The Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987)

dir. Sam Raimi cast Bruce Campbell, Sarah Berry, Dan Hicks, Kassie Wesley

"Kiss you nerves good-bye!" said the poster for this one, but there's nothing to be scared of, though you may die laughing. The pinnacle of the "splatstick" sub-genre (along with Peter Jackson's Dead Alive), this resembles a Wile E. Coyote/Roadrunner cartoon directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Ash (Campbell), brings his girlfriend to a remote mountain cabin and, while there, turns on an old reel-to-reel tape recorder left by the former owner of the cabin, a college professor who was investigating the occult. Unfortunately, the tape contains incantations from the "Book of the Dead," a medieval guide to summoning demons, who immediately posses Ash's girlfriend. Chopping her head off with a shovel (in a scene perhaps borrowed from Hammer's Plague of the Zombies) he buries her and barricades the cabin against a demonic onslaught, which he must face alone until the arrival of the professor's daughter, her boyfriend, and a couple of rednecks.

The catalog of horrors goes on and on. We get the old standby, the crawling hand, perambulating evil trees, a dancing corpse, a laughing disembodied head ("Hello, lover!"), a "witch" in the cellar (actually the professor's possessed wife), oceans of blood, and much more. The special effects are excellent, but not "realistic." Instead they're caroonish; the dancing corpse and the monster that the "witch" becomes both look like what they are: good examples of stop-motion animation. The demonic trees, with evil faces in the bark, look like something out of The Wizard of Oz.

Few actors ever seemed more like live-action cartoons than Bruce Campbell in this film. The only comparison would be Jim Carrey, whom Campbell strongly resembles, in some of his more manic roles. The demons seem to want to beat Ash up, rather than possess him (though he is briefly possessed) and he suffers just about every indignity one can imagine, even having is own hand turn on him at one point. Ash cuts off the hand with a convenient chainsaw, then, later, attaches the chainsaw to the stump of his wrist ("Groovy!" he says). Campbell is very, very funny in this movie.

I was always skeptical that a movie with lots of gore could possibly be funny, but this film really does take it so far that it's impossible to take seriously. It's far too cartoonish to work as a truly scary film, but as a black, black comedy, it succeeds admirably.

Lady Frankenstein (1971)

dir. Mel Welles cast Sarah Bay (Rosalba Neri), Paul Muller, Mickey Hargitay, Joseph Cotten


Dr. Frankenstein (Cotten) welcomes his daughter, Tania (Neri) home from medical school. She's managed to overcome sexism to win recognition as a fully qualified surgeon and wants nothing more than to help her father in his latest attempt to create an artificial man. Frankenstein, however, must pay a group of scummy criminals to steal bodies for him and doesn't want his daughter involved. Without her help, Frankenstein and his loyal assistant, Charles Marshall, bring life to a monster, which ungratefully murders Frankenstein (for no apparent reason) and flees into the countryside.

When Tania finds her father's body, she swears to vindicate his name by creating a new monster, which will kill the original one. Telling the suspicious policeman Captain Harris (Hargitay) that her father was murdered by a thief, she develops a plan to put Charles' brain into the body of a mentally challenged but handsome stable hand. She gains Charles' acquiescence to the scheme by promising him to become his lover once his brain has been transferred. Meanwhile the first monster goes on a killing spree and the police and townspeople become increasingly suspicious.

There are a few good aspects to this movie. Cotten is professional. There are a few moments of effective atmosphere. Neri is astonishingly beautiful.

However, the weaknesses far outnumber the strengths here. The original monster has to be one of the most ridiculous-looking in the history of Frankenstein films. He looks like something straight out of a bad 1950's horror comic. Since the lighting strike that brought him to life also burned his face, the right side of his face is nothing but a mass of burn scars with a protruding eyeball. How his eye survived the fire that burned all the tissue around it is inexplicable, and the makeup looks completely artificial. He also has a huge domed, hairless head, which looks comical rather than scary. He has no personality and we feel no sympathy for him. He kills Frankenstein and a couple of random people, then goes after the gang of graverobbers who dug him up. Why? How does he even know who they are?

