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There are seven unsolved murders in a small village. An Interpol inspector is
called in to check it out and the only clue is that the power goes out whenever
a murder is committed. The villagers don't trust the inspector and think it has
something to do with "the vague shadows in the caves under the local castle."
They also let you that this was a 1964
West German-Yugoslav production and that in the U.S., it came out on a double
bill with Tomb of Torture. They also make sure to tell you that you can buy that movie from them as
well. 1964, 86 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
The Germans get some measure of revenge on us for their thrashing in a couple
of world wars by unleashing this most typical non-epic about vampires, on an
unsuspecting public. I have no idea who Image is getting revenge on by
slapping the EuroShock label on this, loading the DVD with exactly no extras
and then charging 25 dollars on a public that is obsessive-compulsive about
completing their EuroShock Collection. This is one of those movies that will
remind you of early Mario Bava films or any cheap Italian horror movie of the
period. These films as you surely by now are aware, are characterized by their
stark black and white photography, spooky castles, and good looking babes that
turn
all vampire on you. You will recognize this type of movie immediately by its
omnipresent boredom. All these movies are the same. Yes, you can say that
about somebody like Lucio Fulci, but at least when his movies are similar it
involves a bunch of eye gougings, gut spewings, and an assortment of zombies
and other yucky phenomena. You're roll your eyes as you see him recycle
gimmicks over and over, but you never have the urge to lay down on your couch
and doze. The lame Goblin soundtrack you hear in all his movies will see to
that. With a movie like Cave Of The Living Dead, however, characters stand around talking, walk around grottos (that means
caves to people out there that don't speak Germanic), and hook up with mad
scientists' sexy assistants. I was watching this one and at one point I
thought that if anything less eventful took place in the movie that I would be
watching a home video of my life. I was reminded of films like Bava's I Vampiri and Black Sunday when watching this. I Vampiri was an affair that dulled your senses pretty
good, but at least you had lots of Bava's beautiful camera shots to keep you
watching. Black Sunday is obviously a lot better than either one of these, but there we had a lot of
stuff going on as well as the look of the film. And that's really the problem
with this movie. Ain't nothing going on. A cop is investigating some murdered
chicks and stumbles onto a mad doctor that 's turned them into vampires. Then
he kills the vampire. End of story. And it's a lot less interesting than all
that. Let's take a closer look.  Adrian Hoven portrays Inspector Frank Dorin. You might know Hoven better under
his birth name, Wilhelm Arpad Peter Hofkirchner. You would if you were a real
fan. Dorin is a cool cat that is hanging out at a bar using all his charms on
the ladies in the establishment. This involves rubbing the leg of one and
rubbing the hand of another as she holds a phone for him when HQ calls. We all
know that when HQ tracks down Inspector Dorin at his favorite pool hall that
something real big is up. There's an important case that needs his expertise
immediately. I never did figure out why Dorin was the only guy that could
handle the job or why he needed to be called in real special like, but he rolls
into the Chief's office and he lays the bad news on Dorin. There's six girls
that have turned up murdered at some village across the sea and they need to
send a man in there real quiet like before the press gets ahold of it and
starts panicking the public with such tabloid-ish headlines as "Six Girls
Murdered" and "Case of Murdered Girls Unsolved." Those bastards in the media
will stop at nothing to sell their precious little rags! The chief gives
Dorin the use of a rental car (hey wow, how many miles do I get per day on
that?
Can I something a little sportier than a Neon?), gives him some gizmo that
allows him to see in the dark with infrared stuff (I guess this is the 1964
version of nightvision goggles - they look like a flashlight with a box
attached), and some papers in case the local police give him trouble ("Hey,
what are you doing here, trying to solve unsolved murders?"). Dorin already
has that angle doped out because he announces with a fair amount of pride
that he's going undercover as a tourist! Just before Dorin leaves, the chief
tells them that there is one more thing, but he's not sure if it has anything
to do with the murders. Every time one of the girls has been killed, all the
power in the village goes out for awhile. The local power plant has no
explanation
for this. Hmmm, I wonder if that is just a coincidence or maybe - I better
leave all this brainstorming to a professional like Dorin. He can probably get
to the bottom of things by arranging a tour of the spooky castle that a mad
scientist just moved into right near the village. Since Dorin will be
masquerading as a tourist, no one will suspect a thing.  Inspector Dorin gets in his rental car and drives up to the village. Some
really inappropriately bouncy and generally upbeat music is blaring (apparently
from his radio) as he does this. Before he can get all the way to the village
though, his car conks out on him. As he's checking under the hood, a hand
reaches out and touches him on the shoulder. A shudder passes through the
audience as we realize that we have just been introduced to the completely
pointless and unbelievable love interest. She is a blonde chick named Karin.
