Let us now put our hands on the table and join them together, forming an endless chain that must not be broken under any circumstance. In the great beyond, the souls of those who left us are floating. Let us enter into the world of the shadows and the spirits. Whoever wants to communicate, with the departed one, let him speak up and make it.
Hello, and welcome to Hello, This is the Doom Show. I am Richard. Folks, we are back in the Fun Studio. It's got all kinds of cool rugs, and it's got lots of denim on the walls, because that's what you should soundproof with, because it's biodegradable. I'm on a tangent, and we already started. Talking to Mark. Hello, Mark.
How are you doing, Richard?
I am doing great. How about you?
I am good, and I'm admiring, like, how you have acid-washed denim, and then, like, the deep-dyed denim, and you've got quite the denim collection on the walls.
I spent a little extra, so it would be all Jordache and Bugle Boy jeans.
Now, let me just pull out my bedazzler here, and I'll make it more homey.
Don't put too much bedazzling, because then it won't be soundproof anymore. It'll be very equity with all that metal. Folks, we're here talking about Devil's Kiss, 1976, aka La Perversa, Carcia, oh, maybe I'm messing this up already, Caricia, maybe, that might be the pronunciation, de Satan from, I believe this is a French and Spanish co-production. It feels...
It feels as such, doesn't it?
Yeah, it's a good blending of both. I was going to say, this feels French. And then I'm like, no, it also feels Spanish as hell. So this was directed by Jordy Guigo, or Guijo, he's going by Georges Guijo, or Guigo for this one. And the most information I could find about this movie is on the back of the freaking Blu-ray, where Tim Lucas says, Devil's Kiss was the first and only horror film directed by Georges Guigo, the French pseudonym of Spanish born Jorge Luis Guigo Aznar.
And he has a cameo in the film, and then he talks about the quality of the film. So there's no extras on the disc, sadly.
Yeah, nothing. Not even trailers. Nothing.
Well, that's the thing. I cannot find a trailer for this movie. I can also, I wanted to do something special tonight. I wanted to find the Spanish VHS tape, not to buy it. I'm not going crazy. I wanted to find just someone who had scanned the back and then I was going to use Google Translate to translate the Spanish directly into English and then see what madness came up. But no, I couldn't find a picture clear enough to even run the text recognition on it. So I didn't get to do that.
Oh, sadness. And there's no trailer, but the plot for this is straight off of IMDB because I'm not reading the two paragraphs on the Blu-ray. Former Countess Clare and Professor Gruber conduct occult research in Castle basement of Count Victor, reanimating people to kill for them. So probably a user wrote that, left out a couple of words there. It's fine. We're going to spoil this thing. We're not going to do the whole scene by scene.
Mark and I were talking before we started recording about how insane that would have been, because even trying to economically write down things, I still took almost two and a half pages of notes. So we're going to cover the key points of the plot, but you should absolutely check out this thing. About the quality of the film, I don't have to spoil this. Get the cheapest copy you could find. You know, you might love this. You might be angry that you check this out because of our discussion today.
But I leave it up to you. I will hold how I feel about this movie till the end, as we usually do.
And now I can't speak for Richard, but like I myself would actually enjoy coming to your home and watching it with you just to see what you think about it.
Oh, man.
I would love that.
I would say this would be a party movie for The Enlightened. No, maybe the Unenlightened would be better off. Anyway, so the only thing I found about Jordy Guijo, he did direct something that's called El Spectro, oh, excuse me, El Espectro de Justine in 1986, which is, IMDB claims is a horror movie, but I can find absolutely nothing about it. Oh, interesting.
Okay. Well, there you go.
Who knows? The other thing about this guy is that he wrote Exorcism, the Paul Nashie exorcist ripoff. So someone actually wrote that thing, which I like that and filmed quite a bit, though, you know, it's got some issues. All exorcist ripoffs have some issue. So starring in this movie, we got Claire Grandier, our villainess, although, hey, the cards were stacked against her. I don't blame her at all. She's played by Sylvia Solar from Killer War Gloves and frickin eyeball. Eyeball. Oh, man.
Next up is Olivier Mathot. I don't know, French is happening. Huge Jess Franco guy. This guy was in so many Franco movies, I didn't even write any of them. Oh, he plays Professor Gruber, who for some reason, when we first see him, has literally got green makeup on. And he never looks like that again. Never, ever. There must have been a bad day on the set for him. It's so insane. We have José Nieto, the Duke de Haussamont. This is the patron of our mad scientist here.
José Nieto was in Frankenstein's Bloody Terror, which I've been overdue for a rewatch for a long time. Next up, we've got our sexy maid Loretta, who's played by Evelyn Scott. She was in Night of the Skull. Just Frank goes all over this thing. She's particularly hilarious in this movie. She seems like she'd be a character that would just disappear, but she never goes anywhere. It's great. Next up is Daniel Martin, Richard de Haussamont. He's the nephew, I believe, of the Duke.
His name is Richard, which of course I love people named Richard. Later, he becomes the Duke. So he's Duke Dick or Dick Duke. But this play by Daniel Martin, and he was in Demon Witch Child, which...
I love Demon Witch Child so much.
Yeah, that's our list. We're doing that eventually. And then we got Susan, who is his girlfriend, who's a model, who has the scene-stealing model montage we'll talk about. She was in two Nashi movies, Curse of the Devil and The Mummy's Revenge. Finally, we got just a couple of notable people. Victor Israel is in this. Briefly, as a baron, I was hoping he'd be a main character.
