Showing posts with label 1960's. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1960's. Show all posts

Friday, 16 March 2012

DRACULA THE DIRTY OLD MAN (1969)



Or "Dracula (the fucked-up vampire flick)."

In the caves of an abandoned mine, Mike Waters is looking for "Mr. Alucard." Instead, he finds a Count Dracula with a Jewish accent: "I'm Count Dracula which is Alucard backwards. So you can call me Allie."

Wearing a hairpiece that resembles a dead skunk, Dracula hypnotizes Mike: "I want for you to go out and get me, every night, a different girl. You like to do that for me, hmmmm? You'll have fun! What's left over, I give you. I'm going to make you a jackalman. Irving Jackalman. That's what I'm gonna call you from now on."

Mike then turns into a mangy wolfman. Pardon me, a jackalman. (The makeup looks like the same goofy mask and three-fingered claws used in the 1967 monsters-loose-in-Las-Vegas epic, The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackal). Growing a big snout that makes him look like a giant rodent, "Irving" immediately starts attacking women who are just as immediately transported back to Dracula's cave. There, Drac strips 'em naked, ties 'em to a rack, and bites them on the boob -- "I'm gonna give you a kiss like you wouldn't believe. Right here in your good place!" -- leaving two bloody bite marks right above the nipple...

As becomes quickly apparent, Dracula (the dirty old man) is really two films in one. Visually, it's a crude but nevertheless seemingly serious and straightforward sex horror film that even occasionally detours into Rollin-like territory with its slam-fisted imagery of nude women bound and bitten on the breasts by bats (minus, of course, Rollin's style, wit, or sense of poetry). The soundtrack, however, is something else entirely. A la Woody Allen's What's Up Tiger Lily? (1966), the original dialogue has been discarded (assuming it was even recorded; this could just as easily have been shot silent) and replaced with idiotic "comic" narration that often sounds like the narrator is making things up as he goes along. A couple of times he even cracks up at his own jokes.

But even the narrator doesn't know what to do with one bludgeoning sick sequence where the dumb-looking werejackal jumps atop a nude woman and rapes her into unconsciousness. While continuing to hump away, the woman eventually comes to and starts to struggle, so the big bad wolf kills her by bloodily biting her in the throat... then continues to happily screw the corpse.

THE PLAYGIRLS AND THE VAMPIRE (1960)

A landslide on a stormy night causes a bus with five showgirls, their manager and the driver to take the road less traveled - straight to Castle Kernassy. Count Gabor (Walter Brandi), is less than hospitable - until Vera (Lila Rocco), one of the girls, stands up to him, causing him to relent. They're told to stay in their rooms no matter what they might hear in the night. Vera seems intuitive about the place, almost as if she's been there before. Katia (Maria Giovannini), another in the troupe, decides to disobey the Count's orders and goes off in search of a shower. Not a good idea. While walking around the castle, Vera is surprised to find a portrait of Margherita Kernassy, a distant relative of the Count, who bears a striking resemblance to herself. Inexplicably, she goes for a walk outside the castle that night and discovers Katia's grave opened, her body missing and a pale, unresponsive Count standing nearby. Vera goes wandering around the castle herself to speak to the Count about Katia's disappearance and finds her way to his laboratory where she discovers Katia's body.

The Count explains his research into vampirism without explaining the presence of Katia's exhumed corpse on the table before them. That evening, a very much alive (and naked) Katia appears in manager Lucas' (Alfredo Rizzo) bedroom. Vera, on the other hand, notices someone (or something) attempting to enter her locked bedroom, naturally she unlocks the door and goes off wandering about the castle, accidentally opening a secret passageway that leads to the Kernassy family crypt. There she's confronted by the Count and vampirized. Coming to her rescue is...another Count! It turns out that Gabor's 200 year old undead ancestor is responsible for the murders associated with the castle and Gabor's promise of the release that the vampire seeks falls on deaf ears, setting up a final confrontation between the two.

The Last Man on Earth (1964)



Based on the chilling Richard Matheson science fiction Classic "I am Legend" and later remade as "The Omega Man" starring Charlton Heston. This classic features Vincent Price as scientist Robert Morgan in a post apocalyptic nightmare world. The world has been consumed by a ravenous plague that has transformed humanity into a race of bloodthirsty vampires. Only Morgan proves immune, and becomes the solitary vampire slayer.

The Phantom Planet (1961)



After an invisible asteroid draws an astronaut and his ship to its surface, he is miniaturized by the phantom planet's exotic atmosphere.

Tuesday, 13 March 2012

Brain That Wouldn't Die, The (1962)



Dr. Bill Cortner has been performing experimental surgery on human guinea pigs without authorization and against the advice of his father, also a surgeon. When Bill's fiancée Jan Compton is decapitated in an automobile accident, he manages to keep her brain alive. He now needs to find a new body for his bride-to-be and settles on Doris Powell, a glamor model with a facial disfigurement. Jan meanwhile doesn't want to continue her body-less existence and calls upon the creature hidden in the basement, one of Bill Cortner's unsuccessful experiments, to break loose. 


Wasp Woman, The (1960)



The founder and owner of a large cosmetics company, Janice Starlin (Susan Cabot), is disturbed when her firm's sales begin to drop after it becomes apparent to her customer base that she is aging. Scientist Eric Zinthrop (Michael Mark) has been able to extract enzymes from the royal jelly of the queen wasp that can reverse the aging process. Starlin agrees to fund further research, at great cost, provided she can serve as his human subject. Displeased with the slowness of the results she breaks into the scientist's laboratory after hours and injects herself with extra doses of the formula. Zinthrop becomes aware that some of the test creatures are becoming violent and goes to warn Janice but before he can reach anyone he gets into a car accident. He is thus temporarily missing and Janice goes through great trouble to find him, eventually managing and then transferring his care to herself. Janice continues her clandestine use of the serum and sheds twenty years' in a single weekend, but soon discovers that she is periodically transformed into a murderous queen wasp.

Monday, 12 March 2012

Bloody Pit of Horror (1965)


A photographer and his models go to an old, abandoned castle to shoot some sexy covers for horror novels. Unbeknownst to them, the castle is inhabited by a lunatic who believes himself to be the reincarnated spirit of a 17th-century executioner whose job it is to protect the castle against intruders.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)



The radiation from a fallen satellite might have caused the recently deceased to rise from the grave and seek the living to use as food. This is the situation that a group of people penned up in an old farmhouse must deal with.