Hitch Magazine | Deadtime Stories

Horror Rises from the Tomb

(1973)

*

Horror from the Tomb is a plodding Spanish effort starring Paul Naschy that manages to be relentlessly dull from the start, with nearly four minutes of slow horseback riding before anything happens. That anything consists of a warlock being decapitated by government officials, while his witchy wife is stripped naked, hung upside-down over a tree limb and whipped to death.

Five hundred years later, a séance brings them back to life (or, in the warlock’s case, just his head, initially), allowing them to get lots of unhealthy looking Spanish girls to show them their boobies. Guts are ripped out and then at the end, there’s an out-of-nowhere zombie attack. Points to you if you make it this far, but it’s no reward.

Zombie Flesh Eater

(1975)

**

In Zombie Flesh Eater, two shapely models drifting in the ocean on a boat for a publicity stunt (I didn’t understand, either) enter thick fog and ram into a giant pirate ship with torn sails (most often shown as an obvious model). One of them decides to board this spooky vessel and disappears. Then the other one decides to board this spooky vessel, too, and finds out why her equally dumb friend disappeared – because there are hooded skeletons with handlebar mustaches on board! And they kill! But move very slowly.

It seemingly takes forever for the dead to rise, and when they do, there’s no flesh eating to be seen. Just feet shuffling and bony hands choking. Those Italians – how do they do it? Or better yet, why?

The Demon

(1976)

***

I’d never seen a truly good horror movie from Australia. That didn’t change after The Demon, either.

Cameron Mitchell stars as a detective with ESP, hired to help the parents of an abducted girl locate her whereabouts. To do this, he goes to her room – where a picture of Grizzly Adams adorns the wall – and sniffs her pillow.

Meanwhile, nursery school teacher Jennifer Holmes is being stalked by the bad guy Mitchell’s looking for – a killer with a blank face mask. Eventually, he catches up to her in her own home, just as she’s about to take a shower. Soon, he’s chasing her around the house as she wears nothing but a pair of panties.

Yet, despite such a plus, The Demon is tame horror, overly talky and packed with over-the-top acting from Mitchell – until he’s dispatched halfway through the film for no good reason. But I’ll take it.

Night of the Ghoul

(1975)

***

Following an impromptu auto race, a rich couple gets stranded in the English countryside. The woman makes her way to a nearby mansion, run by former priest Peter Cushing and inhabited by a wacky, voodoo-type housekeeper; a crazy gardener (John Hurt); and a flesh-rotting, green-hued killer cannibal they keep locked up in an upstairs bedroom.

It is this latter resident who causes the most problems for our heroine, not to mention the others who come looking for her, all of them bloodily dispatched. Night of the Ghoul – better known as simply The Ghoul – is a passable, if overlong and not entirely memorable, horror film.

Night of the Death Cult

(1975)

**

This movie has crabs – literally. Also known as The Blind Dead, the slow-moving Night of the Death Cult opens with a credit proclaiming it to be a true story. Ain’t bloody likely.

An English doctor and his skeptical wife have moved to a remote seaside village – sight unseen, as is usual in these Italian horror films – for him to practice medicine. From the start, his wife thinks everything is way too weird, and she’s right, because each night, the townspeople tie up some virgin to the rocks and soon enough, the cloaked skeletons that were once the Templar Knights come riding in on their horses, snatch the girl up, take her back to their tomb, rip her top off, stab her chest, pull out her heart, feed it to their demon statue and then turn into crabs and feed off her.

This goes on and on until one night, the doc intercepts the virgin before the Knights can reach her, so the good humans hole themselves up in their home, Living Dead-style, and try to fend off the armies that soon attack.

Bad dubbing, obvious day-for-night shots and a just plain uninvolving story add up to one dull movie. On the plus side, it won’t make you hungry for Red Lobster.

Fangs of the Living Dead

(1968)

***

La Dolce Vita’s Anita Ekberg – the Anna Nicole of the swinging ‘60s – stars as a voluptuous model who inherits a spooky castle. Two weeks before she is to be married, she hops a Pan Am to check out the place. It’s inhabited by her skinny, pale uncle, who’s really a 100-year-old vampire and tells her about the curse that haunts her because her great-great-grandmother was a witch. Anita breaks off her engagement via letter and resigns to live at the castle.

Meanwhile, her obviously horny fiancé tracks her down to find out what’s what. To complicate things for him (yet make things easier on you, the viewer), several buxom vampire babes traipse about town. While the film captures some Bava-esque atmosphere and eye-popping visuals (courtesy of Ekberg), it lacks a real payoff. The melting-head effect at the end doesn’t count. Neither does the comic coda – predictable, corny and very, very Italian.