I don't know if he has a glass eye or a lazy eye, I'm not sure, but Victor Israel is all over Spanish horror and occasionally pops up in those Spanish-Italian co-productions. I love him. And then we have José Lefante. Folks may remember his deep-set eyes with big black circles around them from Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, aka Murder at Manchester Morgue, Breakfast at Manchester Morgue, and Zombie 3. That movie had so many titles. It was great.
He plays a servant who's a little handsy with the models in the house.
Yes, he does. Now, just real quick, I don't want to derail this, but now I also noticed that Oliver Mithat and then Evelyn Scott and Sylvia Solar all starred in House of Cruel Dolls, if you ever saw that. They were all in that as well.
Dolls?
Yeah, it's basically like a white slavery thing, and they force the woman they kidnapped into sex work. But they were all in that too. I just found that very interesting. And then you were talking about the Jez Franco thing. I don't know if you watch a lot of weird Jez Franco stuff. But Evelyn Scott and Oliver were both in the Shining Sex film as well.
Yes, I reviewed that. And that was beyond my porn capability. The deleted scenes were like, oh, there's extended scenes. I go to them like, oh. The key word there was extended. No, I have not heard of House of Cruel Dolls, although I see Jez Franco co-wrote it.
Yeah, like you were saying, like a lot of Jez Franco overlap, and then a lot of them worked with Nashi in some degree.
I definitely did a deep dive into good old Jez Franco. Boy, oh boy. Instead of a trailer, I'm just going to play a little bit of the music from this because this has got some nice cuts to it. This movie's got some nice needle drops in it that I wonder how much composing was done or this guy who they credit as the composer was one of those house composers for a movie studio. This was all like library music for other things. But I just watched Curse of the Screaming Dead not too long ago.
And the funny thing about that movie is I was listening to it. I'm like, man, they really dug deep for this library music. Then I realized there was a recurring motif in the music. I'm like, holy shit. Someone composed this for the movie. And sure enough, it had its own composer. They spent money and they made a whole soundtrack. But what they ended up with was music that sounded like library music from a 60s film. In the 80s, it was so weird.
He's like, look what I can do.
Oh, man, Curse of the Screaming Dead, folks. That is one of the most brutal, boring things I've ever sat through. That hurt my feelings. I mean, hey, I'm not a filmmaker. I've made really bad short movies. I've never even attempted a feature length movie. But one of the reasons is I don't have enough ideas to fill a feature length movie.
That's never stopped some people, Richard.
No, clearly not. It's called Curse of the Screaming Dead. So anyway, I'm going to jump into this plot here, or what could be called a plot. If you just went by the dialogue of this movie, you wouldn't know what the story was. You'd never know. The film opens up at an amazing castle, inside of which there is a group of people watching a sick opening dance number. Mark, what is this dance number all about? What's happening here?
Okay, so in my mind, this would be like the perfect birthday party. If I had this as a 12-year-old, I'd be in heaven. So basically, you've got this scantily clad woman, who I think it's Betty, if I'm not mistaken, one of the models, I think. The scantily clad male dancing with her, he's more dressed than her, but it's really bizarre. He has a headdress and arm, not feathers. It almost looks like straw. Yeah, like straw.
And then I love that people are just well dressed, standing around watching this transpire. I told Walt, my husband, I'm like, is this a timeshare thing? You have to sit through this before you can get your free buffet meal. But it's wonderful. Every party should start like this, in my mind.
This is cultural appropriation, but we don't know what culture...
No, we have no clue what culture this would really be. None whatsoever.
I'm not sure who's supposed to be offended.
No. It's wonderful in so many ways. It's just great.
After this dance number, that's when we get the meat and potatoes of this movie, which is a fashion show. Holy cow! And according to what I was reading off the back of the box, is that the fashion show announcer is wearing this skin-tight bodysuit.
Yeah, nipple zippers.
That's the director.
I was going to ask you that. So he's not a bad-looking gentleman. He looks good in a nipple zipper jumpsuit.
He's very confident. But his outfit is just the beginning. Mark, tell us about this fashion show, because I know you were excited to talk about it.
Imagine being at this party where you've just witnessed a dance number and you thought there's no way you can top this, but it can be topped by a bevy of models coming out in these jumpsuits. And I don't know how they're walking in some of these shoes because they put Kiss to shame. To me, it looks like someone's almost forcing them. There's a cannon shooting them onto the floor, because they're propelled out there, and they're working it around. It's amazing. I would be into a frenzy.
I would be speaking in tongues. It would be so exciting for me. I can't even imagine, Richard, what this would be like. I can't. I just... Oh, my gosh, Richard. It's unbelievable. I will say this, though. As you watch it, I feel like they led with some of the better jumpsuits, and some of the weaker ones followed up. I would have started with some of the other ones, but either way, it's just... It's a feast for the senses. It really is.
Especially on Blu-ray, there's an outfit that I think the Blu-ray format was invented for. I can't remember the colors, but I want to say it was like a flash of... like flashes of pink and orange and red, like a collage of those colors, but then a stark black or stark brown section to the jumpsuit that gave it this weird uniform look to it, but it was skin tight. These fashions are completely insane. And some of them are so wildly unflattering. Oh, yes.
For girls, like a couple of them are... you know, there's one girl especially. I'm not sure which model it is. She's like the first one we see naked, and she just zips up into her suit. I'm like, wow. They tailored this for this woman. Because she's naked. I'm like, there's a naked woman. And then she puts on the suit, and I'm like, whoa, that's a really hot woman in a jumpsuit.
