Retro Review: EDGE OF THE AXE (1988) and DEADLY MANOR (1990)

EDGE OF THE AXE
(Spain - 1988)

Directed by Joseph Braunstein (Jose Larraz). Written by Joaquin Amichatis, Javier Elorrieta and Jose Frade. Cast: Barton Faulks, Christina Marie Lane, Page Moseley, Fred Holliday, Patty Shepard, Alicia Moro, Jack Taylor, Conrado San Martin, Joy Blackburn, May Heatherly, Elmer Modlin. (Unrated, 91 mins)

In recent years, there's been a resurgence of interest in the work of Spanish exploitation auteur Jose Larraz (1929-2013), perhaps best known for his 1974 British-made cult classic VAMPYRES, which really took the "lesbian vampire" subgenre--ushered in with Hammer's THE VAMPIRE LOVERS in 1970--just about as far as it could go. 1974 also saw Larraz helming his most serious film, the Roman Polanski-esque psychological thriller SYMPTOMS, which was actually nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes before falling into obscurity for decades until Mondo Macabro released it on Blu-ray a few years ago. Despite the Cannes accolades, Larraz went right back to his exploitation roots with films like 1977's THE COMING OF SIN (included on a 2019 Larraz box set from Arrow Video, along with VAMPYRES and his 1970 debut WHIRLPOOL), 1979's AND GIVE US OUR DAILY SEX (with Laura Gemser), and 1982's sleazy BLACK CANDLES. A pair of late '80s Larraz slasher films recently resurfaced for the first time since the VHS era courtesy of Arrow, because physical media is dead: 1988's EDGE OF THE AXE, and 1990's DEADLY MANOR, with another Larraz title from the same period, 1987's REST IN PIECES, rumored to be coming from Vinegar Syndrome later this year. Parts of AXE and all of MANOR were shot in the US, with Larraz putting forth a lot of effort to make them look as much like American slasher films of the era (albeit a few years after the craze had passed) as he could, right down to hiding behind his Americanized pseudonym "Joseph Braunstein" on EDGE OF THE AXE.

Released straight-to-video in the US by the short-lived Forum Home Video, EDGE OF THE AXE was partially shot in Big Bear, and it really busts its ass to fool you into thinking it's an American production, with Larraz including an abundance of second-unit work that turns a good chunk of the film's opening half hour into an unintentional travelogue. Starting with a strange but striking sequence in an automatic car wash, a white-masked, axe-wielding serial killer is amassing a body count in the fictional Paddock County, with Sheriff McIntosh (American TV actor Fred Holliday) determined to dodge any kind of responsibility for dealing with it (one victim is found partially decomposed, bloodied and hanging upside down in the basement of a bar, and he tells the coroner to write it up as a suicide). There's no shortage of suspects: SANTA BARBARA's Page Moseley as the local exterminator Richard Simmons (!), who makes no secret that he only married his older wife Laura (Patty Shepard) for her money, and is openly trying to hook up with Susan Nebbs (Joy Blackburn), the hottie daughter of wealthy Mr. Nebbs (Conrado San Martin); Nebbs' other daughter Lillian (Christina Marie Lane), who's back from college; Rev. Clinton (Elmer Modlin), who keeps pestering Lillian about choir practice; weirdo church organist Christopher Caplin (Jack Taylor); and drifter Gerald Martin (Barton Faulks), a computer whiz and old friend of Richard's who's just arrived in town and starts dating Lillian. Also a suspect: the entire remaining male population of Paddock County once floozy hairdresser and part-time prostitute Rita (Alicia Moro) is murdered, leaving behind a black book with the name of every married guy in town who paid for her services. That doesn't include Sheriff McIntosh who, at the crime scene as Rita's mutilated corpse is being carted off on a stretcher, openly laments to the coroner (who describes the condition of the body as "hamburger meat") and a visiting big-city detective who looks and acts like a drunk Civil War re-enactor that he never got the chance to screw her.

