Lost Weekend of Schlock

Damn it - I had another of those lost weekends of watching schlock.  I've been trying to cut down, but you know how it is: lockdown, nearly Winter, with the weather closing in, settling down on the sofa and watching a continuous stream of low rent movies for forty eight hours just seems the natural thing to do.  There were points where I started to wonder about what I was witnessing - during a double bill of Rosalba Neri movies (Lady Frankenstein and The Devil's Wedding Night), I began to feel as if I was having an out of body experience.  While the latter of the two is a frenetic tale of vampirism, with Neri as Dracula's widow, busy bathing in the blood of virgins to retain her youth, it was the first that really led me question my grip on reality, so surreal did it become.  Here she is Frankenstein's daughter, who seeks to avenge her father's death at the hands of his own monster by creating a second monster.  She does this by transplanting the brain of her older lover (and father's former assistant) into the hunky young body of the idiot stable boy.  The result has brains, beauty, is a sex machine in bed and possesses superhuman strength.  The first monster conveniently returns to the castle in time to be fought and dismembered by Lady Frankenstein and her monstrous lover, only for the requisite band of angry villagers with flaming torches to turn up and set fire to the place.  The local police chief, played by Mickey Hargitay (one can only assume that Edmond Purdom was unavailable) and the idiot stable boy's sister turn up just in time to witness Lady Frankenstein and her monster lover (which of course has the stable boy's body) engage in a victorious shag fest amid the flames, climaxing with the monster strangling her.  At which point, I thought, 'this is bloody pervy' and began to question what I'd just seen.  After that, The Devil's Wedding Night, with its naked chained virgins, zombies, vampires and Mark Damon in a dual role, seem like reality TV.

I also took in one of those Italian post-apocalypse Mad Max knock off I was talking about a few posts back: Exterminators of the Year 3000 (1983).  Costume-wise, this one adhered pretty closely to the Mad Max formula of lots of black leather, but eschewed the usual junk yard setting of the Italian product for a sand pit in Spain.  This time around, the scarce commodity everyone is after is water.  The anti-hero main protagonist has the usual turbo-charged and customised car - the 'Exterminator' of the title - there are bands of badly acting brigands wandering the wastelands, sporting various extreme hair styles, not to mention the obligatory young kid who acts as sidekick/moral conscience to the main character.  Of course, if we take the title at face value and the film really is set in the year 3000, then all those cars and trucks you see in it must be 1000+ years old.  It must be hall getting spares - I remember the trouble I once had getting a replacement exhaust for 2010 Ford Focus, (the excuse I was given was that it was a diesel and the exhausts rarely needed replacing).  Watching the film made me realise that I've seen so many dubbed Italian films now that I can even recognise the English language voice artists.  It helps when the same voice artist is used consistently for individual actors.  In Exterminators, for instance, Luciano Pigozzi was instantly recognisable to me, not just because of his distinctive looks, but also because he had the same English language voice I've heard him speak with in just about every film I've seen him in.  (It is the same voice artist often used to dub another burly bearded Italian actor, Bud Spencer, into English, although in his films with frequent co-star Terence Hill, Spencer's English voice, rather disconcertingly, varies enormously from movie to movie).  Anyway, in its own, utterly predictable, way, Exterminators of the Year 3000 is actually quite entertaining and rounded off my lost weekend of schlock quite nicely.