Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.
Today’s theme: 1960s
Mickey Hargitay had a life. In the first twenty years of his life, he was a part of an acrobatic act with his brothers, a champion speed skater, a soccer player and a resistance fighter during World War II. He made it to America and settled in Cleveland, working as a plumber and carpenter. He married Mary Birge and started a new acrobatic act with her before being inspired by Steve Reeves and going into weight lifting, becoming a pin-up model and then part of Mae West’s crew of hunky muscular men.
Jayne Mansfield saw him perform with West and said to her waiter, “I’ll have a steak and that tall man on the left.” He used his building skills to create a Pink Palace for her, including a heart shaped swimming pool, and they had three kids together, Miklós,Zoltán, and most famously Mariska, who has been on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit forever.
Jayne demanded that Mickey be in her movies and she had enough power to make it happen. After a few films, he was able to appear in Italian movies like Revenge of The Gladiators, Sheriff Won’t Shoot, Three Bullets for Ringo, Black Magic Rites, Delirium and many more.
However, Hargitay said that when he made this, he “wasn’t any more of an accomplished actor than a taxi driver.”
He’s being kind. He’s amazing in this.
First off, I have no idea what American audiences would think of the idea that a horror magazine is shooting photos for a story. Italian audiences would know that Daniel Parks (Alfredo Rizzo) published a fumetti (more accurately fotoromanzi and fumetti neri, as Raoul wears a costume like Kriminal at one point)a photo comic book that often did horror stories. His entire team — writer Rick (Walter Brandi), secretary Edith (Luisa Baratto), photographer Dermott (Ralph Zucker), assistants Perry (Nando Angelini) and Raoul (Albert Gordon), and models Suzy (Barbara Nelli), Annie (Femi Benussi), Nancy (Rita Klein) and Kinojo (Moa Tahi) — is trying to find the perfect castle to shoot a murder scene in.
They find one that appears just like their wildest nightmares and Perry scales his way into it after no one knocks. Why you would just jump into someone’s castle is beyond me, but this an Italian gothic horror movie, after all. They’re soon caught by the striped shirt wearing henchmen of the castle’s owner, Travis Anderson (Hargitay). He demands that they leave until he sees Edith, who in a movie coincidence used to be his fiancee.
Everyone can stay for the night but the dungeons — where the Crimson Executioner killed innumerable people and was put to death inside his own iron maiden — are forbidden. So the first thing the crew does is go down there and start taking pictures. They disturb the seal of the Crimson Executioner and that’s when Anderson loses his mind, puts on a pro wrestling outfit and starts screaming things like, “Mankind is made up of inferior creatures, spiritually and physically deformed, who would have corrupted the harmony of my perfect body.” It’s Hargitay doing the wild gestures with the voice of Anthony La Penna.
Seriously, Hargitay goes for it in this, killing people in magically lunatic ways, like a gigantic spider web with an obviously fake spider that is all rigged up to shoot arrows at anyone that moves the strings, as well as ladling boiling water onto women’s backs and having a poisoned death massive called the Lover of Death. All the while, he is flipping out and cutting promos on everyone who came into his home and ruined the time he has to escape the world, oil up his body, flex in front of mirrors and spend time with all of his identically dressed muscular hunky servants.
Filmed in Psychovision, this was directed by Massimo Pupillo (Terror-Creatures from the Grave, Lady Morgan’s Vengeance) using the name Max Hunter. The script is by Romano Migliorini and Roberto Natale, who also wrote Lisa and the Devil.
A nascent slasher at the end of the Italian gothic cycle that looks as pop art colorful and has all the lurid BDSM promise of those police black and white magazines that are pervy than any hardcore pornography because they can’t show it all so they decide to go demented, like having spinning knives cut off bras and slowly reveals nipples, all with jazzy music by Gino Peguri and incredible cinematography by Luciano Trasatti.
This was shot at Balsorano Castle, a place that has seen so many scummy movies for how gorgeous it is. I mean, Sister Emanuelle, Lady Frankenstein, The Devil’s Wedding Night, The Lickerish Quartet, Ator: The Blade Master, Crypt of the Vampire, Black Magic Rites, The Bloodsucker Leads the Dance, Baby Love, Metti lo diavolo tuo ne lo mio inferno, C’è un fantasma nel mio letto, Lady Barbara, 7 Golden Women Against Two 07: Treasure Hunt, Farfallon and Pensiero d’amore.
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