Yes, EDGE OF THE AXE is that kind of movie--not quite PIECES but certainly in the ballpark. As the murders continue, Lillian is convinced that the killer is her unseen cousin Charlie, who was recently released from a mental hospital. She's also a fellow techie, and together with Gerald, they do some amateur detective work on a computer whose capabilities demonstrate that the filmmakers really don't know how computers work, the level of realism falling somewhere between a CBS police procedural and NIGHTMARE WEEKEND. The comparisons to PIECES also extend to Holliday's McIntosh being the most useless cop in a pretend-American Spanish slasher movie since Christopher George delegated his entire caseload to "that kid Kendall" in pursuit of the chainsaw killer, plus there's an almost equally hilarious Agatha Christie-type moment where Larraz uses a fish-eye lens for extreme close-ups of all the suspects as they're gathered at a victim's funeral. Eurocult aficionados will find EDGE OF THE AXE of interest for the presence of Spanish exploitation stalwarts Shepard, Taylor, Modlin, and May Heatherly (best known to bad movie fans as the hysterical mom finding the nudie jigsaw puzzle in the opening sequence of PIECES), all American expats who spent virtually their entire careers in Europe, all seen here acting with live sound and using their actual voices, which were rarely heard in the era of post-sync dubbing (other than a couple of bit players, everyone is using their own voice, which explains Moro's thick accent). The appearance of these actors is also the tell on which scenes were shot in Big Bear, CA and which were done in Madrid, Spain. EDGE OF THE AXE bogs down a bit in the middle, but the murders are surprisingly brutal and the killer's reveal in the climax, while goofy as shit, makes for a pretty wild finish.

DEADLY MANOR
aka SAVAGE LUST
(Spain/US - 1990; US release 1993)

Written and directed by Jose Larraz. Cast: Clark Tufts, Greg Rhodes, Claudia Franjul, Mark Irish, Liz Hitchler, Jerry Kernion, Kathleen Patane, William Russell, Jennifer Delora. (Unrated, 86 mins)

Larraz's penultimate feature film and his last in the horror genre, 1990's DEADLY MANOR is a lifeless slasher outing that's about eight years late to the FRIDAY THE 13TH ripoff party. It feels even more unfashionably tardy when you consider that it wasn't even released in America until it went straight to video in 1993, misleadingly rechristened SAVAGE LUST, with cover art featuring someone who isn't even in the movie but bears a striking present-day resemblance to Brie Larson. A Spanish/US co-production shot in and around Suffern, NY in the summer of 1989, DEADLY MANOR doesn't have any of the usual suspects in Spanish exploitation in its cast and is Larraz's most American-looking film by far, and as such, it's surprising he uses his real name instead of his trusty "Joseph Braunstein" alias. It also reunites him with his VAMPYRES producer and holder of the world's most British name until the dawn of Benedict Cumberbatch, Brian Smedley-Aston, but they decidedly fail to recapture that old magic. A group of college kids en route to a camping excursion get lost, pick up a brooding, bad-boy hitchhiker (Clark Tufts) who knows the way, and decide to crash at an abandoned house in the woods when it gets dark. Despite the discovery of a smashed car, coffins in the basement, scalps in jars in a closet, and photo albums of nude corpses, they stick around and are soon offed one by one in predictable fashion.

I guess there's some surprises in their order of exit--the one who's overly cautious, legitimately afraid and keeps saying "We need to get out of here" (Claudia Franjul) would usually be the final girl, but here, she's the first one to bite it. But all the slasher genre archetypes are here, including the sexually voracious one who pays the price for promiscuity (Liz Hitchler), the preppy (Mark Irish), the dudebro tough guy (Greg Rhodes), and the loud, obnoxious fat dude (Jerry Kernion) who, after seeing the gruesome discoveries inside the deadly manor, snarks "What's next, Uncle Fester on the patio?" It would've helped a little if any of these characters were likable or if any of the actors were good, but the performances are terrible across the board. The killer is a disfigured woman (Jennifer Delora, the only main cast member other than Kernion who's still eking out a living as a working actor) who wears a Phantom of the Opera mask and has an axe to grind just like Mrs. Voorhees for reasons that have nothing to do with these intruders, and considering the amount of bodies on the property and in the house, you'd think the cops would be alerted to a missing persons epidemic in this secluded area. There's no logic here, and the whole subplot with the hitchhiker being an escaped con is a time-wasting McGuffin that goes nowhere. Larraz made one more film, the 1992 action comedy SEVILLA CONNECTION, which was never seen outside of Spain, and he finished his career with the 2002 Spanish TV miniseries VIENTO DEL PUEBLO, a biopic of poet Miguel Hernandez. He was active on bonus features in the DVD era, most famously on Anchor Bay's 2000 release of VAMPYRES, on a memorably pervy and hilarious commentary track with Smedley-Aston that would likely get both men canceled today.

