aka Rome Against Rome, Roma Contro Roma, Night Star: Goddess Of Elektra
Director Giuseppe Vari Writers Ferruccio de Martino, Massimo de Rita, Piero Pierotti, Marcello Sartarelli
Cast John Drew Barrymore (Aderbad), Susy Andersen (Tullia), Ettore Manni (Gaius), Ida Galli (Rhama), Mino Doro (Lutetius), Ivano Staccioli (Sirion), Philippe Hersent (Azer)
“Unconquerable warriors of the damned!” screams the US poster for War Of The Zombies. “SEE the undead cross swords with the living! SEE the goddess of the night whose gaze mummifies men!” Sounds to me like the premise for one of the most incredible horror films ever. Imagine then your reaction when the film unspools and it’s YET ANOTHER ITALIAN SWORD AND SANDAL MOVIE! As if American theatre screens and televisions weren’t inundated enough in the early to mid Sixties with peplum-themed product, the films’ distributors – in War Of The Zombies’ instance, American International Pictures – were forced, as the peplum cycle was grinding towards its demise, to primp up or flat-out lie about their content.
Luckily War Of The Zombies from 1964 is not just another Sons of Hercules muscle-fest, but an ambitious fantasy-horror ranking comfortably near Mario Bava’s Hercules In The Haunted World and Riccardo Freda’s The Witches Curse. In War Of The Zombies, however, there’s no Hercules, Samson or Ursus as the beefcake-flavoured focal point. Instead the film’s hero is Roman centurion Gaius, sent without his troops to the troubled Salmacia province to investigate Rome’s missing tribute. In the opening sequence Roman troops carrying treasure from Salmacia back to Rome are butchered by barbarians, stripped of their armour and their bodies stolen by deformed scavengers. It appears the entire province, including its weak Roman pretern Letitius and his double-crossing snake of a wife Tullia, is under the spell of a devilish cult dedicated to the Moon Goddess and “daughter of Isis”, whose Oath of Blood is performed under the blazing high beam of its enormous stone bust’s single Third Eye. Through Letitius’ slave girl Rhama, held in a trance by the cult’s high priest Aderbad, Gaius learns of its plan to revive the spirits of the dead Roman soldiers and lead them into an ultimate showdown against their own living comrades.
Sounds incredible, and to a certain extent it is. This IS a peplum, let’s not forget, and as such there are dry patches of wooden dialogue and stiff-as-corpses emoting to suffer. Once we wade through the regulation courtships and betrayals, however, we’re presented with the payoff: a magnificent low-rent but surprisingly effective battle between the living and the dead, smothered with superimposed colour swirls of saturated reds and blues (Mario Bava’s favourite palette for supernatural effects). Rather than rotting corpses, the Moon Goddess’ army is presented as ghostly figures, their otherworldliness underscored by slow motion cameras and an eerie echo-laden soundtrack. Just as impressive is the over-the-top performance of their leader, high priest Aderbad, played by John Drew Barrymore (son of John Barrymore, father of Drew Barrymore) in one of his numerous Italian film appearances between numerous cocktails in the early Sixties. Quasi-psychedelic, and several notches above your ordinary Italian sword and sandal, is the zombie-themed peplum chiller Rome Against Rome, or War Of The Zombies.
aka La Frusta E Il Corpo, What, Night Is The Phantom, Son Of Satan
Director “John M. Old”/Mario Bava Writers “Julian Berry”/Ernesto Gastaldi, “Robert Hugo”/Ugo Guerra, “Martin Hardy”/Luciano Martino
Cast Daliah Lavi (Nevenka Menliff), Christopher Lee (Kurt Menliff), Tony Kendall (Christian Menliff), “Isli Oberon”/Ida Galli (Katia), “Alan Collins”/Luciano Pigozzi (Losat)
We are proud to present two early films from the master of Italian horror Mario Bava, both starring the legendary Christopher Lee. First is a gothic melodrama with a lurid undercurrent of sexual perversion: The Whip And The Body from 1963, was made after his early masterpieces of gothic horror Black Sunday and Black Sabbath, and while not as well known, will certainly be a memorable one here on Schlock Treatment.
