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"Rare and unknown sensations" are promised, the call of the dungeon must be acknowledged. Killings in the Gothic hamlet, in the manner of the cursed nobleman from centuries earlier, "a phantom" to locals but very real to his victims. The descendent (Howard Vernon) is his spitting image, his nephew (Hugo Blanco) arrives in a leather jacket and promptly feels the subterranean pull. A curious construction, variously served up as grim superstition by vagabonds, jaunty inquiry by the reporter from Mädchen und Morde magazine (Fernando Delgado), and analytical project by the horror novelist (Ángel Menéndez). "Not a story for children, but certainly compelling." Jesús Franco has a Germanic setting but works in the distinctively French vein of Franju and Clouzot, his Buñuel side shows through in a lingering view of Gogó Rojo in garter belt and stockings. Ancestral horrors and provincial scandals, the grand piano and the curved blade. Round-up of suspects at the hotel, where a cheating husband fears discovery more than death and a chambermaid takes a sinister warning as a compliment. "Vulgarity" is the culprit's offense, nothing like the "refinement" of his bloody forebear, cf. Sirk's Lured. Plenty of befuddled police officers, plus a chase to the family crypt. "Where's the book about Marienbad?" Pièce de résistance, the barmaid in the throes of ecstasy before getting lashed and manacled and eviscerated, "l'éroticisme tragique" that's to become Franco's métier. The coda revises Psycho, with Norman Bates at long last embracing the swamp and the voices before a bewildered audience. With Ana Castor, Paula Martel, Georges Rollin, Serafin Garcia Vazquez, and Manuel Alexandre. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |