Castle of the Living Dead is famous for two main reasons.
First, Donald Sutherland took his son Kiefer’s name from the film’s writer and co-director Warren Kiefer AKA Lorenzo Sabatini
Second, it represented the first credit for Michael Reeves, who co-wrote the film and apparently functioned as more than just second unit man; producer Paul Maslansky subsequently backed Reeves’s official directorial debut The She Beast the following year.
The Reeves connection is immediately apparent, as a scene-setting voice-off establishes a somewhat disordered situation that prefigures Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General.
First, we are told that Napoleon may have been defeated, but that demobbed soldiers have turned to banditry and made the roads unsafe.
Then we are told that executions of bandits are thereby commonplace, and presented with what seems to be one such scene. The incongruities are the victim’s dress – a harlequin’s motley, rather than a soldier’s uniform – and the souvenirs being sold by a dwarf.
The harlequin then contrives to have his would-be executioner put his own neck in the noose and kicks away the stool, much to the (anti-authoritarian) amusement of those gathered.
Next it is revealed that executioner and executee, along with the dwarf, are in fact part of a theatrical troupe and the whole thing was a gag.
They collect their money and go to the inn.
There, the leader of the troupe, Bruno, and the harlequin, Dart (Luciano Pigozzi), argue over money – another trope whose mundane quality seems very Reeves if we think of the impoverished circumstances of Karloff and Lacey’s couple in The Sorcerors or the discussions between Hopkins and Stearne – another arguing (homosexual) couple, perhaps – in Witchfinder General.
Eric (Philippe Leroy) intervenes as Dart is about to kill Bruno, leading to Dart fleeing on the ex-soldier’s horse. (Ian Ogilvy’s Richard Marshall is also a soldier in Witchfinder General.)
Turning a bad situation into an opportunity, Eric decides to join the troupe, just as they have been offered the chance of doing a private performance for Count Drago for three gold pieces – a tidy sum, apparently.
Watching this, and the similiarity with what unfolds, I wondered if the makers of the 2000 French fantastique entry Deep in the Woods had also seen Castle of the Living Dead.
The troupe travel to Drago’s castle, en route encountering a witch, played in drag by a young Donald Sutherland, who had earlier played a soldier/policeman at the hanging, who foretells doom should they go there.
Since the film wouldn’t get much further if they heeded said warnings, the troupe continues on, greed outweighing other considerations.
There they meet Drago, (Christoper Lee) who makes his entrance in the approved Dracula-esque manner and who proves to be equally suspicious in his behaviour, as when he offers Bruno a pre-performance drink:
Bruno: "Aren’t you having any?"
Drago: "Alas, no. I give it only to my guests."
Indeed, having imbibed the concoction, Bruno suffers a fatal ‘accident’ whilst performing the hanging routine…
More character driven than most 1960s Italian horrors, Castle of the Living Dead is unusual for its relatively low-key approach to evil. Drago has no grand designs for revenge or ruling the world. Instead, he just wants to be able to perform his dubious experiments in peace. His victims, meanwhile, are neither particularly heroic nor bent on vengeance. Instead they just want to make it out alive in one piece.
Adequately directed and nicely shot in black and white (Luigi Kuveiller was camera operator), the film is atmospheric and benefits from wry performances from Leroy, Lee and Mirko Valentin (as Lee’s henchman, Hans), while Gaia Germani as Laura makes for an unusually active and level-headed love-interest cum victim.
Showing posts with label Luciano Pizoggi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Luciano Pizoggi. Show all posts
Sunday, 28 June 2009
Saturday, 11 April 2009
Tornado / The Last Blood
Made in between the David Warbeck and Lewis Collins jungle war trilogies, Tornado is something of the odd one out amongst Antonio Margheriti, Tito Carpi and Gianfranco Couyoumdijan’s 80s war entries.
Though there is still plenty of action, stunts and things exploding, it’s more of a message movie with stronger defined characters and situations than normal. The big surprise, in terms of the traditional derivativeness of the Italian genre film, is that as a Vietnam war film it was made after First Blood, but before Rambo, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and company, and as such emerges as a film which innovates as much as it imitates.
At the core of the film is the conflict between two Green Berets, one a Captain and the other a sergeant. The Captain believes that the war against the Vietcong could and must still be won and, as a demonstration of this, relentlessly sends his men on what Sergeant Maggio surmises to be pointless, high risk missions.
To the captain the men are fundamentally resources excepted to follow orders, whatever they are, while to the sergeant the are human beings who need to be protected against his superiors' growing Kurtzian madness.
In the middle is journalist Freeman, played by Alan Collins / Luciano Pigozzi, who provides a sounding board and critique for both men's perspectives whilst also making clear where his own sympathies lie.