You know, like, I'm really, you know, like, like, it's like when you watch a lot of Jess Franco and you see Lena Romain naked in, like, 30 movies. But then when you see her in, what's that one, Macumba Sexual, where she's just walking around in a tank top in Daisy Dukes, and it's the hottest thing I've ever seen, I'm so desensitized to Lena Romain naked.
You're right. She's got to put on clothes to get a reaction.
I've heard that in that review. I can't remember. It's a long time ago.
Yeah.
The thing about this fashion show that I really love is the sick bass line. This music had me doing fricking turns on the catwalk. Man, some of the music in this is just wonderful.
Oh, it's incredible.
So this segues very awkwardly. So, so far, we've had a floor show, and we've had a fashion show. And in between all this, we've been introduced to Claire and Dr. Gruber and, you know, Mr. Duke of Day House Mall. This is his house. This is the chateau. I'm going to make this as short as possible, because this is the one thing I love, is how convoluted and complicated all of this is.
Claire's husband was a landowner of some kind, and then some bad deals went down with the House of Mont, and he ended up killing himself. And now she's here bent on revenge, and the Duke doesn't realize that he's the target?
Yeah, he's not the rise bulb in the box.
He's one of the targets. Yeah. She's literally talking about how upset she is, but here's the thing about Claire. She's verbose, like extremely verbose. There are sentences in this movie, Mark, where the dubbers are so confused, the script for the dubbing of this movie must have been wild. I wrote in my notes that the dubbers are getting confused mid-sentence. Her and Dr. Gruber will omit some sentences that are just run-on things that sound worse than what I'm doing right now.
They don't recognize me. Time is not on the side of the poor. I certainly recognized you the other day in Paris. Because I gave myself away, in a sense. You must be the only one to know about me. You have to promise me. I give you my word.
No one will know a thing.
The Countess de Montcourt has died. Perhaps you can talk with her spirit. Don't joke about this, Duc d'Orsement. It's terrible. The communication with the other world is the most tangible proof of the immortality of the soul and the struggle between the forces of good and evil. Tonight you asked me to come here. Your parties were beginning to get boring. Here we are, hundreds of kilometers from Paris. Thanks for sending a car to the station.
Unbelievable. But anyway, she just lays it down that she's pissed off, and she's very hung up on what name you call her, and I can't even keep track of it. It was so complicated.
Yeah, she was very upset about that, yeah.
But the reason she's there is she's a medium, although she says she told the fashion show that she was petite.
That's why her costume didn't fit as well as she thought it would.
A joke, yes.
I'm so sorry, Richard.
That wasn't a laughing joke. Don't apologize. That was just me trying to make a joke that I knew wouldn't be. So she's there to bring the spiritualism or as I believe I heard right in the script, the spiritism, which I've never heard before. So she's about to do some fricking seance-ing, which you know my favorite thing in movies is seances. And I think it's one of the models or one of the guests who says, I'm not interested in that bunk, which we need to bring back bunk. It's a great word.
So while this is happening, one of the models is hanging out, getting changed in the room. I believe a model named Betty.
Betty, the only model whose name, so we know something important is going to happen to Betty.
Exactly. And she is snooping in the room and she picks up a box. This is like gilded nice box. Maybe it's a music box. I'm not sure. And our pal, the manservant, Charles, he comes in and just smacks the hell out of her after, of course, attempting to rape her over her stealing this box, which to her credit, she was just admiring it, I believe. But as soon as she's left alone, the lights go out during the seance. And as they're manifesting a spirit, her lighter that she was holding is blown out.
And she screams, and everyone runs to go save her. And she's just unconscious on the floor, talking about a force. Is that what happened?
I know her name is Betty because they said it like, if they said it once, they said it like 50 times.
Right.
And then, so the Duke is also talking about, is it his deceased wife that he wants to get in contact with? Wasn't Betty in her room? So we're led to believe that like the spirit of some sort's gonna, like something's gonna happen to Betty. But of course, none of that transpires whatsoever.
No. Not at all.
No. And I'd also like to say that if I'm ever, ever present at a dance number followed by a fashion show that's followed by a seance, I will have a conniption fit on the floor because that is my perfect evening. Like, it will never be top, Richard. Like, I would die a happy man.
Just call it date night.
Oh my gosh, yes. I can't imagine what the... You could not top that ever.
Oh, dark powers, forces of the good and of the evil, forces of the night, permit the spirit of Laura to return here with us tonight. Permit him to approach the world of the living. Laura, I ask you if you hear us and can do so. Let us note your presence here with us in this house.
Now we have the horse riding scene, where a village girl has been assaulted by someone, but her parents are trying to calm her down, like, it's okay, nothing happened, we got here in time, thank god we got here in time. And there's some movement in the bushes, while Claire is riding a horse. She's riding and riding and riding, and she sees the movement of the trees. They call him a dwarf, but he seems rather tall. Or a dwarf. Yes, I believe he's a shortish guy, short dude.
Ronnie Harp is the actor, this was his only credit I could find, but he looks familiar to me. I feel like I've seen him in another movie. I also wrote that he looks a little bit like Roger Daltrey.
Okay, oh my gosh, Richard. So do you ever recast movies as you're watching them? Because I turn to Walt and I'm like, that's Roger Daltrey. But we're not done, because I really want Claire to be Angelica Huston. And the Professor Gruber can either be Andy Warhol or Artie Johnson.
Very interesting.
