*This is the first part of “Karloff’s Bizarre and Final Six Pack,” a series examining Karloff’s final films.
A lot of people have expressed the wish that horror icon Boris Karloff could have ended his career with Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets (1968). But Karloff, on his last leg, pushed himself through six more movies, four of which were the Mexican films for producer Jack Hill and director Juan Ibinez. This last six pack of films is, by consensus, godawful. Why did Karloff do it? According to his biographers, the actor said that he wanted to “die with his boots on.” And he nearly did just that.
This series is not going to be a revisionist look at those six films. They are awful within the accepted meaning of the word. Several of them, however, are downright bizarre products of their time, which now might be looked at as examples of naive surrealism. The films are: House of Evil (1968), Fear Chamber (1968), Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968), Cauldron of Blood (1970), Isle of the Snake People (1971), and Alien Terror (1971).
Fear Chamber ranks as one of the weirdest of the lot, and that is saying much. It begins with pseudo-torture of scantily clad women. The scene is soaked in garish sixties colors and a “bleepy” soundtrack. The various female victims are tormented by a goateed chap, wearing turban, sunglasses (in an underground cavern), white gloves, and black turtleneck. With “all the macabre horror of Edgar Allan Poe” these poor sixties chicks are subjected to hot coals and boiling cauldrons.
The posthumous classification of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello erroneously places them on a level with Laurel & Hardy or The Marx Brothers. However, few, if any, of the Abbott and Costello films withstand the test of time. Their initial rendezvous with a trio of Universal monsters retains some dated charm, but little of it comes from the comedy team. Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) is essentially a vehicle for Bela Lugosi‘s Dracula parody and Lenore Aubert’s vamp. The Monster (Glenn Strange) has little to do, and Lon Chaney Jr. seems mightily uncomfortable with the surrounding juvenile antics. Even worse is Bud Westmore’s unimaginative assembly line makeup, which reduces Lugosi’s Count to baby powder and black lipstick and Lon Chaney Jr’s Larry Talbot to a rubbery lycanthrope.
La casa del terror (1960) is a south of the border imitation of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, along with about a half dozen other films, including King Kong (1933). German Valdes (aka Tin Tan) is Casimiro and, just like in A & C Meet Frankie, he is doing some work in a house of wax horrors, which currently has a real mummy display. Below the exhibit, the Professor (Yerye Beirut) is deep in mad scientist experiments (just like Boris Karloff in his Columbia movies or Lugosi at Monogram). None too surprising, the Professor has an assistant who helps his boss steal bodies and blood. When bodies are not to be found, the two extract fluids from Casimiro, which renders our hero lethargic (at least Lou Costello kept his energy level up). Narratively, having your protagonist sleep through half of the film does not seem like a sound idea. Casimiro’s gal Paquita (Yolanda Varela) doesn’t think so either. After all, she is working a full time job and beau here is one lazy sot! Perhaps the all too repeated shots of Casimiro counting sheep are not necessarily a bad device after all because when he does wake up, he breaks into comedic patter which actually makes Lou Costello look funny again. Valdes elicits more groans than laughs and he even engages in a song and dance number with Valera. YES, IT’S A MUSICAL TOO! Valera does not have to work hard at making Valdes’ musical talents look pedestrian.
Director Gilberto Martinez Solares cast Lon Chaney Jr, clearly past his prime, as a dual mummy/wolfman which, of course, were the two characters that Chaney played most often in the 40’s Universal horror cycle. Chaney is only briefly glimpsed as a mummy, and a rather well fed one at that. The make-up job is something akin to a glob of silly putty. The Professor, tired of Casimiro’s rotten blood, decides to steal the mummy for experimentation. The Doc and his assistant put the ancient Egyptian into a big Son Of Frankenstein (1939) contraption. Briefly, a Continue reading LA CASA DEL TERROR (1960) AND FACE OF THE SCREAMING WEREWOLF (1964)→
Luis Buñuel‘s self-imposed exile in Mexico from 1946-1964 yielded a fruitful harvest, and his films from this period are, arguably, his most organic and economically composed. The director listed Nazarin, based off the Benito Perez Galdos novel, as a film he felt much affection for, and that affection extended to the character Father Nazario (Francisco Rabal). Buñuel’s paternal attachment to this child/film was sincere enough that when the film failed to win the Prix de l’Office Catholique (Catholic Film Prize), he could express a sense of relief.
