YOUTH OF THE BEAST (1963)

Seijun Suzuki's color noir for Nikkatsu studio is stuck with an inexplicable title in its present day English edition. Most of the cast isn't especially young, and many of them are beastly enough to force the question of which beast and what youth we're talking about. It's also been called Wild Youth but that gets even further away from the real thing, making it sound like a juvenile delinquent film when it really is a film noir, albeit in vibrant color, with a story that could easily be transplanted into an American setting, if the vice versa hasn't already happened.

It's about a guy named Jo (Jo Shishido) who we meet while he's muscling in on the local vice operations. His appearance follow a black-and-white intro in which detectives discover an apparent double suicide: a prostitute and her john. The john proves to be a police detective himself. The film shifts to color to tell Jo's story, and at first I thought that the color stuff would all be flashbacks. Not so, for in the course of establishing himself with the local underworld and proving himself such a tough guy that the mob would rather hire him than punish him, he pays his respects at the home of the late detective's wife. The widow asks him to tell her a story, any story, about her husband, but there isn't time for that now. As it happens, Jo does have a kind of story about the guy; he thinks the man was murdered. And what's that to him? Well, the detective took care of Jo's wife while Jo did time in jail, so Jo feels that he owes the detective, and now his widow, a moral debt. Jo himself is an ex-cop. The ex part has to do with his jail time; he was framed for malfeasance by the mob. Now he's going on a private undercover vendetta, determined to find out who killed the detective if he has to take the yakuza apart in the process. But his hunt will end up taking him back virtually to where he started.

Jo has a way with the ladies (above) and a different way with the opposite sex (below).

This film has a more western feel than a lot of the Japanese crime films I've seen. It's detached from the usual yakuza genre trappings or any real social context in its focus on the lone-wolf antihero. Jo's surrounded by a variety of eccentrics, including his moronic sidekick Minami who abhors women and booze in favor of guns (we later learn that this was wise while it lasted) and a gang leader who hates being reminded that his mother was a whore. Bring that up and he acts like you'd said "Niagara Falls" and gets into a stabbing mood. This actually matters to the movie, since one of the ultimate villains is disposed of by being tricked into discussing this person's parentage in his presence. That was corny but overall Suzuki gives the film a hard-boiled quality that Shishido expresses quite effectively. The novelty of the Japanese setting and Suzuki's colorful style actually made what should have been a predictable noir plot twist more of a surprise for me.

If you think that Jo was mean to the people in the pictures above, consider these scenes his comeuppance.

Yaju no seishun is a sensory treat, from Kazue Nagatsuka's vivid cinematography to Hajime Okamura's brassy, jazzy score. Karyo Yokoo contributes one brilliant piece of production design: the panopticon nightclub whose glass walls and floors allow the gangsters to observe everything from their own drab lair while allowing Suzuki to shoot shots through the floors to get unique angles on the action. As a matter of all-around style the film has that distinctive Sixties feel you might associate with the early Bond films or a lot of Italian product. Noir fans who aren't dogmatic about black-and-white will get a kick out of this Japanese variation on some familiar themes, and fans of Sixties pop culture should dig it too.

Scenes from a nightclub, designed by Karyo Yokoo

Compared with his more kinky (Gate of Flesh) or just plain weird movies (Branded to Kill) this is probably the most accessible Suzuki film I've seen to date. The later, crazier stuff is probably more characteristic but taking a look at Youth of the Beast might make people more willing to give the rest a try.

The badass trailer (with English subtitles) was uploaded to YouTube by rodazi.

LONELY ARE THE BRAVE (1962)

During his long career, Kirk Douglas has often presented himself as a rebel against repressive authority, a persona that probably comes close to his own self-image. Spartacus may be his best-known rebel role, but the type turns up in his ill-fated Broadway version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and he came back to it decades later like a tongue to a loose tooth in his TV-movie Amos, which was Cuckoo's Nest set in an old-folks home. David Miller's modern-day Western, which Douglas produced, is said to be his own favorite of his movies, and may be the purest expression of his rebel persona.

Objects in the rear view mirror may appear larger than life later in the picture.

Douglas plays John W. "Jack" Burns, a cowboy somewhat in decline, reduced to sheep herding as the film opens. He lives off the grid, carrying no forms of i.d., claiming no permanent residence and asking the question "Occupation?" with "Yes." Riding his horse Whiskey through auto traffic into town, he learns that a friend of his has been jailed for assisting illegal immigrants. Deeming that unjust, Burns resolves to "break into jail" by getting arrested so he can break his friend out. He arranges this by visiting a bar on the wrong side of town and getting into a brawl with a one-armed man -- the one-armed man of Fugitive fame, in fact. When the police fail to consider that jail-worthy he picks a fight with them and is told that he can expect a year in jail for his trouble. In the lockup he learns that his friend is prepared to do his time (two years) and unwilling to risk more time by escaping. Burns asks him to think of his wife (Gena Rowlands) and kid, but the friend says he is, and that escaping and becoming a fugitive would ruin their lives as well as his. Burns takes this rebuff with his customary good grace and sets about escaping on his own. He stops back in town to tell Rowlands what's up, then heads into the mountains High Sierra style, expecting to thwart all pursuers and make it to Mexico. It begins to look like a good bet when he manages to shoot down an Army helicopter by blasting its tail rotor, but at the same time the film's been telling us all the way through that Burns's defeat is just a matter of time....