No, like the minute I saw our dwarf, I'm like, that's Roger Daltrey hiding in the bushes.
Get the other laughing guy, get Henry Gibson.
Yeah, yeah.
No, actually, I did this with a lot of people in the movie, because the one guy, like the curtain rapist with Betty, Steven Wright, he reminds me of Steven Wright, the comedian. There's many recasting in this movie for Mark.
I don't know why, I thought you were going to say Paul Reubens for some reason.
Oh, I love Paul Reubens. Not that I don't like Steven Wright, but I think it's the eyes that remind me of Steven Wright. Dower, yeah. We will never get back to him again, but the bear that you were talking about with the maybe glass eye, that would be Chris Milley.
Yes, there you go. Oh, God, yes. Claire rescues this guy and is like, will you come work for me? So she gets him on the back of the horse and they awkwardly ride, and this looks like the most uncomfortable, ball-busting horse ride ever. It looks so bad. I thought it was hilarious. She forces this guy to give him a meal, but she commands him to eat slowly.
And on the floor.
And on the floor. She makes him sit on the floor, eat slow, and then watch me undress, which I thought was very funny. But now we've got a satanic ritual to raise the dead here. And Mark, you need to tell me all about it.
So I kind of love this because it's just so wonky. So the professor has come up with a way to reanimate flesh, basically. But you also have to work in a like satanic incantation to cause the whole thing to come to fruition to make it work. And that's where Claire comes in, because she's got the satanic ritual to make it all work.
Yep, she's got the book and all the decorative elements you need for a good ritual.
It's like a twist at Wonder Twins power.
So they use their pal to steal a guy who recently died in a village. And that's when we find out about Gruber's process, which he explains very long winded, extremely long, hard to follow explanations of what it is. I think the French with the subtitles, is it French? Yes, the French with the subtitles is less crazy than the English dub as usual. So of course, I'm going with the English dub. He talks about his regeneration process, which involves the micro cells.
And he says, I hope I have enough magnetism to be able to dominate the satanic mind that will take control of the body of this poor fellow. And that is the short version of what he said.
Dead matter on the verge of decomposition will rejuvenate. In just a few hours, new and identical cells will replace the old ones from which they will be born by mutation from the injected microorganisms. But all this will only be possible if the supreme breath of animation penetrates into the body.
We get a fake chicken sacrifice. So it's a real dead chicken, but they don't really kill it because it's already dead. I was very happy about that. And we find out in the same scene about Dr. Gruber's heart condition. He can barely contain the monster because he has a heart condition. And when he loses control of the monster temporarily, he uses a magical spell, a three-word magical spell to calm the monster down. Did you catch what the three-word spell was?
No, what was that?
Take it easy. The monster actually listened to that like, oh, oh, my bad.
Oh, my gosh. So don't you think this is like a bit of oversight on Claire's part, hooking yourself up with this gentleman who's in really bad shape?
She's like, could you teach me how to psychically control the monster? This monster is going to serve a purpose other than looking like a very skinny guy with some corpse paint and one of his eyes is covered with scars, and they send him out for a specific mission. What is his mission in the castle, Mark?
Well, basically, they've reanimated this guy to seek out the Duke and do their dirty work for them.
Yes.
Which isn't that a lot of work, Richard?
Yes. They're not even doing it where they were at another thing, so they don't even have an alibi.
No, not at all. Well, then, also, I'd like to point out that the Duke is nice enough to let them stay there to do this. So if they kill him, they won't have any place to stay.
I love it. It's insane. So, yes, he kills the baron who's having a cigarette and holding his candelabra. There's so many candelabras in the movie that you'd think it was Ricardo Freida's favorite film.
Yes.
The Duke dies, and he sets his bed on fire. And they cut to the cops trying to sort it out, and the cops going in the middle of his... In mid-sentence, the cop is like, and that's why the fire didn't spread to the rest of the castle. And you're like, well, no, hold on. Well, how?
Why? That's so good. But I do love the setup because he's got the candelabra, and then you see the zombie come in, and you know that candelabra is going to set that bed on fire. You just know it's going to happen.
I love it.
I love it so much.
Speaking of dream casting these characters, there's a model who looks like Debbie Roshan. And there's another model that Lietta said looked like Diane Lane, which I think that might be Susan, who Lietta thought. Oh, Diane Lane. Yeah.
Later, Bill Hader and Patrick Swayze will show up, just so you know.
Classic. Classic. So here comes the unforgettable photo shoot. This was your words, Mark.
It's amazing. I like how they lead into it, because isn't that when the inspector's like, we're going to have to get some official photos or something, and then they go to this guy who I, of course, recast as Patrick Swayze. It's Richard. So he's got this woman, Susan, who's just there by a piano, and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, she's got this sparkly silver outfit on in a wig that's like the most unflattering thing ever. And it's a dark wig, and she's in front of a black curtain.
So that would be the worst setup ever for photography because she would just look like bald, like me. It looked like me in a silver outfit. And then he's taking pictures, but then come to find out, he's actually, is it the nephew of the Duke?
The nephew.
Yeah, and so he's inherited this castle, which, by the way, seems so cold and drafty because it's not like a contained castle, like all the rooms are separate, it looks like.
Yep, and it's just brick, just everywhere you look, it's just old decrepit brick, which is part of the charm of this frickin Yeah. Of the creations.
The photo shoot is like, it's not like smile before death photo shoot level, but it's pretty good. It's pretty good. There's not nearly as many costume changes.
