Jess Franco was such a gifted director. Too bad he wasted much of his talents on softcore trash like this. There’s an interesting setup: a woman is released from a psych ward to her palatial estate with a basement full of paralyzed/zombified women. Her pervy husband and her initiate a quest to seduce an ambassador’s daughter. That’s the first ten minutes of the movie, the rest is devoted to sleazy, extended scenes of naked women writhing for whatever reasons. It’s all shot beautifully, unfortunately there is no substance.
I’ve run out of engraving blocks, so the the last few prints of mine have been made using whatever scrap materials I have hanging around my studio. This is a small chiaroscuro woodcut made using two blocks. On block has the black lines and another has gray tones.
My ability to correctly register the blocks is limited. I had to throw away about a third of the prints because they were severely misaligned or other glitches. The final result is this small edition.
Cat prints seem to sell well, so here’s another cat print, but I couldn’t resist adding a little gore.
The story sets the puzzle up in an interesting way. Eight guests are invited to a dinner party. Four are slueth-y types the other four are thought by the host to have committed murders in the past. The host is killed and the mystery feels like a game in which all the clues are “on the table.” Went pretty well until the ending which just confused me. There was no “ah-ha” moment at the reveal. Not what you want in a murder mystery.
Gene Kelly dances and sings in an attempt to woo a teenager. Mostly a mediocre musical with a visually stunning final number.
This has all the look and feel of a typical spaghetti western except this takes place in 19th century Spain. Franco Nero plays what looks like a Union soldier but is actually a Spanish colonel. He gets hoodwinked by a pretty Gypsy girl and then it’s all downhill from there as he make mistake after mistake in order to please her. Klaus Kinski shows up, is predictably deranged, and further screws up his plans. The story is not nearly as action-packed as one would expect, but I enjoyed it and the characters.
After watching the famous version from a few years later, I wanted to see this, the first adaptation of Gaslight. It feels roughly the same but this version’s casting of the female lead is not as good. I appreciated that there was more emphasis on the relationship between the husband and the maidservant. Made him even more sleazy.
The Devil’s Nightmare would pair nicely in a double feature with Bava’s Lisa and the Devil. Both films tell the story of a group of doomed travelers who have to spend the night in a castle as their souls are collected by the devil one by one. Devil’s Nightmare isn’t quite up to the caliber of Bava but it has it’s share of haunting imagery especially through the performance of the demon white-faced Erika Blanc’s succubus. A little more budget and a little more visual atmosphere would have helped, but this gothic horror surely punches above its weight.
The title here is somewhat deceptive. The yeti vs. werewolf battle you would expect is just tacked on to the end. Most of the movie is about a Himalayan warlord who keeps slave girls as a means of curing his bacne. A scientific yeti expedition gets ensnared by the bandits. Meanwhile, Paul Naschy gets ensnared by demon cave girls and subsequently werewolfed by them. Parts of this crazy plot work, others fall flat under the cheapness of the location and the production.
Season of Storms is a fitting palette cleanse after the main Witcher series thud of an ending. There’s no more Ciri multiverse antics and it’s just a nice solid tale about Geralt that harkens back to the short story compilations. Even though there is an overarching plot, it feels episodic as the various sub-plots are told in discreet chunks. I certainly enjoyed it but opinions around the ‘net are mixed.
This is the first book I’ve read that was written by a saint. It’s the description of an ideal state in which everything is free and everyone is awesome. A lovely thought, but just about everything about the society More envisions is negated by the simple fact that humans are flawed, At least he thought women were people too.
