Shameless Self Expression

Maribel Martin has just married Simon Andreu, but when they get to the hotel for their honeymoon and he starts making wedding night advances, she freaks the hell out. Eventually they go back to Andreu’s family estate, and Martin starts to have dreams at night where a beautiful woman entices her to kill Andreu. Before long the couple are running into that woman naked on the beach. She’s Carmilla (Alexandra Basterdo) and she’s got plans in mind for the newlywed couple.   Notorious 1972 Spanish version of J. Sheridan Fanu’s Carmilla from writer-director Vincente Aranda doesn’t particularly deliver the goods from a Sapphic vampire perspective. Thankfully it delivers in enough other ways to earn a soft recommendation at the very least. It really could’ve been an exploitation classic, unfortunately the narrative is all over the shop (the reveal of a new teacher comes far too late), the pacing is slow, and as I said it’s not one of the better displays of Sapphic vampirism you’re going...

Local GP William Prince comes home to find his young daughter has been kidnapped. His secretary Jacqueline Scott (in her film debut) receives a disturbing phone call claiming that the child has been buried alive with only a few hours left. The race to locate her burial site begins...well, after a lot of standing around and talking. Jim Backus plays the local sheriff who has a grudge against Prince from way back, concerning the deaths of both men’s wives (who were sisters to one another).   Schlock producer-director William Castle ( “House on Haunted Hill” , “I Saw What You Did” ) has an off day with this slow and unhelpfully complicated 1958 thriller. The cast looks good on paper but no one has a very good showing here. William Prince (a good actor elsewhere) is implausibly calm and too flat, whilst a fence-swinging Jacqeline Scott is at the other extreme from moment one. Scripted by Robb White (Castle’s “House on Haunted Hill” ) from an Anthony Boucher novel, the p...