I refer to this scene as the many faces of Susan. Oh my God. She, it's so cute the way she's trying to make this work. The actress is trying to make this work. Like, because he and Susan are an item, and I don't know if they were always a thing or if this is a new romance. I'm not sure. It's not entirely clear what's actually going on with these two, but they're definitely literally in bed together later.
But the saddest part of the movie, of course, is they lose control of the monster, and he kills Loretta, which is bullshit, because I love Loretta. My favorite moment with Loretta was when Richard takes over being the Duke. He becomes Duke Dick. She's like, sir, what room would you like me to prepare? And he's like, why yours, my dear? And she's like, you're so funny.
There are so many instances of people that would be turned into HR immediately in this movie.
It was a different time, Mark. It was.
You could just address in front of the help and share their beds.
After Loretta is killed, the monster gets out of the castle and goes for a run. We got a monster on the loose. And then we have the telepathic car chase.
It's so ridiculous, Richard, because so like Claire's driving this car. And then Artie Johnson or Andy Warhol or Professor Gruber, however he wants to do this, he's like just like holding his temples and like controlling this zombie. But I don't know. I just feel like the whole plan was very ill thought out. Like these two, like I almost did you come up with this on the way to the party? Yep.
They even talk about how that's going against their plan to just let the monster go. What they do is they manage to psychically send him to the Baron's house, which was, I believe, Victor Israel's character, this random Baron.
Yes. Yeah.
But here's the insane thing. The cops talk about the deaths of the Baron and his family. So we are cheated of the monster just breaking down someone's door and murdering them in their house because the film could not afford to show us said scene. Oh, my God. You know, and it's like we've got these two really long sex scenes in the movie. And I would trade both of them to see this the scene of the monster like breaking into someone's house. But whatever, it's fine.
Except you would not get Loretta's blue, blue, blue eye shadow.
That's true.
Well, you could just cut to that real quick and then have the family murder.
We'd have to imagine it.
Yeah.
In order to cover up Loretta's murder, they do the most logical thing, which is turn her into a zombie. So they dress her up in her maid's outfit and zap her and mentally control her to run the house just like she did before. But now her choker that she was wearing is now a scarf to cover her strangulation marks.
And she's ghastly white.
Yes, yes, I love it. One of the things I didn't mention from earlier was she has this lover who will drop in. She and her lover have a very long sex scene. After she's dead, he comes back. And how does that go?
Not well. So I love how they set this one up too, because earlier we noticed that Loretta must like to knit in her spare time, because on the side of her bed, there's like some yarn and knitting needles and a scissor and everything. So he shows up. It's Joseph, I believe, shows up, and he wants to get all randy with her and everything. And she's not having it because she's dead. But that's not turning him off whatsoever. He's still going to like, you know, I guess get some.
But then she just decides to kill him. Stabs him, stabs him right in the back. But I love her reaction because it's just her eyes are huge and she's so pale and she's got that scarf on. And it's just, I don't like, read the room, Joseph, read the room.
It's iconic. Her look is iconic. And I feel like she's, that's why I love this actress, is she's so fun and just a striking presence. He thought he could warm her up. He's like, you're cold as death, but no problem for me.
So now Gruber's got two dead people to control and he's in bad health. I just want to point this out.
He can't contain anything. He's not going to make it. The cops find dead Joseph, and then they take Claire into the hospital because she's like manic and crazy. So they take her to the hospital, and there's this whole sequence with her hooked up to machines, and it looks so uncomfortable. This head gear they have her in. They're doing all these things on her. They're just baffled, baffled by her condition. It's really cute.
Now it's Loretta, Loretta in the hospital.
What did I say?
Claire.
Okay.
They look very like clockwork, orangey, like the next room over would have... Yeah, would have him next to him with his eyes open and she's over there with all that stuff on her head.
Her eyes are already like that. They use electroshock therapy to try to help good old Claire out. I don't think electroshock therapy is what they think it's for.
That's the only explanation I can offer without a full exam. Hard as it is to believe, what you have brought me is a person who is already dead. See for yourselves the results of the encephalogram. Her movements were automatized, or they were guided by some unknown power. Her trance was, but the product of abandonment of this strange flux that had been maintaining her in this pseudo life of hers. The electroshock was quite decisive, though I can't say for sure about that.
All this is much too fantastic. Starting tomorrow, I'll begin with my colleagues a careful study of the remains of this poor woman. Perhaps we can find the cause of what happened in our experiments.
So they give her some juice, and this straight up kills Dr. Gruber. Like this trauma to his undead servant kills him, and now the monster is totally on the loose. Unfortunately, Susan, Richard's main squeeze and the greatest model, that ever modeled a silver dress, she's alone in the castle, now the monster is after her.
And so she takes off running into, it's almost like chicken wire. But she's got that look, like she actually saw it, but she still thinks she can go through it somehow. She looks right at it, so she's like boing and she bounces off that. And then it's the weirdest flight for your life that I've ever seen, I think, captured on film. It's just so odd, because the zombie himself to me isn't very menacing.
You could really kind of outrun him, but she just kind of goes from locked door to locked door. She's not that worried for her life, I don't really feel.
I feel like the director was very scared of this movie being too short. So he's like, oh yeah, just run straight into that chicken wire and bounce off of it and go the other way.
Yeah, and there's a couple of like falling to the ground for no reason. There's really no reason you should have tripped and she ends up on the ground. But luckily she makes her way to like the church.
