MonsterHunter

Mickey Hargitay was a body builder who starred in Hercules Vs. The Hydra, Delirium, and a couple of other Italian schlock flicks, but the most impressive item on his resume is that he was once the husband of Jayne Mansfield. He puts all that vital experience to use in Bloody Pit Of Horror as a guy that runs around shirtless in red tights, torturing and killing the folks who just wanted to use his castle to do some cheesecake photo shoots for a horror anthology they were working on.

As you watch this one, you immediately are struck that you no doubt already have this movie in your EuroShock DVD collection when it was called The Playgirls and the Vampire. In that film you had a gaggle of babes with a broken down bus staying at a mysterious castle, only to get killed off by some crabby count that owns the castle.

There’s a further connection between these two films in that Walter Brandi who played the count in The Playgirls and the Vampire also plays Rick in this film. As you may have guessed by his name, Rick will be your hero this go around. So if you’ve already seen The Playgirls and the Vampire, is there really any reason to see this one? Well, heck yeah!

There is a distinctly different vibe going on in this film and it has something to do with the fact that the well-oiled Hargitay runs around in his way too snug tights, his little red hood, and his large black belt, all the while complaining about how everyone is “corrupting the harmony of my perfect body.” This is sort of thing you rarely get in horror films, even Italian ones!

Mr. Mansfield acts about as well as you would expect from a guy that starred in Lady Frankenstein and Revenge Of The Gladiators, but his role doesn’t call for anything approaching subtly. If you’re going to prance around in bronzer, making faces at people, putting on your little Lone Ranger mask and command a posse of musclebound henchmen in form fitting striped shirts, it’s okay if you camp it up a bit. In fact, I think we would demand it. We aren’t looking for one of those quietly tortured monsters that hide in the shadows and strike when no one is looking. This guy is decked out in flaming red tights and babbles about how he and the original Crimson Executioner had such awesome bodies!

Who is this Crimson Executioner with the perfect body that Mickey admires so much he has a mannequin dressed up as the Crimson Executioner? And how in the dickens did Mickey Hargitay end up in a castle with all these really nifty torture devices?

Back in the middle ages, there was a guy named the Crimson Executioner. He looked an awful like Mickey Hargitay (I’m sure he’d appreciate the compliment) and was some type of executioner. The only problem was that he was one of those executioners that got tired of liberal judges letting witches and pagans off with a little stake burning, so he took the law into his own hands and tried to clean up the filth that infested his land with his various torture devices. He was caught and executed in his own device (a type of iron maiden) and his body and soul were locked up inside, complete with a really cool wax seal. What I love about these wax seals is that they last for hundreds of years, but instantly fall apart as soon as some cheesecake photographer brushes against it.

Fast forward to the mid sixties when some models, publisher and staff show up at the very same castle that the Crimson Executioner use to call home. They’re looking for a good place to take pictures of sexy things like girls getting menaced by suits of armor and they think they’ve found the perfect castle. No one answers the door, so they just have somebody scale the wall and let them in. That must have been real handy in the middle ages during sieges.

Once inside, one of the musclemen in the striped shirts shows up and tells them that the boss wants to see them. This would be Mickey Hargitay. He’s playing a character named Travis Anderson, though we don’t know that yet. Travis tells the trespassers to hit the bricks and that he just wants to live all by himself in that big old castle with nobody bothering him and his very well-muscled employees. He relents though when he sees one of the women through a one way mirror, telling them they can stay the night and shoot photos, but they must leave in the morning.

After being told that the dungeons are strictly off-limits to them, the girls and their handlers go down to the basement of the castle to set up the photo shoot. This involves a montage of scenes of the girls getting into their costumes which consist of fairly skimpy attire, but nothing you wouldn’t let your junior high aged daughter go to school in (you know - short shorts and midriff baring tank tops).

Then we watch as they pose for these pictures. One involves a girl kind of dressed up as a pirate, another involves a blonde in black tights trying to pose as some kind of giant cat, and yet another has a girl near a guy who is underneath some type of “pit and the pendulum” apparatus. While some of the guys are running around down in the bowels of the castle, they bump into the seal that has held the Crimson Executioner in his tomb and it drops off and the next thing you know there’s an accident at the “pit and the pendulum” attraction. They swing the rope holding this bladed gizmo so that it swings over top of the dude laying underneath it and the rope just happens to break right when the blade just happens to be over top this guy!

Everyone stands around staring at this fiasco and someone might have screamed, but this is one of those deals where you’ve just seen a co-worker and a friend killed in a freak and horrible accident and you react like your favorite football team has just been knocked out of the playoffs - a little sick to your stomach and disappointed, but life goes on and lets get this photo shoot finished. I think this is pretty much how it was when members of that jug band in The Playgirls and the Vampire started getting bumped off.

