‘Deadly Manor’ aka ‘Savage Lust’ (1990) - José Ramón Larraz Gil.

It is edifying to note all the posthumous plaudits uber-talented genre filmmaker José Ramón Larraz Gil is currently garnering after his previously neglected films are lovingly restored. These welcome Blu-ray editions encourage a new generation of fear-seeking frightlings to appreciate Larraz’s vividly shock-steeped cinema in such creep-inducing clarity that thrillingly highlights his luminous talent! Shot not long after his bloodier ‘Edge of The Axe’ (1988), Larraz’s macabre chiller ‘Deadly Manor’ aka ‘Savage Lust’ (1990) relies more on mood than grisly splatter. Ostensibly utilizing familiar slasher tropes, 'Deadly Manor' remains, from my skewed perspective at least, the more dramatically idiosyncratic of the two final works from this uniquely entertaining, genre-bending film artiste. 

After picking up a suitably dishevelled, plainly furtive, plot-thickening hitch-hiker, our holidaying protagonists find themselves quite literally off the beaten track! Fatefully taking questionable sanctuary in a deadly, mysterious manor house. This dangerously ramshackle, gloomily turreted Gothic travesty is so palpably threatening as to give the ‘Bates Motel’ a grievous inferiority complex! Once playfully ensconced within this morbiferous-looking domicile, our jocular, conspicuously denim-clad clique of blithely trespassing misfits soon Scooby Doo themselves into a spooky maelstrom of increasingly weird events! A monstrous manifestation of hysterical, melt-faced evil tormenting them until the film's lurid, generously corpse-laden, banshee-wailing finale! 

To jaded gore hounds expecting a generic, razor-straight slasher, Deadly Manor’s relative lack of arterial over-spill might prove disappointing. Maestro Larraz’s increasingly menacing, unpredictably loopy-Lou shocker includes a number of disturbingly off-kilter set-pieces. The macabre chiller's dearth of explicit gore eerily replaced with ominous oodles of doomy, spine-fingeringly Gothic atmosphere, and lashings of enjoyably glib pre-kill repartee. And last, but no means least, the wickedly voluptuous firebrand, Amanda (Jennifer Delora) makes for a memorably mental, horrifically disfigured, mentally twisted, teen slaying despot!!!! 

‘While mere physical beauty is a divinely fleeting affair, Amanda’s eternal hate stretches far beyond the macabre mysteries of her infernal madness! She had an unwholesome lust for life...pray it’s not YOURS she craves!’ - Weirdlingwolf.