Retro Review: RED RINGS OF FEAR (1978)

RED RINGS OF FEAR
aka ENIGMA ROSSO
aka RINGS OF FEAR
aka TRAUMA
aka VIRGIN KILLER
(Italy/West Germany/Spain - 1978)

Directed by Alberto Negrin. Written by Marcello Coccia, Massimo Dallamano, Franco Ferrini, Stefano Ubezio, Alberto Negrin and Peter Berling. Cast: Fabio Testi, Christine Kaufmann, Ivan Desny, Jack Taylor, Fausta Avelli, Bruno Alessandro, Tony Isbert, Helga Line, Brigitte Wagner, Caroline Ohrner, Silvia Aguilar, Taida Urruzola, Maria Asquerino, Cecilia Roth. (Unrated, 84 mins)

The final installment of a loosely-connected "Schoolgirls in Peril" trilogy that began with 1972's WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? and 1974's WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS?, the giallo RED RINGS OF FEAR was a troubled production even before filming began. Massimo Dallamano, a career journeyman (A BLACK VEIL FOR LISA, DORIAN GRAY, THE NIGHT CHILD) who established himself as a top cinematographer in the 1960s with Sergio Leone's A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE, directed SOLANGE and DAUGHTERS and was set to helm the third installment, but was killed in a car accident in Rome in November 1976, not long after the release of his final film, the polizia COLT 38 SPECIAL SQUAD. He was still in the process of completing the RED RINGS script, which was then cycled through an additional five credited writers--including future Dario Argento collaborator Franco Ferrini--over the next year and a half before shooting finally began. In Dallamano's stead, directing duties were assigned to Alberto Negrin, who's spent his entire career in Italian television as a go-to guy for prestigious RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana TV-movies and miniseries that would occasionally make it onto American networks, such as the 1985 miniseries MUSSOLINI AND I with Susan Sarandon, Anthony Hopkins, and Bob Hoskins as Il Duce, and 1990's VOYAGE OF TERROR: THE ACHILLE LAURO AFFAIR with Burt Lancaster and Eva Marie Saint. RED RINGS OF FEAR remains Negrin's only theatrical feature to date in a career going back to 1971, and he took the opportunity to cut loose and run with it. Typical of the sleazy direction gialli would take in the latter half of the 1970s beginning with the likes of the subtly-titled STRIP NUDE FOR YOUR KILLER, RED RINGS OF FEAR doesn't go as far as the 1979 giallo/porno crossovers GIALLO A VENEZIA and PLAY MOTEL, but it doesn't avoid embracing the trashier side of things, with a twisty and perverse story involving murders, corruption, cover-ups, abortion, and Catholic schoolgirls forced to take part in a prostitution ring being run by one of their own teachers.

Fabio Testi starred in WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? as a lecherous teacher at a posh girls school who, as per giallo rules, becomes an amateur sleuth in an attempt to get to the bottom of a mystery in which he's briefly the main suspect. Here, dubbed by the velvet tones of Ted Rusoff, he plays the actual detective in charge of the case, Insp. Gianni Di Salvo, assigned to investigate the death of a teenage girl whose genitally-mutilated corpse was found wrapped in plastic and dumped in a river near a dam. The girl was a student a nearby Catholic girls school and, from a tip by the victim's little sister Emily (Fausta Avelli), learns that she was part of a clique known as "The Inseparables." He immediately suspects the other girls are hiding something, and since it's a giallo, he's right. The investigation leads to numerous red herrings, mostly involving the teaching staff who all act like they're hiding something, including an uptight headmistress and another who pointlessly sleeps with one black glove on his bedside table. The dead girl's diary also has recurring drawings of a designer jeans logo, which eventually leads to the involvement of uncooperative clothing store owner Parravicini (Jack Taylor with a perm). Anger management case Di Salvo begins losing his patience, especially after an attempt on his life as well as an escalating body count when a teacher (Tony Isbert) is killed in a mysterious hit-and-run accident and the remaining Inseparables become targets themselves.

