Lisa Reviews An Oscar Nominee: Spellbound (dir by Alfred Hitchcock)

Posted on October 1, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1945 Best Picture nominee, Spellbound, tells the story of Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman), a psychoanalyst at a mental hospital in my least favorite state, Vermont.

Constance has fallen in love with a man (Gregory Peck) who she believes to be Dr. Anthony Edwardes, the newly appointed director of the hospital. Dr. Edwardes is youngish and handsome and idealistic and authoritative …. well, he’s Gregory Peck. However, he also has an intense phobia about seeing any set of parallel lines. Curious to discover the reason for Edwardes’s phobia, Constance does a little digging on her own and discovers that Dr. Anthony Edwardes is not a doctor at all! Instead, he’s a guilt-stricken amnesiac who is convinced that he murdered Dr. Edwardes and took his place!

Constance, however, doesn’t believe that the Amnesiac is a murderer. She thinks that he is suffering from some sort of deep-rooted guilt that had led him to believe that killed the doctor. She wants a chance to psychoanalyze him and discover the truth about his background. Unfortunately, the police do think that the Amnesiac is a murderer and their determined to arrest him.

Constance and the Amnesiac go on the run, heading to the home of Constance’s mentor, Dr. Alexander Brulov (Michael Chekhov, the nephew of Anton Chekhov). With Brulov’s help, Constance analyzes a dream that the Amensiac had, one involving curtains decorated with eyes, the faceless proprietor of a casino, and a man falling off a mountain. Can Constance and Brulov solve the mystery of the Amnesiac’s identity before the police take him away to prison?

Spellbound was the last of the four Hitchcock best picture nominees and it was also the last film that Hitchcock made for producer David O. Selznick. Selznick was quite a fan of psychoanalysis and he insisted that Hitchcock not only make a movie about it but that he also use Selznick’s own therapist as a technical advisor on the project. Hitchcock, for his part, was able to bring in the surrealist Salvador Dali to help design the Amnesiac’s dream sequence but Selznick felt that the 20-minute sequence was too long and too weird and, as a result, it was cut down to two minutes for the final film. All this considered, it’s not a surprise that, despite the fact that Spellbound was a hit with critics and audiences, Hitchcock himself didn’t care much for it and considered it to be more of a Selznick film than a Hitchcock film. And it is true that the film’s total faith is psychoanalysis feels more like something one would expect to hear from a trendy producer than from a director like Hitchcock, who was known for both his dark wit and his rather cynical attitude towards anyone in authority.

For a film like Spellbound to truly work, there has to be some doubt about who the Amnesiac is. For the suspense to work, the audience has to feel that there’s at least a chance, even if it’s only a slight one, that the Amnesiac actually could be a murderer, despite the attempts of Constance and Brulov to prove that he’s not. And Spellbound is full of scenes that are meant to leave the audience wondering about whether or not the Amnesiac should be trusted. However, because the Amnesiac is played by Gregory Peck, there’s really no doubt that he’s innocent. Hitchcock was not particularly happy with Gregory Peck as his leading man. Peck projected a solid, middle-American integrity. It made him ideal for heroic and crusading roles but made him totally wrong for any role that required ambiguity. It’s difficult to believe that the Amnesiac is suffering from a guilt complex because it’s difficult to believe that Gregory Peck has ever done anything for which he should feel guilty. Cary Grant could have played the Amnesiac. Post-war Jimmy Stewart could have done an excellent job with the role. But Peck is just too upstanding and stolid for the role. In a role that calls from neurosis, Peck is kind of boring.

That said, the rest of the cast is fine, with Ingrid Bergman giving one of her best performance as Constance and Michael Chekhov bringing some needed nuance to a role that could have turned into a cliché. Leo G. Carroll has a small but pivotal role and he does a good job keeping the audience guessing as to his motivation. Even at a truncated two minutes, the Dali dream sequence is memorably bizarre and the famous shot of a gun pointed straight at the camera still carries a kick. This is a lesser Hitchcock film but, that said, it’s still a Hitchcock film and therefore worth viewing.