No one in these movies is ever sufficiently distraught when they witness death up close and personal. I guess this whole “horror photography” game is a tough biz. Do they leave the castle once this happens? Of course not! Heck, that guy ain’t going to be any more or less dead in the morning is he? May as well make his death count for something and get some more pictures!

The henchmen tell our party that the master of the house has been informed of the death, so there’s no need to bother him and the home owner’s insurance he has on his castle will probably cover an “accidental torture-device related” death, so just submit the claim to State Farm once you get back to civilization.

More people start ending up dead so Rick tells the publisher and sends another guy out in their “fastest car” to get the cops. We later see that guy driving in circles with an arrow in his neck. Even though people are getting rubbed out as fast as Travis can oil up his pecs, they still insist on not sticking together. This leads to one of the best scenes in the film and it involves a giant spider web, cross bows, and a spider so fake you can see that it is being held up by two strings!

Rick and his gal pal Edith run into a room, following the screams from the Hawaiian girl that is on their trip and find her all trussed up in the center of a giant spider web. The web stretches all across the room and about a foot over the floor. She tells them that if anyone tries to rescue her and they trigger any of the webbing that all these arrows are going to shoot out from the walls. She also complains about this big ugly spider that is dangling in front of her and that he is going to bite her and kill her with his poisonous kiss!

Rick immediately sets about saving her in a scene that reminded me of one of those Mission: Impossible movies where someone had to try and move around without hitting the shafts of light that would trigger the alarm. Rick gets on his back and starts slithering across the floor, trying to get close to her without hitting any of the strings. At one point, his coat button gets caught on the webbing and it is almost as if time itself stood still as he gingerly slid back a little and got it uncaught!

Finally he gets past all the webbing that is covering the floor, but then the spider bites this chick and she rolls her eyes and croaks. Rick runs up to her then and checks to make sure she is dead, then announces something to the effect that it was a “horrible way to die.” All the while he is farting around with her dead body, that dang spider is still hanging around doing nothing. I guess, it won’t bite you unless you’re some scantily-clad island girl.

Rick then notices that Edith is gone and says, “Geeze, Louise! What is with these dames?” Before he leaves, he grabs the spider and throws it into the webbing where it bounces around like the rubber prop it surely was. And what of Edith? Edith has not gotten bored by Rick’s limbo act on the floor, but in fact has been kidnapped by the Crimson Executioner. She figures out that it is former movie star Travis Anderson, a dude that she used to date! What are the odds?

Travis tells her that he dropped out of society and just wants to be left alone with his perfect body and really beefy henchmen. Trav further complains that the world is polluted and now that she and her gang have infested his castle with their impurity and flabby chests, he will have to take care of them Crimson Executioner style!

Everyone ends up in the Crimson Executioner’s torture chamber. Here, Travis subjects the remaining women and the publisher to various forms of torture. He has two women up on some rotating gizmo that spins around while it shoves knives closer and closer to them. He’s got another one tied up and pours hot oil on her back. (Shoot, that’s just how he gets ready for one of his posedowns during competition !)

There’s also a gal on a rack and the publisher is in a cage above a burning pit. Edith is laid out on some oven, while Travis and his henchmen dump coal inside of it to keep it nice and toasty for her. Rick appears and battles everyone, using his fairly bland brand of karate to even the odds. Finally, he and Travis hook up in the main event and it is a back and forth affair, but soon Rick’s speed wins out over Travis’ strength and insanity as he ducks the charging freak and Travis runs smack dab into a dummy loaded with poison knives! Edith and Rick escape and exchange some wise words about the dangers of wearing red tights, living with musclemen, and getting too hung up on your perfect body.

Finally, you get one of these trashy Italian castle torture epics that wasn’t tedious to sit through. At seventy-four minutes, director Massimo Pupillo (Django Kills Softly, Terror-Creatures from the Grave) keeps things moving along fast enough that this surprisingly good looking film doesn’t over stay its welcome. The absurdly hyper Travis flitting about his dungeon like some kind of murderous humming bird, smiling his big ugly smile as he runs from victim to victim doling out his torture is worth the price of the DVD alone.

You couldn’t help but like Travis with his self-obsession and preening, all the while complaining about the half naked nubile chicks laying around his basement posing for their cheesecake horror photos. Unlike a lot of movie maniacs, he doesn’t kill women because he’s never been good enough for them, but because they aren’t as great as he is! He also kills men for the same reason. I’m not sure I’d want to be on his household staff, because if you ever quit training and let yourself go just a little bit, out come the red tights and little black mask!

© 2008 MonsterHunter