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 Newlyweds live in an old castle and the wife finds herself "face to face with an ancient evil cult of devil worshipping monks." Among other things, these monks "seek out the blood of virgins to complete their sacrificial killings." 1988, 90 minutes, DVD
The front of this DVD from Hardgore, a division of UK DVD producer Screen Entertainment, proclaims this to be part of the Lucio Fulci Collection. If you're wondering why you've never heard of this particular film of Lucio's or why no American DVD labels have been tripping over one another to add it to their own lines of Fulci releases, it's becomes apparent once you flip the DVD case over and read the following: "Italian master of horror Lucio Fulci presents The Red Monks directed by Gianni Martucci." By now visions of those two squalid little Italian gore movies, The Murder Secret and Massacre are unfortunately penetrating your skull like that drill from Fulci's City Of The Living Dead.
The Murder Secret and Massacre were both movies directed by two different guys named Bianchi and were marked both by their horrific production values and equally heinous stories. Lucio was credited as producer on one of the movies and a "supervisor" on the other. This time according to the Internet Movie Database, Lucio role was something called "supervisory of makeup effects" which I'm guessing translates into regular English as the guy who oversaw the gore. If that's what he did on the movie, I'm not sure how this qualifies as him presenting anything, especially if you saw the effects that he supervised. It basically amounted to about four severed heads. One of them was so fake that I thought the head was supposed to be a mannequin's head made up to scare one of the characters, but after that thing appeared (imagine a fourth grader's papier mache project with bad paint job), one character was never seen again, so I deduced that the severed head was her send off.
There's really no reason to be concerned that Lucio had so little do with any of this though, right? First of all, it's not like any of his own movies from this time period approached anything that wouldn't be above the category "professional humiliation." (See for example Touch Of Death, Sodoma's Ghost and his abortive involvement in Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 that Bruno Mattei had to finish up, for Lucio's other 1988 paychecks.) Second, even though this director and the writer Pino Buricchi are a couple of unfamiliar names that have worked on several other unfamiliar projects, we have in the lead roles, Chuck Valenti and Lara Wendel! Chuck also starred in 1989 in Bronx Executioner. Though this was his only other credit and came several years later than most of those futuristic Italian Bronx set films (see Bronx Warriors and Bronx Warriors 2), he wouldn't have gotten fourth billing in that one if his work in The Red Monks wasn't up to snuff, would he? As far as Lara goes, she worked with such Italian legends as Lamberto Bava (The Midnight Killer), Umberto Lenzi (Ghosthouse) and Joe D'Amato (Zombie 5: Killing Birds). Joe freakin' D'Amato!
Even though it sounds like we're are in typical incapable hands, this movie manages to make you long for the relatively large cast and routine story line featured in Massacre and for the deliriously gratuitous gore effects from The Murder Secret (destined to be remembered always for its chainsawing in half of a little boy). With no gore to distract us (One chick even got beheaded off camera! That's an unacceptable violation of the audience's trust.) and scenes of newlyweds Robbie and Ramona sniping at one another while the mysterious housekeeper scowls in the background, The Red Monks easily tops those two for our newly instituted award "Worst Fulci Movie Ever Not Actually Directed By Fulci" which is not to be confused with our traditional and long-running "Worst Fulci Movie Ever" (an award I might add that is still very much in dispute as of this writing).
The movie begins with one of those unnecessary prologues that establishes that some curse or other gets visited on generation after generation, even though the rest of the movie makes that clear as well. A guy is wandering around the grounds of the old castle he's inherited and encounters an old hag playing a violin. He compliments her on her music and then he goes on his way and spies a naked woman running amok on his lands. He calls to her and receives no response and follows her into his house and down into the sprawling basement of the castle. She still gives him no response to his queries, but finally she turns around and with sword in hand beheads him. The narrator then intones, "fifty years earlier" and you groan as you realize that the first five boring minutes involving this guy meant absolutely zero to the plot proper. And we never do get any explanation about the hag with the violin. Please don't tell me that was Gianni Martucci's meager attempt at classing this movie up with the old "mysterious musician" gag.
Things don't go any better for us though once we travel five decades into the past as we end up back on the grounds of the castle with a guy discovering another broad on his lands. (They don't seem to sell that type of babe-attracting property up here in northeast Missouri, but what with the babes the property attracts usually ending up killing you and all, it's probably a bit of a wash.) Incredibly, this woman is not only full clothed, but she's up a tree! Pinned there by Robbie's vicious hound (surprisingly the hound wouldn't be involved in any attacks or get possessed by the devil or anything), Ramona and Robbie engage in some delightfully absurdly dubbed repartee about her jumping out of the tree into his arms and he not peeking up her skirt. Of course, Robbie could have just called off the hound, but then we wouldn't have all those shots of him pretending not to peek, right?