By 1962 the end of the West was becoming a more frequent theme in generic Westerns like Ride the High Country, but Lonely Are the Brave argues that the West was still ending in that very year. Something has changed (or definitively ended) since then, which may explain why Douglas's performance doesn't seem to ring true at first glance. John W. Burns seems too nice, too glib. A modern audience might expect such a character to be more alienated, more taciturn, possibly more ruthless. They might envision Tommy Lee Jones rather than Kirk Douglas, and they might be more inclined to believe that something must be wrong with Burns to explain his aversion to modernity. Some may see Lonely Are the Brave through the prism of First Blood, as the makers of that film may have when they invited Douglas to play Col. Trautmann -- a part he reportedly rejected when the writers changed the script from the novel's ending and spared Rambo's life. John W. Burns seems too good to be true in his apparent incapacity for anger and his unwillingness to kill his pursuers. We're told that he shoots the tail rotor exactly so the copter will have a soft landing that the pilots can survive. Given an opportunity for revenge against a guard who abused him (George Kennedy with a weird, half-Hispanic, half-Transylvanian accent), he does no more than the minimum necessary to subdue him, and doesn't even grab the guard's guns.

During his odyssey of escape, Kirk Douglas faces such epic adversaries as a helicopter (above) and George Kennedy (below), in no particular order of epic-ness.

It becomes apparent that Douglas and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo have conceived Burns as a Romantic version of the cowboy. As Douglas himself says on the new DVD, Burns is a "good guy," and that's probably what distinguishes him from the Burns we might envision in a theoretical remake. He isn't about alienation or anti-sociability or any other hangup. For Douglas, Trumbo and Miller Burns embodies nothing but freedom. Douglas says that he wanted to call the movie The Last Cowboy (the source novel by Edward Abbey is called The Lonely Cowboy), but you could just as easily have called it The Noble Savage. Burns is a natural man and naturally good, one for whom the modern world's regulations are superfluous. This understanding of the character explains why the movie starts out far more light-hearted than I expected. The comedy persists as Walter Matthau's sheriff copes sardonically with his idiot deputies and the oppressive assistance of the military. But the comedy only sets us up for an ending out of a Seventies movie in its sudden, crushing defeat.

Actually, it's not too sudden if by that you mean unanticipated. One major weakness of the screenplay is its introduction of Carroll O'Connor as a truck driver hauling a load of "privies." Trumbo strives briefly for satire in asking why someone needs to ship privies to New Mexico from hundreds of miles away, but beyond raising the question O'Connor has absolutely nothing else to do, yet Miller keeps cutting back to him. His activities advance the plot in no way whatsoever until it sinks in, probably well in advance of the actual event, that there's only one way he can intersect with the main action of the movie. His truck is like the proverbial gun on the theater stage; if you show it, it has to be used. It's a crude plot device that, were the film itself consistently crude, might make a perfect metaphor for anything as heavyhanded that so obviously telegraphs the finish of a film.

But as it turns out, the predictability of the climax doesn't dent its devastating power. A beautifully filmed finale on a rainy roadside transforms a gently satirical comedy-drama into a kind of tragedy. O'Connor justifies the film's attention to him with his horrified reaction to the disaster he creates, while the once-glib Douglas is reduced to ruined muteness. Lonely Are the Brave leaves it open whether John W. Burns lives or dies from his adventure, but he experiences an indisputable symbolic death that marks the end of a kind of American dream or his own personal fantasy of the cowboy life. The ending transforms him from a fugitive noble savage to something more like Don Quixote, a knight out of time who almost won, but probably never could have. It darkens and elevates the entire film.

A movie like this is going to rise and fall on its location work, and Miller found a photogenic mountain to work on. He works on a scale that allows him to cut from the helicopter pilot observing Burns from high above to Matthau observing the helicopter from far away. Douglas, his stuntman and the horse do great physical work on the mountain and Miller captures it effectively. Douglas himself gives Trumbo more credit than Miller, suggesting that once the great script was written Miller had it kind of easy,but the director definitely deserves credit for his contribution to one of the great years for Hollywood. The actors, Kennedy excepted, are all good, with Matthau still biding his time waiting for the breakout role that would come a few years later and Rowlands probably overqualified for her relatively small role. I wouldn't rank Lonely Are the Brave too highly in the exalted class of 1962 but it's further proof of what a good year than was for American movies.

Somehow Universal couldn't include a trailer on its fancy Backlot Collection DVD, but here it is, taken from TCM and uploaded to YouTube by foxter65.