This films seems to be a copy of both the Hammer films and the sadomasochistic films of directors like Jesus Franco (all three sex scenes in the film end in death), but it fails on both counts. The Hammer films were low-budget, but were anchored by fine performances in the lead roles by such accomplished actors as Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing; this film does have Joseph Cotten, but he has little to do and is killed off early on. Neri is sexy, but everyone else is quite dull and the script gives them nothing interesting to say. The verbal duels between Captain Harris and the head grave robber, which are supposed to sound like tough-guy banter, just fall flat. Franco, at least in his best films, like Necronomicon, could keep viewers interested with parades of surrealistic imagery, but this film is visually quite dull. Between the monster attacks (which aren't very interesting) and the sex scenes, nothing worth watching happens.

This is Neri's film, but she just can't carry it. It's not all her fault; her character is weakly developed suffering from confused motivations. At first she seems to be motivated by a desire to vindicate her father's reputation, but then simply by the desire to create a handsome and smart lover for herself.  The beginning of the move seems to be setting Tania up as a strong, independent woman, but in the end, she's controlled by her sexual desire; she's just a sex object. Spoiler Alert: She successfully creates her new monster just in time to fight the old one, who's returned to the lab. Tania and the new monster manage to kill the original one, and then immediately have sex on the laboratory floor. It strangles her. The End. What? This makes no sense, as the second "monster" actually seems to be a totally rational human being: Charles' (fully self-aware) brain in the stable hand's body. He has no reason to kill her. End of spoiler.

I'd heard a lot about this movie before actually seeing it. I wasn't expecting a good movie, but I thought it might be an entertaining piece of exploitation cinema, or at least a so-bad-it's-good movie. But it doesn't even rise to that level.

Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

dir. John D. Hancock cast Zorha Lampert, Barton Heyman, Kevin O'Conner, Mariclare Costello

This is my favorite sleeper. Despite a low budget, no major horror stars and a director not known for horror films, this manages to be a fantastically effective and frightening film. Unlike many low-budget horror films of its era, it does not rely on gore or nudity to make it watchable.

Jessica (Lampert) is a young woman just out of a stint in a mental home. She and her husband, Duncan, and a friend, Woody, are moving to an abandoned farm that Duncan owns on an island off the coast of Connecticut. Sneered at by the hostile townspeople (who seem to consist entirely of elderly men), they arrive at the farm to find a rootless young woman, Emily, living in the farmhouse. The kindhearted Jessica convinces her husband to allow Emily to stay. At first, everything seems to go well, but it's not long before strange things start to happen. Jessica sees a strange woman in white running through the woods. She also seems to see a corpse, but when she leads her husband to the spot, it is gone. Emily begins to act strangely toward Jessica and seductively toward Duncan, indicating she may not be as innocent as she seems. When Jessica finds a photograph apparently showing a young woman who drowned at the farm on the eve of her wedding in the late 19th Century, the picture seems to bear a strong resemblance to Emily. Is it all in Jessica's head? Duncan seems to think so and reacts with frustration rather than sympathy when Jessica tries to share her concerns.

One of the film's biggest strengths is in its portrayal of Jessica. She is far from the usual brooding psycho, but rather is portrayed as a cheerful and friendly, in some ways even childlike, woman who just happens to have a fragile grip on sanity, and knows it. Throughout the movie, we hear her interior monologue as she tries to convince herself that everything is normal and to avoid the temptation to confess her fears to her husband. As the strange happenings pile up, and become stranger, we feel great sympathy for Jessica and anger at Duncan for his lack of understanding. It's a masterful performance by Lampert.

The other key performance in the film is by Mariclare Costello as Emily. Starting out as a homeless waif at the mercy of the "legitimate" occupants, she gradually asserts more and more control of the situation. Her transformation is played marvelously by Costello, as we gradually realize there is something very different about Emily. Costello's physical appearance doesn't hurt her portrayal, either. Beautiful actresses are a dime a dozen, but Costello's red-blonde hair and piercing blue eyes give her an otherworldly look that fits the role perfectly. The scene of her "rebirth" as she rises from a lagoon is one of my favorite scenes in any horror film.