The other notable thing about this scene is that unbeknownst to Ramona or Robbie and maybe even the hound (but they have super senses we don't, so who knows?) is that while she's up in the tree, Ramona is being menaced by the worst wind up toy tarantula that $1.99 (five million lira) can buy! This thing sort of shifts its legs back and forth mechanically on a tree limb and during cutaways to Ramona and Robbie, some stagehand moves it up a little. We'll just have to assume that Lucio was out sick that day when that effect was being supervised. You know how the kids are when you have a substitute teacher. Luckily for all involved, Ramona jumps out of the tree and into Robbie's arms as well as an ill-advised marriage.
It's ill-advised because Robbie has a basement full of red monks and they seemingly want this girl sacrificed in four days. That's pretty bad for Robbie (not to mention Ramona), but what's even worse is they want her sacrificed as a virgin! Why didn't someone mention this to Robbie before he went and married her? As expected, this puts a bit of a crimp in his first night of marriage and Robbie further botches things up with the old lady because he's always getting called away to important business meetings. All the while, the housekeeper with the bad attitude is hovering around making faces.
Ramona has an ally in her personal made, the French gal named Lucille. Lucille shows Ramona the basement and even points out a bizarre looking guillotine. Later on, Ramona is prowling the basement and meets up with the red monks. Then she wakes up in her bed and the housekeeper and Robbie convince her it's all in her mind. Later, Lucille tells Ramona that she saw her go into the basement that night and that it wasn't in her head after all. And speaking of heads, it Lucille's that plops out of picnic basket during a romantic lunch between Ramona and Robbie that they're having the next day.
Later, Ramona is out on the grounds painting and gosh darn it, but would you believe that someone went and let loose their toy spider again? There it is, creeping ever so unconvincingly along the ground towards the oblivious Ramona (heck, she may have seen it and figured that there was no reason to sweat a toy spider). Just when you think the spider is going to play a part in all this drama, a skinny dude with a Eurotrash pony tail shows up and ravishes Ramona. She seems to be against this, but later she meets this guy in town, so it couldn't have been as repulsive as the guy looked.
Once in town, she and Ponytail go to a store where a guy in horrible old guy and fake beard make up (please tell me that Lucio was on a lunch break when this guy was outfitted) tells Ramona the history of the castle that she's living in. I almost collapsed into tears as this guy began "it was the year 1418" or some similarly dim era of long ago. We were taken back to the grand duke who owned the castle. He was involved with a bunch of satanic monks that liked to dress in red and then he found a naked gypsy running around his grounds (what is it about that property and naked gals?) and rapes her, then marries her (their courtship methods were a little different than ours are today, plus this was over in Europe). The Church gets tired of these satanic monks living in this guy's basement, so they send an assassin to kill the duke.
What follows is a laughably bad sword fight with the duke and this assassin who is wearing a silly black mask. The assassin ends up with the duke's sword at his throat, begs for mercy, but then double-crosses the duke and scratches him with his poisoned ring. Why, didn't he just knock on the door and shake his hand in the first place? He finishes off the duke by knocking him off a balcony with a mace. The assassin inherits the duke's lands and the duke's gypsy wife lays down a curse on him and his descendants. End of history lesson.
You can probably puzzle out the rest of the movie. Ramona is apparently a descendant of the gypsy because she goes back to the castle and beheads Robbie while the red monks stand around. I think they were standing around. I know they made a couple of appearances in the movie, but they never did anything of any note. This left us with many questions. Namely, what was all that business that Robbie was involved with where Ramona was supposed to be sacrificed? It seemed like the red monks were actually against him. That is, if there were really any red monks at all and they just weren't ghosts who helped awaken the inner gypsy within Ramona. But where was Robbie going all the time and who was he meeting with? And who was the guy with the Ponytail?
And why was he marrying Ramona if Robbie was just humping the housekeeper? And what did it mean when Robbie found out that Ramona was already dead? Was Ramona a ghost or just an imposter? And who was beheading the housekeeper and the maid? You can understand if it was Ramona that did in the housekeeper for messing around with Robbie, but why the maid? The maid was the only one outside of the mysterious Ponytail that treated her halfway decently. And who sent the stupid hour glass full of red sand to Robbie that supposedly marked the time until Ramona was going to be sacrificed unless it was really secretly marking the time until she sacrificed him? And what was the deal with the fake spider? Maybe some of these questions would be answered if I watched this movie. Oh wait a minute - I already did.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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