Tag Archives: Paul Naschy

There’s No Place Like Home

Posted on by
Reply

Spanish director Eugenio Martin is not a name familiar to the average American moviegoer but for fans of European genre films, he has developed a cult following over the years, thanks to the release on DVD and Blu-ray of some of his better known titles. Among these are the fast-paced, enormously entertaining sci-fi/horror/train disaster hybrid Horror Express (1970) with Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Telly Savalas, the giallo The Fourth Victim (1971) starring Carroll Baker, and A Candle for the Devil aka It Happened at Nightmare Inn (1973) in which two religious fanatic sisters are behind a series of murders. Martin also helmed several entrees in the Spaghetti Western genre such as The Ugly Ones (1966), Requiem for a Gringo (1968) and Bad Man’s River (1971) featuring Lee Van Cleef, James Mason and Gina Lollobrigida but some of his efforts defy easy categorization like Aquella Casa en las Afueras (English title: The House on the Outskirts, 1980), which is like a woman-in-peril melodrama crossed with an “old dark house” thriller. Throw in some unspoken but implied social commentary on women’s birthrights and you have a rather unique film from post-Franco Spain.

Continue reading →

Leon Klimovsky’s Pothead Noir

Posted on by
Reply
The Argentinean exploitation film poster for THE MARIHUANA STORY (1950).

Among the many anti-marijuana films made over the years, it is generally agreed that the most famous of them all is Reefer Madness (1936), which earned a huge cult following in the 1960s due to its outrageously over-the-top depiction of marijuana use and its effects. Most of the anti-pot movies were false, exaggerated presentations of how the herb turned users into addicts and rivaled heroin as a gateway into sin, debauchery, violence and death. The U.S. was not alone in turning out these anti-drug scare films and one of the lesser known but historically significant releases for its time was Marihuana (U.S. title, The Marihuana Story, 1950), directed by Argentinian filmmaker Leon Klimovsky, who would later relocate to Spain and specialize in horror movies, spaghetti westerns and other low-budget genre efforts.

Continue reading →

The Stiletto Club

Posted on by
Reply

Conspiracy thrillers have been a popular subgenre in movies ever since the silent era with such memorable entries as The Ace of Hearts (1921) in which Lon Chaney stars as a member of a secret society that gets rid of people deemed unfit to live among them. Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935) is an equally menacing early talkie classic and The Manchurian Candidate (1962), about a brainwashed ex-military hero being controlled by political subversives, is probably the best-known representative of all. However, it wasn’t until the 1970s that conspiracy thrillers reached an all-time high in popularity as witnessed by such iconic Hollywood releases as The Parallax View (1974), The Conversation (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975), Capricorn One (1977) and The Boys from Brazil (1978). Other countries contributed their own variations on the genre like Spain, which released La Casa sin Fronteras (English title: The House Without Frontiers), a deeply unsettling effort from director Pedro Olea, which was made while General Franco was still in power and which prefigures the paranoid scenarios made popular by The Parallax View and others.

Continue reading →

These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends

Posted on by
Reply

The William Shakespeare tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, has served as the inspiration for countless movies about star-crossed lovers such as Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953), West Side Story (1961) and the zombie comedy Warm Bodies (2013) but it has rarely been re-imagined as a spaghetti western. One of the few but notable exceptions is Dove si spara di più (1967), which is also known under the alternate release titles of Fury of Johnny Kidd, Ultimate Gunfighter and Ride for a Massacre.

Continue reading →

Freaking Out in Franco Era Spain

Posted on by
Reply

Not all film preservationists are focused on saving and restoring lost classics of silent and early cinema like Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927) or overlooked noir indies from Hollywood’s golden era such as Richard Fleischer’s Trapped (1949). Mondo Macabro, which has been around since 2003 or so, is dedicated to introducing movie lovers to fringe cinema from around the world – obscure genre films that run the gamut from horror to sexploitation to art house oddities from countries as far flung as Japan, Latvia and South Africa. Among some of their offbeat releases are Lady Terminator (1989), a cheesy Indonesian rip-off of James Cameron’s The Terminator, The Living Corpse (1967), a vampire thriller from Pakistan, and Strip Tease (1963), a melancholy French drama starring Nico (of The Velvet Underground) with music by Serge Gainsbourg and Alain Goraguer. The company’s most recent release on Blu-Ray, The Killer of Dolls (El asesino de manecas, 1975), is easily one of their most peculiar and transgressive acquisitions to date.  Continue reading →