It's probably no spoiler to say that the end of the film provides no definitive answers for all the strangeness that has gone before. I usually dislike and feel cheated by ambiguous endings, but this film seems to require one. It's tremendous fun to think back over the film and try to build one's own explanation and answer the unanswered question for oneself. There are several possible explanations, though, strangely, the one suggested by the title seems the least likely. This is a truly original horror movie that doesn't easily fit into any sub-genre. Various sources have referred to it as a zombie movie, a vampire movie, and a ghost story. Whatever sub-genre it may fit into, it's definitely worth checking out for fans of horror films of this era.

Note: If, like me, you're a fan of the 1970's TV series, The Rockford Files, you may recognize the mysterious woman in white. Gretchen Corbett had a recurring role on the detective series as Beth Davenport, Jim Rockford's attorney.

Baron Blood (1972)

dir. Mario Bava cast Joseph Cotten, Elke Sommer, Massimo Girotti, Antonio Cantafora

Italian director Bava made his international reputation through atmospheric Gothic chillers such as Black Sunday (1960) and Kill, Baby, Kill! (1966), then switched gears with Twitch of the Death Nerve, released in 1971. It portrayed gruesome, bloody murders, mostly by sharp implements, on an isolated island and, thus, is often considered an ancestor of 80's slasher movies. In Baron Blood, though, Bava seemed to be trying to return to his Gothic roots, although the film takes place in the present.

Peter Kleist, who has been attending college in the US, returns to his ancestral hometown in Austria. Welcomed by his uncle, and a beautiful architect named Eva (Sommer), he visits the crumbling castle of his ancestor, Baron Otto Von Kleist, nicknamed Baron Blood. The good Baron was a sadistic torturer and murderer, who was burned alive by his own peasants when they tired of his nocturnal activities. The castle is about to be sold at auction.

Peter has some ancient documents that he found which supposedly contain an incantation for resurrecting the Baron, and another one for sending him back to the grave. Despite the warnings of his uncle, Peter and Eva, decide (for no very good reason), to go to the castle at midnight and read the revival incantation.Although they do not actually see the Baron, something seems to be happening and Eva urges Peter to read the other passage. Before he can so so, a gust of wind blows the paper into the fire. Subsequent scenes make it clear that Peter and Eva have indeed unleashed Baron Blood back onto the unsuspecting village, and the Baron resumes his campaign of torture and murder. Peter and Eva gradually realize what is going on, but, predictably have a hard time convincing anybody, including the elderly wheelchair-bound businessman (Cotten) who has bought the castle.

Bava does manage to showcase some of his old flair for creepy atmosphere that helped make Black Sunday and Kill, Baby Kill! so effective. The crumbling, dark, cobwebby castle, with its myriad staircases and dungeon full of rusty torture implements, is marvelous, lending a Gothic air to a story set in the early 1970s. I also liked the look of the revived Baron; he's mostly seen as a shadowy figure in long cloak and broad-brimmed hat, invoking the old 1940's radio character the Shadow, or perhaps Vincent Price in House of Wax. The scene where he chases Eva through the fog-shrouded streets of the village is nearly as good as anything Bava ever filmed. The very brief glimpses we get of his face and hands reveal the effects of the fire that killed him. The acting is acceptable, though Cotten makes his character sound disturbingly like Mr. Magoo! Sommer was quite simply one of the most gorgeous actresses in the long history of film, and frequent closeups of her beautiful face certainly, for me, added to the visual appeal of the film.

Unfortunately, the film also has weaknesses which keep it from being top-drawer Bava. There are many gaping plot holes. There doesn't seem to be any clear motivation for Peter and Eva to go to the castle at night and read the incantation. Peter's young cousin claims to have seen the Baron, but this is before the incantation is read. Don't the characters wonder how Cotten is able to get around the castle when he's confined to a wheelchair and the castle seems to consist mostly of stairs? Like many horror heroines, Eva seems to be initially set up as a capable, smart, and brave woman, but when the chips are really down, all she can do is scream (in one hilarious line, Peter tells her "pull yourself together" after she's witnessed events that would unhinge just about anybody). The film also tends to descend into dullness when the Baron is not lurking about. The Baron himself seems a pretty impersonal menace until near the very end of the film.

This can't really hold a candle to the legendary Bava's best films, such as the ones mentioned above, but it's a good movie nonetheless. If you, like me, enjoy Gothic horrors with lots of creepy atmosphere, this may not make your Top Ten, but is still worth checking out.