The saturnine Fr. Nazario lives in a phantasmagoric haze, imagining that he is following the commandment of Christ to “take up one’s cross,” but only disaster lies in the stations Nazrio visits. Nazario does not build his house on rock, but on mud. He keeps company with a menagerie of freaks: beggars, thieves, whores, and a dwarf. Nazario refrains from bolting his door, despite the fact that his mob plunders his abode daily. He is relieved of all possessions, save his Sunday best and crucifix. Thank God for that. He befriends the suicidal Beatriz (Marga Lopez), whose self destructiveness is birthed from her incessant need for the abusive man who regularly deserts her.
Nazario provides shelter to Beatriz’ homely prostitute sister, Andara (Rita Macedo) after she is wounded in a knife fight. Andara has killed her rival and is hiding from local authorities. The local Church learns of the living arrangement and accuses Nazario of improprieties. Beatriz and Andara become Nazario’s Mary and Martha, but the paradox of the priest’s hypocrisy is that he pragmatically shuns Andara’s imaginative qualities, labeling it a “sickness.” Yet, Bunuel invests this setup with an inviting sense of irony. Nazario is Continue reading BUNUEL’S NAZARIN (1959)→
“Nothing in [critic’s] educations or experiences can have prepared them for The Holy Mountain. Here is a film completely outside the entire tradition of motion picture art, outside the tradition of modern theater, outside the tradition of criticism and review. Criticism is irrelevant.”–film critic Jules Siegel, a quote chosen for The Holy Mountain‘s trailer
PLOT: A thief, who looks like Jesus Christ, silently wanders through a bizarre and depraved city with an armless and legless midget companion, participating in a lizard circus where toads are dressed like conquistadors, bearing a crucifix through the streets and eating from Jesus’ body, and meeting a prostitute with a chimp. He comes to a giant tower in the middle of a busy highway and rides up a hook to the top, where a mystic with a menagerie introduces him to seven companions and purifies him by burning his feces and turning it into gold, among other rituals. After preparation the assembled nine set off the find the Holy Mountain where the immortals are said to live, so they can displace them and become like gods themselves.
BACKGROUND:
In preparation for making the film Jodorowsky studied with both a Zen master and with a disciple of Gurdijeff. Part of his training involved sleep deprivation (he claims he went a week without sleep) and taking LSD for the first time.
During filming, the Catholic church in Mexico was not happy with The Holy Mountain because of its apparent blasphemy, and the President Luis Echeverría’s regime was angry with Jodorowsky because soldiers in Mexican uniforms were depicted massacring civilians. There were public marches protesting the filming. Per Jodorowsky’s DVD commentary, he left Mexico with the footage he had already shot to finish the movie in New York after receiving threats from government officials and paramilitary groups.
John Lennon partly financed the film. The budget was $750,000, a fairly extravagant sum for a film largely made in Mexico in 1973.
According to Jodoworowsky’s DVD commentary, George Harrison wanted to play the role of the thief, but balked at playing a nude scene where the character has his anus scrubbed. Sources at the time reported that it was Lennon who wanted the role and that he could not follow through due to scheduling conflicts.
Jodorowsky dubbed the voice of the thief.
Various “masters” the characters meet as they prepare for their ascent of the Holy Mountain were played by actual Mexican shamans and witch doctors.
Due to disagreements between Jodorowsky and producer Allen Klein, The Holy Mountain did not receive any sort of legitimate home video release until 2007. The same issues plagued Jodorowsky’s previous film, El Topo. According to Jodorowsky, Klein became angry and vindictive when, thinking it was too commercial, the director abandoned a project to adapt the erotic classic The Story of O with the producer and instead pursued an opportunity to make George Hebert’s cult science fiction novel Dune (a project Jodorowsky never completed—David Lynch was hired instead to film Dune, which ended up as a flop and an embarrassment).