As I mentioned previously, this was the last of Hitchcock’s films to be nominated for Best Picture. Ironically, his best films — Rear Window, Vertigo, and Psycho among them — were yet to come. Spellbound was nominated for six Oscars but only won for Miklos Rozsa’s score. (Ingrid Bergman was nominated for Best Actress that year, not for her role in Spellbound but instead for The Bells of St. Mary’s.) The big Oscar winner that year was Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend.

Horror on TV: The Hitchhiker 4.1 “Perfect Order” (dir by Daniel Vigne)

Posted on October 1, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

During the month of October, we like to share classic episodes of horror-themed television. That was easier to do when we first started doing our annual October Horrorthon here at the Shattered Lens because every single episode of the original, black-and-white Twilight Zone was available on YouTube. Sadly, that’s no longer the case.

However, there is some good news! Twilight Zone may be gone but there are other horror shows on YouTube! For instance, I’ve discovered that there are several episodes of The Hitchhiker on YouTube! The Hitchhiker was an American/French/Canadian co-production that aired on HBO from 1983 to 1987 and on the USA Network from 1989 to 1991. It was an anthology show, one in which each story was introduced by a mysterious hitchhiker (played by Page Fletcher).

Let’s get things started with Perfect Order, an episode featuring Virginia Madsen as a model who works with a famous but eccentric photographer named Simon (Steve Inwood). It turn out that Simon’s eccentricity includes an obsession with death. Along with featuring good performances from Madsen and the underrated Inwood, this episode both satirizes the world of New York fashion and it features a climax that is full of laser beams. What more could one want for the beginning of October?

This episode originally aired on February 17th, 1987.

October Hacks: The Prey (dir by Edwin Brown)

Posted on October 1, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1983 slasher film, The Prey, opens with a wildfire raging through the Rocky Mountains, destroying a community of people who lived in a cave. 32 years later, the only survivor of the fire (played by Carel Struycken, who would later be memorably cast on Twin Peaks as the “It is happening again” giant), wanders through the forest. When he spots a middle-aged couple camping and tending to a campfire, the survivor snaps and kills them both.

The next morning, a van drives through the national park. Inside the van are three young couples, Nancy (Debbie Thureson) and Joel (Steve Bond), Bobbie (Lori Lethin) and Skip (Robert Wald), and Gail (Gayle Gannes) and Greg (Philip Wenckus). They are looking forward to a nice weekend of camping, sex, and mountain climbing. The girls are especially happy when they meet the handsome local parker ranger, Mark O’Brien (Jackson Bostwick). The couples head into wilderness, little realizing that they are being followed and watched by the murderous survivor.

Watching The Prey, I was reminded of why I don’t go camping. I mean, I like looking at nature. I like handsome park rangers. There’s a sweet scene where Mark tells an extremely corny joke to a baby deer and it made me go, “Awwwwww!” But seriously, I would never want to spend my night sitting around a campfire or sleeping on the ground. Not only is the wilderness full of bugs but there’s always the danger of getting trapped in a sudden storm or some other natural disaster. And I have to admit that I’m just not a fan of the way that people act while camping. My fear is that, if I ever did go camping, I would end up with people shouting, “Go! Go! Go!’ at me. If my camping companions insist on going mountain climbing, am I obligated to accompany them? If one of them falls off the side of the mountain, that’s really going to ruin my weekend.

As for The Prey as a film, the plot is standard slasher stuff. Attractive young people end up stranded out in the middle of nowhere and they are picked off, one at a time, by a monster who seems to take issue with anyone trying to have any fun. That said, The Prey has enough strange moments to make it memorable. With an 80-minute running time, The Prey is an oddly paced film. (And yes, oddly paced does often translate to boring.) The majority of the film is just made up with footage of the three couples walking through the forest and having conversations that were reportedly improvised by the cast. (Gayle laughs as she talks about a time that she nearly drowned.) The film is full of skewed camera angles that give the entire proceedings an off-balance feel and occasionally the action cuts away from the main characters to Mark playing a banjo or another park ranger (played by former Charlie Chaplin co-star Jackie Coogan) having a tense conversation with a policeman who calls to ask about the missing middle-aged couple. The survivor doesn’t really go after the main couples until the film’s final 15 minutes and the pace suddenly quickens as if to mirror the relentless violence of the film’s killer. The strange pacing and the weird details gives The Prey a dream-like feel and the ending, in which the survivor reveals that he has interests outside of killing, is fascinating in just how unexpectedly bizarre it is.