Unlike SOLANGE and DAUGHTERS, RED RINGS OF FEAR was never released theatrically in the US, instead going straight to video in 1985 as TRAUMA (one of its many retitlings, another being the grindhouse-ready VIRGIN KILLER), in one of those Wizard Video big boxes that also erroneously included five-time Oscar-nominee Arthur Kennedy in the credits on the packaging (he was in his share of Eurotrash movies in the mid-to-late '70s, but this wasn't one of them). It's just out now on Blu-ray from Scorpion in a restored transfer, properly framed at 2.35:1, and looking better than it ever has after decades of barely watchable VHS prints that were ported over to numerous public domain DVD sets. From the time of Dallamano's tragic death, the film was plagued with problems, from script changes to, as Nathaniel Thompson points out on the Blu-ray's commentary track, co-star Jack Taylor even claiming the film was never completely finished. At the very least, things seem to be missing and possibly never shot, which may explain the unusually brief running time of just 84 minutes. Second-billed Christine Kaufmann, an Austrian actress and former Hollywood ingenue who was married to Tony Curtis for five years after co-starring with him in 1962's TARAS BULBA, is barely in the movie as Di Salvo's kleptomaniac friend-with-benefits. It's not really clear if they already know each other when he catches her stealing cat food at the supermarket early on (some of the dialogue even hints at the possibility that she's a prostitute) and nothing results from a later revelation after they have a fight and she's next seen sleeping with Di Salvo's boss, Chief Insp. Roccaglio (Ivan Desny, dubbed by Ed Mannix). She's never seen again after that--it's unknown whether she had scenes cut or never filmed and her appearances are sporadic and pointless enough that it's not out of the question to wonder if she simply quit the movie. For a prominently-billed actress of established repute in both Europe and Hollywood (she won the Golden Globe for Best Newcomer Female for 1961's TOWN WITHOUT PITY and went on to appear in several Rainer Werner Fassbinder films before and after RED RINGS OF FEAR), it's a strangely minor and insignificant role. Spanish cult actress Helga Line (HORROR EXPRESS) also has a brief bit part as the first victim's mother and future Pedro Almodovar regular Cecilia Roth (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER) has a small early role as a Parravicini employee sleeping with her boss. In keeping with the choppy, seemingly rushed nature of the film's assembly, Riz Ortolani's main theme sounds like it belongs more to a 1970s cop show than a giallo murder mystery (Thompson points out that it was recycled in full from Ortolani's score for Dallmano's 1973 crime film SUPERBITCH).

But RED RINGS OF FEAR holds your attention: you've got Testi's rageaholic detective barging into a school meeting and bellowing "Somebody with a cock THIS BIG raped and killed her!"; you've got a bizarre sequence where, following the designer jeans lead, Di Salvo's partner (Bruno Alessandro) goes jeans shopping and struts around in skin-tight denim; you've got Di Salvo sarcastically calling the same partner "Starsky," something obviously ad-libbed by Rusoff in the dubbing studio; you've got one victim being stabbed in the neck with a flaming hot curling iron; bullying Di Salvo interrogating and threatening a scared-shitless Parravicini on a speeding rollercoaster; there's an ominous, unsettling vibe in the dimly-lit hallways of the school, filled with intimidatingly-placed religious iconography and a statue of a scowling, finger-pointing nun at the top of the main staircase, seemingly silently and pre-emptively judging everyone who walks in the building; an Argento-like sequence where an absurd amount of marbles are poured down a staircase being ascended by one of The Inseparables; a memorable performance by young Avelli, the other little red-haired girl in 1970s Italian horror movies who was called upon when the far creepier Nicoletta Elmi was busy (Avelli is probably best known to mainstream audiences as "Sweets," the little girl O.J. Simpson is killed trying to rescue in the 1977 plague-on-a-train disaster movie THE CASSANDRA CROSSING); and, in what has to be the film's most notorious bit, a cross-cutting juxtaposition of Inseparables member Virginia (Silvia Aguilar) going to a clinic for an abortion, intercut with flashback footage of the Inseparables at the orgy where the first victim was killed, bleeding out after her vagina was penetrated and torn apart by an oversized dildo. It has to rank as one of the tackiest sequences in any giallo up to that point, made even more retroactively surreal since one of the actresses playing The Inseparables is a dead ringer for Jennifer Lawrence. It had to be hard to fathom the giallo getting any more tasteless, but fear not, the 1979 double shot of GIALLO A VENEZIA and PLAY MOTEL saw ENIGMA ROSSO's abortion/orgy jawdropper, said "Hold our beers," and introduced hardcore porn into the genre, pretty much taking things as far as they could go and effectively ending the giallo at least until it was given a post-slasher film resurrection with a return to relatively traditional, classier fare in the 1980s. RED RINGS OF FEAR is a mess, but it's got its share of unusual, inventive, and audacious moments that make it hard to outright dismiss, especially with a quality Blu-ray presentation that helps it make a credible case for itself.

