October 31: A Horror Film that Leaves You With a Smile

Known as Girly outside of the UK, this movie was the dream project of cinematographer-turned-director (turned cinematographer) Freddie Francis. He wanted a movie that he had complete creative control over, so he worked with writer Brian Comport to build the movie around Oakley Court. The film is based on the two-act play Happy Family by Maisie Mosco, which Comport had novelized as Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny, and Girly.

Mumsy (Ursula Howells), Nanny (Pat Heywood), Sonny (Howard Trevor) and Girly (Vanessa Howard) have turned their lives into an elaborate role-playing game they call The Game. The rules aren’t really clear, been if the first one is to play the game. They live in a secluded house in the countryside and Girly lures in men who are dressed as schoolboys and forced to play as New Friends. If they refuse, they are sent to the angels in playground games that are turned into killing rituals and captured by Sonny on camera so that the family can enjoy the snuff films that result.

Girly and Sonny attend a party in London where a prostitute (Michael Bryant) is attracted to her. He talks his client (Imogen Hassall) into following them to a playground. He’s so drunk he thinks that he’s killed the woman when it was really Girly and Sonny.  They make him play The Game and keep her body, using it to remind him that they could get him arrested at any moment.

Mumsy makes it known that she wants to have sex with the New Friend, as he is now known, so he turns the family against itself by sleeping with both her and Girly. Sonny tries to kill the New Friend before Girly kills him. Now, New Friend must bury Sonny under a fountain where he sees just how many New Friends have been killed. Nanny tries to kill Mumsy, only for Girly to kill her as well and use her head for cooking stock.

Mumsy and Girly decide to share New Friend, setting a schedule for days of the week that they can sleep with him. However, they will surely get bored of him. He already has a plan for that.

Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly was released as Britain had a backlash against indecency and sexuality in movies. There’s a moment where Girly sucks Sonny’s finger that really upset censors. If they’d only seen the play, where the incest isn’t suggested but shown, they would have freaked. That’s the scene, however, that everyone talked about. It didn’t help that this played double features with Goodbye Gemini, another movie about murderous siblings, but one that has even more brother obsessing over sister sexual content.

The film disappeared after its failure and as a result, Vanessa Howard retired. She didn’t know for a long time that the film did much better in the U.S. where it was retitled Girly. It came out on VHS in the U.S. but UK fans couldn’t even find a copy for a Freddie Francis festival in 2004. It took until 2010 for Salvation Films to release it there on DVD.

I love that in 2015, an event was held at Oakley Court to pay tribute to Vanessa Howard and Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly. There was the dedication of a memorial bench in Howard’s memory, a trip to some of the film’s shooting locations,and a dinner themed around the Family’s meal with New Friend.

This remained one of Francis’ favorite movies.

October 30: A Horror Film Directed by Koji Shiraishi

This is based on the Japanese urban legend known as Kuchisake-onna. She was a woman who missed her samurai husband while he was away at war and began to sleep with other men. When he returned and learned of how she was stepping beyond the bounds of their marriage, he sliced her face. She came back from the dead as an onryo who covered her face and appeared to people, asking if she was beautiful. If they answered no, they died. If they said yes, she removed her mask and asked again. Now, if they say no, they will die. If they say yes? They will be given a face like hers.

This legend dates back to Japan’s Edo period but came back in the late 1970s, when rumors of her reappearance led to children needing to be walked home by parents from school.

In this movie, rumors of Kuchisake-onna have spread through a small town. School teacher Noboru Matsuzaki (Haruhiko Kato) hears a voice asking “Am I pretty?” while students begin to disappear. One of the students, Mika (Rie Kuwana) doesn’t want to go home to her abusive mother (Chiharu Kawai). The teacher she tells this to, Kyoko Yamashita (Eriko Sato) has lost her daughter to her ex-husband. She hesitates in dealing with Mika and the girls runs away, meeting Kuchisake-onna.

Noboru and Kyoko start to look for the missing children and learn that Kuchisake-onna can possess other women. That’s when Noboru reveals that a woman in a photograph who may be the evil demon is actually his mother Taeko Matsuzaki. She used to abuse him until one day she disappeared. Later, she came to him and asked him to kill her. He slit his mother’s mouth and stabbed her, then dressed her body up in a coat and mask, and hid it in the closet. He thought that would stop the demon but it has only led to decades of possession and torment for women and children.

Directed by Kōji Shiraishi, who wrote the movie with Naoyuki Yokota, this followed his movie Noroi: The Curse.