As a horror tale the gothic elements are amplified: a family riddled with guilt, jealousy, betrayal, not to mention incest and madness. Disgraced nobleman Kurt returns to the family castle to find his brother Christian is marrying his former sex slave (and family member) Nevenka. The family still hasn’t forgiven Kurt for seducing the servant’s daughter Tania who subsequently killed herself. Every member of the family and staff have a motive for killing Kurt, so when he is stabbed through the heart with Tania’s dagger, no one is surprised. That is, until Kurt returns and continues his sado-masochistic obsession with Nevenka from beyond the grave. “Why do you torture me?” she implores a red gel-soaked phantom Kurt, while the family is picked off one by one in the ultimate love-hate death pact. Other people are Hell, it’s often argued, and particularly when it’s your own blood. My advice to the family would be: don’t shit where you eat.
It’s hard to believe this film was made in 1963. There’s a ghoulish amount of blood, not to mention the rotting corpse, but most shocking of all is the beach scene of Kurt whipping Nevenka in a frenzy before making love to her – it’s like From Here To Eternity, Opus Dei style. Lee plays his Sadean archetype with superior menace, a remarkable performance and ripe for rediscovery. The Whip is lacking the starkly memorable presence of Barbara Steele – Daliah Lavi as Nevenka even looks like Steele with her stately manner and wide, tragic eyes, but is sadly no match – and missing the elaborate and truly terrifying setpieces of Black Sabbath, relying instead on tired spookshop techniques like tree branches on windows and secret passageways.
However it’s a minor classic in Bava’s filmography, and stunning to look at. Trained as a cinematographer, Bava sets up each shot like a painting and bathes them in his customary red-and-blue palette. It’s hard to argue it’s art when the film’s so sleazily and joyously B-grade, but I’m sure you’ll agree we’re broadening the definition of “art” tonight with Bava’s kinky shocker The Whip And The Body.
Hercules In The Haunted World
Italy 1961 colour
aka Hercules In The Center Of The Earth, Ercole Al Centro Della Terra, Hercules vs. The Vampires
Directors Mario Bava, Franco Prosperi Writers Mario Bava, Sandro Continenza, Franco Prosperi, Duccio Tessari
Cast Reg Park (Hercules), Christopher Lee (King Lico), Leonora Ruffo (Princess Deianira), George Ardisson (Thesus), Rosalba Neri (Helena)
We backtrack a few years in the Mario Bava filmography to 1961, and an early film for Bava as director. By the time Hercules In The Haunted World was released the sword and sandal (or “peplum”) genre was at its midpoint, with Italian production companies turning out one sausage-meat-squeezed-into-a-human-skinsuit actioner after the other. Only a few rise to the top of the B-film mudpool to be recognized as minor classics, and this, my dear Schlock fiends, is one of them.
The story is pure peplum with little deviation from the rules. Demigod Hercules travels to the kingdom of Ecalia with his friend Theseus to be reunited with his love, the king’s daughter Diarina. After fending off would-be assassins, he arrives to find the king dead and Diarina in a death-like trance under the control of her regent uncle Lyco (a creature described as “the spirit of evil on Earth” played, appropriately enough, by Christopher Lee). The film unfolds as a predictably mythic quest to find a magic rock from Hades, the world of the dead presided over by the god Pluto, to restore Diarina to life.
It all sounds like a hundred muscleman actioners and that’s exactly how we’d remember it without director Mario Bava at the helm. Bava had worked as cinematographer on some of the more strikingly visual sword and sandal films of the late Fifties. Hercules In The Haunted World was his first as director, and despite an embarrassingly low budget to work with, the talented cameraman was able to work miracles. Aside from the creepy studio-bound sets bathed in gels and dry ice, there’s subtle camera movements and breathtaking compositions – take the moment, for instance, when Diarina emerges from her sarcophagus and floats towards Lyco. Then there’s Bava’s trademark macabre touches, like blood seeping from vines holding the souls of the Underworld, and the final journey through Hell is a sight to behold.
