'La Casa de Las Siete Tumbas' (1982) – Pedro Stocki.

Talented Argentinian director, Pedro Stocki's compelling psychodrama 'La Casa de Las Siete Tumbas' remains a divinely skewed, especially off-kilter delight! An increasingly sinister journey into the distempered, introverted mind of beautiful, Clara (Soledad Silveyra) whose childhood companion, Cecilia (Cecilia Cenci) mysteriously forms part of an elaborate, fascinatingly unsettling narrative. Deep-seated childhood trauma, sexual awakening, and escalating neuroses torment the fragile, distraught, permanently housebound, Clara. Cecilia visits Clara on her birthday, noting that she appears withdrawn, anxious, increasingly obsessed with a singularly emotional event from their past. Cecilia's arrival disturbingly provides a powerful catalyst for, Clara's doomy reverie, roiling evilly with vividly strange, greatly disturbing dioramas, backwoods horror, psychological discords and bizarre Black Magic machinations!

'La Casa De Las Siete Tumbas' is a truly rare treat, a mad, bafflingly unheralded Euro-chiller that mines a singularly uncompromising reservoir of mental anguish like, Polanksi's 'The Tenant' and Larraz's 'Symptoms'. Much of the film's strident originality resides primarily in the beguilingly oblique screenplay by gifted writer, Laura Garavano. A gorgeously confounding delirium of ceaseless mystery and potently Lynchian weirdness, her gruesomely 3-dimensional 'Pig Girl', once seen, is not readily forgotten! Director, Stocki is blessed with a fabulous cast who create a very believable milieu of writer, Garavano's altogether macabre imagination! The exquisite soundtrack, by Jorge Candia is worthy of a Morricone or Cipriani, his elegiac theme draws you deeply into this macabre miasma of screaming madness!

 

 

 'Horror Rises from the Tomb' (1977) – Carlos Aured.

'Horror Rises from the Tomb' remains one of my favourite, Carlos Aured/Paul Naschy horror collaborations. Their gratuitously gruesome, sensationally Satanic splatter opus stars, and is written by charismatic terror polymath, Paul Naschy! This bravura tale of macabre, black magic fuelled cruelty contains all the horrifically stomach-churning hallmarks of a gore-drenched, grisly-gothic, Paul Naschy classic! Featuring one of vintage horror's more profane protagonists, the revenge of the delightfully despicable, ferociously foul-hearted, crypt-dwelling cannibal killer, Alaric de Monsac, is not soon forgotten!!! This vile necromancer assisted in his perfidy by his breathlessly beauteous, and no less degenerated consort, Mabille (Helga Line). Finally found guilty of the most abominable heresies, their reign of tyranny coming to a suitably bloody end, these two wanton degenerates are sentenced to death!

Alaric is ritualistically decapitated, his severed head buried separately, the God-fearing folk hopeful this might finally rid them of this foul warlock. Happily, you can't keep a good devil-worshipping B-Movie despot down, and many centuries later the headless heretic has his Satanic slumbering dramatically disturbed via the age-old celluloid catalyst of a candle-lit séance. Nightmarishly awakened, Alaric's powerful spirit overwhelms those that have so foolhardily revived him! His mesmeric persona, manipulating them into Satanic murder zombies, all wholly subservient to Alaric's vengeful will! Evilly possessed by forces beyond the grave, these grim ambulatory horrors proceed to unthinking perpetrate Alaric's gruesome revenge in, Carlos Aured's magnificently malevolent supernatural 70s Euro-shocker 'Horror Rises from the Tomb'.

 

 

'Curse of the Devil' (1973) – Carlos Aured.

Reunited with cult director, Carlos 'Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll' Aured, the multi-talented icon, Paul Naschy enriches the bloodily burgeoning Daninsky legend by successfully adding another moonlit flit into the tragic legend of melancholy lycanthrope Waldemar Daninsky. The terminally lovelorn landowner, forever cursed to suffer in the shadow world of his bloodthirsty half-man, half-beast alter ego. The tormented nobleman, perpetually at war with the bestial lusts of the preternatural beast within him! Tormented by a romantic love he can never consummate, as once roused, his werewolf animus destroying the lives of all those close to him.

Carlos Aured's gruesome reiteration of the doomed Daninsky mythos opens in spectacularly thrilling fashion! Daninsky purges his land of blackened satanists, only to find himself the victim of a witch's curse!!! Through each generation, all the male descendents shall be cruelly damned to prowl the earth as a rageful werewolf! Aptly titled, Waldemar descends into a malevolent maelstrom of thwarted love, eldritch curses, revolting peasants, doomed twilight trysts, and bloody bouts of lunar lunacy! The haunted Waldemar's single hope of release is death by the delicate hand of one who genuinely loves him!

'Curse of the Devil' remains a monstrously twisted addition to the diabolically doomed Daninsky mythos! While formulaic, the blood-spattered narrative proves engaging. Maestro Paul Naschy unleashes all his inimitable feral charm as he perpetrates myriad sensationally splashy kills! Daninsky's victims being gored most explicitly, faces pounded into gelatinous goo, and their fleshly protuberances flayed most ferociously! Aured's grisly set-pieces endowing 'Curse of the Devil' with an additional frisson of Grand Guignol glamour! The handsome castle exteriors, and luxurious forests express a pleasingly atmospheric Gothic verisimilitude, even a middling Naschy nightmare is greater than many less gifted genre filmmaker's best!

 

 'The Whip and The Body' (1963) – Mario Bava.

It could be argued that one of mood maestro, Mario Bava's most visually sumptuous and preternaturally perverse horror confections is the deliciously deviant, Ernesto Gastaldi scripted Sado-Gothic classic 'The Whip and The Body'. A sublimely sensual nightmare wherein towering terror titan, Christopher Lee, is at his sinisterly stern best as the beastly, eminently degenerated son, Kurt Menliff. Hoping to reclaim patrimonial rights, Kurt's doomy return to shadow-slaked Castle Menliff, reignites the dangerously incandescent passions of his dusky-haired ex-paramour, Nevenka (Daliah Lavi), unhappily wed to pallid brother, Christian (Tony Kendall). Kurt's seething malevolence heralds lashings of lurid terror trysts, murderous familial discords, grisly deaths, and macabre masochistic ministrations from beyond the grave! Maestro, Mario Bava's ghostly Gothic Giallo is a beautifully illuminated, scintillatingly sinister phantasmagoria crowned with an exquisite performance from tormented sultry siren, Daliah Lavi. A stylish, criminally underrated 60s Euro-shocker, and certainly no less haunting than, Jack Clayton's 'The Innocents' (1961) or Roger Corman's similarly necromantic 'The Tomb of Ligeia' (1964).