Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again host a fundraiser for Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and providing them with happy homes.
Today’s theme: Birth Year (1972)
I mean, how could I pass up a movie with that title?
Directed by Bepi Fontana alongside multi-hyphenate artist, poet, and shamanic novelist Mario Mercier (who would go on to make La Papesse), this is1970s French euro-sleaze fantasy at its most unhinged. It sits right in that sweet spot alongside Jean Rollin, The Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay and the most paranoid, acid-drenched occult exploitation flicks of the era. Trying to map out the narrative is a bit like trying to read tea leaves while riding a tilt-a-whirl, especially since the surviving footage is a battered, color-faded, yellow-tinted transfer of an unfinished 16mm print.
That means this is the good stuff.
An elderly magician/alchemist named Axel takes a bullied young orphan named Raymond under his wing, raising him in the left hand path. When his teacher passes on, Raymond inherits a heavy burden: he must act as the guardian of La Goulve—the Daughter of the Golem. Rather than doing anything sensible with this cosmic power, Raymond uses his newfound dark sorcery to navigate his disastrous love life. His girlfriend is a two-timing nightmare, he’s desperately lusting after his cousin and he runs in terror from soaking-wet, topless French babes.
Naturally, the solution is to invite a comely female relative over to participate in an escalating series of gender-bending blood rituals. What follows is a chaotic maelstrom of sacrificial birds, blood magic, naked snake dances, colored smoke and people taking off their faces. So basically sixty minutes of a bad trip, scored by Guy Boulanger and Jean‑François Gaël with drone upon drone.
Supposedly, c-director Bepi Fontana ran off to make jazz records and left the project unfinished and one of the actresses allegedly freaked out at the premiere and got the film seized under French obscenity laws. That means that the surviving print feels like a piece of cursed 16mm found footage. Cinematographer Paul Soulignac’s visuals melt through oversaturated colors, whip-pans and jagged jump-cuts. Blood sprays, wind roars, lightning crashes, and the screen pulsates with a raw ritual energy.
It feels like you’re watching whatever is inside the head of the band Electric Wizard.
Is La Goulve a masterpiece? In its current malformed, blurry, ultra-rare state, it’s almost impossible to score fairly. But for fans of French sleaze, avant-garde occult cinema, and ambient horror atmospheres, it’s an undeniable badge of honor. There’s a very good reason doom-metal titans like Electric Wizard worship this kind of raw, weird magic. They played it as part of their Electric Grindhosue Cinema at Roadburn 2013, along with The Sinful Dwarf, Mark of the Devil Part II (under the German title Hexen geschändet und zu Tode gequält which means Witches Raped and Tortured to Death), Janie, Take An Easy Ride, Erotic Rites of Frankenstein, The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave, Hunchback Of The Morgue and the Lasse Braun shorts Perversion-Violence, The Vikings Trilogy, Lady M, Hooked!, The Maniac and Psycho Doll.