The back of the Wizard Video big box from 1985,
with Arthur Kennedy mistakenly credited. 

Cult Classics Revisited: COUNT DRACULA (1970)

COUNT DRACULA
(Italy/Spain/West Germany - 1970)

Directed by Jess Franco. Written by Augusto Finocchi. Cast: Christopher Lee, Klaus Kinski, Herbert Lom, Maria Rohm, Fred Williams, Soledad Miranda, Jack Taylor, Paul Muller, Franco Castellani, Jesus Puente, Jeannine Mestre, Emma Cohen, Jess Franco, Colette Giacobine. (Unrated, 97 mins)

He seems more at peace with it now, but for many years, Sir Christopher Lee openly despised his reputation as a horror icon, specifically his inextricable link with Dracula. Right on the heels of playing Frankenstein's monster in Hammer Films' THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN in 1957, 36-year-old Lee had his breakout role in the studio's HORROR OF DRACULA (1958), and while Dracula films only make up a tiny percentage of the now 92-year-old actor's nearly 300 credits over a storied and versatile career that's still trucking along in its eighth decade, it's indeed Dracula that will always be the first thing that comes to mind upon hearing the name "Christopher Lee." After HORROR OF DRACULA established Lee as a bona fide horror star, it didn't take long for him to spoof that image in the 1959 Italian comedy UNCLE WAS A VAMPIRE, but he didn't actually reprise his Dracula role in Hammer's official series until 1965's DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS. That was followed by 1968's DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE and two films in 1970: TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA and SCARS OF DRACULA. Lee was growing disillusioned with Hammer's Dracula films and the writers' refusal to stick to Bram Stoker's novel, instead concocting what Lee thought were absurd ideas that had nothing to do with Stoker's vision of the character. After resurrecting Dracula in mod, swinging London with 1972's DRACULA A.D. 1972 and 1973's THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA, which had Dracula masquerading as a wealthy real estate mogul attempting to unleash a deadly virus upon the world, Lee reached his breaking point. By this time, he was openly bashing Hammer and the DRACULA films to the press and when Hammer announced a co-production deal with Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers for THE LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES, which would pit Dracula against a team of Bruce Lee-inspired kung-fu fighters, Lee refused to have anything to do with it and was replaced by a bland and ineffective John Forbes-Robertson. The film was eventually released in the US as THE 7 BROTHERS MEET DRACULA, and marked the end of Hammer's DRACULA series.

Before his frustration reached critical mass, Lee did enjoy spoofing his Dracula image in cameos in the Peter Sellers-Ringo Starr film THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN (1969) and in the Sammy Davis Jr-Peter Lawford post-Rat Pack comedy ONE MORE TIME (1970), the latter at the personal request of horror aficionado and Lee superfan Davis. Even after his acrimonious departure from Hammer's series, Lee would play Dracula one last time in the 1976 French comedy DRACULA AND SON, directed by Eduardo Molinaro, who would go on to make the 1978 smash LA CAGE AUX FOLLES. In addition to appearing in two Hammer DRACULAs in 1970, Lee also made a Dracula film outside of the studio, almost as an open act of rebellion. Lee had done several films with producer Harry Alan Towers and Spanish exploitation legend Jess Franco in the preceding few years, including five FU MANCHU films (Franco directed the final two) as well as the softcore porn outing EUGENIE: THE STORY OF HER JOURNEY INTO PERVERSION (1970), a film in which Lee has maintained the racier elements were added after his scenes were shot. Lee was upset with Franco and Towers, but when they offered him a chance to star in a Dracula adaptation with the promise to remain faithful to Stoker's novel, the disgruntled actor couldn't resist.