THE PRICE OF POWER (1969)

The President is coming to Dallas. He's going to promote his social agenda, including racial reconciliation and an agricultural reform program that'll be paid for "from the pockets of the rich," despite protests from reactionary elements. It's so bad in some quarters that they've put up posters claiming that the President is "Wanted for Treason." His Texan Vice-President is of little help, since he's believed to be in thrall to powerful local interests who have damning evidence against him from his early days. The year is... Actually, I don't know what year it is. They never say, but I guess it would be Eighteen Something. For that matter, they never say what the President's name is, either, but you can guess who he represents. That's because Tonino Valerii's political thriller retells the story of the Kennedy assassination in the form of a spaghetti western.

Van Johnson is The President, but he's just Mr. President to his friends.

The nameless President is played by Van Johnson (though some filmographers claim that he's playing James A. Garfield), who did not stick around to redub his English dialogue in the recording studio. It's always strange to see a familiar actor and not hear his familiar voice, but if anything the vocal stand-in sounds more presidential than Johnson might have. This President was a Union colonel during the Civil War, and in that capacity condemned a Texas Unionist, Bill Willer (Giuliano Gemma), and his black sidekick Jack Donovan to ten years in prison for refusing to fire on Bill's father, a Confederate general. The elder Willer in the present day stumbles onto knowledge of an assassination plot because his old cronies don't realize that he's loyal to the reunited nation. The conspirators bump off the old man, but not before Bill thwarts plot number one: a scheme to blow up a railroad bridge as the presidential train passes over.

Giuliano Gemma weighs the charges against the President.

Jack, still Bill's sidekick and a resourceful character in his own right, is wounded in the early action. He recuperates in a central-city doctor's office that gives him a perfect view of the President's coach as it rolls through town -- and a perfect view of two snipers on an overpass who plan to plug the chief executive. Jack tries to thwart plot number two, but in the confusion is arrested as the successful assassin, playing the Oswald patsy role of conspiracy myth. Bill struggles to win Jack's freedom, reveal the real killers and get to the bottom of the obvious conspiracy, but his efforts are complicated by the conspirators' collapse into separate cut-throat factions (including one led by Fernando Rey) and a Presidential security officer determined to cover up the truth in order to avert a second civil war while pursuing the conspirators himself.

Back and To the Left: The President has been shot in The Price of Power. Who benefits? Fernando Rey, for one.

Il Prezzo del Potere is an act of cinematic audacity on a WTF level. Its generic cross of spaghetti action and conspiracy thriller is an unusual mix that gives the film a different feel from most Italian westerns. In the typical spaghetti the hero is always in control of the situation, or acts as if he is, apart from the requisite beatdown in the middle of the picture. Here Gemma must maneuver around forces that are clearly bigger and more powerful than he is, and the inevitability imposed by importing the JFK archetype gives the movie an atmosphere of inescapable doom, at least for the first two-thirds of it, that may be unique to the genre. The picture shakes loose of its pseudo-historical shackles late in the game, however, as Gemma gradually gains the upper hand and hunts down the conspirators who aren't busy destroying each other. Valerii doesn't do entirely without generic spaghetti shenanigans, introducing such details as a repeated guns-and-cigars game that requires antagonists to shoot at one another in the dark and a crippled journalist friend of Gemma who reveals his ownership of a crutch gun at a timely moment.

The corrupt sheriff (Benito Stefanelli) arranges for Jack Donovan's transfer to Fort Worth, with a posse of Jack Rubies lying in wait.

The film automatically raises the question of whether it reflects Valerii or screenwriter Massimo Patrizi's actual beliefs about the Kennedy assassination. Van Johnson embodies their idea of Kennedy when he speaks out in favor of racial equality and quotes lines associated with Robert Kennedy -- "I see things that could be and ask why not," etc. The Texan veep who's elevated into the Presidency by the assassination is aware of the conspiracy but torn by guilty feelings while wrestling with a determination to be his own man in Washington. His desire, shared by the security man MacDonald, to suppress any evidence of conspiracy for the sake of peace approximates what some people take to be Lyndon Johnson's own view, though in his case it's suspected that he didn't want to discover a Cuban connection to Kennedy's death because it might provoke World War III rather than an internal American conflict. The portrait as a whole of a relatively minor character is an ambivalent sketch of Johnson, who is more of an outright villain in some accounts. Jack Donovan's role as a patsy implies that the filmmakers believed that Oswald was one as well. While Oswald was seen as a leftist set up by rightists to take the blame, Jack, who is indisputably innocent, is blamed by the conspirator sheriff despite the exculpatory claim that Jack loved the President, "like all the poor and oppressed." The real enemy, the filmmakers insist, is a reactionary racist elite, some of whom are ready to risk renewed war to get their way, while others would be content to control the new men in power.

This, too, is America. Norma Jordan plays Annie, Jack Donovan's girlfriend who's willing to sell him out for a new wardrobe and the nearest thing to a femme fatale in The Price of Power.

