5 – Devil Monster: Skipped, seen it.
6 – The Head: Skipped, seen it.
7 – CRYPT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1972)
OK, this I actually kind of liked. It’s no classic, and the Mills Creek version certainly does it no favors. Not only is it a hacked full frame, a black & white presentation of a color film, but the print is so dark that during several of the nighttime scenes—which constitute most of the movie—you can’t see what the hell is going on. (Although I suspect that some portion of this is inherent to the subpar film stock and lighting they used. Even so, other prints have to look far better than this one.) And, as usual, the soundtrack was a lot more muffled than I would have liked, especially since my hearing isn’t all that great.
Despite these drawbacks, I found the film an enjoyable little diversion. If you were to want to take a gander at it, you’d want to stick with the VCI copy (one of several out there) sold under that alternate title of Young Hannah Queen of the Vampires, which is a widescreen color print with a digital audio track. DVDDRIVE-IN.com gave it a good review, and they are a more than dependable site. Meanwhile, Netflix offers under Crypt of the Living Dead the Rhino DVD, which is also in black & white and cropped apparently, but presumably a better print (hopefully by far) than the Mills Creek one.
Maybe we should set up a Jabootu lending library. We all kick in $20 or $30 bucks, buy the better copies of some obscure movies that are hard to get, and mail them back and forth so everyone can take a gander at them.
The setting is the remote, desolate “Vampire Island.” (The film was actually shot in Turkey.) We open with Peter (Mark Damon) luring, with the help of the disfigured, feral Wild Man, Professor Bolten to his death in an ancient crypt. After killing him, they smash the support leg of the crypt’s humongous stone tomb and pin his body underneath it. Although some disagree, I actually liked the fact that they didn’t play the murder as a mystery. By revealing right away that the outwardly friendly Peter is a villain, it’s interesting to then watch him interact with the rest of the cast, knowing that he has some malign scheme in the works.
Soon after, Bolton’s son engineer Chris (Andrew Prine) arrives at the desolate island community. With the body still trapped under the massive sarcophagus, Chris tries to solve to organize the superstitious, surly members of the island’s small fishing community to help him move the tomb out of the way. The locals are especially nervous because the stone coffin holds the body of Hannah, supposedly a vampire entombed here 700 years ago.
Things go pretty predictably, but again, the whole point of a genre fan is to see variations on familiar themes, and I rather liked some of the ones done here. Peter’s scheme to free Hannah might seem elaborate, but I enjoyed the fact that they film actually dealt with the issue that her sarcophagus would literally weigh several tons. Three, actually, as they establish here.
How many movies have we seen where one or two guys grab a stone slab that would weight a thousand pounds or more, grunt a little, and just heft it out of the way? Here, the sheer mass of the thing is actually *part* of the plan. Peter knows the only way Chris is going to be able to move the thing, even with a block and pully system and the villagers’ help, is to break the stone coffin’s seal and remove the top of it first so as to shift the thing in pieces.
Some might also balk at the way Chris suddenly goes from being a sarcastic skeptic to being the chief proponent of the vampire theory. However, to me it was more of a tipping point thing. Eventually the evidence just overwhelmed his initial reticence on the issue, and he shifted from one unyielding position to the opposite one. I don’t think that’s so weird. Also, I’ve often felt movies overplay people’s resistance to the supernatural anyway.
Again, you won’t see much, if anything, that’s new here (although I kind of liked the silent vampire queen—it made her more inhuman seeming). However, the film is usually fairly intelligent and rarely aggressively stupid. I wish that were a statement I could make about more horror films, but it isn’t. Meanwhile, the acting by a veteran cast is pretty naturalistic, and helps quite a lot in selling things.
Mark Damon (Peter) has a definite young Martin Landau thing going here, especially in regards to a broad smile hiding malicious intent. Damon is most famous for playing the hero opposite Vincent Price in Roger Corman’s House of Usher. He also appeared in Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath. He worked mostly in Europe, largely in crime mellers, thrillers and Spaghetti Westerns.
Andrew Prine (Chris) was starring in a ton of genre stuff during the ’70s, including Simon, King of Witches, Barn of the Naked Dead, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, Grizzly and The Evil. He also appeared on an episode of Kolchak the Night Stalker amongst zillions of other TV appearances. Jabootites might recall him playing the villainous like in Abe Lincoln: Freedom Fighter. Mr. Prine continues to work today.
Peter’s sister and Chris’ love interest Mary is played by Patty Shepard, an actress with a sort of Barbara Steele thing going on. She worked mainly in Spain. (The film was an American/Spanish co-production, and there rumors that the film was also shot separately in Spanish. This might explain the silent vampire, which would cut down on dubbing.) Ms. Shepard was herself quite the horror vet, having starred in stuff like the Paul Naschy sci-fi monster free for all Assignment Terror and Slugs.
She is best remembered, however, for playing the vampire queen in Naschy’s 1971 Werewolf vs. the Vampire Women, aka Shadow of the Werewolf. There’s a nifty DVD of the film you can rent from Netflix. Naschy liked the generally concept enough that he returned to the female vampire thing in several werewolf movies, most notably Night of the Werewolf (1980, also on a great DVD), which is a virtual remake of the above film. Sadly, these awesome Naschy DVDS, of which there were several others, were among the last put out by the now defunct BCI.