Yep. And here's when we find out that the satanic stuff actually makes some kind of difference. Because as soon as the monster sees the crucifix, he's like, oh, shit, I forgot about Jesus. And so he's not able to catch her. How do they stop the monster? Does he die just because of the crucifix or?
Yeah, he just turns to like powder, like dust.
Yeah.
Yeah, just falls to the ground.
Yeah. I knew that.
That easy, Richard.
Hey, I know. I knew the end result, but I couldn't remember how they got there.
Yeah, it's just like, I'm done. Yeah.
Monsters defeated. That's the end of this bat shit crazy movie.
Fresh wholesome hostess, cupcakes, fruit pies, golden Twinkies with cream filling.
In the producer category, this was produced by Marius Le Sur. Luckily, there's not too many French names for me to butcher in this. He produced something outrageously crazy that I told Jeffrey about, and I was so shocked Jeffrey hadn't seen it. I'm kind of hoping that he and I get to do this because it feels like a Jeffrey movie. It's called Angel of Death from 1985. It is Andrea Bianchi, the Italian, who's hideous, by the way, as far as directing goes. I mean that in the nicest way possible.
Paired up with Jess Franco, it is insane. It is completely insane. It's Nazis in the 80s experimenting, trying to create a master race, combining people with monkey DNA for some reason. And it's one of the most pitiful action films I've ever seen, and it's so entertaining. Oh my God, Angel of Death. I can't, I didn't even look up anything else about this producer. As soon as I saw that he'd been involved in that, I'm like, nope.
The music is by Alberto Argudo, who also did the music for Exorcism, for Paul Nash's Exorcism. The cinematographer is Julio Perez de Rosas. I don't know what else. Oh, the Killer War Gloves. There's still some, you know, those like, Spanish Giali that need Blu-rays. Or is Killer War Gloves getting a Blu-ray?
I don't know.
He also shot Whirlpool for good old Jose Ramon Larraz, which is one of my... I love Whirlpool.
I'm sorry. I love it so much.
No, it's great. That's one of my unseen Larraz movies I need to get to.
It's in a box set, isn't it?
Yes, I didn't buy that box set because my copy of Vampires is nice, and I have no interest in the coming of Sin based on that artwork. It's like, horsey. The other Larraz one that I really, really need to get to is Deviation. I've still never seen Deviation, and there's one more that there's actually a nice copy of out there called The House That Vanished.
Oh, I love that one, too.
That looks so good. I was putting them off, and now I can't remember what my reasoning was, so now I'm just going to get to them. I get to them. Big Larraz fans in the house. So trivia, we have nothing, honestly, other than what Tim Lucas helped us out here. And we made all the cast connections for all the cool people in this movie who are in all these other great things and everything. So I guess we could go to... Mark, how do you feel about the Devil's smoochie?
Smoochin. To me, I love it so much. I can't... You said it earlier, the translation would actually be The Perverse Caresses of Satan.
Oh, yeah.
And so, you know, just use that, and there's my sequel, because I demand more birthday dancing. I demand more fashion show and a follow-up sequel seance. This is so good. I just can't... I can't. It's so good. I love this. For the right person, this is just like a chef's kiss of a movie, for the right person. It really is.
A chef's devil's kiss.
A chef's devil kiss. Yes, yes. Opportunity missed. Yeah, I love this thing. I enjoy movies, I think, for reasons other people don't, because I love the fashions. The actress Sylvia, like her looks that she gives, like the camera, she's got like lots of side eye and her puppet and everything. She's just amazing to me in like so many great ways. It's just so ridiculous. Like they really did not plan this out well at all. It's just, it was just, it was destined to fail for the beginning, Richard.
It was just a bad idea. But boy, I sure loved it for trying, you know. I don't know, Richard. I just love stuff like this. I can't help it. Yeah. What did you think, Richard?
I really like this one. I don't love it. The only reason I don't love this is I got a little nervous about that 95-minute running time because I was like, ooh, this feels like a 75-minute movie right here. This feels like an 80-minute movie at max. And it does lose that energy, like that energy from the fashion show. I mean, the whole beginning of the movie is like five movies in one.
But it does lose some steam for me, but under the right circumstances, you could definitely enjoy yourself with this. I found it hilariously cheap that we were cheated out of another monster attack sequence. I thought that was very funny. I feel like this was the movie that Jess Franco didn't want to make. The architecture of the castle is gorgeous. It is lovingly filmed. Oh, my God. This looks great. The pseudoscience is off the chain. The devilry stuff, all of that is just crazy.
All the dubbers mispronouncing, every single devil is mispronounced.
Accult? Like occult is accult? Yeah, I've heard that. Yeah, she'll say some things. I'm like, what does she say? And you have to listen. It's like, oh, it's an English word. It's just the way they pronounced it. Not at all how you would say that word.
That's how a lot of old movies used to call it sadism.
Yes.
Like boo-hoo.
I just picture a lot of emo kids sitting around. It's sadism.
Instead of ball, she said bail. And I was like, and Leigh-Anne and I were like, wait a minute, that doesn't sound right. The reason I feel like this is so French is that there's other, like, probably more heavily French co-productions that leaned into the Frenchness. This one leans more into the Spanish side of things, but I was thinking of movies like The Devil's Nightmare around this time.
I love The Devil's Nightmare.
Yeah, it's a great movie. That's a great movie. There's just always something a little different. Whenever there's that French spin on things, it's a little... I don't know if you've seen Night of Death from 1980. Ooh, God, 81, 82. I forget when Night of Death came out, but that is a very French horror film. That is as French as it gets, and it's so odd. You can never predict what's coming next. That's what I think of. It might be just a French film thing where they don't have American brains.