British-born Reg Park was a former runner-up to Steve Reeves in the Mr Universe contest before winning the title three times, and so can more than hold his own in the oiled muscleman stakes. As always, Christopher Lee is at his cadaver-like best, playing a semi-dead bloodsucker at the height of his Dracula fame (and pre-empting the film’s alternate title Hercules vs The Vampires). Tragically his distinctive voice dubbed by someone else, and even more disconcerting is his pageboy wig, but these are minor quibbles – it’s a stunning frightfest stapled to a muscleman actioner as we catch Hercules In The Haunted World.
aka The Horrible Secret of Dr. Hichcock, The Secret of Dr. Hichcock, The Terrible Secret of Dr. Hichcock, The Terror of Dr. Hichcock, L’Orribile Segreto del Dr. Hichcock Director “Robert Hampton”/Riccardo Freda Writer “Julyan Perry”/Ernesto Gastaldi
Cast Barbara Steele (Cynthia Hichcock), Robert Flemyng (Professor Bernard Hichcock), “Montgomery Glenn”/Silvano Tranquilli (Dr. Kurt Lowe), “Teresa Fitzgerald”/Maria Teresa Vianello (Margherita Hichcock), Harriet “White”/Medin (Martha the maid)
Good evening, and welcome to an Schlock Treatment All Italia special with two films from horror specialist Riccardo Freda.
We’ve often remarked here on Schlock Treatment just how far ahead the Europeans were in the Sixties in their portrayal of on-screen sex and violence. There’s usually a perverse undercurrent that’s also lacking in horror films from America and Britain at the time, and The Horrible Dr Hichcock from 1962, a necrophilic reimagining of The Premature Burial with all of Poe’s morbid sexuality intact, is the perfect case in point.
English actor Robert Flemyng plays the title role with gusto as the Victorian professor with a penchant for women who are… well, let’s just say they he doesn’t like them to move a lot. His first wife Margherita passes away as a result of one of his sexual experiments gone horribly wrong. Years later the Professor’s new bride Cynthia (a rare sympathetic role for British scream queen Barbara Steele) arrives at Hichcock’s mansion to find nothing has been touched since Margherita’s death, including her coffin in the family crypt jealously guarded by her black cat Jezebel, and Cynthia starts feeling the first wife’s presence everywhere. To make matters worse, her husband has turned emotionally and physically cold, spends a lot of time in the hospital morgue, and her milk is starting to taste a little strange…
Hichcock’s director Riccardo Freda was a true craftsman held in the same regard as other horror specialists Mario Bava and Dario Argento, if not as well known. His horror films even predate Bava’s; the 1956 I Vampiri, released overseas as The Devil’s Commandment, started the Italian gothic cycle, and although working in every conceivable genre, Freda would return to horror with perhaps his signature works, this and its follow-up The Ghost from 1963, also starring Barbara Steele. In Bava’s Black Sunday and Freda’s The Horrible Dr Hichcock, Steele was never better, and as the tortured bride Cynthia her iconic features dominate the screen, looming out of shadowy passages and gothic sets drenched in red lighting as her stunning eyes convey her unravelling sanity. Add Freda’s meticulous framing and attention to detail, and we have one of the true masterpieces of Italian horror, the 1962 The Horrible Dr Hichcock.
The Witch’s Curse
Italy 1962 colour
aka Maciste In Hell, Maciste All’Inferno
Director “Robert Hampton”/Riccardo Freda Writers Oreste Biancoli, Ennio De Concini, Eddy H. Given, Piero Pierotti
Our second film tonight is one of those bizarre hybrids we like to screen on Schlock Treatment. A few weeks ago we screened Hercules In The Haunted World, a Mario Bava film in which Hercules descends into the nightmarish world of the undead. Just to prove Herculean horrors are not a one-shot genre, we have Riccardo Freda’s reply, in which Hercules goes to hell – via Scotland – in the 1962 The Witch’s Curse.
