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| Janine Reynaud and Howard Vernon. |
Filmed in Austria at Burg Kreuzenstein, the same castle where Caminnecci would produce his last film (Freddie Francis' THE VAMPIRE HAPPENING, 1971) and where Mario Bava would later lens his splendidly atmospheric BARON BLOOD (1972), the story begins with a decadent bourgeois party thrown by playboy Roger de la Valière (Caminnecci, very much playing himself) where the aristocratic Baron Brack (Michel Lemoine) invites Vera Legrange (Janine Reynaud) and two other couples (including her sister Elena, played by Elvira Berndorff) to spend the weekend at his country home. Brack and Elvira arrive before the others and he takes advantage of their solitude to rape her, after which she flees to the nearest neighboring property, the castle owned by the present Count Saxon (Howard Vernon), who ends up playing host to the whole crowd when they come looking for her. The Count - the only living descendant of the original Graf Saxon, who was a notorious alchemist - is conducting experiments toward the reanimation of his long-dead daughter Katharina (Claudia Butenuth) and is shocked to see her living likeness among his young visitors. The film jumps back and forth in time, with ancient history sometimes inhabiting the same plane as the contemporary characters (who are shown as having played important past life roles in certain legends), and the sometimes soft-focus lensing shows that this distinct style introduced in SUCCUBUS may have had more to do with co-cameraman Jorge Herrero than Jess Franco.
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| Michel Lemoine and Reynaud. |
Married in real life in the most open way, Lemoine and Reynaud have a fascinating onscreen chemistry; it's not exactly a mutual attraction so much as a mutual fascination, and we can't help sharing it too. Lemoine (a true devotée of the fantastique who made his screen debut in a couple of José Benazeraf pictures and ended up directing French porn) had one of the most uncanny faces in Euro exploitation; he is handsome, but so extremely handsome that he borders on becoming another, more Satanic species. (In an ideal world, he would have played Prince Namor.) Reynaud is at once elegance incarnate but also has something unclassifiable about her, an insistently sexual yet ambivalent vibe that makes us wonder if she might be transexual or so attuned the female and the male within herself that she's asexual. Directors tended to keep them apart and in the arms of other actors (or adventurous producers), but when you see them together, one on one as it were, when they turn their eyes on other characters, you feel a distinct chill in the blood, a regal chill, that you sense might enjoy the power of deciding, with a mere gesture, whether you live or die - that they would laugh as you breathed your last. Here they both demonstrate their horseback-riding prowess, and Reynaud so dominates the early part of the film with her energy and her dancing, it's a bit disappointing that Vera becomes such a dishrag toward the third act. The same goes for Lemoine, who is so believable as the aristo libertine rapist, and yet he's knocked off his pedestal in the most humiliating fashion - by a woebegone actor in a moth-eaten bear suit. A mad bear is said to be haunting the mad scientist's neighborhood.
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| Lemoine finds out there really is a crazy bear in the woods. |
In the marvelous and English-friendly extras included with this Blu-ray disc, Hoven's widow Joyce and son Percy (who played one of the child roles in his MARK OF THE DEVIL, 1970) give us some interesting and quite necessary information about him, such as the fact that he grew tired of the popular leading man roles he played in the 1950s and once went to the extent of shaving his head to declare his independence from public expectations of him. He wanted to play offbeat characters and make equally offbeat films, but he also suffered from a weak heart and this played hob with the fact that he could only get the roles he wanted when he was also producing and directing, resulting in a workload that overtaxed his heart and eventually claimed his life at the age of 58 in 1981. Before that, he'd suffered many strokes and more than one heart attack - and we see the fear he lived with take literal form in this film in the shape of inserted surgical footage of a pacemaker being implanted in a human heart. It is also intercut with an extended sex scene between Reynaud and Caminnecci, who were in fact involved in an open extramarital affair at the time, which lends the footage a sense of sexual dread, if not outright sexual panic. (It should be noted that the nudity here is noticeably more prolonged and explicit than in SUCCUBUS, which has a somewhat bewildering reputation as a bold, erotic film.) There is also a hectic, antic quality about the filmmaking here, which is quite uneven and subject to peculiar jolts of changing mood, the one constant being the about interpolations of lush, syrupy arrangements of classical themes by Chopin and others, which we learn were ripped from the vinyl copies in Hoven's own record collection. So, whatever we may think of the film overall - and I think it's an enjoyable wedge of stinky cheese, the kind that goes well with the right wine and the right company - it can't be said that it was impersonally made. It's actually very consistent with the later films we know to be Hoven's, such as the two MARK OF THE DEVIL films. (His family explain in detail that the first film was only briefly directed by Michael Armstrong and that Hoven replaced him after the first few days, though Armstrong retained credit by contract.) They are all marked, so to speak, with contrasts of horror and schmaltzy Bavarian beauty, episodic structure, and a tendency to overstatement.
The extras include half-hour Q&A with the Hovens conducted by Uwe Huber at a screening of MARK OF THE DEVIL, an additional private interview with them strictly concerning this film, a tour of the film's locations, Percy Hoven's introduction to the film, German and English trailers, an optional alternative title sequence, and a choice of English or German soundtracks with optional English subtitles. I believe this disc was released as much as five years ago, but I just found out about it - by accidentally acquiring what appears to be a BD-R bootleg from an eBay seller. It didn't include the locations tour.
(c) 2020 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.
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