THE HAND THAT FEEDS THE DEAD
This Full Moon Features release is a film very much out of step with its own time. It's hard to believe that this Italian Gothic was made after the release of THE EXORCIST, the film that rewrote the genre's rule book until Ridley Scott's ALIEN upped the game once again in 1979. What we have here is a sentimental journey for horror fetishists, a veritable bouquet of Italian... no, Euro Gothic tropes: the coach accident that deposits a honeymooning couple at the doorstep of a remote castello whose lord and master (Klaus Kinski as "Dr. Nijinsky," no less) recognizes the young bride (SPIRITS OF THE DEAD's Katia Christine) as the very image of his own lost love... the misshapen, monster-like manservant whom unseen hands torment by plucking the prongs of a tuning fork... the hooded figure who never leaves the turret rooms of the castle... the tragic back story of the former lord of the manor... the furtive candelabra-lit peering as the visitors respond to strange noises in the night... and finally the revelation that Kinski is deliberately trapping passersby to feed his ongoing experiments to restore his wife's fire-damaged beauty with homicides and skin grafts.
Director Sergio Garrone (DJANGO THE BASTARD), who shares credit with Turkish filmmaker Yilmaz Duru, directed this film back-to-back with LE AMANTI DEL MOSTRO ("The Lover of the Monster"), another period opus featuring the same principal players. Sometimes it's obvious that he did so with tongue at least sometimes in cheek. During the obligatory tour of the family crypt, Garrone foreshadows the "Hugo Stiglitz" moment in Tarantino's INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS by revealing the name of Nijinsky's dead predecessor and father-in-law as IVAN RASSIMOV - a wink to those initiates in the dark who recognize the reference to the cruelly handsome star of Sergio Martino gialli and Umberto Lenzi mondomovies.
There is also a lengthy surgical procedure, proving to my satisfaction that this film was indeed the work of the man behind SS EXPERIMENT LOVE CAMP (1976). Either the money ran out, or Kinski refused to participate in the film's trashier scenes; his unconvincing stand-in faces resolutely away from the camera throughout, and the swarthy bare arms seen during the surgical close-ups are not even remotely a good match. This being the 1970s, there's also a lesbian hook-up between Marzia Damon and HOUSE OF EXORCISM's Carmen Silva. The orchestral music, credited to Stefano Liberati and Elio Maestosi, has a bitter yet cloying quality, from roughly the same romantic/obsessive school as Berto Pisani's exquisite score for another Kinski horror of the same period, DEATH SMILES ON A MURDERER - which makes a pretty good companion piece to this one, until Full Moon's announced release of THE LOVER OF THE MONSTER this coming June 8.
THE HAND THAT FEEDS THE DEAD is no kind of classic, yet it invites affection for struggling to assist the survival of the Euro Gothic in more modern times and more continuing to honor the efforts of its forefathers. It is touching to see someone still toiling to fuse grisly EC Comics' horror and grand opera for the dwindling audience of that time who still cared. Garrone's two Kinski horrors have circulated on the gray market for many years, in shabby condition and often without subtitles, but Full Moon's Blu-ray release is excellent, restored from the original 35mm camera negative. No English dub was ever created for the film, but the Italian soundtrack is included in 2.0 and 5.1 options. Alas, the embedded English subtitles could have used an editor's hand; not only do they misspell Nijinsky's name (spoiling the reference) but also simple words like paid ("payed") while also sometimes making the dialogue sound more half-witted than it really is ("Professor Niginsky could explain you better").
Bottom line: I had to have this, and so might you - and the day will come when that LOVER OF THE MONSTER disc coming in June will join it in my own, personal Ivan Rassimov crypt.
(c) 2021 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.
Subscribe to Tim Lucas / Video WatchBlog by Email
If you enjoy Video WatchBlog, your kind support will help to ensure its continued frequency and broader reach of coverage.
