Sfida al diavolo / Challenge the Devil / Katarsis

One of the things about watching lots of Italian genre films from the late 50s through 80s is that you get used to certain names cropping up, like wig makers Rocchetti and Carboni or CSC graduate Carla Mancini.

This, by contrast, is one of those films where most of the names in the credits don’t mean much – including director Guiseppe Veggezzi / Joseph Vegh whose sole IMDB credit this is.

The two important names in the cast are Christopher Lee and Giorgio Ardisson, the former spelled as Cristopher in the credits and the latter’s forename Anglicised to George.

The film opens at an airport and looks like it’s going to be a crime thriller as two hitmen prepare to go into action against Carlo, for his refusal to hand over some documents.

Although wounded, Carlo escapes – it isn’t completely clear how – to a monastery where he asks to see one of the order, Pejo, an old friend. Carlo explains he hasn’t got the documents because Alma took them.

We then cut to a nightclub and are presented with a succession of song and dance numbers. Their relationship to the previous scenes only becomes evident when Pejo goes to visit Alma, a dancer at the club, backstage. Alma is reluctant to give up the documents – at least not for a considerable sum of money.

Pejo then recounts the story of how he became a monk – we’re now 20 minutes into the 75 minute film – and we segue into an extended flashback.

He and the rest of the gang – including the particularly out of control Ugo, played by Ardisson – were out looking for kicks, entailing forcing other cars off the road and then beating the occupant of one such vehicle after he has crashed.

Continuing on, the gang leave the road and, as night falls, end up at an old and apparently uninhabited castle. They decide to break in and explore the place, soon finding a banquet table laid out with food and drink which, needless to say, they gorge themselves on, before having a remarkably chaste “orgy” entailing dancing around and playing bongos for several minutes.

At this point Lee makes his appearance as the old man of the house and talks about his dead beloved and sold his soul to the Devil in order to bring her back. He hears her voice, but can never find her, and thus offers the gang all the riches in the castle if they can find her for him. After they have gone, the clock chimes midnight and the man is either replaced by or transforms into the Devil himself.

Round about this point the gang, who have gone in search of the treasure, start to feel a little less brave, and we get some reasonably decent Gothic/Fantastique atmospheres along with the woman making her appearance, leading the gang onto a seemingly endless spiral staircase ending in a crystal/mirror image filled room, traps each of them such that they can see the others but not reach or touch them.

The existential dread of the scene is effectively conveyed, recalling the likes of Sam Dalmas’s entrapment in the gallery sequence of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage; the infinite plane that Liza and John find themselves in at the end of The Beyond; Eswai’s pursuit of himself in Kill Baby Kill and – perhaps ultimately most revealing – the doubled characters in Nude for Satan.

Having been trapped for a while and now on their last legs, the gang follow one of the spiders inhabiting the place to find an equally long descending staircase that in turn leads onto a long passage. They have only just entered it, however, when they fall into a pit and encounter the Devil and/or the old man again. Suitably chastened and transformed by their experiences, they flee the castle.

At this point we cut back to the framing narrative as Pejo provides the moral of the story before, back in the past, the lady of the castle appears to them once more, coming out of a clock in a somewhat Rollin-esque manner.



At this point we cut back to the framing narrative as Pejo provides the moral of the story before, back in the past, the lady of the castle appears to them once more, coming out of a clock in a somewhat Rollin-esque manner. They take her out of the castle, into the light, and give her a proper burial. Significantly here we’re given a semi-subjective shot from inside the grave, looking up to the heavens.



As the contrite gang members pass the man they had earlier beaten, they tend to his injuries. “Strangely, his face resembled the old man from the castle.”

Alma, reduced to tears by Pejo’s tale, gives him the documents; that her name means soul hardly seems coincidental insofar as she too has been saved.

While this can in no way be considered a good film, it is certainly an interesting one for its combination of the inept and the poetic, or that “sublime” which Ado Kyrou famously identified as a reason for watching bad films.

Thanks must again go out to the badfilm community for recording this obscurity off Italian TV;  converting it to an AVI and torrent, and providing fansubs.

Torremolinos 73

Madrid, the early 1970s: Alfredo works as an encyclopaedia salesman for Montoya publications. The Spanish public is less and less interested in the 3,000-plus page multi volume collection on the history of the Spanish Civil War, complete with complimentary scale bust of Franco’s head; he’s behind in his rent; his wife Carmen is desperate for them to have a baby, and has just lost her own job in a beauty parlour.