The film starts in 1550 in the tiny Scottish village of Loch Laird, at the burning of the local witch Martha Gaunt, once courted by judge Parrish in her youth but now condemned to the stake. A hundred years later Martha’s final uttered curse appears to be driving the town’s young women to hang themselves at a certain tree, forcing the local burgomeister to declare them witches and burn them anyway. When the great-great granddaughter with the unfortunate name of Martha Gaunt is thrown in a dungeon awaiting execution (just in case, you understand), Hercules - or, as he’s dubbed, his original Italian title Machiste - makes an appearance in his loin cloth and sandals, looking like he’s not only a long way but a long TIME from home, with no-one seeming to give a rancid haggis either way. Machiste proves he’s more than walnuts in a sausage suit by setting out to lift the witch’s curse, ripping up the hanging tree and descending into Hell through the hole underneath, where he battles an ogre, a stampede of cattle, and the temptations of a young blonde witchy woman who may very well be the Cursing One herself.
It’s an absurd combination of genres with some of the worst Scottish accents committed to film (including that one!), which at times gives you Monty Python And The Holy Grail flashbacks: “She’s a witch! May we burn her?” Like Hercules In The Haunted World, The Witch’s Curse is Hell on a shoestring, and even that’s starting to smoulder, but ever the artist-as-filmmaker, Freda tries to give more than a smoke-and-cardboard spookshow and if you look past the ludicrous stuffed lion, for the most part he succeeds. In fact the weakest link in the film is Maciste himself, Kirk Morris (real name Adriano Bellini), a blonde Elvis lookalike and former gondolier from Venice whose presence in over a dozen Hercules or Sons of Hercules features is the closest thing resembling cardboard, and whose wretched look of strain and pain when picking up boulders is the same one he has delivering his dialogue. A Herculean effort, but it’s back up the canal for you my son.
Hardly a classic, but a weirdly memorable peplum and Black Sunday knockoff nonetheless, Schlock Treatment once again descends into the bowels of hell with the 1962 The Witch’s Curse.
Tonight we pose the eternal question: How many weightlifters does it take to change a light bulb? Ten - one to change it, and nine to stand around him saying “You’re looking HUGE, man...” With that, we hit the sword and sandle or “peplum” genre with a vengeance, with The Giant Of Metropolis and The Last Days Of Pompeii.
The international success of Steve Reeves as Hercules, made in Italy in 1958, unleashed a titanic tidal wave of Homerean and Bible-themed epics, most with “Hercules” or the convenient “Sons Of Hercules” in the title. Soon every muscleman in America AND in Europe headed to Italy, wanting to be the next Steve Reeves. Acting ability or not, they believed they could flex their way through these colourful adventure yarns - cheap, tacky, but with genuine scenery, and technicians trained on Hollywood epics shot in Rome’s Cinecitta Studios like Ben Hur and Sodom And Gamorrah.
The lunkhead in Giant Of Metropolis is American B-identity Gordon Mitchell, who toured the US stages behind a rapidly aging Mae West with fellow bodybuilders and future peplum superstars Mickey Hargitay and Brad Harris. Forming a column of human flesh in the background of The Ten Commandments in 1956, he soon jumped on the first plane to Italy and established himself as a B star, first in a toga, then later with a pistol in a series of successful spaghetti westerns. So tight was the Europe-bound bodybuilding fraternity that his funeral service in 2003 was attended by Arnold Schwarzeneggar, Lou Ferrigno and Richard Harrison - who weirdly enough have ALL played Hercules. Small world, and with even less room than usual around the buffet table at the wake. “Zese buggalo wings are sublime...uh uh uh...”
Giant Of Metropolis tries to break out of the Hercules formula and cosies up with a wild science fiction plot reminiscent of Island Of Dr Moreau without the cute pantherwoman. Muscleman Obro played by Mitchell travels to the “sinful” Metropolis - a vaguely disguised version of Atlantis - where Mitchell towers over the local pygmies (relatively speaking of course) and where the evil lord Yotar is searching for immortality. This involves implanting braincells and other odd futuristic nonsense. Speaking of futuristic nonsense, there’s some wild silver-foil sets and ray guns, as well as a gladiator ring where our hero does the inevitable battle.