She's the assistant for the mad scientist who moved into the castle six months
ago. She's been doing some type of research for this guy and she is due to
leave in the morning. Dorin is naturally real sorry to hear that and also
notes that in addition to his car conking out, even his flashlight doesn't
work. I'd like to think that whomever was responsible for knocking out the
electrical power did so in an effort to stop Dorin from playing his infernal
rock and roll. Dorin makes it to the local inn which is run by an old guy who
spends his nights hitting on the maid. This goes about as well you would
expect it would when the involved parties are one hot young maid and one old
fart that bears an uncanny resemblance to Nikita Krhuschev. She ends up
locking her door and he ends up tipping his box of wine to get the last few
dregs of $11.99 goodness. Dorin shows up and as he stands outside in the cold
night air, the innkeeper explains to him that of course rooms are available
since nobody in their right mind would stay in town what with all the
unexplained murders taking place. Dorin succumbs to this hard sell approach
(We have a Cave Of The Living Deadtheme room available - you lie down on your bed and nothing else happens) and
ends up with a room right next to the maid's room. Once everyone is asleep,
somebody dressed in black shows up in the maid's room through the window, and
leaves two puncture wounds on her neck. The next morning the local cops are
banging on Dorin's door and demand to be let in. He does and they try to stick
a gun in his face because they think he's the killer (the maid's body was
discovered earlier). He disarms them with this really cheesy karate chop and
yells at them for being such Rosco P. Coltrains. If I was the killer, would I
have a room right next to the victim, kill her, go back to my room and sleep
until you guys show up yelling and screaming? Rosco and Enos agree that maybe
they have the wrong man, especially when Dorin shows him the magic papers from
the chief that say something like "you have the wrong man." 
The local doctor shows up to check out the maid ("yep, still dead") and
declares that the puncture wounds mean nothing except that maybe she had a
boyfriend and his fangs must have given her hickies or something (see what
happens when you're easy, ladies?). The doctor's official finding is that the
maid croaked from heart failure. Somehow he's also managed to make the same
assessment for the other six victims. Dorin shows his mental mettle when he
comes to the conclusion that seven otherwise healthy young women from the same
village with puncture wounds on their necks, probably didn't die from heart
failure and that maybe autopsies should have been done. The doctor, like all
doctors, is pissed that someone would dare say that he might be wrong (I know
this sounds a bit like crazy talk, but bear with Dorin, he's the best there
is). Somehow or other Dorin goes off to visit the local witch, who knows
everything about stuff like vampires in the grotto. It seems that in spite of
the doctor's claims that the village is suffering from a simple epidemic of
heart failure, rumors are flying that there are vampires on the loose. Oh, and
I suppose the movie tries to throw you a bit of a curve because it turns out
that the doctor isn't trying to cover up anything, he's just grossly
incompetent. This isn't that much of a red herring since there's still a mad
scientist living in a spooky castle that we haven't even met yet. Dorin, who I
assume we're supposed to think doesn't believe in the supernatural, though it's
hard to tell since he goes running off to a witch as soon as possible, gets
some pointers from her. Wear this cross, take this powder to cure the bite of
a vampire, sell any K-Mart stock you have, that sort of thing. As you can
tell, this is another one of these foreign horror movies where the copper
doesn't investigate so much as just hangs around soaking up the local color
and waiting for someone to tell him where the vampire is hiding. Soon Karin
comes by again and invites him to stay at the castle. It seems that the mad
scientist has extended an invitation though one wonders why. If it was so that
he (Professor van Adelsberg) could kill Dorin, I'd be all for that, but once he
gets there van Adelsberg doesn't do much more than tell Dorin not go into his
locked up, super duper, secret lab. At this point, you can tell that the
filmmakers realized there wasn't really all that much happening in the film. I
think that explains why we get to see Karin change out of her dress and into a
sheer nightie. If you're going to remember one thing from this movie (other
than the fact that you just torched twenty five bucks) this will be it. Oh,
it's not a great scene and if you actually have a life, it will fly right by
you, but for most of us losers that spend our time reading trash like this
review on the internet, it will be remembered fondly. The maid's body disappears a few times, but not before Dorin is able to get a
blood sample. Instead of sending it off to the crime lab to test it to see if
it is positive for vampirism, he gives it to the witch who dumps it on a snake.
The snake apparently dies (I couldn't really tell) which proves that something
undead is afoot in this here village. Dorin gets some more advice from the
witch like where the vampire is, how to kill him, and here's a hammer and some
wooden stakes - now don't lose these! Dorin gets this advice because he's had
to haul Karin's dumb ass over there to make sure that he applied to the powder
correctly to a bite she suffered from one of the other vampires. That was a
funny scene because Karin was being guarded by a cop and this vampire just
stands on a rocky outcropping and throws a boulder down on top of his head.
Never knew a vampire could do that! Finally, Dorin follows the old witch's
directions, comes upon the mad scientist in his coffin and stakes him and
that's that. There was also some electrical equipment there, but who knows
what that was for (Reviving his victims? But wouldn't the bite do that?) It
wasn't clear enough for me get it right off and it wasn't interesting enough
for me pay attention. The tedium one experiences as all these non-events play
out is something to behold. When this witch was telling him all this stuff, I
was wondering why she hadn't told anyone else before. Or better yet, if you
know where and when the vampire is down for his nap, why not you haul your saggy
butt over there and do the deed yourself? There's no gore, no violence, this
dude that plays Dorin has the personality of cottage cheese, and inexplicably
the professor has a black servant running around. The strange thing is that
the professor didn't seem to use the servant or Karin in his dull scheme to
much effect. I don't really know why he needed a staff of two people when he
had six or seven vampire chicks at his disposal (I'm assuming they all turned
into vampires - I don't recall ever seeing more than one or two). There's also
a deaf guy that's got a real bad attitude, but he has nothing to with anything
either. When you think about it, this movie is really amazing for its ability
to accumulate a bunch of characters who don't get involved with much, in a
movie where
nothing of any interest ever happens. But does that fact alone make it worth
the money? What if I was to tell you that when Karin gets bit, her shirt gets
torn and you get see a little bit of bra? How about then? Um, well the black
servant did look a bit like Yapphet Kotto and we all liked him in the hit TV
police dramaHomicide. This one goes out on the curb next to my old couch for spring clean up days.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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