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 A "busload of curvaceous showgirls" skip out on an unpaid hotel bill. A
thunderstorm forces them off the road and they find the castle of the
"reclusive" Count Kernassy. One of the dancers, Vera, who is described as
"leggy" resembles a long dead ancestor of the Count's. Vera is also attractive
to the Count's other ancestor who looks like the Count. The box claims this was
one of the earliest Italian horror films and that it was important because it
was "one of the first horror films from any country to mix Gothic horror and
explicit eroticism". The extensive historical notes continue from the back to
the inside cover, which folds out into an extra page . 1963, 80 minutes, DVD
Five showgirls, their manager, and their piano playing bus driver Frank are
hightailing it out of town after they fail to pay their hotel bill. They are
driving in their tour bus (all showgirl groups that can't pay their hotel bills
have tour buses you know) on a dark and stormy night. Soon they come upon a
"local". Now, you already know what I'm talking about here when I call this guy
a "local". A "local" is of course the guy in these movies that shows up early
in the film right before our main characters do something inevitably stupid.
Usually, the "local" will warn these dopes away from some cursed place like an
old house, forest, town, cemetery, or in this case a castle. The "local" always
looks the same. He's a dirty old white guy who talks a little funny and he's
kinda scary looking, but he always turns out to be a pretty decent guy in the
end. Sometimes (not in this one though) he even pulls somebody's fat out of the
fire. So anyway this "local" tells our (ahem) stars that the bridge is out or
some malarkey and that they have to turn back. But what about this other road,
the showgirls ask. Oh no, that's the road to a real creepy castle, no visitors
allowed, shunned by villagers, and all that. So, knowing a good deal when they
hear it, Frank hangs a left and heads on up to Castle Creepy.  So the busload of babes gets to the castle, after we endure some of their
prattling about this and that and watch one of them torment Frank and us
viewers by hiking her skirt up and adjusting her stockings (oh, you darn
things!). Once at the castle, we meet Count Kernassy (that's a real scary
name), who manages to look square jawed and wimpy all at once. First of all,
he's wearing these ugly, cheap, ill-fitting suits that just don't flatter him
and second is his helmet hair. At this point, I feel compelled to note that he
is further undermined by his voice. This is an Italian movie so a "special"
feature on this DVD is the dubbing which is to be charitable, laughable. The
bonus of having it dubbed though is that the usually stilted dialogue of
efforts such as these, is made doubly so here. Someone had to translate the
awful Italian dialogue into awful English dialogue and the results are
sometimes lip-biting and often cringe-inducing. You will also notice the worst
music you've heard in awhile. It alternates between trashy scary piano music
which seems to consist of hitting the same couple of scary notes real fast and
blaring horns that scream, "scary part! scary part!" The Count is one of those cold fish types that live in castles all by
themselves except for their scary housekeeper. He's telling our heroines to get
to stepping and "not in my house" and all that until he sees Vera. She looks
like one of his dead relatives so he lets them all stay. If people showed up at
my castle looking all like my dead relatives, I'd peek out my window and pull
the old, "you keep a knocking, but you can't come in" routine. Now since
they're going to bunking at the castle for the night, the Count has got to lay
down the house rules on them. They're the same rules that are posted at all
your creepy castles. You know the drill, don't look around, go to your room,
lock the door, don't leave your room no matter what sound you hear or what
vampire you see, that sort of thing. And since you know the drill, you know our
Einsteins in heels will readily agree to abide by those rules, nodding their
heads as they mosey out the room to check out that locked door at the end of
the hallway (is the shower in here?).  Soon it's bedtime and that's when the fun begins. The rest of the movie our
showgirls make themselves at home in the castle as the lounge around in various
bits of lingerie and baby doll nighties (and high heeled shoes of course). Also
they seem to enjoy touring the castle and its grounds with only a see-through
nightgown on and perhaps a leather overcoat (it's chilly with no bra on!). Well
one of the girls goes looking for the shower and finds something horrific and
then her friends find her dead body outside in the morning. The Count announces
that she must have taken a wrong turn somewhere inside and fallen out of the
castle to her death. Everyone seems to sort of buy that because, yeah, people
just wander around and fall out of castles all the time. Probably why we don't
have so many castles anymore. Building codes and all that. Well she comes back
as a vampire and scares one of the guys and is eventually staked by the Count's
vampire ancestor cause she got lippy. Then Vera who looked like the Count's
ancestor sees a picture on the wall and she and the Count say it looks just
like her. Well, first of all, the dang thing looks like some five year old with
ADD painted it by numbers and second of all, it looked nothing like her! I
guess it looked like her because both her and the painting were ugly. Then
there's a lot of blah blah about how everyone looks like all these dead people. Vera stumbles onto the Count's secret lab in the basement. Those come standard
with castles. Then it all comes out that the Count has been working on figuring
out how to fix his vampire ancestor who looks just like him right down to the
bad suits and perfectly poofed hair, though he is a bit more pasty faced being
that he's the undead and all. Well there's a confrontation because the vampire
wants Vera because he looks like his dead wife and so you get a battle to the
death down in the crypt (probably conveniently located near the secret lab -
with secret rooms in castles it's location, location, location) and the vampire
takes the old oops - backed into a spike on the wall bump. There is also in
this film a little dance and strip number the girls do that is just awful,but
what really makes it stand out is that they do it right after they find their
dead friend. So they decide to just hold a little practice right there in the
castle. "The show must go on," their scuzzball manager says. The movie seemed
to move along nicely, at least if you just sort of fall into that "I could
watch girls in their underwear for hours on end" trance. The whole business
about the all the ancestors who looked alike never really made any sense. I
mean I could understand how one ancestor could look like someone. But a second
one? And it happened to be the wife of the other ancestor? And it just happened
to be one of the showgirls that happened to show up after they had been warned
away? Sometimes you can see the stretch marks on this plot (but not on the
ladies!).
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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