Illusion




Reality


Fascist spectacle reduced to kitsch


A world drained of colour

Soon thereafter Alfredo’s boss Don Carlos summons him and the three other remaining salesmen to a hotel for a conference weekend. They’re given two choices: Start making educational documentary films with their respective partners for a Danish magazine and film series on sexual practices throughout the world or look for a new job. The other two couples present leave in disgust. Alfredo and Carmen stay behind, at least for the time being, along with the single Juan Luis. (We soon find out more about his sexual practices, probably only legal in the Danish market...)


The white coater

Alfredo proves a natural filmmaker and is soon offering the Danish director who has come to train him suggestions, leading to his being given a megaphone that was supposedly given the Dane by no less than Ingmar Bergman when he was his assistant. Whatever the truth of this, it only enhances Alfredo’s determination to do a good job.

With Carmen persuaded by virtue of the purportedly educational nature of the film, that it will only be screened in the Scandinavian territories and – above all – the money they can make, the money which will help pay for a baby, she consents to appearing with her husband.

The finished product is a bit raw and ready but Don Carlos and his Danish partners are nevertheless pleased and want more from Alfredo and Carmen. They oblige, purchasing a new car, television and various other consumer goods with the money that is now rolling in. The only thing that is still lacking in their lives is a child.


The erotic charge of the personal over the impersonal pornographic?

Alfredo seeks to turn their frustrations into art, scripting the Bergman inspired Torremolinos 73 for Carmen to appear opposite a respected actor. Don Carlos agrees to bankroll the project and even to pay for a professional – if small – Danish crew.

What Alfredo doesn’t realise, or doesn’t want to realise, is that he can have all the existential angst he wants, as long as there is still some sex...


70s discotheque, beautifully reproduced

Let’s get the negative out of the way first: Torremolinos 73’s central premise doesn’t seem completely plausible in itself nor quite worked through as dramatic license by writer-director Pablo Berger. To realise this, however, does probably require a bit more knowledge of the ins and outs (groan) of porn cinemas of the period than the typical viewer perhaps cares to acquire.

To explain: The white coater sub-genre of porn, in which an educational premise was used as a pretext for showing sex on screen, essentially belonged to a period when porn qua porn was not yet permitted. But in Denmark all pornography was legalised in the late 1960s, making a white coater premise seem unlikely for Danish films from 1972/73. Even if we grant that the white coater shown to the Spaniards serves to reassure/dupe them into believing that what they are doing is scientifically justified, there’s then the issue of believing that amateur Spanish productions was really what the market wanted. Alfredo’s films are shot on 8mm (yet somehow acquire sound) with him functioning as cameraman and director as well as male performer – an unlikely combination in a pre-gonzo/POV era. The amateur aspect is also undermined by the hint of formula emerging in some of the porn stereotypical scenarios, of the trades- or delivery man turning up at the housewife’s door. For what we don’t get here (unless we are meant to assume some meta-commentary on Alfredo and Carmen’s fantasies as conveniently mirroring those of professional pornographers and audiences, which is possible) is anything about emergent porn conventions. There is nothing about close ups of the action, for instance, while the money shot is only referred to in relation to Torremolinos 73 itself.








Product over process

Having said all this, it is true that the film is a comedy-drama and not a documentary. Moreover, comparable criticisms could be levelled at Boogie Nights. For instance, Dirk Diggler is basically John Holmes, yet Holmes’s Johnny Wadd films are also referenced diegetically as something Diggler wants to get away from in his rival Brock Landers series.

Torremolinos 73 is far stronger when it is on home soil, in representing and critiquing the final years of the Franco regime in Spain. Even before the encyclopaedia is introduced, we have Alfredo standing before a massive billboard for the Paradise Apartments, whose representation looks little like their reality, which he then has to trudge across a field to reach. And, once there, inevitably the lift is out of order. Or then there are the references to child-star Marisol and “Spanish weekends,” by which Spanish filmgoers would cross the border into France to watch forbidden films such as Last Tango in Paris. Or there is the top of the range colour TV Alfredo buys, only to find that programming is still in black and white.