Yes, I have seen that. Yeah, I had to look it up. Yes.
Yep. That's a weird one.
That's a weird one.
It's one of my favorite Jerry Lewis movies.
What's that?
It's one of my favorite Jerry Lewis movies.
Night of Death?
No, Night of Death is really good. I'm being serious now. Night of Death is really good. Sometimes I have to actually look them up because I see so many. I don't know if I remember that title, but yeah, Night of Death is very good.
Well, there's only several thousands of these things that should be broken. And hey, I don't know about you, but the older I get, I can retain... There's a movie just in the... just out of my reach of memory. What's even worse is like, I used to be able to remember director's names and actor's names, actress's names. Now that shit's over.
Right.
My 30s, in my 30s, sure, no problem. But now I'm like, give me Google.
Yeah, yeah. I hope people listening to this will at least give it a chance because I think it's pretty fun.
Absolutely. And I'm sure the Redemption Blu-ray is not expensive. I suspect it's easy to find. And the old Euro Shock DVD, the Euro Shock collection, that looked great too for the old DVDs. I just, how many people like, how many people were introduced to so many great things from that Euro Shock DVD collection? What a, oh man.
Yeah.
Image was great. They would mess up a few things. Like some, sometimes they put out a version of a movie and you're like, what did you guys find? I think Image put out the erotic rights of Frankenstein without the erotic part. I have on my shelves the rights of Frankenstein, which has no sex in it. So it's 70 minutes. So just Franco with no sex. So it's probably a Spanish version, because Spain, they didn't want those sex scenes. And it is so short.
And then to fill up time, there's a subplot where Lena Romay is this village maiden who sneaks away from her family to go and masturbate by a stream. But before she even touches herself, even above her clothes, the movie cuts away from it. And no one knows this version. Everyone's like, Lena Romay is not in that. I'm like, she is in the non-erotic version. So interesting. I have a version of a Franco film that's catered to my taste because I'm a neuter.
No, I started strong watching Franco's movies and the sex scenes, I got burnt out, man.
I was like, Mr. Franco.
I love him. I love him so much. He is one of the filmmakers I've seen the most films of. Him and Takashi Maike, almost the same numbers of films of both of those guys. I've seen so many films directed by them. It's insane. Your entire movie collection could be those two directors. Right, right.
That's funny.
But anyway, we have discussed Devil's Kiss and what we like to do on the show here is pick something recently seen and loved, any genre, anything's up for grabs. Mark, do you have a movie you'd like to talk about?
I do have a movie. I do have a movie I'd like to talk about. Mine is, the title is not a good title. The title is a good title, but it doesn't tell you anything about the movie. It's The Hand That Feeds the Dead from 74. Okay, you know this one?
I do.
But it was also known as Evil Face, which I think is way more apropos. It's from 74. I don't know if I said that already. It's a Turkish-Italian production with Klaus Kinski, which who doesn't love Klaus Kinski? Star of like Creature, Crawl Space, Venom. Yeah. And then is it Katia? Katia Christine? She was in Five Women for a Killer, and then also in Ryan Women's Prison, same year, 74.
But it's like Gothic, but it's almost like a Gothic version of like one of those easy comic tales, like where there's a twist at the end. It's just fun for what it is. I really enjoyed it. You can't apply logic to it at all.
Everyone's a moron in it. It's great.
It's like my kind of movie. Yeah, but it's a lot of fun.
And it has this sequel they shot back to back. I remember that.
What's the other one? I wonder if I have it.
Lover of the Monster?
Yeah.
Okay.
I didn't realize that, Richard. I've already. Okay. So I watched that one a long time ago.
That was not as good.
No, I know. I agree with you. It's a full moon feature release.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah. There you go. So they're real stripped down, but they're fun.
Yeah. I haven't thought of that movie in years. I haven't thought of that. I just rewatched that actually. Not the lover of the monster, because that one's real rapey, if I recall correctly.
Even when they aren't, isn't every Klaus Kinski movie kind of rapey, even when they're not? Like, you just know somewhere in there.
It's implied.
Yeah. He's just thinking it. You just know what's going on.
He's raping your psyche. I remember that there's a gravestone in the one that just says Rosamov in it. And it's like, hmm, was that, were they talking about Ivan Rosamov? Was he supposed to be in this movie?
No, he's actually, it is actually Ivan Rosamov, because I told Walter, I'm like, that's an actor. Yeah, no, it's actually Ivan. Yeah, so I don't know if that was on purpose or not.
I strongly suspect it was on purpose. I picked a movie. I thought I had seen this one before, but I picked it up over here at Viper Video here in Tampa. If you're in Tampa, go to Viper Video. It's a freaking fun place to shop. They got tons of movies. But one of the, there's slightly less tons of movies, because I've got a bunch of movies. I got Dragons Forever from 1988. It is a action comedy romance with the trio of amazing people.
We got Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung and Bio Yuan, or Yuan Bio, I always forget which order they put his name in. This is the most overstuffed, convoluted, schmaltzy bullshit movie with tons and tons and tons of action. Of course, I'm hovering over it on IMDB, and they've got the trailer playing. It's super kooky. Bao Yuan's character, I think he's supposed to be deranged. I think he's supposed to be completely insane because he rushes into every situation that requires tact and screws everything up.