October 29: A Horror Film That Has Multiple Beheadings

Tag starts with an entire schoolbus full of girls making fun of Mitsuko (Reina Triendl) for being a dreamer before all of them — like fifty people — are beheaded as Mitsuko stands screaming and covered in blood.

This is not the last time that she will be the only survivor.

She wanders through the woods, avoiding a deadly wind, and meets Aki (Yuki Sakura), Sur (Ami Tomite) and Taeko (Aki Hiraoka). The girls discuss predetermination and how they could all die at any moment. Before they go back to class, Sur shares her hypothesis that fate can be tricked by simply doing something one would never normally do.

Back in class, the teacher pulls out a gigantic weapon when no one is paying attention and kills everyone with Sur and Taeko saving Mitsuko, who is again the only survivor as teachers and the wind kill everyone she knows. Mitsuko wanders into town where a cop recognizes her as someone else, Keiko (Mariko Shinoda). She is taken to her wedding, where Aki is her bridesmaid and encourages her to kill all of the other bridesmaids to save herself from being married to the pigheaded groom inside a coffin before the teachers return and attack again. Aki and Keiko defeat all of them as our heroine runs away from the church.

Keiko, who was once Mitsuko, now becomes Izumi (Erina Mano). She’s trapped in a deadly marathon with Aki, Sur and Taeko as they run from the pig husband, the teachers and the wind. Izumi finds her way into a cave where zombie girls try to kill her, claiming that while she lives, they remain undead. Aki saves her and they travel through several parallel world until she demands that Izumi pulls the cables from her arms, killing her and opening a doorway to where she meets a young and old version of a man who is playing as her in a game called Tag that has Mitsuko, Keiko and Izumi as the characters. More than a century ago, Izumi was a girl he admired. He took her DNA and that of her friends and made clones for his 3D game, which is played by men throughout the world. The final part of his game is that she will make love to him.

She then changes the game and each version of herself through all of the different moments of the film kill themselves all at once. She wakes up in a pure white world.

Sion Sono, who directed and wrote Tag, is wild. Seriously, this never stops and never gets the least normal. For a movie that starts with so many heads being removed, you’d think that was the highest point. It’s not. Somehow Sono made four other movies in 2015 and it was inspired by 2008’s The Chasing World.

October 28: A Horror Film That Features Helpful Ghosts

Directed and written by Mike Cramer, who also plays Detective Pete McGarry in the movie, Teenage Ghost Punk is about what happens when Carol (Adria Dawn) divorces her husband and takes her kids Amanda (Grace Madigan) and Adam (Noah Kitsos) from the life they’ve known to a new house and school.

As if fitting in at school wasn’t hard enough, the family starts finding evidence that their new home is haunted. They hire Medium Madame Lidnar (Lynda Shadrake) and a team of paranormal experts, all of whom find nothing. It’s Amanda that finally meets the punk rock band — the Raging Specters — led by Brian (Jack Cramer).

Getting over the guy she left back at home, who is now dating her best friend, means that Amanda is perhaps ready for new love. Who knew it would be with a dead punk rocker? Should her mother and teachers be worried about her? Or is this a healthy relationship?

You can say that this isn’t really punk rock and that it’s all kind of silly, but it’s a teen movie about ghosts and love. You know, maybe that means it can just be fun. This is fun. I won’t be cynical. I mean, a guitarist could be hit with lightning on the roof and haunt a house waiting for the right lady to come into his life. Or whatever a ghost has.

Actually, this really gets in an interesting idea that Brian dated Amanda’s mom when he was alive and now, he can only see her on Halloween as a party is thrown in the house. I know this is a low budget family friendly movie, but I ended up enjoying it way more than I thought that I would.

You can watch this on Tubi.

October 27: A Found Footage Horror Film That Isn’t From America, Japan or the UK

Director and actor Adrian Țofei plays someone who I hope is not all himself, a director and actor that wants to make a movie with Anne Hathaway so badly that he films a found footage camcorder proof of concept with three local actresses, Sonya (Sonia Teodoriu), Flory (Florentina Hariton) and Alexandra (Alexandra Stroe).

The creator comes from a background in method acting and theatre. On a small budget, he was the director, producer, writer, lead actor, editor, cinematographer and most other jobs usually performed by a film crew. He had never shot with a camera before and met the actresses for the first time while they were doing the movie. He also only kept the original takes in his final cut. This was all set up with months of online preparation.

I really think that he’s a maniac.

His filmmaking method? Working for months on an alternative psychological reality for the actors including himself so that when they start to improvise, he just records it. The action is shot in English and the safe word is basically shifting dialogue to Romanian.

