrociously Z-rent abomination snooze-fest that is The Legend of Boggy Creek was this dramatic re-telling of the infamous Texarkana Moonlight Murders of 1946.  The Town That Dreaded Sundown has a catchy title, a fetching horror movie slasher villain in the white-hooded The Phantom, and a handful of nasty scenes where victims scream and beg as they are dragged out of cars, beaten to a pulp, and brutally done away with.  Pierce stages these killings in an effectively disturbing way, usually with minimal to no music.  That and the Phantom's heavy breathing, weird grunts, and bugged-out eyes peaking through tiny slits in his crudely makeshift mask make it pretty horrific indeed.  Elsewhere it is the usual slag though with county sheriffs and Texas Rangers talking about how they are going to catch the guy in drawn out, emotionally unengaging and talky scenes.  Pierce's attempts at comic relief are more head-scratching than funny, like some Dukes of Hazzard getaway scenes and several officers dressed in drag, pulling a stakeout in cars to try and bait the killer.  The combination of legit actors and town locals is jarring and overall, it is an uneven affair that regularly looses momentum or becomes unnecessarily goofy when it otherwise should keep its non-murder sequences properly compelling.

ATTACK OF THE KILLER TOMATOES
(1978)
Dir - John DeBello
Overall: WOOF

When a movie's entire purpose is to be "so bad it's good", it can be a misconception that achieving such a thing is like shooting fish in a barrel.  As Attack of the Killer Tomatoes clearly demonstrates, this task is in fact far more difficult.  One or two chuckles aside, (a smiling guy in a library calmly over-enunciating the word "tomato" to insinuate a small riot is legitimately laugh out loud funny), almost the entirety of this deliberately lousy B-monster invasion parody is actually just that; lousy.  All of the technical blunders are there knowingly, (bad acting, bad miking, bad special effects, bad script), but the fact that so very little of it is actually amusing rather completely sinks the entire thing.  The humor or lack thereof is way too on the nose.  When trying to hit the same beats as schlocky drive-in genre films that are accidentally a hoot, those same beats here are exaggerated to such an extreme as to try and be intentionally funny instead.  This ultimately makes them too juvenile, obvious, and groan-worthy to work and the movie's knowing stupidity becomes overwhelming in the worst way.  Three more sequels followed, (all directed and co-written by John DeBello), but one is enough thank you.

1970s American Horror Part Eleven

COUNT YORGA, VAMPIRE
(1970)
Dir - Bob Kelljan
Overall: MEH

One of the seemingly untold number of horror films to be distributed by American International Pictures, Count Yorga, Vampire, (The Loves Of Count Iorga, Vampire), is an adequately entertaining though ultimately run-of-the-mill modern day vampire yarn.  It takes its cue from most film adaptations of Bram Stoker's Dracula.  A dashingly handsome, polite, Eastern-European foreigner with hypnotism powers, a cape, and some undead "brides" at his disposal is inevitably confronted by a doctor and some other people, though not during the day when he is napping in his coffin but instead after the sun goes down.  There is also a deformed brutish man-servant and the police fill the skeptic quota as they will not even entertain the idea that vampires exist.  Horror mainstay Robert Quarry makes for a solid bloodsucking Count, but just as the movie itself, he is no better or worse than any of the other generic aspects at play.  The title character only appeared in two films, (this and the following year's The Return of Count Yorga), after an idea to have him square off against Dr. Phibes was abandoned.  Quarry still ended up playing an immortal in Dr. Phibes Rises Again anyway, so we hardly missed out.

THE NIGHT STRANGLER
(1973)
Dir - Dan Curtis
Overall: GOOD

The one/two punch of the successful The Night Stalker and its follow-up The Night Strangler, (broadcast in 1972 and 1973, respectively), garnished the launching of the Kolchak: The Night Stalker TV series, one of the best horror-tinged program that 7's television ever produced.  Returning screenwriter Richard Matheson is joined by Dark Shadows creator Dan Curtis, (in the same year that the duo collaborated on the Jack Palance-starred Dracula adaptation), and if The Night Stalker laid the blueprint of Carl Kolchak endlessly annoying newspaper editors and police officials as he is assuredly convinced that supernatural shenanigans are afoot, then its sequel here solidified that blueprint.  The same stuff/different story approach would be for naught if said story was not compelling and the strangler of the title is a formidable, otherworldly foible indeed.  The comedic sparing between Darren McGavin and Simon Oakland as Tony Vicenzo was always the highlight to this unwavering formula and such is still the case here.  Minor roles from John Carradine, Margaret Hamilton, and Al Lewis are also appreciated.

THE AMITYVILLE HORROR
(1979)
Dir - Stuart Rosenberg
Overall: GOOD

Calling the first of to date about four-hundred and twelve in the Amityville Horror franchise "good" may be a bit misleading.  Though wildly over the top, messy, and centered around a fraudulent, sensationalized "true story", it is at the same time largely a hoot and makes for one of the most interestingly flawed films in the entire genre.  An adaptation of Jay Anson's novel of the same name, (itself a fictionalized account of the "hoax" haunting experiences by the Lutz family which was also visited by con-artist paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren of The Conjuring fame), it comes tailor made with haunted house cliches up the wazoo, many of which were further borrowed to death by countless horror films of varying quality since.  For almost all of the cast, it seems to have been written into their contract to overact, with an aging Rod Steiger in particular going for the jugular, at least when he is not staring off into space emotionless or just sweating profusely.  The supernatural occurrences are of course completely arbitrary, yet they are also so frequent in number and delivered so oddly dead-pan that they are anything but lame.  It is precisely this bizarre, tonal balancing act that's consistently maintained which makes it such a fascinating work.  Like it or not, it is too historically important alone to leave out of any "family moves into an underpriced house that people died in and evil stuff starts happening" film conversation.

1970s Spanish Horror Part Six

THE GLASS CEILING
(1971)
Dir - Eloy de la Iglesia
Overall: WOOF

The first thriller from Spanish filmmaker Eloy de la Iglesia, The Glass Ceiling, (El techo de cristal), could be described as criminally insipid.  When almost every scene of the movie is two people talking yet almost none of them advance the plot, you have a serious problem.  The results are so boring that forty-minutes in, it is too bothersome to even care about or have any idea of what is even happening.  There are two women living in a rural apartment building, each of whom have a husband who is out of town.  There is a sculpture, another lady, some other guy, and a pervert around and they all have various conversations about things that vaguely allude to maybe one of the woman's husbands being missing or murdered.  The film is such a tedious drag though that you pretty much have to use your imagination to even surmise that much.  Sadly the dubbing, cinematography, and performances are as flat as the pacing and story.  Even a would-be trippy nightmare sequence seems uninspired.  The last fifteen minutes almost give the movie some signs of life, but if you have to wait that damn long, it is hardly worth the trouble.

THE LORELEY'S GRASP
(1973)
Dir - Amando de Ossorio
Overall: MEH

This creature feature from Amando de Ossorio came right smack in between the four entries in his more famous, Blind Dead series.  While The Loreley's Grasp, (Las Garras de Lorelei, When the Screaming Stops), is exquisitely violent with body parts being clawed up, chests getting ripped open, and vital organs getting pulled out, its title monster also has an embarrassingly silly costume that pushes the whole thing into schlock terrain.  This may have been simply a budgetary matter, (after all, the Knights Templar had a simple visual design yet came off creepy enough), but no matter how sudden and brutal the killings are or how quickly Ossorio tries to cut away from it, a reptilian Halloween costume in a black hood still provides nothing but hysterics.  Elsewhere the plotting is typically lazy and primarily seems concerned with having scantily clad women present for as many shots as the monster is not in.  Though it does manage to shoehorn an angry mob in there for what it is worth.  With its unintended humor creating a clashing atmosphere and, (naturally being an Ossorio movie), having too leisurely of a pace, it is kind of a failure, but an occasionally fun one.

DEVIL'S KISS
(1975)
Dir - Jordi Gigó
Overall: WOOF

Jordi Gigó only directed three movies, (one of which was called Porno Girls), and it is not too surprising that his career was not more lucrative after enduring his debut here.  Devil's Kiss, (La perversa caricia de Satán), is an unrelenting drag of a movie, even by 70s Euro-horror standards.  A professor of something and a medium move into an old boring guy's chateau after an equally uninteresting seance and fashion show takes place there, (do not ask), and then it is mostly people talking, some boobs, and a shirtless Frankenstein monster stamping around killing a few folks while the choppy, stock organ music drops some minor key bombs on the soundtrack.  When the organ bursts are not reminding you that you are watching a horror movie, the rest of it plays to silence or crickets chirping which understandably enhances the lameness tenfold.  If you are unfortunate enough to sit through the dubbed version, the voice-over actors sound like they were trying to cram the whole recording session in before lunch and could not be bothered to do any second, more enthusiastic takes.  It is not so much standard as just random and above all else, dull, dull, dull.  For certain viewers, its overwhelming vapid qualities may make it a hilarious trainwreck of uninspired nonsense.  For the rest, it will just be an aggravating waste of time.