Sometimes, though, the Kennedy conspiracy narrative and the spaghetti western genre don't fit well together. Consider the hero's determination that two men shot the President from the fatal overpass. Why two? Because no man can fire a gun twice in ten seconds. Leave aside the veracity of that claim and try to deal with the fact that this assertion is being made in a spaghetti western! Talk about what a motivated man can do with his rifle...

Oddly, The Price of Power ends up endorsing the idea of a cover-up for the good of the nation. In the penultimate act, an enraged Bill Willer forces MacDonald to turn over his documents proving a conspiracy so he can publicize the truth. He says he has two good reasons for taking the papers: he has a gun and he'll kill MacDonald if the security man doesn't turn them over. But in the last scene Willer returns the papers to MacDonald, saying, "You need them more than I do."

This is probably a spaghetti western that any genre buff should see, simply because there is and can be no other film like it. You may not agree with what it insinuates about the Kennedy assassination or about American politics in the 1960s, but the film is so uniquely and straightfacedly weird about its work that its worth a stop by any tourist in the wild world of cinema.

The Videoasia DVD of Price of Power, part of its new Spaghetti Western Bible Vol. 3 set, comes without a trailer or bonus materials, but does present a letterboxed copy of the film. The Italian trailer, uploaded to YouTube by mart85, shows off some of the impressive location work and some of the impressive score by Luis Enriquez Bacalov.

Bad Bloodsuckers: Wendigo's 10 Worst Vampire Movies

As an epilogue to Halloween and a follow-up to my vampire-connoisseur friend's ten-favorite list from last week, here is his possibly more controversial chronological list of his least favorite vampire flicks. As a reminder, Wendigo is an ecumenical vampire fan; he does not believe that certain presentations of vampires are "wrong." The films that make this list did not violate some set notion of what a vampire should or should not be, but are, in his view, badly performed or simply badly made.

On a personal note, since Wendigo submitted this list we sat down together to watch Al Adamson's Blood of Dracula's Castle. I'm ready to say that Alex D'Arcy's Count Townsend is easily one of the worst cinematic vampires ever, but Wendigo would rather not pick on easy targets.

1. House of Frankenstein (1944). Universal's monster-rally is a mess that fails to live up to its concept by never having the monsters interact with one another. Wendigo actually thinks that the Dracula episode featuring John Carradine is the best part of the film, but it irritated him to have the vampire out of the picture so quickly. He respects Carradine's interpretation of Dracula, but thinks Long John was better in House of Dracula and slips too often the first time out into "southern gentleman" territory. His part of House of Frankenstein seems too much like a throwaway that inevitably frustrates a vampire fan. The film as a whole is far less than the sum of its parts.

2. Blood of Dracula (1957). A rare pre-Hammer female vampire film that completely fails to exploit any opportunity to emphasize the seductive succubus aspect of the menace, choosing instead to put a bug-eyed monster makeup on the vampire and burdening her with pseudo-science explanations that put it more in line with Poverty Row schlock from the 1940s while maintaining the slightest connection to Dracula. This may strike some as an easy target because it's a low-budget independent production, but it's such a wasted opportunity for its time that Wendigo thinks it belongs on the list.

3. Frankenstein's Bloody Terror (1968-72) -- by which Wendigo means not the original Paul Naschy film that introduces Waldemar Daninsky but the U.S. travesty that makes next to no sense. Naschy had better luck dealing with vampires in Werewolf Shadow and other films, and Wendigo is willing to grant that the film in its original unmangled form might not make this list. But the vampires he remembers from the American edition are weak and uninspired (Count Chocula is arguably more menacing), and the overall presentation of the story as something it isn't is infuriating. None of this is meant to reflect on Naschy, since Wendigo is if anything even more of a werewolf fan than a vampire fan, and therefore holds Naschy and Daninsky in high regard.

4. Count Dracula (1970). Jess Franco's version is one of the most overrated Dracula movies despite a new and admirable approach to the character by Christopher Lee. Unfortunately, no one else involved in the production lives up to his work. The hero (a vague amalgam of Stoker's male protagonists) is hopelessly dull, while Klaus Kinski gives an inexplicably acclaimed performance as a Renfield so understated that it borders on somnambulism. He is a vacuum on film that brings the story's momentum to a halt whenever he appears. This is a huge missed opportunity to do justice to Stoker's story. Lest you think Wendigo has it out for Franco, he notes that Vampyros Lesbos is one euro-vampire film that he likes.

5. Lust For A Vampire (1971). The third Karnstein film from Hammer falls on its face with an obvious drop in production values. The film has nothing new to say and the actress, though attractive, has no way to say it. By now, not even dropping her top can keep you interested in yet another do-over of standard tropes (not to mention a bald do-over of The Vampire Lovers) that shows no real effort on the studio's part to raise the stakes of transgression. A typical product of Hammer in its decline that fails on all levels.