The Prey was undoubtedly made to take advantage of the popularity of other wilderness slasher films but it’s just weird enough to establish an identity of its own.

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: Blackenstein (dir by William A. Levey)

Posted on October 1, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

1973’s Blackenstein tells the story of Eddie Turner (Joe De Sue), a black man who served in Vietnam. Unfortunately, while serving his country, Eddie stepped on a landmine and lost his arms and his legs. Now back in Los Angeles, Eddie spends his days laying in a bed in a VA hospital, where he’s taunted by an orderly who, it turns out, is actually just upset because he wanted to join the army but he failed his physical. Because this film was made on the cheap, Eddie’s limbless state is represented by continually having the covers of his bed drawn up to his neck.

Eddie’s girlfriend, Dr. Winifred Walker (Ivory Stone), is upset because Eddie is having a hard time adjusting to life in the States and, having lost the lower half of his body, Eddie has been rendered impotent. She gets a job working with Dr. Stein (John Hart), a doctor who has down amazing things with DNA and RNA. He lives in a castle-like mansion and he has a laboratory that is full of lasers and beakers that are labeled “DNA.” Apparently, Dr. Stein can inject people with DNA …. don’t look at me like that, I didn’t write this movie …. and not only reverse the aging process but also help people regrow limbs.

Eddie is brought to the mansion to be Dr. Stein’s latest patient. Unfortunately, Dr. Stein’s assistant, Malcomb (Roosevelt Jackson), has fallen in love with Winifred and is stung when she tells him that her heart belongs to Eddie. Malcomb sabotages Eddie’s DNA injections so that Eddie, along with growing back his arms and his legs, also transforms into a turtleneck-wearing monster with a flattop. Eddie spends his days in a coma and his nights stalking Los Angeles.

Blackenstein was released at the height of the blaxploitation boom, when filmmakers were reinterpreting classic genres with black actors. Some of these films, like Shaft and Superfly, hold up very well and remain a part of the pop cultural landscape. And others, like Blackenstein, would be largely forgotten if not for the strangeness of their title. Blackenstein was clearly inspired by the success of Blacula, though it comes nowhere close to being as compelling as that film.

Blackenstein has more than a few problems. The pacing is abysmal. The plot requires a lot of smart people to do a lot of dumb things. As opposed to other films based on Mary Shelley’s novel, the Monster is neither scary nor sympathetic. Eddie Turner was played by a non-actor named Joe de Sue, who was hired because he was a client of the Frank Salteri, the criminal lawyer-turned-filmmaker who produced the film. Joe de Sue rarely speaks and when he does, he turns his face away from the camera and it is fairly obvious that his dialogue was dubbed in after the scene was shot. Ivory Stone and Roosevelt Jackson awkwardly deliver their lines about DNA and RNA in a tone that suggests that neither they nor the filmmakers were exactly sure what either one of those were. John Hart is perhaps the most mild mad scientist in the history of horror cinema.

One could argue that there’s an interesting subtext to this film, with its scenes of a white scientist conducting a dangerous medical experiment on a black man who is not in a position to refuse. But let’s not fool ourselves. This film is not Blacula, with its title character being transformed into a vampire as punishment for standing up to Dracula’s racism. Blackenstein had very little on its mind, beyond cashing in on the then-blaxploitation boom. The title promises a certain over-the-top silliness but, ultimately, this film is way too boring for something called Blackenstein.

The Eric Roberts Horror Collection: Deadly Nightshade (dir by Benjamin Rider)

Posted on October 1, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

2021’s Deadly Nightshade is not an easy film to describe.