In terms of look and feel the filmmakers get the early 70s look down beautifully, whether its cars, clothes, hairstyles, decors or music. It’s probably no exaggeration to suggest a disco/nightclub scene could be cut in into a Paul Naschy vehicle from the period without any but the most astute being able to notice the difference. (If this was an Italian film, there would be prominently displayed J&B bottles, Punt e mes and Fernet Branca somewhere.)

The performances are impressive, with leads Javier Cámara and Candela Peña proving equally adept at comedy and drama and beautifully channelling the hopes and frustrations of their parents’ generation; interestingly Peña has more recently appeared in the similar sounding Los años desnudos, about the Spanish ‘S’ film boom of a few years later.

By turns funny and touching, Torremolinos ’73 is a film that the cult film fan should enjoy, reservations notwithstanding; its treatment of the intersection between art and commerce in erotic and pornographic cinema may appeal particularly to the Jesus Franco or Lina Romay fan.

Gebissen wird nur nachts / Mezzo litro di rosso per il conte Dracula / The Vampire Happening

[Note that this review contains spoilers]

The Vampire Happening is, to all intents and purposes, a contemporary re-make / rip-off of Roman Polanski's Dance of the Vampires, with a modish late 1960s happening substituting for the vampire's annual ball.

The filmmakers freely acknowledge their inspiration through the casting of Ferdinand Mayne as the head vampire, here none other than Dracula himself, and a similar flip/cynical ending which sees vampirism able at last to move beyond its Transylvanian heartland – albeit via jet plane going to Hollywood rather than horse-drawn sledge.


Betsy Williams (AKA the Countess Von Ravenstein, AKA Pia Dagermark) in...


A film within the film, with Dance... inspired credits







This said, the film also contains echoes of other vampire films of the period, including Malenka AKA Fangs of the Living Dead, in the painting that reveals the uncanny likeness between our heroine and her undead ancestress; Lust for a Vampire, in the lesbian vampire in a girls' school motif and Jean Rollin's sexy vampire films, in general surrealistic weirdness if not obvious personal obsession.




The painting as double

The distinction on the last count is that the film was helmed by Hammer and Amicus regular Freddie Francis, a man whose films as a director are marked by what I'm tempted to call a professional detachment or indifference: He'd do what was needed, but rarely go that extra mile nor really identify with his material.

What we get are various comic and nudie-cutie type comic scenarios along with various sight gags and one-liners: A 20-something sexy school student remarks of her Dutch-lesbian teacher Miss Nielsen that “that dyke should go back to Holland”; Mayne's Dracula tells another vampire to “Call me Christopher. I'm sure he won't mind”; and a broadcast from Radio Transylvania warns that "the local blood bank is running low and requests donors report to Dr Frankenstein”...

One difference between The Vampire Happening and its model here is the sense of toleration: While Count von Krolock's homosexual son is undoubtedly a stereotype, as is Alfie Bass's Jewish inkeeper turned vampire (“Oy, you got the wrong vampire,” when the serving wench tries to scare him off with a crucifix) they are more affectionate than mocking. Here, by contrast, the camp airline steward is unnecessary while the lesbian vampire teacher is now doubly marginalised, her advances rejected by the same 20-something but now undead students.

Another of the film's targets is the Catholic church, with a monk and the abbot getting bitten; the abbot, a peeping tom in life, insisting that they maintain their old hierarchy.

That the film is of West German origin meanwhile explains why it could not follow its model here: Jewish vampire jokes have a different meaning when made by a filmmaker of Jewish origins than by Gentiles.








The sight of Betsy encourages one of the monks to see sexual symbolism everywhere he looks, with the woman-statue not out of place in the likes of Bunuel.

It's all very hit and miss and, at 102 minutes, undoubtedly has one or two characters, ideas and skits too many.

The Barbara Steele-esque confusion over the identity of Pia Degermond's 20th century US actress, Betsy Williams, and her great-great- Transylvanian ancestress Clarimdone is well played, however, while the fact that Degermond spends much of her time as Betsy not wearing much and the rest as Clarimonde wearing even less (other than a black wig) is an obvious attraction.


More impressive in itself than Bray studios?

The same might be said for Jerry Van Rooyen's very happening soundtrack (cuts from which are available on Crippled Dick's At 250 Miles Per Hour compilation), and the production design, with good use being made of an actual castle.

The Vampire Happening is available on a good but long OOP Anchor Bay DVD and a not so good Alpha one, neither unfortunately presenting it in the original German dub.