Decades of Terror: Takoma's Slow-Moving October Time Machine

Wizard of Gore, 1970

Sherry Carson (Judy Cler) is a television news host who attends a magic show with her boyfriend, Jack (Wayne Ratay). During the show, the magician, Montag (Ray Sager), horrifically mutilates a woman, though by the end of the trick she seems to be fine. However, the woman later dies, seemingly of the same type of injuries she sustained in the show. Suspicious of Montag, Sherry and Jack begin to investigate him as he continues his gruesome performances and the bodies continue to pile up.

In this gorefest, a dogged ambiguity manages to add interest right up until the all-out nutty ending.

There’s nothing all that novel about a movie where a man brutally dispatches women, delighting in the violence and framing it all with sexual overtones. And when faced with some movies of this ilk, I often turn a weary eye to trying to decide where the line is between the misogyny of the killer and the misogyny of the film itself. But in this movie, I didn’t find myself having to think all that hard about this line, because whether it’s intentional or not, the killer is such an utter turd that it condemns the film’s point of view whether or not it’s meant to be exploiting or tut-tutting at such violence towards women.

The strength of this film (aside from the completely insane last 5 minutes) lies in the strangeness of what’s happening in Montag’s magic shows, and the film’s total refusal to commit to a “real” point of view. Each show begins the same way: Montag goes before his audience and does some tepid crowd work. Then, somehow, the entire room falls into a collective trance. Montag repeatedly asks if there isn’t a “young woman” who will volunteer for his act. (No, I’m sorry to say that Montag has no interest in eviscerating the male attendees at his shows). An entranced woman puts her hand up, is led to the stage, restrained in some way, and then impaled or gored or otherwise mutilated. And as eyeballs pop out and Montag runs his hands through a questionable amount of intestines, we suddenly get a shot of the trick being performed in a totally bloodless way. Bwah? By the end of the trick, the woman leaves the stage seemingly in one piece.

So what are these sequences? At first, I thought that the idea was that the entranced audience were seeing the bloodless version and Montag was magically “undoing” his violence. But that doesn’t really make a lot of sense. A more unsettling idea is that Montag is indulging in violent, sadistic fantasies that are so powerful that somehow in the moments of intimacy that he has with these women, his fantasies imprint themselves into the women’s bodies. Now, that also doesn’t make the most sense, but I think that it serves as an eerie exaggeration of the way that intense (usually male, in my experience, but I’m sure women can also be imposing creepers!) attention can almost feel violent. The fact that Montag “needs” young women to make his shows work (something that no one ever questions). The power imbalance between the performer and his audience (that even without the trance would make it hard for the women to refuse participation). It all adds up to something that feels vaguely familiar in an unpleasant way.

Now, I’m very aware that it doesn’t feel at all like the film is trying to comment on male violence, or the use of violence against women as entertainment/spectacle. It seems like the person making this movie sort of gets off on vaguely bondage situations where women are tortured in ways that are overtly sexualized, with the added fetish touch of a live audience watching the whole thing and doing nothing about it.

But it really doesn’t matter. The movie makes a point with itself as evidence. For me, the ickiest idea is that even after multiple women have died after volunteering in Montag’s shows, people continue to attend the shows. Women go. Men take their wives or girlfriends.

Now, is the acting bad? Yes. (Though I did enjoy Cler in the lead role, especially in the last act). Is the old-age makeup on Sager appalling? Absolutely. But this is one of those films where all of the “bad movie” indicators sort of circle around and for the most part add to the off-kilter feel of it all. I’m not saying that this turns the film to gold: at times the bad stuff is just bad. But I didn’t find myself getting bored with the film, and the question of how self-aware it was kept me interested until the end.

It’s not good. But it’s . . . something.

Django the Bastard, 1969

In a Western town in the late 1800s, a mysterious man, Django (Anthony Steffen), appears bearing wooden crosses with the names of several of the town’s residents. While loose cannon Hugh (Luciano Rossi) seems to be at the heart of the mystery, prominent citizen Rod Murdock (Paolo Gozlino) also has a role to play.

Despite a less-than-compelling protagonist, this horror-thriller-western still delivers with strong imagery and a great premise.

This is a movie that never quite rises to greatness, but it does maintain interest in both the plot and visuals from the striking beginning to the mysterious final shot. Steffen’s Django arrives in town and immediately plants a cross in the ground bearing a man’s name. That man, currently enjoying himself in a saloon, is disconcerted to say the least. Well, he’s disconcerted for about 5 minutes. Then he is dead.