An analog voice asks us to return to a time in the recent past, when people watched movies on VHS tapes and the television was the world’s main source of escape. In Brixton, Victoria (Suzie Houlihan) goes to her flat, excited to spend the weekend in Brighton with her boyfriend, Marcus (Matthew Laird). She finds a mysterious man named Adam (Christopher Blackburn) in the flat. Adam says that he’s a friend of Marcus’s and he’s going to be staying in the flat for the weekend. Adam wants Victoria to listen to a tape recording of what he claims is an exorcism. Victoria is not comfortable with him.

Marcus finally shows up, covered in blood that is not his. Marcus says that he witnessed an accident on the way home and he stopped to rescue one of the women involved. Suddenly, that woman shows up. Her name is Mia (Lottie Johnson) and it appears that she’s planning on staying in the apartment as well.

The analog voice invites us to watch a documentary about the real events that inspired Deadly Nightshade but an appearance by Eric Roberts as occult expert Father Walsh clues us in that the documentary is just as fictional as the film that we’re watching.

Strange things continue to happen at the flat. Victoria’s mother mysteriously appears at one point. Adam has visions of a woman lying in bed and telling him that he’s too obsessed with television. Victoria falls asleep and when she wakes up, Mia is claiming that Marcus is her boyfriend and that Adam is Victoria’s boyfriend and no one really seems to know why Victoria is even at the flat. For all the talk of spending the weekend in Brighton, no one seems like they’re in a particular hurry to leave the flat….

It’s an odd film and I would suggest not trying too hard to follow the plot. It’s a film that plays out like a filmed nightmare, working on its own bizarre strain of logic. Just as in a dream, personalities change randomly and the lay-out of the flat seems to alter from scene to scene. Plot points, like Adam’s exorcism tape, are brought up and then abandoned just to mysteriously be brought up again. It’s not a movie that makes much sense but, if you relax and just go with it, it definitely leaves an impression.

As for Eric Roberts, he’s not in much of the film. It’s pretty obvious that he filmed his scenes in an hour or two, probably at his own home. It wouldn’t surprise me if he provided his own clerical collar. That said, if you’re going to have a mysterious man talking about the supernatural in your low-budget film, I would say that Eric Roberts is who you would want to go with.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

The Zombie King (2013, directed by Aidan Belizaire)

Posted on October 1, 2023 by Jedadiah Leland

Embittered by the death of his wife, Samuel Peters (Edward Furlong) turns to voodoo in an attempt to bring her back to life. Kalfu (Corey Feldman), the lord of the underworld, agrees to close the gates of Hell and allow the dead to roam the Earth with Peters as the immortal zombie king.

Edward Furlong selling his soul to Corey Feldman might sound like the premise of an entertainingly bad movie but, unfortunately, nether Furlong nor Feldman have much screen time. As hard as it is believe, The Zombie King may be one of the first recent films that would have benefitted from more Corey Feldman and Edward Furlong. Instead, the two of them are basically just special guest stars with limited screen time.

Instead, the majority of the movie is about a group of humans trying to survive in a village that’s been invaded by zombies and quarantined by the government. The movie tries to balance horror with British humor in a style that tries way too hard to duplicate Simon Pegg’s success with Shaun of the Dead, right down to casting a Nick Frost look-alike as a quirky milkman named Munch.

Much ends up in a group led by a stoic mailman named Ed Wallace (George McCluskey), who says that delivering the mail in Northgate was just as dangerous as being a member of the SAS. The movie mixes scenes of zombie mayhem with scenes of Ed, Mulch, and the other survivors having very British arguments about how best to deal with the situation and whether it’s safer to head to a church or a pub. There are some amusing moments but there’s even more jokes that fall flat and Munch is never as funny as a character as the film seems to think he is.

Even with Edward Furlong welcoming the recently dead to “Hell on Earth” and Corey Feldman giving a surprisingly energetic performance as the lord of the underworld, The Zombie King never escapes the shadow of all the zombie comedies that came before it.

Horror Scene That I Love: Tom Atkins in Halloween III

Posted on October 1, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today’s horror scene that I love features an actor appreciated by horror fans everywhere, the great Tom Atkins.

The son of a Pennsylvania steel mill worker who originally planned to follow in his father’s footsteps, Tom Atkins served in the U.S. Navy and noticed that officers seemed to have all the fun. He also noticed that the officers all had college degrees so, upon getting out of the service, he enrolled in Pittsburgh’s Duquesne College. It was while at Duquesne that Atkins met a girl who was involved with a local theater group and he discovered that he actually enjoyed acting. Atkins made his film debut in 1968’s The Detective and he’s been working steadily ever since. A favorite of both John Carpenter and George Romero, Atkins has been a reliable horror fixture since the early 80s.

In this scene, from 1982’s Halloween III, Tom Atkins plays a doctor who desperately tries to stop the cruelest Halloween prank of all. One reason why this scene is so effective is because, if Tom Atkins can’t stop the broadcast, then that means nobody can.

Thrill us, Tom.

Horror Book Review: Into the Dark by R.L. Stine

Posted on October 1, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

First published in 1997, Into the Dark tells the story of Paulette Fox. Paulette has been blind since birth but she hasn’t let that stand in her away. She’s one of the most popular students at Shadyside High. She has two best friends, Jonathan and Cindy, who are devoted to her. She enjoys eating the pizza at Pete’s Pizza, watching silly slasher films with her friends, and taking piano lessons at the Music Academy. And, assuming that she can get her overprotective parents to sign off on it, she’s looking forward to taking self-defense classes.

Best of all, she’s got a boyfriend! Brad has just moved to Shadyside. Like Paulette, Brad loves music and wants to make it his life. Unfortunately, Brad does not come from a rich family so he has to work as a janitor at the Music Academy. Brad seems to be sweet and considerate and he treats Paulette like an adult. Paulette touches his face and discovers that not only is he very handsome but he also a scar on his eyebrow. Scars are sexy!

However, no sooner has Paulette started hanging out with Brad than strange things start to happen to her. Twice, she is nearly run over by a car despite the fact that Paulette is always careful while crossing the street. (The second time, Paulette is convinced that someone pushed her, even though everyone tells her that they didn’t see it happen.) She starts to get weird phone calls. According to Cindy, someone has broken into Paulette’s bedroom and painted all sorts of threatening messages on the wall. Even worse, Brad starts to act strange. Sometimes, he’s the considerate and nice Brad that she wants to date. Other times, he acts possessive and creepy. Her friends tell her that she needs to stay away from Brad, especially after he’s accused of robbing Pete’s Pizza! But Paulette remains convinced that only she can figure out what is truly happening with Brad….

This is an R.L Stine novel so there’s really no way that you won’t guess what the big twist is. In fact, if I remember correctly, it’s a twist that Stine has used in quite a few of his other books. Because I’m a nice reviewer, I will not spoil what the twist is but …. I mean, seriously, you figured it out while reading the previous paragraph, right?

Obviously, Into The Dark won’t win any points for originality but still, as far as the Fear Street books are concerned, Into the Dark is an entertaining and quick read and Paulette is a likable and relatable heroine. Indeed, Stine actually appears to have done some research for this book and the passages where he describes how Paulette navigates every-day life without being able to see ring true. Paulette may be blind but she’s also a typical teenager. It’s easy to roll your eyes when she repeatedly refuses to call the police despite the number of weird things that happen to her but seriously, what teenager wants to call the police for anything? When I was 17, I was woken up by what I thought was the sound of someone breaking into my house and, even though I had a phone and could have easily called the police, I instead grabbed a golf club and walked around the house in my t-shirt and underwear, searching for the thieves. When you’re 17, you think you’re immortal and, even more importantly, you don’t want to have to deal with any authority figures.

(Incidentally, there were no thieves and it was all just my imagination. Yay!)

Finally, who couldn’t relate to Paulette’s confusion about Brad? Sometimes, Brad is extremely nice and caring. Sometimes, Brad is cold and kind of a jerk. That sounds like every guy I knew when I was in high school. Like the best of Stine’s book, Into the Dark works because the reader can relate to it, even if they’ve never lived on Fear Street or been threatened by …. well, I won’t spoil it. But you already figured it out, right?