INDELIBLE IMAGE: There are so many candidates—the apocalyptic toad and chameleon circus with amphibians dressed as conquistadors and missionaries, the giant mechanical vagina art installation stimulated by a nude woman with a probe, the hermaphrodite with leopard head breasts that squirt milk onto a proselyte—that choosing a single representative image seems like an almost arbitrary exercise. Still, there is one trick so stunningly beautiful and effective that Jodorowsky essentially uses it twice: the live birds that fly from out of the gaping wounds of corpses mowed down by fascist soldiers.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The Holy Mountain plays like a cut-up version of the world’s sacred texts. If you tore out pages from the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, The Golden Bough, and a dozen other esoteric works from the Kabbalah to Gurdijeff—throwing in a couple of sleazy pulp novels for good measure—and put them together in a giant cauldron, stirred them up and pulled out sheaves at random and asked a troupe of performance artists, carnival freaks, and hippies tripping on peyote to act them out, you might come up with a narrative something like The Holy Mountain. Here, the cauldron is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s skull, and the stirrer was LSD, and an ex-Beatle gave the director and master visual stylist a small fortune to bring any elaborate and depraved fantasy he could dream up to shocking life. The singularly bizarre results—the pure, undiluted essence of mad Jodorowsky—are unlike any film that has ever existed before, or ever shall be, world without end.
The Internet Movie Database is a wonderful and a terrible thing. Wonderful, because it allows you to create impressively thorough lists of potentially weird movies. Terrible, because it may tease you with the names of intriguing movies you may never be able to see.
Below is a list of dozens of highly-rated movies that have been tagged with “surrealism” or similar keywords, broken down by country. To my knowledge, none of these movies is currently available on DVD, and I suspect that several of them may never have been translated into English. Any information on these titles by people who are familiar with them would be of enormous value to us in deciding whether or not we should invest time in trying to track them down. So, my non-American friends, please have at it! If you leave a comment with some information on any of these titles, I’ll update the body of the text to reflect it. (Information supplied by readers is added in bold).
Argentinian
Razón de mi vida, La (20??) [The Reason for My Life]. This showed up on the IMDB as a highly rated 2008 release a while back. Now, the link goes to a movie of the same name, but it has no rating and is listed as a 2010 release. OFFICIAL UPDATE: Per Kino Red: “completed in this month. Release soon (Buenos Aires, Paris and Tokyo). Trailer and teaser (in Spanish) in youtube: NOTE: The film is not based on the Eva Perón autobiography. The title of the film is ironic or parodic about the Eva Perón’s book.” I will add that the trailer looks very promising!
Rosaura a las 10 (1958) [Rosaura at 10 o’clock]. Alon thinks it’s only borderline weird at best.
Brazilian
Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (1964) [God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun] Per Alon: “interesting, beautifully filmed and edited, movie about the drama of the Brazilian dispossessed… but I wouldn’t consider it weird by any measure.”
O Anjo Nasceu (1969) [The Angel Was Born]
Per Alon: “…seems to be famous for its unconventional camerawork and editing. The film tells the story of two murderers, one of whom has mystic visions, and was regarded as quite gory for its time.”
Terra em Transe. No English translation of the title. Per Alon, Entranced Land or Land in Anguish. Has read it’s more “daring” than Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol by the same director.
Czech/Czechoslovakian
Adéla jeste nevecerela (1978). Per LRobHubbard: translates to Adele Hasn’t Had Her Dinner Yet. From the director of Lemonade Joe(which we do plan to review). “Spoofs the ‘Nick Carter’ detective stories, featuring Carter investigating strange disappearances, which involve a carnivorous plant, the ‘Adele’ of the title.” No Region 1 release. Worth seeing, but not necessarily weird.
Akumulátor 1 (1994).
Jak utopit doktora Mrácka aneb Konec vodniku v Cechách (1974) [How to Drown Dr. Mracek, the Lawyer]
Kytice (2000) [Wild Flowers]
Lepsie byt bohaty a zdravy ako chudobny a chory (1993) [It’s Better to Be Wealthy and Healthy Than Poor and Ill]
Nejasná zpráva o konci sveta (1997) [An Ambiguous Report About the End of the World]
Nevesta (1970).
Pane, vy jste vdova! (1970) [You Are a Widow, Sir]
Postav dom, zasad strom (1980) [Build a House, Plant a Tree]
Sedím na konári a je mi dobre (1989). No English translation of the title. Probably never translated into English.
Tajemství hradu v Karpatech (1981) [The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians]. Per LRobHubbard: from the director of and similar to Adele Hasn’t Had Her Dinner Yet (above) but a pastiche/parody. The idea may be from a story by Jules Verne.