To put it in era-appropriate terms, Lee making COUNT DRACULA in 1970 is akin to Sean Connery making a 007 film for a rival studio while still starring in the official Bond series. Shot in Barcelona, COUNT DRACULA is a low-key affair with a script (credited to Augusto Finocchi in the print on Dark Sky's DVD, though Franco and Towers worked on it, and the US ads gave sole writing credit to Towers, under his screenwriting pseudonym "Peter Welbeck") that takes whole chunks of dialogue directly from Stoker's novel. Dracula is even introduced as an old man who gets progressively younger as the film proceeds and he gets a fresh supply of new blood from his victims. Intending to sell his decaying residence, an aged Dracula is visited at his castle by young lawyer Jonathan Harker (German actor Fred Williams). Dracula promptly puts the bite on Harker, who escapes from the castle and is transported back to a sanitarium in London, where he's treated by Dr. Seward (Paul Muller). His situation attracts the attention of clinic head Dr. Van Helsing (Herbert Lom) as a spry and younger-looking Dracula has followed Harker back to London to buy a neighboring castle so he can stalk and vampirize his fiancee Mina (Towers' wife Maria Rohm) and her friend Lucy (Franco muse Soledad Miranda). Dracula has also established a psychic hold on crazed asylum inmate Renfield (Klaus Kinski), who lost his mind after his family had a fateful encounter with the vampire years earlier.

While staying generally faithful to Stoker in spirit, COUNT DRACULA takes some liberties in its execution, especially in the way it takes elements of the book's Van Helsing's backstory and transfers them over to Renfield. The film is very slowly-paced and, like most Franco efforts, budget-deprived. Many of the sets look like they belong in a high school play, with some interiors appearing ready to topple over at any second. At times, the cheap, sparse look of Dracula's castle adds to the sense of gloomy despair looming over the elderly vampire (a happy accident I'm sure, given Franco's track record). Elsewhere, dangling rubber bats are laughably phony-looking, the camera occasionally doesn't seem to be pointed in the right direction, and the day-for-night work is atrocious, with one scene taking place at night when it's obvious it was shot in the middle of a bright, sunny day. Lee underplays it for the most part, but you can see his commitment, especially in one epic monologue to Harker early on that's delivered directly into the camera in a way that only Lee can. Lee absolutely nails this long sequence ("This was a Dracula indeed!") and it ranks with the finest acting of his career.

Franco did some of his most professional work during his years with Towers, a veteran exploitation huckster who was great at corralling money to lure name actors who maybe weren't at their pinnacle of their career (like a visibly drunk Jack Palance in Franco's 1969 De Sade chronicle JUSTINE) or were just cool with whatever as long as the check cleared (Lee and Lom, the latter having just appeared in Franco's sleazy 1969 women-in-prison classic 99 WOMEN and would continue slumming in Eurotrash until Blake Edwards rescued him to reprise his role as the perpetually-flustered Dreyfus when he restarted the PINK PANTHER franchise in 1975). Towers managed to get Lee, Lom, and Kinski together for COUNT DRACULA, but the three headliners are never seen together and were never on the set with one another. Franco leaves a lot of the plot's heavy lifting to Harker and Lucy's fiance Quincy Morris (played by American expat and Franco regular Jack Taylor), while Lee, Lom, and Kinski only worked on the film for a few days each. Dracula and Van Helsing's sole scene together is shot in a way that makes it quite apparent Lee and Lom were not there at the same time. It's worth noting that there is the possibility that Dracula and Van Helsing were meant to interact more than they do--Lom was a last-minute replacement after Vincent Price backed out just before shooting began. Perhaps his hasty casting and limited availability necessitated changes, which may explain why Van Helsing doesn't even take part in the final ambush of Dracula, instead sending Harker and Morris to deal with it after suffering a stroke from which he's apparently recovered two scenes later. Kinski's Renfield never leaves his asylum cell, where he makes funny noises, smears food on the walls, and eats flies, which may have just been Franco filming Kinski's lunch break. As an actor, Kinski only interacts with Muller, Franco Castellani (as an abusive guard) and, for one scene, Rohm, who's said that Kinski initially refused to appear in a Dracula movie and Towers had to convince him that his scenes were for another project. According to legend (and Rohm, who perhaps embellishes somewhat but it's still amusing and, considering Kinski's volatile personality, quite plausible) when Renfield attempts to choke Mina, Kinski had his hands around her neck and whispered "Maria, I think that husband of yours has me in a fucking Dracula film." Interestingly, Kinski would star in two Dracula adaptation years later, with Werner Herzog's NOSFERATU: THE VAMPYRE (1979) and its unofficial sequel, NOSFERATU IN VENICE (1988).