6. Dracula vs Frankenstein (1971). We just let Al Adamson off the hook for Blood of Dracula's Castle, but despite what I said about Alex D'Arcy, echo-chambered Zandor Vorkov gives the worst vampire performance ever in a film that hurts even more by spotlighting the degradation of J. Carroll Naish and Lon Chaney Jr. The big vampire-vs-monster battle is really lame, as is Dracula's laser-beam ring and his disintegration into a pile of maggots.

7. Zoltan, Hound of Dracula (Dracula's Dog, 1978). A movie about a vampire dog. What more is there to say, other than that it's a depressingly silly concept. There are glimmers of worthy ideas from its source novel, but nowhere near enough to justify the inadequate adaptation. There's stuff you can do with infected animals, but this film tries too hard to force the canine into classical vampire mold, down to sleeping in a coffin and other foolishness.

8. The Lost Boys (1987). From the awful "Thou Shalt Not Kill" opening music on, this is a depressing experience, especially once you learn what it was meant to be rather than the quasi biker movie it ended up being. There might have been a unique horror fantasy film here, but Joel Schumacher never seems sure whether he's making an action film, a horror film or a comedy, and ends up doing none of the genres well. This film suffers in comparison with its contemporaries Fright Night and Near Dark, doing many of the same things those films do, but worse. Its only original contribution is not a good one, the idea that vampires in humanoid form can fly like Superman. Wendigo will give Kiefer Sutherland credit for bringing a charismatic menace to his role that the script doesn't provide, and the film has one strong horror moment in the vampires' attack on the beach party. But the inconsistency in tone is fatal, and Wendigo hates to see vampires killed by squirt guns. This is a landmark vampire film only in the eyes of people who don't see many vampire films or don't care about the genre.

9. From Dusk 'til Dawn (1995). This is a love-hate film for Wendigo, in that there are parts he loves, but more parts that he hates. It's a well-made thriller with interesting characters and relationships until the cast arrives at the Titty Twister. But after Selma Hayek does her sexy dance the movie grinds to a dead halt and never recovers. The film jumps the shark when her character turns into a fat rubber-suited critter and cavorts with her peers like something out of Octaman. Tom Savini and Fred Williamson as vampire hunters are wasted, all too quickly turned into special effects. The film is doomed by its mandate to show off special effects above all else. No matter who's backing the film, effects should service the story, not vice versa.

10. Dracula 2000 (2000). There's a temptation to give this film another chance now that Gerard Butler is a sort of star. He has done good work in his career, but not this time. He shows none of the charisma he will show later in the decade, and how can he in his silly costume and hairdo that force this mighty man into a Lestat mode which, given what the movie claims about Dracula's biblical origins, doesn't seem quite right? This film was probably doomed as soon as it received the deadly "Wes Craven Presents" stamp. The likes of Omar Epps, Jeri Ryan and Nathan Fillion are built up only to be wasted and disposed of in perfunctory fashion, while Butler participates in one of the lamest CGI-morphing scenes ever when he slowly lopes with widely swinging arms in the process of becoming a wolf. Other clunker moments are D2K's rave review of the Virgin Megastore ("Brilliant!") and the lamest debate with an inanimate Jesus since Sam Neill in The Final Conflict. If anything, it's more disappointing in retrospect considering all the talent involved.

As the cartoon Dracula of our collective unconsciousness says, "Blah, Blah!" to all involved.

DELIRIUM (Delirio Caldo, 1972)

You know as soon as you see Mickey Hargitay eyeballing a young woman in a pub that he has bad intentions. Sure, he's all helpfulness as he offers her a lift to a nightclub, but he can't stop himself from trying to feel up inside her miniskirt. The outraged girl demands that he let her out, and he complies. Of course, then he follows her, despite her dropping her shoes for speed, to the bank of a rushing river, where our man seems confused over whether to rape, strangle or drown her. She still ends up dead, the latest victim of a sex maniac the police have been unable to track down, despite the best efforts of consulting criminal psychologist Herbert Lyutak. Well, they're probably not his really best efforts, since he's our killer.

Herb's got problems at home. He loves his wife and she loves him back, but he's been unable to perform his husbandly duties. It seems that he can't get aroused unless he's strangling somebody. Marzia Lyutak (Ria Calderoni) worries that hubby is holding something back and urges him to indulge any impulse he has, so long as he'll do it with her. It gets pretty hot for a while. Just the sight of the Lyutaks making out gets the maid to licking her shoulder and fondling her own breasts. But Herbert simply can't rise to the occasion unless he takes it, or her, by the neck. For all the Mrs. knows, this is just a game of erotic asphyxiation. She doesn't realize that this is a two-way street as far as pleasure goes, though she might not be coming back. But no: Herbert won't let himself do this to his beloved. He realizes he has gone too far. He must end his murderous career.

