MonsterHunter

Barbara Steele must have had it in her contracts to appear in as many scenes in a movie as possible because here she is again playing a dual role. When we last checked up on her in the Nightmare Castle, she was playing twin sisters in a film best described as subpar. You may recall in that flick that it was her wigs that did most of the acting for her and she didn’t really impress all that much. In Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (Mask of Satan if you’re to believe the opening credits - of course if you believed them, you would think that Ms. Steele’s name is spelled “Steel.”), she plays a witch/vampire (the film was never clear on which she was) princess named Asa as well as her descendant, Princess Katia.

You could tell that Steele was going for the gusto in this movie, because she didn’t leave the acting up to the wigs. This time, I think I was supposed to tell them apart because the bad princess had a smile that was always turning into a snarl. It also helped that whenever one princess of hers was up and about, the other one was either dead or unconscious. This movie, frequently praised as one of the great horror films, would have to be considered overpraised to all but the most slavish Bava and Steele devotees.

Yes, it has style. It has also has atmosphere. Its problem is the characters. Don’t know who they are. Don’t care what happens to them. Dr. Soandso has been turned into a zombie slave? Big whup. The prince has fallen into a spike filled pit? Too bad - what was his name again? Dr. Whatshisface is trying to save Princess Whoisit? Great, once you get that done, you can make yourself useful and get me another beer.

Bava kickstarts the action with a beautifully shot opening sequence where the dastardly Princess Asa is being put to death for her black magic, consorting with Satan, and generally being a giant rag. Prince Javutich, who is either her brother or lover or both (are they Arkansas royalty?), has already been planted in the ground by a well-disciplined angry mob of torch wielding geeks wearing hoods.

The guy heading up the stake-burning has a little something special planned for Asa. He went to all the trouble of having this really nifty metal mask made that he’s going to let Asa wear as she’s being burned. And just to make sure that it doesn’t fall off when things get hot, it has a whole bunch of really sharp spikes on the inside of it! This is where the big fat dude with the really big sledge hammer comes into the picture.

After some fancy camera shots through the mask, they have some people hold the mask over Asa’s whining face and this guy with the sledge comes in and smashes it right down onto her face, driving the spiked mask into her satanic head. You even get to see some blood gush out of her head. I was amazed. I mean, you would thing a terrific blow like that would have dented the mask or at least cracked it, but the thing still looked mint!

I guess I should also tell you that before they managed to pound the mask onto her head, she managed to squeeze out one of those nasty curses that witches always manage to lay down on the unsuspecting busy bodies in charge of witch burning. You know the curse I’m talking about. I think the otherwise agreeable Veronica Lake even uttered it in the comedy I Married A Witch .

It’s about how the descendants of the dopes that burned up the witch will be cursed to have really bad things happen to them, like terrible deaths, being possessed by the ghost of the burned up witch, downturn in the family business, kids dropping out of college to join a band - that sort of thing. Why they don’t gag these hussies before they roast them, I’ll never know. But as usual, the guy hears this, shrugs his shoulders (he’s not the descendants, after all), turns the oven up to 350 degrees, puts the timer on for thirty minutes and goes and reads The Sporting News, until it’s time to baste.

In the present (about 150 years ago give or take a decade) two doctors are riding in a carriage to some type of medical convention. One of them is a young, hunky doc named Doctor Gorobec. His square jaw and full head of perfect hair immediately tags him as the dude that will be saving good princess Katia. His mentor is an older looking dude named Dr. Kruvajan. His balding, wrinkled up face has us pegging him as “the friend who dies at the hands of the evil princess.”

Kruvajan wants to take a shortcut through the old, dark, and creepy forest. We know that’s a bad idea, because the carriage driver is very much against that and if it’s one thing we’ve learned after sitting through about two-hundred of these flicks, it’s that superstitious locals should always be believed. If it’s another thing we’ve learned, it’s that superstitious locals are always ignored.

With a little bread greasing his palm, the driver takes the shortcut (Crypt Ruins - 1 Mile, Spooky Castle - 2 Miles) and promptly wrecks the carriage near some old ruins. While the driver sets about trying to figure out how to put the donut on his vehicle, the two doctors go off and explore the old ruined crypt that is nearby. In one of the film’s most unfortunate scenes, Dr. Kruvajan is attacked by a gigantic bat on a string. He finally whacks it to death with his cane, but not before giggles escape from the audience because of how fake that prop looked.