Night Train to Terror

(1985)

*****

I defy you to name one other film that offers as much breakdancing, animated monsters, Spandex, gushing blood, naked boobies and Bull from Night Court as the diabolically incompetent and mammothly entertaining Night Train to Terror. Destination? Hilarity!

It’s a horror anthology film, comprised of one unfinished flick and two existing films severely edited to the point that they play like extended trailers. The wraparound segment has God and “Mr. Satan” – played, according to the credits, by Himself and Lu Sifer, respectively – sitting on a moving train, debating for the souls of each story’s characters, while a musical group with way too many guys wearing headbands and aerobic outfits sings the same damn song over and over and over in the next car.

The first case they pore over – the incomplete Scream Your Head Off – stars Barbarella’s John Philip Law as a salesman who ends up in a mental ward and is coerced by the hot middle-aged nurse to go out and drug young women so that they can be strapped to tables naked and have their internal organs harvested to the highest bidder. Oh, and Richard Moll is in it.

Next comes the heavily abbreviated version of 1983’s Death Wish Club, in which Gretta, a skank with bad teeth, makes porno movies until she meets frat boy Glen. Gretta takes her new beau to a strange suicide club, at which one member is dispatched each time via some bizarre method, whether that be a giant winged beetle with a sting of death, electric-chair Russian roulette or lying in sleeping bags until your head is crushed by a wrecking ball.

Last is a chunk of 1980’s Cataclysm, in which a Nazi war criminal with a cloven hoof continues to live – and murder – in the present day without having aged. Cameron Mitchell investigates, and finds stop-motion monsters and open-heart surgery footage. Oh, and Richard Moll’s in it.

Between each vignette, That Damned Band “sings” that “song,” engages in semi-Laugh-In bits and breakdances in slow motion. At the very end, a model train car crashes, presumably killing all aboard, which is a good thing. This utter mess was written by Philip Yordan, who used to pen bonafide classics like El Cid and King of Kings. This is genius in its own fucked-up way.

Memorial Valley Massacre

(1988)

****

Things aren’t going so well on opening day of the Memorial Valley Campgrounds. A construction worker dies, the roads aren’t finished and the discovery of a dead dog in the well has tainted the water supply. (“I ain’t never seen anything like this,” says a worker as he pulls out the canine carcass, apparently having never driven down city streets in his life.) But owner Cameron Mitchell, in a “check, please” cameo – insists the camp open.

His Dartmouth-student son is there to help (but how smart can he be, wearing sweaters on Memorial Day weekend?), much to the chagrin of the barrel-chested, hooch-hitting park ranger. They’re given hell at every turn by the ragtag bunch of campers, including motorcycle gangs, horny teens and a fat kid. But it turns out there are even bigger troubles afoot: a killer teenage caveman’s on the loose!

Yes, you’ve stumbled on an incompetent mix of Friday the 13th, Eegah! and Meatballs. The script is poor, the direction a notch below that and the acting even further south. But how can you beat slutty chicks who like to dance in the rain or aged bosomy women with names like Pepper Mintz? Well, you can always throw in a teenage caveman! And how can you beat that?

The Slave of the Cannibal God

(1978)

**

Judging from the opening credits of this juicy helping of Italian sleaze, you’d think this would be called When Animals Attack the Shit out of One Another, as the film introduces us to the laws of the jungle via real-life, mondo-style footage of how the food chain works. These bits are sprinkled throughout the film at random moments as well, allowing you the full-color spectacle of, say, a snake swallowing a monkey whole.

But there’s a movie here, too, albeit not much of one. The Slave of the Cannibal God stars Ursula Andress as a woman in search of her husband, unheard of for months after his jungle expedition. Ursula and her brother hire Stacy Keach – who looks coked out of his mind – to take them into the same jungle to locate him, though few doubt he is still alive.

The group encounters poisonous spiders, venomous snakes, arm-hungry crocodiles and spike-laden booby traps. Eventually, they come across natives wearing freaky masks and Keach admits he has been here before and partaken of their unusual rituals. “You never forget the taste of human flesh!” he screams.

Eventually, Ursula does find her husband, though dead and partially liquified he may be, with a Geiger counter sticking out of his tum-tum. The cannibals strip her naked, paint her orange and tie her up. One cannibal tries to rape her, so the lead cannibal cuts off the eager man’s penis.

If you rent the longer, uncut version titled Mountain of the Cannibal God, you get to see even more deviant footage, such as female cannibals masturbating and a man fucking a pig. But the shorter movie is so slow, I don’t know why you’d want to extend the pain.