That should be simple enough. He can confess to his police pals, right? But they might not believe him if he tells them. He has to show them. So he calls them and explains that, thanks to his advanced "meteoropsychic" analysis, he can predict the time and location of the killer's next attack. The cops just need to stake the site out and set up a decoy to lure him. All is arranged as he wants, and on cue he arrives at the park and approaches the designated victim. But he can barely strike up a conversation with her when they hear a woman's scream. The killer has struck; a woman is dead. Lyutak's analysis was virtually perfect, the police admit, but the doctor himself is quite perplexed. After all, isn't he the killer?

Thus writer-director Renato Polselli drops us through the trapdoor into the utter wackness that is Delirio Caldo, one of the greatest love stories ever rendered on celluloid -- as long as you leave morality or sanity out of the equation. We're in the amour fou zone here with a lead couple each of whom looks to the other in vain as an anchor of normality in a turbulent sea of compulsions. Marzia, for instance, clings to Herbert while dreaming of lesbian romps with the maid and Marzia's own niece, Joaquine. The highlight of the film is a red-lit nightmare sequence in which Marzia envisions herself and Herbert writhing and shackled as Joaquine and the maid get it on on the floor. Joaquine frees Marzia while Herbert thrashes and grimaces as only Mickey Hargitay can, and the loyal wife descends for a female threesome, only to see the other girls laughing at her. Fighting these urges, Marzia will do anything to keep her husband, if you get my drift. But she isn't dreaming Joaquine's own urges, which make the niece just as determined to drive the couple apart. And all the while the bodies keep piling up. The dead ones, I mean.

Delirium is a film on the cheap. Our detectives operate out of a police headquarters which looks neither official or public and is pretty obviously somebody's house with a couple of guys dressed up as bobbies. And did I mention that this impoverished Italian film is supposed to be set in Britain? Polselli won't do anything so obvious as tell you this, but you can figure it out from the bobbies, the "TELEPHONE" booth one victim hides in, and the habit one comedy-relief murder suspect has of uttering an occasional English phrase.

This is Britain.

Polselli can't even be bothered with stock footage or anything that might slightly suspend your disbelief in the Englishness of it all. But he seems to have trouble with the basics of cheap cinema. In one scene, Hargitay is driving a car at night. You'd expect some kind of process shot to create the illusion of a moving background, but what you get looks for all the world like a pinwheel made of rocks that rotates counterclockwise rather than a scrolling image from right to left. At times the cheapness of Delirium is almost embarrassing, but at others it actually enhances the starkness of the situation. Hargitay's first murder scene is dark, clumsy and protracted, but the notion you get that it had to be an unpleasant experience for the actress playing the victim gives the scene a certain primitive power.

Let's face it, anyway. You don't need big or even plausible sets to convey Delirium. A film like this depends entirely on its actors, and that's where Mickey Hargitay comes in. Mariska's Dad earned his nutjob credentials for all time when he played Travis "Crimson Executioner" Anderson in Massimo Pupillo's Il boia scarlatta, better known in America as Bloody Pit of Horror. If anything, Hargitay is ever screwier here, where he has to play a conflicted antihero with a guilty conscience, than when he played that more famous narcissistic maniac. With his fevered expressions and his bad hair, he looks quite convincingly like someone at the end of his rope. For all I know, showing up in this project meant that he was at the end of his rope. I notice that he did only one more movie in Italy, again for Polselli (The Reincarnation of Isabel) before retiring. That's regrettable, though maybe not from his own standpoint, because he could have given many more crazy performances in the years that followed. But I guess that makes the few he actually did, like this one, more precious. His female colleagues aren't far behind, Calderoni keeping at a constant level of hysteria and Christa Barrymore as Joaquine exploding over the top late in the picture.

Rita Calderoni and Christa Barrymore play very rough in the last act of Delirium, but it leaves them very relaxed afterwards.

Objectively speaking, I'd probably have to call Delirium a bad movie, but it's bad in an entertaining way. As an exploitation film, it presses most of the right buttons, and I'd definitely recommend it to fans of female nudity and guileless overacting. At the very least, Delirium comes closer to truth in advertising than most movies do.

If there was an original trailer for Delirio Caldo it doesn't exist online, but GialloTrailers has uploaded an unofficial trailer featuring the movie music of Gianfranco Reverberi.

Wendigo's Ten Favorite Vampire Movies

"Wendigo" is the nom de net of one of my oldest friends and the biggest vampire fan I know. I consulted with him nearly a year ago when Twilight came out and he reviewed it favorably. That seems unusual among horror movie fans, but Wendigo is, in one sense, more of a vampire fan than a horror fan. That is, he is interested in the concept of the vampire and its evolution, and he wouldn't claim that vampires belong to the horror genre. He understands that the vampire has meant many things to different people over time, from the night terror made manifest to the modern power fantasy, from the quasi-rape fantasy offered by the master vampire to the forbidden fruit represented by his female counterpart. If anything is consistent about the vampire in pop culture, it's the temptation of immortality and the challenge of its moral cost.