It's grand. He has this sense of justice that you have to like... Just everything has to be perfect. Justice has to be served constantly, and all it does is make everyone around crazy, and it's so wonderful. If you can find the Blu-ray of Dragons Forever, grab it. You will not regret it. I am just so enamored with Sam Oh Hong. He's a big man, and he could do the Kung Fu moves just like the rest of them, although they were getting pretty famous at this point.
So there's a few stunt doubles that creep in. Even Jackie Chan, who's famous for his destroying his body for films. Even he has stunt doubles in this, because they do some really dangerous shit in this movie. But yeah, I highly recommend Dragons Forever.
Now, is this just like a blind buy or did you already see it? Did you know something about it?
I thought I'd seen it. What happened was is I've seen Wheels on Meals, which is there's two movies that when they talk about this trio of actors that come up and Wheels on Meals and this one are like the two movies that are always about together. And I had watched one of their lesser ones and it was so bad. Oh my God. And what was funny was I had taken notes on it years before and kind of told myself, don't watch this again. But I'd forgotten.
So Leigh-Anne and I are watching this one night recently going, oh boy, wow. And I felt so dumb because I was like, it's called Lucky Stars, the Lucky Stars. Oh, I'm sorry, my Lucky Stars from three years earlier, which I'm sure that movie has its fans, but it's just really annoying, irritating. I did not like that movie at all. And that might be why I thought I'd seen Dragons Forever. So when I rewatched my Lucky Stars, it was clear that that was not something good.
But for fans of the three of them, they probably are telling me I'm crazy.
They're sending you letters as we speak.
I know, I feel bad. It's silly. My Lucky Stars is silly. But yeah, Dragons Forever has that extra punch of just being a good movie. It's not just chaotic and frenetic enough to keep your attention. It also is a good movie.
Well, that's cool. You said it was Blu-ray? Yep. Who put it out? It was Aero.
I don't know if I did a Region A. The one I found is Region B.
So are you in possession, then, of a Region Free player?
Yes.
Oh, okay. I'm afraid to go down that road.
For many years, I was not going to do it. I told everybody, I said, hey, as soon as my Sony Blu-ray player dies, I will go International Blu-ray player. And then finally, it didn't die so much as I started making a noise that was so loud, it was distracting while you're trying to watch it. Let's see. Dragon's Forever Blu-ray. Who has put this out? There's an Ultra K, an Ultra 4K Blu-ray. Who put that out? I wonder. 88 Films. Maybe I got the 88. I said Aero, didn't I? Yes, 88 Films.
That's who put it out. I have the region B of that, but yeah, it's region A too as well.
Well, that's nice. That way people listening want to pick it up. They know how to get it.
You'll find it. And folks who've seen Kung Fu Hustle, the Stephen Chow movie, one of the main characters from Kung Fu Hustle is in Dragon's Forever. I did not realize how many films this particular guy... I'm not even going to say what it is because I won't be able to find out. And if you haven't seen Kung Fu Hustle, I recommend that very highly. That's a great entryway into comedy Kung Fu, and especially an entryway into Stephen Chow.
Stephen Chow of Shaolin Soccer and God of Cookery and a thousand other great comedies.
I caught that one in the theater, Kung Fu Hustle.
Oh my God, me too. So good. We watch that all the time. That's one of our favorites. Leon and I were dating back when we saw that. I return to that all the time. My friend had a bootleg Stephen Chow box set. Oh, that's cool. It was 40 discs. All of them were DVD-Rs, and it was very shoddily made, barely holding together, and the artwork was definitely just a pre-Photoshop, slapped together bunch of bullshit, printed on a box.
And then when you opened the box, it was just like, not spindles of DVD-Rs, but like the plastic sleeves, that weird, soft, almost fabric on the inside of the plastic sleeves. That was the whole box set, and I recorded everything that had English subtitles, because there was like a good third of them that didn't have English subtitles. So I didn't bother with those. But yeah, I'm a massive Stephen Chow fan. I find it funny now how cruel his humor is in all of his movies.
The slapstick is often very mean-spirited. It's not like punching down to like lower classes. It's punching everyone at all at once. Across the board. Yeah, rich, poor, handsome, ugly. Everyone just suffers. And it's very brutal comedy, but man, I will laugh and laugh. It's a lot is lost in translation. Believe it or not, I am only an English speaker. Haven't gotten my Cantonese and Mandarin and Japanese and Italian and Spanish and French and German and every other language I watch films in.
Haven't mastered them yet. Believe it or not, still working on English.
Now, if you could have the skill to just one language, the second one, which would it be?
Oh, God, you know it would be Italian.
Yeah, I was going to say mine would be Italian.
As much as I would love to get the puns, I believe it's Chinese. They love puns, so they'll have like pun battles in movies. They'll have rhyming battles in these movies. And because I don't speak Cantonese, I'm like, this sounds crazy. This sounds like really difficult dialogue to learn, even if you speak Cantonese. But man, I'm rambling. Let's say good night to the people.
Good night, good people.
Mark, thank you so much for being back on the show.
I thank you again for having me. This is still amazing. I can't get over this. This is so cool. Thank you so much, Richard.
You're the only person who isn't suffering when they have to talk to me.
No, this is so much fun. Thank you. Thank you.
Good night, folks.
Au revoir.
Auf Wiedersehen. Folks, thanks so much for listening to this episode. If you'd like to write in to the show, send an email to DoomedMovieThon at Gmail, or hit us up at DoomedMovieThon on Instagram, or at DoomedMovieThon on Twitter, or at DoomedMovieThon at Discord, or go to Hello This Is The Doomed Show on Facebook and message us there.
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