I’ll never be as big a Paul Naschy fan as my friend and overall Renaissance Man Sandy Petersen is, he being the fellow who clued me in to the dictum: “Paul Naschy always gets the girl.” He then proceeded to illustrate this by showing me The Hunchback of the Morgue, in which Naschy plays a greasy-haired homicidal hunchback who nonetheless scores the passionate adulation of not one but two gorgeous women.
I’m really not a huge zombie movie fan, and am not particularly partial to gore, and again am at best a modest follower of Naschy’s work. Even so, I was unexpectedly impressed with the first third of Vengeance of the Zombies, which works as a combo zombie/Giallo sort of deal. (If you’re not up on Italian horrors, Giallos are sort of artsier slasher flicks.) It was a mixture I hadn’t seen before, and handled here better than I would have thought likely. As for the rest of the film, it eventually goes completely off the tracks and becomes quite epically gooftacular. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
I don’t want to get too much into the ridiculous and insanely convoluted plot, because why ruin it? Enough said that Naschy plays three parts, including in a (maybe) dream sequence the devil. His main role is as Indian guru Krishna, whose first appearance had me laughing, as the nut-stained Naschy looked entirely too much like the similarly hued Marlon Brando in Candy.
As I said, there’s some good atmosphere in the beginning, including a scene that for about the hundredth time in a Naschy movie, teaches us that you’re probably better off forgoing robbing a grave. (Meaning the film that probably most inspired Naschy was Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, which features a terrific, similarly-disastrous tomb robbing; different monsters fighting each other, and, of course, Larry Talbot the Wolf Man, the inspiration for Naschy’s long-running Waldemar the werewolf character. In fact, has anyone ever written a paper on this? If not, Sandy, you should get cracking.)
Anyway, if you like some cheese with your sleaze, this should satisfy. Who knew, for example, that you could cut somebody’s head off, prop it back seamlessly on their torso, and then their body would remain standing upright until somebody approached it later? Or that it would be a bad idea after your Evil Boss kills one henchman a short while earlier, and then a second henchman complains and the Boss kills him too, for you to moments later yourself also complain to your boss? You don’t learn that in too many management classes.
Check out also the typically goofy and hilariously inappropriate disco score, and the bad makeup for the zombies, and the fact that play up zombie nudity is bad because, a) you know, they’re zombies, and thus not really falling into that “attractive” zone any longer, and b) no offense, but are played by actresses who weren’t that hot to start with. I also wasn’t really buying the English setting very much, even given the way one guy had a picture of the Queen up on a wall. Also, is it a law in Europe that living dead women must flounce around in slow-motion?
The recent BCI DVD release is pretty terrific looking. Naschy provides an intro for the film, but sadly there isn’t a commentary track or anything. Since this company is looking to mine the Euro horror stuff in some depth, and given how little is generally known about this stuff in this country, a commentary or two by a student of the genre would not be amiss.
