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An often misunderstood satire of marital jitters and Brits abroad, closer to Two for the Road than to Black Sunday. It kicks off with grotesqueries in the name of our "avenging God," a 17th-century prologue with a church mob armed with torches and pitchforks heading to a witch's cave, the scraggly hag is perforated with a spike and dunked into a pond in Michael Reeves' febrile rehearsal for his own Witchfinder General (and Monty Python and the Holy Grail). "Transylvania, today," trekking newlyweds (Barbara Steele, Ian Ogilvy) finding questionable refuge at the dilapidated inn, "more or less the same view." The owner (Mel Welles) is a peeping degenerate ("Privacy breeds conspiracy! Have a good night's sleep"), the only other guest (John Karlsen) is a deposed aristocrat and great-grandson of Van Helsing ("Von Helsing," he assures in a joke surely appreciated by Mel Brooks), bearded like Trotsky and perfectly deadpan on a playground swing. Horrors reemerge when a roadside spill sends the couple's black Volkswagen into a lake and the bride is replaced by the resurrected virago, who has hallucinatory vengeance in mind and tears through the village like a banshee. Reeves' sense of monstrous despair is laced with the slap-happy absurdism of co-screenwriter and second-unit director Charles B. Griffith, so maggoty eyeballs sit next to Keystone Kommies and capitalist fears are fused into a blood-spattered sight gag (the sickle wielded by the wrathful sorceress to slice the innkeeper lands next to a hammer). "Long live social democracy!" British and Italian horror at a junction, the grime and queasiness usually concealed under Hammer elegance unleashed and reflected in the Gothic chic of Steele's knowing smile. With Jay Riley, Richard Watson, and Edward Randolph.
--- Fernando F. Croce |