by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched the
most recent “Internet Slasher Drive-In” double bill, containing two Italian
productions from 1966 that both turned out to be considerably better than we
would have expected from the genre, the titles — The She-Beast and Kill, Baby, Kill — and the time. The She-Beast was one of only four features directed by British horror director
Michael Reeves — the others were Castle of the Living Dead (uncredited), The Sorcerers (with Boris Karloff and Catherine Lacey as a
couple of old mad scientists who invent a consciousness-transference machine
and take over the body of a young man so through him they can experience
vicariously decadent thrills they’re both too old to partake in directly) and Witchfinder
General (released in the U.S. as The
Conqueror Worm to tie it into the cycle
of horror films its star, Vincent Price, made at least nominally based on works
by Edgar Allan Poe), a biopic of the real-life witchhunter Matthew Hopkins.
Like The Sorcerers and Witchfinder
General, the innocent young male
lead was played by Reeves’ schoolhood friend Ian Ogilvy. The She-Beast was billed as a vehicle for Barbara Steele, who’d
achieved international stardom (of sorts) in Mario Bava’s Black Sunday — which I remember watching with Charles years ago
and finding quite impressive, the most accurate reproduction of the visual
style of 1930’s Universal horror since Universal itself gave up the Gothic
tradition — though she only signed for one day’s work and therefore had just a
minor part as Veronica, who with her new husband Philip (Ian Ogilvy) is driving
through Romania in a black VW bug (whose license number, instead of being on a
plate, is actually stenciled across the car’s front) when they get stranded in
a small village.
The village is inhabited by a nasty hotelier named Groper (Mel
Welles) who spies on his guests as they’re having sex, and also a bunch of
superstitious locals, a truck driver who worries he’s going to hit someone and
get arrested, and Alexis van Helsing (John Karlsen, second-billed), last
descendant of a noble family dispossessed by the Communist government of
Romania, whose family has been in the vampire-hunting business for generations
(the name “Dracula” is actually mentioned on the soundtrack). Two hundred years
before to the day, the villagers captured a murderous supernatural hag and
drowned her in the local lake, but as van Helsing explains, her spirit survives
because the villagers jumped the gun and didn’t wait for van Helsing’s ancestor
to arrive and perform a full-tilt exorcism on the woman before they killed her.
Anxious to get away from the hotel because Philip is convinced he murdered
Groper after he caught the man watching him and Veronica having sex (he didn’t
— there’s more than one instance in this film of someone abandoning someone
they think they’ve killed, but who is
still alive), Philip steals back the distributor cap from his car that Groper
stole, refits it and he and Veronica drive off — only mysteriously both the
steering wheel and the brakes cease to function, the car takes a header into
the haunted lake, and Philip swims to safety but Veronica drowns. Only as
anybody who’s seen more than two horror movies in their life will guess,
Veronica isn’t dead; she’s been taken over by the spirit of the hag (Joe
“Flash” Riley in an intriguing bit of Transgender casting) and the old woman
comes to life and starts knocking off people.
The script is by Reeves (under
the pseudonym “Michael Byron” — “no relation,” I joked) and E. Amos Powell, and
they deserve credit for properly locating Transylvania in Romania (almost all
other horror-film makers have mistakenly put it in Hungary!) and also for
slipping in a lot of slyly satirical jokes about Communism — the best of which
comes when the she-beast has just knocked off a victim with a sickle, she
throws it away, and it lands on top of a hammer to form the Communist emblem.
The rest of the movie deals with the killing of the she-beast and van Helsing’s
determination to steal the body before it can be autopsied, because as he
informs the rather incredulous Philip he needs the body intact so he can
perform the ritual that will change her back to Veronica and return Philip’s
wife to him alive and reasonably well. The final chase scene — in which Philip
and van Helsing steal the police van containing the hag’s body, the police
steal van Helsing’s own car (a charming yellow number so old it actually has to be hand-cranked to start)
and then van Helsing realizes he has to recover his own car because that
contains the notes he needs to do the ritual — is pretty risible; the Romanian
police do an excellent imitation of the Keystone Kops. According to an imdb.com
trivia poster, this scene was shot not by Reeves but a second-unit director,
and when Reeves saw it he was horrified (and not in the way this film intended)
at how cheap and silly it looked — but he didn’t have the budget available to
reshoot it, so in it went. The She-Beast is actually a pretty good movie within the genre conventions — the goriest thing in it is a
real-life cockfight (during which one of the murders takes place) and Reeves
proves himself a director with a creative eye and an instinct for the Gothic
(the scenes in the flashback showing the hag’s original drowning look like he
copied some of the setups from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal), but the same misanthropy that made his films
interesting led him to commit suicide at age 25, after Witchfinder General was finished but before it was released.