Even with its flaws and cut corners, COUNT DRACULA is an unusually ambitious project for Franco and Towers, and one that makes a good pairing with the same year's THE BLOODY JUDGE, released in the US in 1972 as the misleading NIGHT OF THE BLOOD MONSTER (it would be 1973 before COUNT DRACULA managed to find a US distributor). THE BLOODY JUDGE is obviously inspired by Michael Reeves' WITCHFINDER GENERAL, itself ripped off in 1969 with the West German tongue-ripper MARK OF THE DEVIL, starring (wait for it) Herbert Lom, but like COUNT DRACULA, it features one of Lee's best performances as puritanical Judge Jeffreys, yet another in a long line of impotent, sexually-frustrated witchfinders taking their penile inadequacy issues out on accused witches and assorted wenches, harlots, and other undesirables of dubious moral standing. Both films catch Franco just before 27-year-old Soledad Miranda's tragic death in a car accident would, for better or worse, completely alter the course of his career. Franco could hold his own as a journeyman gun-for-hire, but he was starting to explore his auteur impulses, which usually meant plotless fever dreams and constant crotch-zooms, an artistic shift that would reach its apex when he met his next muse and eventual life partner Lina Romay. There's a fine line between auteur and perv, and as Franco aged into the emeritus raconteur phase of his career in the years before his death in 2013, his work was reconsidered as that of a legitimate trail-blazer and cinematic genius. I'm not entirely onboard with that--there's some interesting films there in his post-Towers dive into horror erotica, but a large chunk of it is clearly the work of an often sloppy filmmaker who just had a fond appreciation for naked women.  Not that there's anything wrong with that...

In Theaters/On VOD: GRAND PIANO (2014)

GRAND PIANO
(Spain/US - 2013; US release 2014)

Directed by Eugenio Mira.  Written by Damian Chazelle.  Cast: Elijah Wood, John Cusack, Kerry Bishe, Tamsin Egerton, Alex Winter, Don McManus, Allen Leach, Dee Wallace, Jack Taylor.  (R, 90 mins).

Damian Chazelle's drama WHIPLASH earned some significant buzz and the audience and jury awards at this year's Sundance Film Festival, just in time for the US release of the Chazelle-scripted high-concept thriller GRAND PIANO, several months after it debuted in Europe.  Both films--WHIPLASH was acquired by Sony and will be released later this year--deal with psychological pressures on a music prodigy, though GRAND PIANO takes a decidedly different approach in the hands of director Eugenio Mira.  The term "Hitchcockian" has been bandied about for decades, but it applies here.  Unfortunately, the longer GRAND PIANO goes on, the more silly and nonsensical it gets, and despite his background in music, Chazelle seems to have no idea how classical and orchestral performances go down.  Do conductors kibitz with the audience in between movements?  Does the featured pianist get up and wander around for long stretches of time while the rest of the orchestra carries on?  As a suspense piece, GRAND PIANO has a doozy of an idea that ultimately collapses once the villain's motivations are revealed.  It's fun while it's happening, but even before the movie's over, you'll be scratching your head and listing all the ludicrous lapses in logic.  If you want to make it Hitchcockian, then go for it.  Sure, not every Hitchcock thriller is airtight, but Chazelle and Mira are pretty much jamming a funnel down your throat to make you swallow the absurdities that they keep piling on.

Five years after suffering a breakdown in mid-performance and becoming a recluse, stage-fright-prone classical pianist Tom Selznick (Elijah Wood) is set to make his comeback appearance.  He's not eager to do so, but his glamorous movie-star wife Emma (Kerry Bishe) insists he re-enter public life.  He's set to play the priceless grand piano that belonged to his late mentor Patrick Godureaux (played in photos and lobby posters by American expat Spanish exploitation icon Jack Taylor), and is visibly nervous about his return to live performance but, as the gregarious conductor (Don McManus) reassures him, "You play music this dense, you're gonna hit a wrong note.  The audience never knows."  Things quickly head south when Tom sits at the piano and notices some writing in his score:  "Play one wrong note and you and your wife die."  There's a laser pointed at Emma and at Tom's hand.  He turns the page: "During the next break, go back to your dressing room."