Tisícrocná vcela (1983) [The Millennial Bee]
Zítra vstanu a oparím se cajem (1977). No English translation of the title.
French
La Cicatrice intérieure (1972). Written by and featuring glacial chanteuse Nico (best known here for her work with The Velvet Underground).
La Dernière femme (1976) [The Last Woman]. Despite the presence of a young Gerard Depardieu, I am not sure this was ever translated into English for home video. Controversial on release due to its sexual content. Per Irene, not a weird film.
Greek
Souvliste tous! Etsi tha paroume to kouradokastro (1981) [Barbecue them!]. A Greek correspondent tells me this is basically unknown even in Greece and no DVDs are available. It is on Google video, with no English subtitles.
Italian
Capricci (1969). By Carmelo Bene.
Don Giovanni (1970). Also by Carmelo Bene.
Fantozzi (1975) and Il Secondo tragico Fantozzi (1976). These popular Italian comedies seem to have never been released in America. I gather Fantozzi is something like the Italian Monsieur Hulot?
La Rabbia (2008). With Faye Dunaway and Franco Nero in the cast, I would assume this might see the light of day soon.
Indian
Poi (2006).
Japanese
Den-en ni shisu (1974) [Pastoral Hide and Seek]
Tokyo senso sengo hiwa (1970) [He Died After the War]
Mexican
Pafnucio Santo (1977). Per Alon: “…seems promising… directed by Jodorowsky’s cinematographer… the trailer on YouTube is rather terse.”
Polish
Ewa chce spac (1958). No English translation of the title. Per Irene Goncharova, “a mere comedy… I didn’t find it weird.”
Jak daleko stad, jak blisko (1972) [How Far, How Near]
Walkower (1965) [Walkover]. Per Irene Goncharova, “A Polish movie, just drama, nothing weird.”
Russian/Soviet
Den vyborov (2007) [Election Day]. Per Irene Goranchova: “…absolute trash, a really BAD Russian movie. I sometimes laugh watching it. Bad, bad, bad! Nothing weird…”
Posetitel muzeya (1989). [Visitor of a Museum]?
Sobachye serdtse (1988). Literally, Heart of a Dog. Based on a Mikhail Bulgakov novel that was also adapted by the Italians into a film called Cuore di cane. Produced for television? Per Irene Goncharova: It was a television production, although there may also be another filmed version. “…a good movie, quite weird.”
Zhena kerosinshchika (1988) [Kerosene Salesman’s Wife]? Per Irene Goncharova: hasn’t seen it, but looks weird from the description.
Spanish
Amanece, que no es poco (1989). No English translation of the title. Per Alon, English translation may be Isn’t dawn enough? “…a masterpiece of surreal humour. You have a serious candidate for The List.”
Don Juan Tenorio (1952). Alon thinks it’s unlikely to be weird, mentions that its notoriety may come from the fact that Salvador Dalí served as the costume designer.
In the interest of thoroughness, we’re potentially saving a spot on the List for all these movies, so any help as to whether they are must-sees or duds will be greatly appreciated!
Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!
Fear Chamber ranks as one of the weirdest of the lot, and that is saying much. It begins with pseudo-torture of scantily clad women. The scene is soaked in garish sixties colors and a “bleepy” soundtrack. The various female victims are tormented by a goateed chap, wearing turban, sunglasses (in an underground cavern), white gloves, and black turtleneck. With “all the macabre horror of Edgar Allan Poe” these poor sixties chicks are subjected to hot coals and boiling cauldrons.
Director Gilberto Martinez Solares cast Lon Chaney Jr, clearly past his prime, as a dual mummy/wolfman which, of course, were the two characters that Chaney played most often in the 40’s 
Nazario provides shelter to Beatriz’ homely prostitute sister, Andara (Rita Macedo) after she is wounded in a knife fight. Andara has killed her rival and is hiding from local authorities. The local Church learns of the living arrangement and accuses Nazario of improprieties. Beatriz and Andara become Nazario’s Mary and Martha, but the paradox of the priest’s hypocrisy is that he pragmatically shuns Andara’s imaginative qualities, labeling it a “sickness.” Yet, Bunuel invests this setup with an inviting sense of irony. Nazario is 