Țofei developed this character over 5 years, first as a monologue and then as a one man school he called The Monster. When he decided to make the movie, he moved back home and started living the same life as the character to get into his head.

Basically, Adrian is in love with Anne Hathaway to the point that no other woman will do. Notably he doesn’t have sex with any of these women in his movie, as he belongs only to Anne. What follows is some of the most disturbing cinema I’ve seen in some time, moments so cringe-worthy that I felt like I couldn’t stop thinking about them. What a strange film and I hope it was really just a movie and not Țofei working out his real obsession.

I wonder if Anne has seen it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

October 26: A Horror Film Released by Something Weird on VHS

La venganza del sexo (Revenge of Sex) was released by Forbes-Unistar in the U.S. with the amazing title of The Curious Dr. Humpp.

Dr. Humpp (Dr. Zoide in the original, played by Aldo Barbero and wearing a wild outfit) plans on giving mankind eternal life using the power of the human libido. He has kidnapped several people*, including Rachel (Gloria Prat) and her boyfriend, a few hippies, a couple of lesbians and a woman with photos of naked men, and plans on forcing them to make love as much and as often as possible.

He also has a monster to kidnap these young sexual folks.

George (Ricardo Bauleo) is a reporter who follows Dr. Humpp after watching him buy boner pills at a pharmacy. Why does a sex doctor need to buy these things? He follows him to his secret lab and gets captured. He and Rachel make a plan and while George is getting it on with the nurse (Susana Beltrán), he learns that she wants to escape and be part of their plan. The monster has also become obsessed with a stripper that he captured.

Directed by Emilio Vieyra (who wrote this) and Jerald Intrator, this is a movie filled with dialogue like, “I must position this positive electrode against the nerves of the libido. If this experiment succeeds, I’ll not only be able to restrain lust, but also turn humans into veritable screwing machines!,” “Sex dominates the world! And now, I dominate sex!” and “It was I who first discovered how to make a man impotent by hiding his hat. I was the first one to explain the connection between excessive masturbation and entering politics.”

Fog. A monster that plays guitar. A strange and haunting soundtrack that’s as much jazz as early electronic music and I have no way of making it fit into a single category. A movie that tries to look like an Italian horror movie but also has nudity in nearly every scene. And the main power lurking in the shadows? A brain kept alive in fluid. And yes, one of my favorites, ether kidnapping.

The love that I have for this movie cannot be calculated by the logic of alphabets and the weights and measures of the human race.

*All of these scenes are inserts added when the movie made its way to the U.S. You can see Kim Pope (Intimate Teenager) and Kim Lewid (A Thousand Pleasures).

October 25: A Horror Film about a Killer Doll (That’s not Chucky or the Puppet Masters)

Directed by William Mims (who was in the art department for The Beastmaster and produced and shot plenty of swimsuit videos) and written by Sidney Mims, Death Doll has a poster that promises Chucky and a film that delivers near-giallo.

Young widow Trish (Andrea Walters) is being stalked and asks her brother-in-law Dillon (William Dance) to help her. It turns out that someone keeps leaving a doll behind and she keeps finding it, which as you can imagine freaks her out. Those same dolls are being left at crime scenes.

There’s also a fortune telling machine that absolutely terrified me on film and if I ever saw it in person, I would run the other way. It also has a doll inside it and can tell when your palm isn’t facing the right way. When your hand does, it tells you just how screwed you are and how doom is coming for you. No thanks. Weird dolls and strange future reading mechanical devices? I’m real good with not being around any of that.

You can watch this on YouTube.

October 24: A Swedish Horror Film

Monica (Ulrike Butz) and Helga (Marie Forså) are the guests at a huge castle where a will is about to be read. The girls will need to stay there for a year to claim the estate of Baroness Varga, who was burned at the stake for being a vampire hundreds of years ago. They’re joined by folklore scholar Dr. Julia Malenkow (Anke Syring) and her brother Peter (Nico Wolf) crash in the woods nearby. They are descendants of the women who killed Varga, which probably won’t go all that great with the castle’s maid, Wanda (Nadia Henkowa), who conducts nightly lesbian rituals devoted to the fallen blood countess.

Also known as Vampire Ecstasy, this feels like it fits right in with Jess Franco and Jean Rollin’s vampire women. I say that as a compliment. Unlike many of his New York City-shot movies, director and writer Joe Sarno shot this in an actual castle owned by the relatives of producer Christian Nebe.

Other titles include The Curse of the Black Sisters, Plaything of the Devil and Veil of Blood.

You can watch this on Tubi.