Gorobec rejoins him and they notice that there’s this old tomb laying there that is just begging to be tampered with. It’s pretty fancy as coffins go, because it has a giant cross attached to the foot of it and the face of the person inside is visible behind this neat window that’s been installed at the top of it. Kruvajan speculates that the window and the cross are there so that the body can always see the cross and thus be kept in suspended animation (he says it more primitively than that, but not everyone is college educated like I is) by the superstitious locals that think she or he (it’s Asa, but the mask of Satan is still nailed to her face) is a witch, vampire, or liberal.

Before you know it, these idiots have taken the mask off of Asa, Kruvajan has cut himself and dripped blood on her body, and Paul Naschy has the bare bones plot for his The Werewolf vs. Vampire Woman. Asa has been awakened a little and it’s enough to also rouse her pal PrinceJavutich, setting in motion a fairly predictable chain of events.

The doctors leave the crypt unaware of all the dumb things they have done and run smack dab into Princess Katia and her two hellhounds. She says that the crypt is in ruins because her dad is old and is too lazy to work around the house cleaning the garage, refinishing the deck, and keeping up the family crypt. She leaves, letting them know she lives in the spooky castle just up the way and to drop on by sometime if there’s a young, hunky doctor that wants to hook up with her.

Being the stud he is, Dr. Gorobec (that name just says “stud,” doesn’t it?) goes on in to town with his dried up old prune doctor buddy and they get a room at the inn. There, Gorobec proceeds to tie one on for no good reason, but talks about Katia and how he just might go on down to the castle and the next thing you know, he’s back in his room passed out, while the old doctor is still knocking them back (he may be old, but by God he can still drink any young punk doctor stud under the table!).

Back at the castle, the resurrected Javutich is causing trouble, frightening Katia’s father into such a state that they send for a doctor (you just know that Katia’s hoping the old timer is one of those old farts that eats dinner at 4:00 p.m. and goes to sleep at 7:00 right after Wheel of Fortune is done and that it’s Dr. Hunkenstein that is going to show up. Javutich takes care of the real carriage driver sent for the doctor, picks up Kruvajan who is still up and apparently is an alcoholic and takes him to the castle.

However, instead of taking him to see the sickly father, he takes him backstage to the crypt where Asa awaits him. She lures him into kissing her clammy, dead witch face (now with puncture wounds - you know from the mask of Satan and all!) and the next thing we know, the doctor is one of those vacant looking drones that speaks with no emotion and has developed a sudden aversion to crucifixes.

He looks over Katia’s father and says he’s okay, don’t call me, I’ll call you. Some other stuff happens, but my interest was flagging a bit, so the next thing I recall is that this young stud doctor finally comes to in the morning, hears that his old buddy has gone to the castle and hasn’t come back, so he runs out there to check on Katia, I mean, Dr. Kruvajan.

The rest of the movie is made up of your classic spooky castle gimmicks. Hidden levers, secret passageways, deathtraps, fights with resurrected corpses, hunky doctors mooning over starry-eyed princesses - they all get a good workout.

Gorobec enlists the aid of Katia’s brother to help him check for trap doors in the hidden passageway (okay, Prince, when you fall through a trap door onto a bunch of razor sharp spikes, I want you to yell out the codeword “daffodil.” When I hear that, I’ll know to watch out, okay?).

The final confrontation with Asa is pretty anticlimactic. Her big plan was to take over the body of Katia and she tried to trick Gorobec into thinking that she was Katia so that he would kill the real Katia, who was laying knocked out nearby. He tries the crucifix test on them and figures out which witch is which, and sits back and watches as the angry mob that has been suddenly formed storms the castle, and finishes the job on Asa that they started a couple of hundred years back. Katia comes to and gets a congratulatory hug from Gorobec.

It’s an okay movie, that looks great, but suffers, as noted above, from a lack of any interesting characters. The only thing we know about Gorobec is that he likes sexy babes and can’t hold his liquor. The only thing we know about Katia is that she likes hunky docs and resembles a vengeful ancestor who happens to be a witch.

Bava’s skill with creating a distinct look and feel in this movie can’t be denied and it makes you wonder how he also made such bland crud like Twitch Of The Death Nerve . I realize that these films aren’t supposed to be character studies, but give the audience something to identify with or at least keep them engaged. Planet of the Vampires was one of Bava’s best efforts and I don’t really remember the characters there. He made up for it though with suspense, keeping the audience guessing with what was going to happen next.

In this movie, as pretty as it looks, there were never any surprises or suspense. Did you really think that Asa would triumph? Was there ever any doubt that hunky doctor would end up with sexy princess. If your story is by the numbers, the characters have to be intriguing. If you’ve got a suspenseful story, the characters don’t have to carry the load as much (but it would really help). This film had neither. Maybe it got by on its couple of gory scenes forty years ago, but today’s jaded audience’s aren’t likely to be that impressed.

© 2008 MonsterHunter