It all adds up to supremo Italian weirdness played with the straightest of faces - camp without the humour, science without the friction. In the tradition of strange sword and sandal films like Hercules Against The Moon Men, we present the even stranger but weirdly entertaining Giant Of Metropolis.
The Last Days Of Pompeii
Italy 1959 colour
aka Gli Ultimi Giorni Di Pompei
Directors Mario Bonnard, [uncredited] Sergio Leone Associate Producer Lucio Fulci Writers Sergio Corbucci, Ennio De Concini, Luigi Emmanuele, Sergio Leone, Duccio Tessari
Cast Steve Reeves (Glaucus), Cristina Kaufmann (Ione), Fernando Rey (Arbacès), Barbara Carroll (Nydia)
And now a costume epic from the maestro of spaghetti westerns, Sergio “Fistful Of Dollars For A Few Dollars More The Good The Bad And The Ugly Once Upon A Time In The West And America” Leone.
Leone was actually at the start of his career when Last Days Of Pompeii was made in the late Fifties. He was one of several scriptwriters along with future spaghetti western specialists Duccio Tessari and Sergio Corbucci, and ended up directing much of the film uncredited after replacing the original director Mario Bonnard.If you expect the flair and technical prowess of his later westerns with Clint Eastwood or even a “ayee-ayee-yar” when the villain appears you’ll be disappointed, but it’s a solid workman-like effort on Leone’s part.
Last Days Of Pompeii is not your average Sons Of Hercules peplum B-film. It’s actually a big-budget attempt at an A film that somehow becomes more tacky by the presence of its star Steve “Hercules” Reeves. It’s guilt by association; Steve is often accused of being more wooden than the Trojan Horse, but in reality is the best known and possibly the most talented of all the American musclemen working in Italy in the Fifties and Sixties. Here he plays Glaucus, a legionnaire who returns to Pompeii, saves a damsel in distress, finds a string of dead bodies including his father with crosses carved on their chests, and learns of the very anti-Christian activities of the Temple sect of Isis, who are naturally pagan, wear evil black hoods, and plan to throw the Christian population of Pompeii to the lions.
The whole while you’re waiting for MountVersuvius to errupt, and when it does - well, if you’re a fan of both high school science projects and the term “anti-climax”, you’ll be well catered for. With no one-eyed monsters, cold rays, Moon Men, or even a son of a Son of Hercules, it’s still a pretty swanky, well-oiled sword and sandal “epic”. Ladies and gentlemen, we at Schlock Treatment present to you The Last Ninety Minutes of Pompeii.
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“Unconquerable warriors of the damned!” screams the 
Luckily War Of The Zombies from 1964 is not just another Sons of Hercules muscle-fest, but an ambitious fantasy-horror ranking comfortably near Mario Bava’s Hercules In The Haunted World and Riccardo Freda’s The Witches Curse. In War Of The Zombies, however, there’s no Hercules, Samson or Ursus as the beefcake-flavoured focal point. Instead the film’s hero is Roman centurion Gaius, sent without his troops to the troubled Salmacia province to investigate 
Sounds incredible, and to a certain extent it is. This IS a peplum, let’s not forget, and as such there are dry patches of wooden dialogue and stiff-as-corpses emoting to suffer. Once we wade through the regulation courtships and betrayals, however, we’re presented with the payoff: a magnificent low-rent but surprisingly effective battle between the living and the dead, smothered with superimposed colour swirls of saturated reds and blues (Mario Bava’s favourite palette for supernatural effects). Rather than rotting corpses, the Moon Goddess’ army is presented as ghostly figures, their otherworldliness underscored by slow motion cameras and an eerie echo-laden soundtrack. Just as impressive is the over-the-top performance of their leader, high priest Aderbad, played by John Drew Barrymore (son of John Barrymore, father of Drew Barrymore) in one of his numerous Italian film appearances between numerous cocktails in the early Sixties. Quasi-psychedelic, and several notches above your ordinary Italian sword and sandal, is the zombie-themed peplum chiller Rome Against Rome, or War Of The Zombies.