OK, how many breaks does a star pianist get?  It's his comeback performance and he's chosen a composition that seemingly involves as little piano as possible?  Tom makes his way to his dressing room and finds an earpiece radio transmitter waiting for him.  "Get back on stage!" orders the unseen sniper with the voice of John Cusack, perhaps calling from the set of one of the other two new movies he's had dumped on VOD in the last two weeks. "Call for help and I will hear it.  Get a guard involved and I will know it.  Play a wrong note, you will die." What does the sniper--named "Clem"--want?  "I don't want your money.  I want you to play the most flawless concert of your life."  And what's the concluding piece for this comeback concert?  An extraordinarily complex original composition by Godureaux known ominously in the world of classical music as "The Unplayable Piece"...the very piece that caused Tom's public meltdown five years earlier.

This should be a can't-miss nail-biter, and sometimes, it is.  It's hard to get around the gaping breakdowns in logic in Chazelle's script (WHIPLASH may be great, but it's worth noting that he also wrote THE LAST EXORCISM PART II). and as the plot gets dumber and the motivations of Clem and his accomplice (Alex Winter--yes, that Alex Winter), who's posing as a stage assistant, are spelled out, you start thinking "There has to be an easier way."  Where is the stage manager?  Why does Tom just arrive at the hall to play a highly-publicized concert on a piano he's never used with an orchestra with whom he's never played...and no practice, nothing.  Five years since he's played and he's just winging it?  Mira's direction is so stylish, enthusiastic, and brimming with a love of cinema that GRAND PIANO almost pulls it off.  Aside from the Hitchcock influences--particularly the Royal Albert Hall sequence in 1956's THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH--there's the constant classical music, the rich, lush colors, the long tracking shots and widescreen shot compositions of cinematographer Unax Mendia (who did similarly memorable work on Kolda Serra's little-seen 2006 film THE BACKWOODS), and the sweeping camera in constant motion, telling us Mira has obviously spent a lot of time watching Brian De Palma and Dario Argento movies.  There's even a vintage De Palma split screen at one point, and parts of "The Unplayable Piece" sound like something Claudio Simonetti would've written for an Italian horror film.  There's also one brilliant bit where Mira pulls a 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY "bone to spaceship" match cut with a glass shard about to slit a throat seamlessly becoming a bow sliding across the strings of a cello.  Stuff like that will put a smile on the face of anyone who loves cinema.  What Chazelle doesn't seem to understand, and what Mira is forced to work around, is that with high-concept thrillers of this sort--be it Keanu Reeves on a speeding bus in SPEED or Colin Farrell trapped in a phone booth in PHONE BOOTH--the key is to keep them in that spot to maximize the suspense.  PHONE BOOTH is by no means a great movie but it understands why it's called PHONE BOOTH.  GRAND PIANO works best when Tom is at the grand piano being harangued by an endlessly taunting Clem.  It's too much that he's constantly getting up from the piano, is having loud conversations with Clem while playing, and is actually texting for help at one point...all the while never flubbing a single note.

Wood turns in a credibly frazzled performance when he's at the piano, and though he's mostly heard and only briefly seen, Cusack is a formidably intimidating bad guy.  But Clem's ultimate motivation is hardly worth the effort, the climax is weak, and the film ends with an abrupt whimper. There's hints that there's more going on between Clem and Godureaux and Taylor's presence in the closing credits without actually acting in the movie might be an indication that he shot some scenes that were cut, even though the film doesn't run long (this is the second movie I've seen this week where the closing credits sloooowly crawl over ten minutes to pad the film to 90).  Still, there's no denying GRAND PIANO has its moments.  Mira's made a few films prior to this, none very noteworthy (he did serve as second unit director on THE IMPOSSIBLE), and he sported a fake mole and mugged shamelessly as the young version of Robert De Niro's character in the forgettable RED LIGHTS.  But GRAND PIANO is irrefutable proof that the guy's got something...and just needs a better script to take it to the next level.