October True Crime: The Honeymoon Killers (dir by Leonard Kastle)

Posted on October 1, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1970 film, The Honeymoon Killers, takes place in the late 40s. Martha Beck (Shirley Stoler) is an overweight nurse who lives in Alabama with her senile mother (Dortha Duckworth) and her best friend, Bunny (Doris Roberts). Knowing that Martha is lonely, Bunny signs Martha up for a “lonely hearts club,” which was basically the Tinder and Craig’s List of the pre-Internet age. Though Martha is initially reluctant, she soon starts to receive letters from a conman named Ray Fernandez (Tony Lo Bianco). Ray specializes in swindling the women who respond to his letters. After Ray travels to Alabama and tricks Martha into giving him a “loan,” Ray sends her a letter telling him that he can no longer correspond with her. Martha responds by getting Bunny to call Ray and tell him that she attempted suicide.

Recognizing Martha as a fellow con artist, Ray invites Martha to his home in New York. He shows her the pictures that he’s received from other women and reveals how he makes his money. Martha soon becomes Ray’s partner in crime, traveling across the country with Ray and meeting the women, most of whom are elderly, that Ray has corresponded with. Ray claims that his name is Charles Martin and that Martha is his sister. He also swears to Martha that he won’t sleep with any of the women while he’s swindling them. Even though Martha knows that Ray is a pathological liar, she chooses to believe him whenever he swears that he’s actually in love with her.

The first murder occurs when Martha realizes that one of Ray’s victims is determined to sleep with him. Martha gives her an overdose of sleeping pills and then Martha and Ray dump her on a bus, where she subsequently dies. More murders occur, usually due Martha and Ray making sloppy mistakes that reveal their actual plans to their victims. At first, Ray claims that he’s disgusted with killing and he says that Martha is the one who has to do it because she’s a nurse. But eventually, Ray shows his true colors.

When talking about The Honeymoon Killers, one has to start by mentioning that this film was nearly Martin Scorsese’s second feature film. (Fresh out of film school, Scorsese had previously turned a student film, Who’s That Knocking At My Door?, into his feature debut.) Scorsese was fired from the film because the film’s producers felt that he was taking too long to set up the shots and, according to Scorsese himself, he was only shooting master shots. That said, there are a few Scorsese-directed scenes to be found in The Honeymoon Killers and they’re pretty easy to spot. The film opens with a tracking shot of Shirley Stoler walking through her hospital and reprimanding two interns. I was not surprised to learn that was one of the Scorsese scenes. After Scorsese left the project, he was replaced by Leonard Kastle, who wrote the script. The Honeymoon Killers was both Kastle’s directorial debut and his swan song.

The film’s harsh and grainy black-and-white cinematography gives the film a documentary-style feel and while there are moments of dark humor, The Honeymoon Killers is overall a grim movie. It plays out like a creeping nightmare, one where the viewer knows that there’s something terrible waiting right around the corner. The bickering between Martha and Ray may occasionally inspire a chuckle, but there’s nothing funny about the murders and the film, to its credit, it totally on the side of Martha and Ray’s victims. Martha and Ray may look down upon them but the film itself portrays them as being lonely people who are struggling to adjust to a changing world. (In the role of the couple’s second victim, Mary Jane Highby is just heartbreaking.) Ray is a bit of ludicrous figure, with his swagger and his exagerated accent but he’s been able to get away with his crimes because people want him to be the charming gentleman that he claim to be. Even after Martha discovers who he really is, she still finds herself under the spell of Ray’s con.

Shirley Stoler and Tony Lo Bianco both give excellent performances as Martha and Ray, with Stoler especially doing a good job in the role of Martha. At first, it’s easy to feel sorry for Martha. At the start of the movie, she’s just as lonely as any of Ray’s victims. At the film progresses, Martha’s true self is revealed and yet, as soulless as she can be, her love for Ray is strangely sincere. As Ray, Tony Lo Bianco is all swagger and charm until he loses control of the situation and he reveals just how spineless he actually is.

The film presents Martha Beck and Ray Fernandez as a couple who became murderers after they found each other. In reality, it’s suspected that Ray Fernandez murdered at least one woman before he met Martha and it’s also been suggested that Martha killed a few patients while she was working as a nurse. Ray and Martha were both executed on the same day, going to electric chair on March 8th, 1951.

Horror Film Review: Oasis of the Zombies (dir by Jesus Franco)

Posted on October 1, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

1982’s Oasis of the Zombies opens with two girls in a jeep who just happen to be driving through the middle of a desert in Africa. When they come across an oasis, they decided to stop so that they can walk around and allow the camera to focus on their rear ends as they explore the area while wearing short shorts. Unfortunately, it turns out that they’re not very good when it comes observing details because they totally miss the skulls and the pieces of metal that have been decorated with swastikas. One girl thinks that the oasis is creepy. The other wants to keep exploring. Decayed hands suddenly rise out of the ground and attack both of them.

(Oddly enough, the girls reminded me of myself and my BFF, Evelyn. I called Evelyn after I watched the movie and we both agreed that getting attacked by desert zombies is definitely something that will probably happen to us in the near future.)

After the two girls are zombied, the film cuts to an old man named Captain Blabert (Javier Maiza) telling another man named Kurt Meitzell (either Henri Lambert or Eduardo Fajardo, depending on which version of the film you see) about a shipment of Nazi gold that, for the past few decades, has been sitting in the middle of an oasis in the desert. Kurt kills Blabert and then heads off with his wife (Myriam Landson or Lina Romay, again depending on which version of the film you see) to track down the gold.

We then cut to London, where college student Robert Blabert (Manuel Gelin) receives not only a message informing him of the death of his father, Captain Blabert, but also a journal that leads to several flashbacks of Captain Blabert serving in Africa during World War II and getting involved with the Nazis and a sheik.

Eventually, Robert and several of his friends end up going to Morocco, where they randomly meet two filmmakers and everyone decides to head into the desert to search for the oasis and the gold. Fortunately, the oasis and the gold are both easy to find. However, the oasis is still defended by the Nazis who were assigned to transport the gold. Of course, the Nazis are all zombies now!

Oasis of the Zombies is a Jesus Franco film and, like many of his later films, it’s more than a little disjointed. The film’s scenes don’t always seem to follow any sort of conventional narrative logic. Instead, the scenes often feel as if they’ve been randomly assembled and the end result is a low-budget zombie film that plays out like a fragmented dream, one that seems to feature more stock footage than actual plot. Franco himself frequently seems as if he’s having trouble concentrating on just what exactly Oasis of the Zombies is supposed to be about. Random zoom shots are mixed in with shots of a spider building its web and, more than once, the action comes to a stop so the film can turn into an extended travelogue. As was so often the case with Franco’s later films, some of the shots are striking. There’s a shot of a man standing on a roof announcing the call to prayer that achieves a surreal grandeur and, as bad as the zombie makeup is, the shots of the living dead silhouetted in the desert are effective. But for every effective shot, there’s shots of people looking straight at the camera. Franco was director who could both frame a memorable shot and also be remarkably sloppy. As such, his aesthetic transcends conventional definitions of good and bad. Viewers either get him and his semi-improvised excursions into existential horror or they don’t.

Myself, I thought there were enough good shots in Oasis of the Zombies to make it worth watching. Certainly, it’s not comparable to Franco’s better films, like The Awful Dr. Orlof or Faceless. But it’s also not quite as bad as its online reputation might suggest. The zombies relentlessly emerging in the desert are creepy and, in its better moments, the film does capture the feeling of being stranded in the middle of nowhere. One could argue that the film actually does have a deeper meaning, with the Nazi zombies representing the fact that, for all of its defeats, the hate that fueled the Nazis is still alive and still dangerous. In the end, it’s a zombie flick, featuring less than impressive zombie makeup and some adequate gore and it’s undoubtedly a Jess Franco film. There’s no mistaking Franco’s vision for anyone else’s.

Finally, there are two versions of the film. The French-language version features Henri Lambert and Myriam Landson as Kurt and his wife. The Spanish-language version features Franco regulars Eduardo Fajardo and Lina Romay as the couple. Other than the scenes with Kurt, the two versions of Oasis of the Zombies are pretty much the same. As far as I know, the French-language version is the only one that is available in the States. That’s the one that I watched for this review.