In my own view, the vampire has to an extent lost its potency as a moral threat, so that a vampire in a typical "urban fantasy" story might be little different from an elf in a just-plain fantasy novel. But since the vampire has been a fantasy creature all along, there's nothing inherently wrong with that development. Back when I published his thoughts on Twilight, I suggested that I might get Wendigo to make up a list of favorite vampire films. Now, with Halloween and the release of New Moon impending, he's given me a list in chronological order that takes us from the beginning to last year -- and Twilight is not on the list, nor, to my slight disappointment, is my man Count Yorga the swinging Seventies vampire. I know Wendigo digs the Yorga films (and Deathmaster, too), but pressed to pick ten favorites, this is what he came up with:

1. Nosferatu (1922). This would be number one if the list were in order of preference as well. F.W. Murnau's silent chiller is still the definitive vampire film in Wendigo's book, and also the one that, for him, comes closest to the essence of Bram Stoker's seminal novel, even if Max Schreck's uncanny Graf Orlok isn't a perfect physical match for Stoker's repellent yet compelling monster.

2. Dracula (1931). Bela Lugosi remains an icon for good reason. Tod Browning's film has its detractors, but Wendigo feels it does justice to the Balderston-Deane version of the story, while Lugosi's strange gestures and cadences define the essential inhumanity of the vampire. Bela makes you believe you're dealing with someone who is undead.

3. [Horror of] Dracula (1958). The neat thing about vampires is that you can have more than one definitive performance. Christopher Lee's Dracula is archetypal in its own right, and counts for Wendigo as the first modern vampire, the period setting of Terrence Fisher's film notwithstanding. More so than Lugosi, Lee personifies the rape/domination fantasy aspect of the vampire and conveys the commanding sexiness inherent in Bram Stoker's concept despite the author's sometimes unpleasant descriptions of his villain. Lee's more virile vampire is what makes him modern.

4&5. The Vampire Lovers (1970) and Twins of Evil (1971) are prime examples of the forbidden-fruit aspect of the female vampire. These Hammer films from the "Karnstein" series set new standards for vampire sensuality and remain for Wendigo the best lesbian-vampire films. Twins goes the extra mile in its emphasis on the threat of incest as Peter Cushing struggles with the temptation presented by his niece. In these films the female vampire represents a menace to everyone, the classic succubus for men, the supreme transgression for women.

6. Fright Night (1985). Tom Holland's semi-comic horror hit simultaneously looks back to the classical tradition while steering the vampire in a new direction with its innovation of what some people call the "grrr face" as the true visage of the otherwise seductive vampire. Besides the homage to horror hosts of the past, Wendigo likes this film's insistence that faith is necessary to make holy symbols effective against vampires. It was a necessary corrective at a point when all you seemed to need was to cross any two objects together (fingers, even) to turn the undead.

7. Near Dark (1987). Kathryn Bigelow's cult classic pretty much set a template for much of future vampire cinema and vampire literature. Wendigo says it's the first film to really play with the "pack" concept of a society of vampires and their interaction with each other, and the first to effectively imagine white-trash vampires. At the same time, it revives the romantic concept of vampires in the form of an "innocent" vampire that can be redeemed by love.

8. Blade (1998). The first action-adventure vampire movie and as such an undeniable landmark, Stephen Norrington's vehicle for Wesley Snipes also set a new standard of glamour for modern-day vampires, the violent power fantasy making immortality even more alluring.

9. Underworld (2003). Replace Blade with a female action hero and you take the vampire adventure genre to yet another level. In addition, Len Wiseman's film brings cinema in line with the burgeoning urban fantasy/paranormal romance genre by introducing all manner of lineages and bloodlines and the mythology of the ancient feud between vampires and werewolves. On top of all this is Kate Beckinsale in that outfit! Who can argue with that?

10. Let the Right One In (2008). Yes, this is Wendigo's winner of the great vampire kulturkampf of last year, though I must remind you that he likes both this and Twilight. The Swedish film gets the nod and makes the list because Wendigo was impressed with its more "realistic" presentation of a vampire-human romance as a relationship of profoundly disturbed individuals in an evocatively cold and harsh setting.

That's the list of someone who has read many things vampiric and thought a lot about genre fiction in general. Wendigo acknowledges an Anglo-American bias (the last film being the exception) but believes that his favorites will stand up to the competition from Europe, Mexico or elsewhere. Any such list is bound to be provocative as well as informative, and I'll be keeping my friend appraised of any responses to his list. I think he'd make a great movie blogger himself, and if we get a dialogue going we may yet draw him into the fray on a more regular basis.

THE HOUSE WITH LAUGHING WINDOWS (1976)

This October, for many movie bloggers, the theme is Italian horror. Kevin J. "Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies" Olson has declared a blog-a-thon on the subject at his own place, and that inspired me to take a look at this item from Pupi Avati, who has been only an occasional horror director during his still-active career. That may explain why La casa dalle finestre che ridono seems less generic than its genre peers. Its rural setting rules out the decadent modernity of the giallo, and his deliberate build-up denies audiences the regular jolts and assaults they might get from zombie or cannibal films. It's more of a writers' film than a lot of Italian product, advancing the story by narrative rather than stunning you with visual style or gore effects. It aims at instilling a mild sense of dread, but not so much that you aren't shocked when Avati actually wants to shock you.