The wooden crosses are simple props, and yet the film finds many ways to use them. There’s a repeated theme of Django putting down a cross to announce his next victims. But the crosses are also used to prop up the dead bodies of men he’s killed, sending them back to town like scarecrows atop their horses. The crosses also serve as decoys, so that men shoot at what they think is Django but is only a cross propped up with a coat and hat. At times this threatens to go silly--does Django have a warehouse full of these things?--but for me it stayed on the right side of enigmatic.

There are also some strong, spooky stagings of sequences between Django and his antagonists. In one scene, Hugh ambushes Django in a barn, looping a noose around Django’s neck and trying to perform a one-man lynch job. Django, as he is for most of the film, is silent, and simply begins to pull back on the noose. It’s a quiet, creepy showdown. In another sequence, a

I’ve not been hugely impressed by Steffen’s work in the past, but I think that his, um, ~*~less expressive~*~ style is a pretty good fit for the enigmatic character who may or may not be back from the dead. Django is a character who mostly broods, glares, and lurks, and Steffen broods, glares, and lurks with the best of them. This even serves the film well when it comes to a subplot where Murdock’s wife, Alethea (Rada Rassimov) tries to seduce Django, but he’s pretty much uninterested.

My initial reaction to watching this film was that it was a knock off of High Plains Drifter, but it actually precedes that film by a good few years. Now, do I think that this movie is as good as the Eastwood film? No. It’s not as stylish or surreal as that film. But personally, I’ve always had a hard time with the way that we’re meant to enjoy the main character heroically raping and/or threatening to rape the only women in the film. It’s something that keeps me from revisiting it. In contrast, Django’s seeming indifference to Alethea feels like a refreshing change of pace, and a better fit for his maybe-undead character.

That said, this one still manages to not know what to do with the character of Murdock’s wife, who starts out as a conspirator but then is won over by Django’s awesome brooding skills, I guess. The movie passes the very low bar that no one is raped or threatened with rape as a joke, but it still whiffs on a character who could have been really interesting: a person coming to realize what their loved one has done in the past.

And this problem isn’t just with Alethea, though her shifting moods and loyalties stand out the most. Across the board the characters are underdeveloped. The deaths of the men are well-staged, as are a few attempts to trap and kill Django, but there’s not as much emotional weight to any of it because neither Django nor his adversaries make a huge impression. Hugh probably makes the biggest splash, because his scenes are marked by a frantic, sweaty urgency that speaks to what looks like someone who has taken a whole lot of illicit substances.

On the whole, I really enjoyed this film and the way that it let the ambiguity about Django’s character linger until the last frame.

A Quiet Place in the Country, 1968

Leonardo (Franco Nero) is an artist who has hit a creative dead-end. His girlfriend, Flavia (Vanessa Redgrave) arranges for him to spend some time in the countryside. Leonardo becomes fixated on an abandoned mansion and moves in, only to discover that the home is seemingly haunted by the ghost of its former owner, Wanda (Gabriella Boccardo). As Leonardo becomes more and more obsessed with Wanda--and the story of her death--his sense of reality begins to slip away.

Blessed and cursed with perpetual ambiguity, this film thrives on great visuals and incredibly fun performances.

I’m not sure that anything was quite as delightful to me as the very opening sequence of this film, in which Redgrave’s Flavia torments Leonardo---bound by rope to a chair, wearing only his underwear---with a cacophony of modern electrical devices. Blenders whir and televisions blare, careening around on a small electric car. Flavia puts a spinning shoe buffer alarmingly close to Leonardo’s bare feet. It’s an entertaining intersection between kinky and just plain weird, and when a frustrated Leonardo finally chases after Flavia, who has left him to his torment, things really go off the rails. (Quick poll: should Leonardo have been naked in this scene? Part of me thinks that would be more accurate to the power dynamic being portrayed, but another part of me thinks that the tighty whities add a degree of patheticness that is also somewhat crucial.)

From the dizzying heights of that opening sequence, which firmly establishes both the relationship dynamics between Leonardo and Flavia and the floating unreality of the film, things even out just a bit. Leonardo moves into the mansion and slowly becomes convinced of a supernatural presence. Strange things happen to Flavia any time that she visits. Leonardo slowly learns the scandalous secrets behind Wanda’s death and her connections to the people still living in the village. Leonardo establishes a weird relationship with his live-in housekeeper, a young woman named Egle (Rita Calderone).

But things pick up again in strong fashion in the last 15 minutes or so of the film, where the imagery really goes over the top and Leonardo and Flavia’s romance faces a final reckoning. It’s an ending so audacious that it just about makes you forget about the hundred or so questions it raises moments after the film ends.

While I felt that the movie sometimes tried to have things both ways in terms of its narrative---something that is explained by the intentional ambiguity, though an explanation and feeling satisfied are not the same thing---the striking imagery and a particularly fun performance from Redgrave more than make up for any qualms I have with the story. There are sequences here which are obviously dreams/hallucinations, but there are other sequences where the unreal nature of what is happening is less obvious. I really loved Redgrave in this film as a woman who is used to be in control and doesn’t know how to handle her man being taken from her, maybe by the ghost of a dead woman.

Nero’s character felt less well defined to me. There’s a scene where he watches a slideshow that alternates nude art with images of real-life atrocities and suffering. And . . . okay? I never totally felt like I got a deep understanding of his character. Obviously he needed a certain amount of stimulation---sex, violence---for his creative process. And while I felt that Nero did manage to capture Leonardo’s incredible egocentrism, his character’s arc didn’t feel quite as defined. This will be a crazy sentence, but whatever: a man obsessed with violence and sex being seduced by a violent sexy ghost feels a little on the nose.

While this one didn’t quite maintain the high insanity of the first sequence, it’s a solid psychological horror with plenty of engaging imagery and a memorable last act.

The Torture Chamber of Dr Sadism, 1967

Count Regula (Christopher Lee) is tried and executed in gruesome fashion for the killing of twelve young women in his village. Regula swears revenge as he goes to his death, and decades later the descendent of his prosecutor arrives in town. Roger (Lex Barker) is a lawyer who is in the village to assist his client, the Baroness Lillian (Karin Dor), who has inherited a property in the area. Accompanied by Lillian’s companion Babette (Christiane Rucker) and a priest named Fabian (Vladimir Medar), and driven by a nervous stagecoach driver (Dieter Eppler), things get stranger and stranger as they travel through a foreboding forest.

Full of wonderful imagery and fun characters, a thin plot can’t ding the overall enjoyment of this colorful horror.

Pretty much everything in this film walks a very fine line between being pretty neat and being a bit corny. But the good news is that whichever side of the line it veers toward, it still manages to be incredibly entertaining.

Nothing illustrates this aspect of the film better than the character of the carriage driver. Already somewhat hesitant to take a night-time trip through the cursed woods, the driver only becomes more agitated as he bears witness to bodies strewn through the trees, in many cases almost seeming to be embedded within the trunks or branches. What the driver sees is horrifying, foreboding, and definitely a reason to turn a carriage around if there ever was one. AND YET! And yet every time the driver manages to get Roger and Fabian to come out of the carriage, instead of pointing their attention to the many dead and mangled bodies, he instead says things like, “I saw three crows! That’s a bad omen!”, then relents in dismay as his clients insist on continuing the journey.

The trip through the woods constitutes most of the runtime of the movie, eventually moving the action to the titular torture chamber. There is plenty of spooky atmosphere to be had in the torture chamber, though some might be disappointed by the ratio of talking to the actual use of the devices in the chamber. But there are plenty of enjoyable touches, like hallways made of skulls, or Regula’s faithful assistant Anatol (Carl Lange) helping to reassemble his drawn-and-quartered master. We also learn more about the character of Fabian and his real motivations for venturing into the woods.

The lead actors are pleasant enough, though they don’t make a ton of an impression. Medar’s Fabian is probably the most engaging character, mainly due to the fact that he actually has something of a plot arc. While Roger and Lillian are nice enough and do their best to look out for one another, there is something of a lack of action. The film leans predictably into forcing romance between Roger and Lillian and between Fabian and Babette. It’s not bad, just a bit blandly predictable.

Your enjoyment of this film will probably hinge largely on how much you enjoy atmosphere and lovely macabre imagery. I thought it was a lot of fun, even if the characters and story felt a bit thin.

Let’s Kill Uncle, 1966

Barnaby (Pat Cadi) has just lost his father to a car accident and stands to inherit millions of dollars. The only problem is that Barnaby’s uncle, Major Harrison (Nigel Green), would like that money all to himself. When Barnaby arrives on a tropical island to stay with his uncle, Harrison makes it very clear that he intends to kill the boy. Barnaby’s best hope is a fellow child, Chrissie (Mary Badham), who decides to help Barnaby take out his uncle.

Despite a fun, macabre middle act, this one sinks under the weight of irritating characters and terrible bookends.

The middle third of this film is incredibly enjoyable. This is the section of the movie where Harrison has spelled out to Barnaby his intention to kill the boy, and even the rules of the game. (The hotel where they stay is “neutral territory”, while anywhere outside is game for a murder attempt.). During this middle act, Barnaby and Harrison take turns trying to off each other. It’s Green’s performances as Harrison that makes this act so fun. Harrison reacts with comic chagrin every time one of his plans is foiled. This includes getting the classic line “And it would have worked if it weren’t for that meddling woman!” and a failed attempt to burn the children alive that’s scuttled by an untimely rainfall. Harrison also reacts with bemused approval to Barnaby’s more clumsy attempts at murder.

It’s in this middle act that you can see the potential of an effective dark comedy. One of my favorite images was Chrissie singing a jaunty song to herself as she lets the gasoline out of Harrison’s personal airplane. There’s a low-key cat-and-mouse dynamic here, and it manages to be very funny.

Unfortunately, most of the film really misses the mark on multiple fronts. The characters are incredibly unlikable, and the first sequences between Barnaby and Chrissie mainly involve a lot of shrill shouting. There are two totally oblivious, useless adults around: Chrissie’s aunt Justine (Linda Lawson) and Barnaby’s assigned escort, Sargent Frank (Robert Pickering). About 90% of the conversation around them is (1) how they don’t believe the kids about Harrison’s threats and (2) how obvious to everyone it is that they’re gonna bone. And to say that the final act is a let-down would be a grave understatement. Even within the constraints of the more “kid friendly” vibe of the film, the ending to this movie is limp and frustrating.

But what really put this one over the edge for me was the everpresent flirting/suggestive language between the adults and the kids. I mean, yikes. Justine talking to Barnaby about waiting for him to grow up and then marrying him. Chrissie telling Frank “Oh yes, Sargent, I’d do ANYTHING for you” made me involuntarily shudder. The fact that it’s mainly directed from the adults to the kids is what makes it extra squicky. Even framed in comedy, the fact that the adults are flirting with the kids while also ignoring the fact that they are in danger just comes off super creepy.

Green is really the only highlight here, mainly because he’s able to take his character in a fantastically camp direction. The other actors all play their roles more seriously, and it undercuts the outrageous premise.

Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, 1965

A group of strangers settle into a train car where they are joined by another man, the foreboding Dr. Schreck (Peter Cushing). Schreck produces a tarot deck, which he uses to tell the grisly futures of the other men. As each man contemplates the fate that awaits him, the question arises of how to avoid them . . . and they aren’t going to like the answer.

This is a solid anthology film featuring a great cast, two great entries, and no duds!

I honestly would normally have mixed feelings about a film where each segment was something you knew was going to end with a downer, but there’s enough variation and creativity in the different segments that it doesn’t just feel like you’re always waiting for the punchline.

The first segment, “Werewolf”, was one of my two favorites. A man named Jim (Neil McCallum) returns to his family’s home to assist the new owner with some renovations. He soon gets wrapped up in a curse involving the original owner of the house who seems to be haunting and threatening the new occupants. I really liked a lot of the imagery in this one, as well as the way that the final sequence hits.

The second segment, “Creeping Vine”, is fine, but feels a bit derivative of “Day of the Triffids”. A man named Bill (Alan Freeman) comes home from a family vacation to discover a new vine growing on their home. In short order it becomes clear that the vine is both intelligent and malicious, killing the family dog and then setting its sights on the human occupants. While there are some really unsettling moments including the vine silently approaching an unsuspecting victim, it didn’t entirely grip me.

“Voodoo” is the weakest segment, following a jazz musician named Biff (Roy Castle) who discovers the fantastic musical beats of the local voodoo practitioners in the West Indies and immediately starts scheming about how he can steal them to create a top 40 hit. There is one very funny sequence where an oblivious Biff, hiding in the bushes to spy on a voodoo ceremony, is slowly surrounded by unamused locals. I also think that there’s a nice little bit of commentary on how colonial cultures seek to commodify and exploit aspects of other cultures, including their religious ceremonies. But the short doesn’t quite know how to end without just sort of playing into fears about Black native people and/or voodoo being a “scary” religion.

“Disembodied Hand” is another one that doesn’t totally feel like it sticks the landing. Christopher Lee plays a respected art critic named Marsh who is humiliated by a local artist named Landor (Michael Gough) who tricks him into praising a painting created by a monkey. When Marsh finally lashes out in revenge, he ends up haunted by the results of his actions. I wish a bit more had been done with the story, which in the middle just turns into somewhat redundant sequences of Marsh being attacked by the titular hand.

“Vampire,” on the other hand, really packs some good stuff into its runtime, managing to be sexy, scary, and funny all at once. Doctor Carroll (Donald Sutherland) returns home with his new wife, Nicolle (Jennifer Jayne). Soon thereafter, Carroll and his colleague Blake (Max Adrian) care for a child with strange marks on his neck. I don’t know the magic behind it, but Sutherland through his career at times just has great sexual chemistry with his co-stars, and this short is one of those times. That chemistry adds some heft to Carroll’s suspicions about the wife he loves so much. Jayne is a lot of fun as the potential vampire, and Adrian is also quite fun in his supporting role. The ending here is the best of the anthology.

Overall a good collection with some real high points and no lows.