After one mission Maggio is left behind by the helicopter support and forced to bring a wounded soldier back to camp via a canoe. Though the soldier, a promising athlete, survives he proves unable to come to terms with the amputation of his leg and thus shoots himself.
Flying into a rage, the Sergeant has to be restrained by his troops, before being goaded by the Captain into attacking.
Arrested by the reluctant Military Police, Maggio is taken to another base where he will be held until his court martial. The Vietcong attack, giving him a chance to escape for the Cambodian border.
At this point the Rambo element comes to the fore as the Captain takes an ironic pride in the achievements of his “creation,” praising Maggio’s resourcefulness in evading the Vietcong whilst also making it clear that he intends to himself capture and execute his underling for desertion.
Action and direction wise it’s pretty much the standard Margheriti fare, with model work and stock footage being used to compensate for the low budget and a certain gung-ho treatment of the battle scenes. Some torture scenes involving Maggio are also of note as an indicator of what might have happened to Charlie and Tom in Cannibal Apocalypse.
Though there is still plenty of action, stunts and things exploding, it’s more of a message movie with stronger defined characters and situations than normal. The big surprise, in terms of the traditional derivativeness of the Italian genre film, is that as a Vietnam war film it was made after First Blood, but before Rambo, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and company, and as such emerges as a film which innovates as much as it imitates.
At the core of the film is the conflict between two Green Berets, one a Captain and the other a sergeant. The Captain believes that the war against the Vietcong could and must still be won and, as a demonstration of this, relentlessly sends his men on what Sergeant Maggio surmises to be pointless, high risk missions.
To the captain the men are fundamentally resources excepted to follow orders, whatever they are, while to the sergeant the are human beings who need to be protected against his superiors' growing Kurtzian madness.
In the middle is journalist Freeman, played by Alan Collins / Luciano Pigozzi, who provides a sounding board and critique for both men's perspectives whilst also making clear where his own sympathies lie.
After one mission Maggio is left behind by the helicopter support and forced to bring a wounded soldier back to camp via a canoe. Though the soldier, a promising athlete, survives he proves unable to come to terms with the amputation of his leg and thus shoots himself.
Flying into a rage, the Sergeant has to be restrained by his troops, before being goaded by the Captain into attacking.
Arrested by the reluctant Military Police, Maggio is taken to another base where he will be held until his court martial. The Vietcong attack, giving him a chance to escape for the Cambodian border.
At this point the Rambo element comes to the fore as the Captain takes an ironic pride in the achievements of his “creation,” praising Maggio’s resourcefulness in evading the Vietcong whilst also making it clear that he intends to himself capture and execute his underling for desertion.
Action and direction wise it’s pretty much the standard Margheriti fare, with model work and stock footage being used to compensate for the low budget and a certain gung-ho treatment of the battle scenes. Some torture scenes involving Maggio are also of note as an indicator of what might have happened to Charlie and Tom in Cannibal Apocalypse.
Monday, 6 April 2009
Geheimcode: Wildgänse / Code Name: Wild Geese / Arcobaleno selvaggio
Here we have a classic example of the filone principle in operation via an opportunistic bit of titling to make the film sound like a belated sequel to the late 70s mercenary war actioner The Wild Geese but which in fact bears no relation whatsoever beyond the codename given the secret mission.
It’s directed by Antonio Margheriti, whose other work during the early 1980s encompassed somewhat more timely Apocalypse Now and Raiders of the Lost Ark rip-offs, most starring cult favourite David Warbeck and invariably using Philippines jungle locations and likely as not the talismanic Luciano Pigozzi in a supporting role.
The replacement of Warbeck by Lewis Collins, fresh from his long running stint in the British TV series The Professionals, gives the film something of a transitional feel. Having passed the selection procedure for the SAS reserves only to be rejected on account of his celebrity status, it doesn’t take long for Collins to establish his fitness for the role of Commander Robin Wesley. Indeed, he would in time appear in two confusingly similar outings for Margheriti, Commando Leopard and The Commando.
The transition between leading men is also aided by the way we’re thrown right into the thick of the action. Admittedly it’s soon revealed to just be a training exercise, but also serves to establish the no-nonsense professionalism of Wesley and his mercenaries and something of their respective characters. With the group’s pilot suffering an injury, it also provides a means to shoehorn in Lee Van Cleef’s character, China / The Colonel. He’s a grizzled veteran of no less than five wars – the Second, Korean, Vietnam and which two others, one wonders – who’s presently serving a prison sentence for smuggling, for which he is offered a pardon in return for his services.
The mercenaries, you see, are working for the ‘good’ guys rather than the highest bidder, in the form of two government officials. Ernst Borgnine plays the US Drug Enforcement Agency representative and Klaus Kinski’s, complete with an obviously dubbed voice, that of the British Crown in Hong Kong.
The hush-hush, unofficial mission entails destroying a Golden Triangle opium depot belonging to a powerful warlord, known as The General.
Assisted by local guerrilla fighters, everything goes about as well as can be planned, with the mercenaries putting the depot out of commission. Unfortunately the group also lose their helicopter through an act of sabotage, while Wesley discovers evidence of another store further inside The General’s territory that their employers had said nothing about, along with evidence implicating one or other of them as a client of The General.
If all this wasn’t enough, the mercenaries also free a number of prisoners. Though the majority are locals, one is a Canadian journalist whom The General got hooked on heroin after she came looking for an exclusive interview. She’s played by Mimsy Farmer, thus rounding off the name cast, with the rest of the mercenaries being played by German actors as another indication of where the rest of the co-production money was coming from.
As usual Margheriti and his writing collaborators Tito Carpi and Gianfranco Couyoumdijan prove better at dealing with action than character and back story. We get some attempts to establish additional motivation for Wesley beyond money, in the form of a dead brother or son, and understand that there may be something suspect about his point of contact with the British and US officials, but these remain at rather simplistic, comic book level.
If the film is a comic book, it is however also a very entertaining one when its playing to its strengths, even if some of the gimmicks, most notably a makeshift flamethrower Wesley uses from a helicopter, are preposterous and some of Margheriti’s trademark model work a touch too obvious, as when Welsey drives his car sideways along a half-completed tunnel to evade some pursuers.
If Collins’s SAS buddies laughed all the way through the supposedly serious Who Dares Wins, one wonders what they would have made of Code Name: Wild Geese.
It’s directed by Antonio Margheriti, whose other work during the early 1980s encompassed somewhat more timely Apocalypse Now and Raiders of the Lost Ark rip-offs, most starring cult favourite David Warbeck and invariably using Philippines jungle locations and likely as not the talismanic Luciano Pigozzi in a supporting role.
The replacement of Warbeck by Lewis Collins, fresh from his long running stint in the British TV series The Professionals, gives the film something of a transitional feel. Having passed the selection procedure for the SAS reserves only to be rejected on account of his celebrity status, it doesn’t take long for Collins to establish his fitness for the role of Commander Robin Wesley. Indeed, he would in time appear in two confusingly similar outings for Margheriti, Commando Leopard and The Commando.
The transition between leading men is also aided by the way we’re thrown right into the thick of the action. Admittedly it’s soon revealed to just be a training exercise, but also serves to establish the no-nonsense professionalism of Wesley and his mercenaries and something of their respective characters. With the group’s pilot suffering an injury, it also provides a means to shoehorn in Lee Van Cleef’s character, China / The Colonel. He’s a grizzled veteran of no less than five wars – the Second, Korean, Vietnam and which two others, one wonders – who’s presently serving a prison sentence for smuggling, for which he is offered a pardon in return for his services.
The mercenaries, you see, are working for the ‘good’ guys rather than the highest bidder, in the form of two government officials. Ernst Borgnine plays the US Drug Enforcement Agency representative and Klaus Kinski’s, complete with an obviously dubbed voice, that of the British Crown in Hong Kong.
The hush-hush, unofficial mission entails destroying a Golden Triangle opium depot belonging to a powerful warlord, known as The General.
Assisted by local guerrilla fighters, everything goes about as well as can be planned, with the mercenaries putting the depot out of commission. Unfortunately the group also lose their helicopter through an act of sabotage, while Wesley discovers evidence of another store further inside The General’s territory that their employers had said nothing about, along with evidence implicating one or other of them as a client of The General.
If all this wasn’t enough, the mercenaries also free a number of prisoners. Though the majority are locals, one is a Canadian journalist whom The General got hooked on heroin after she came looking for an exclusive interview. She’s played by Mimsy Farmer, thus rounding off the name cast, with the rest of the mercenaries being played by German actors as another indication of where the rest of the co-production money was coming from.
As usual Margheriti and his writing collaborators Tito Carpi and Gianfranco Couyoumdijan prove better at dealing with action than character and back story. We get some attempts to establish additional motivation for Wesley beyond money, in the form of a dead brother or son, and understand that there may be something suspect about his point of contact with the British and US officials, but these remain at rather simplistic, comic book level.
If the film is a comic book, it is however also a very entertaining one when its playing to its strengths, even if some of the gimmicks, most notably a makeshift flamethrower Wesley uses from a helicopter, are preposterous and some of Margheriti’s trademark model work a touch too obvious, as when Welsey drives his car sideways along a half-completed tunnel to evade some pursuers.
If Collins’s SAS buddies laughed all the way through the supposedly serious Who Dares Wins, one wonders what they would have made of Code Name: Wild Geese.
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