The story takes us to a small Italian village dominated by a dwarf, Solmi, who took the lead in rebuilding after the German occupation during World War II. The SS used the village's San Sebastian church as a headquarters and reportedly executed prisoners there. This fact is mentioned, but that promising angle is never developed in the film. In any event, a restoration project is under way that has revealed a fresco portraying the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, painted by the village's most famous son (for all we know), Buono Legnani. The priest would rather cover up the violent scene, but Solmi thinks that a proper restoration would make the town a tourist attraction. He brings Stefano, an art restorer (Lino Capolicchio) in to do the work, but Stefano's project brings back bad memories and wild rumors about Legnani from some people, along with vague hints about a "house with laughing windows." We know Legnani was messed up because we hear a monologue of his over the opening credits, in which he talks about his colors flowing through his veins, to purify death and be purified by death, while we see a man being stabbed repeatedly and howling in agony. As it happens, Legnani is known as a "painter of agony." Was that him we saw stabbed? Could it have been him stabbing the victim? It's too soon to tell.

Stefano's curiosity begins to go beyond the St. Sebastian painting when a friend suffers a suspicious "suicide" just before he was to tell our hero about the house with laughing windows. Despite getting evicted from his hotel room on a spurious pretext, he presses on while staying at an old woman's house deeper in the countryside. He hooks up with the village schoolteacher, and later hooks up with her considerably younger replacement, Francesca (Francesca Marciano, later the screenwriter of a fine 2003 film, I'm Not Scared). An alcoholic handyman, Coppola (co-write Gianni Cavina), spooks him with stories of the evil painter and his more evil sisters. He finally leads Stefano to the H.L.W., where the Legnanis supposedly buried the bodies of their victims -- models who were killed to inspire Buono's paintings. While Buono himself apparently died long ago after setting himself on fire -- no body was found, however, -- Stefano grows certain that the sisters, whom Buono painted as the tormentors of St. Sebastian, are still alive, and possibly still killing people under the influence of some obscure Brazilian cult. It's a hard sell for most of the village, especially since one of his primary sources is one of the most disreputable men in town. But as he delves deeper, and as he and Coppola actually find bodies buried, people suddenly start disappearing fast....

That passing remark about the SS early in the picture hints at a subtext to The House With Laughing Windows, something to do with a community's complicity with atrocity. The Legnanis themselves weren't collaborators, Buono having burnt himself up in 1931 and the sisters disappearing not long after, but it becomes terribly obvious by the end of the movie that the town has in some way, passively or otherwise, collaborated with its own homegrown evil, maybe for no other reason than to protect the reputation of a famous artist. For most of it, I was willing to believe that the mad artist himself might still be at work, though the truth of the matter proves at least as appalling as that possibility. In any event, the painter isn't the monster of the story. The fundamental horror of it ties into the stranger's fear of strangers, the isolation of a visitor in some location where he feels unwelcome or excluded, a primal sensation that everyone is against you. A horror film is where you can have such fears confirmed without having to confess them yourself.

As mad painter Buono Legnani, Tonino Corazzari burns with an unwholesome artistic passion. Actually, in this shot he just burns with ignited alcohol.

Without many of the usual sensationalistic or exploitative elements (the actresses don't even do nude scenes, and the one revelation of a woman's breast comes at the worst possible moment for our hero), Avati's film may strike some horror fans as slow. But it's an atmospheric piece even though the location isn't particularly picturesque, and it's paced carefully to ensure that you will be shocked when Avati is ready. You get the sepiatone stabbing over the credits, then one modestly bloody death early on, and then it's all exposition and character development until an out-of-nowhere scene in which Lidio, an irreverent imbecile of an altar boy (who boasts to Stefano that he threw a live animal into his friend's coffin) rapes Francesca.

Pietro Brambilla as Lidio tries to have his way with Francesca Marciano. See the next photo for his comeuppance.

From that point the film escalates its brutality while pushing Stefano deeper into paranoia as his enemy proves maddeningly omnipotent and he ends up looking like a fool (if not a suspect) to the authorities. The big revelation scene that shows who's been doing what and why is as nasty and nutty as you could want, and it may be a bigger jolt than it otherwise would be had Avati not kept things at a pretty mundane level for most of the movie.

This is an atypical Italian horror because it requires and rewards patience, and while some might say that it's more culturally Italian because of the rural village setting, a properly-dubbed presentation of it might actually prove more accessible to global audiences because it lacks some of the genre elements that may confuse or turn off non-Italian audiences. But I think that even genre connoisseurs will find something to appreciate in Avati's movie.

And here's the Italian trailer, uploaded to YouTube by sneakybaxter: