Each documentary deals with a filmmaker, even a cinema school (the New Wave …), or a particular issue related to cinema (Critic and cinema …). The choice of directors, as well as the issues addressed, are very impressed by the vision of the Cahiers du Cinéma, of which André S. Labarthe is one of the former editors, Janine Bazin being the wife of André Bazin, founder of the magazine.Read More »
Martine Bressac is released from a psychiatric clinic after a year’s treatment and is driven home by her chauffeur, Mathias. She is welcomed by the demented hunchbacked gardener Malou and the mute servant girl Adèle, and impatiently demands the key to her mysterious private chamber. There, set out like exhibits in a waxwork, are the bodies of beautiful girls frozen in postures of terror on the point of death. With Mathias’ help, Martine has just added another girl, a prostitute, to her collection when her husband and accomplice, Charles, arrives home with slides of a further prospective victim: Cécile the virginal daughter of a diplomat…Read More »
The story of two brothers and an essay writer who’s become a theater comedian, switching between dream and reality — knowing that dream is always closer to reality…Read More »
Adolpho Arrietta was a major figure in the new cinemas that appeared in the sixties and seventies in various countries. Thus he became one of the fundamental film directors in the history of Spanish cinema. As with Buñuel, a long exile seems to have been the condition that allowed his work to keep up with the most important trends in the cinema of his era. Throughout the seventies he produced a series of “punk à la française” films, as Severo Sarduy called them, which for their originality and influence are among the most important in French cinema of that decade. In 1989 he returned to Madrid, and despite noteable intervals, which other Spanish film directors of his generation also experienced, his work proceeded. Alone, like in the era of El crimen de la pirindola but with a digital camera, he produced what for the moment is his latest film: Vacanza permanente (2006).Read More »
Two wealthy aristocrats lure a virginal girl to a Spanish island for a night of sex, death and cannibalism.Read More »
After the death of Victor Frankenstein (Dennis Price), two figures vie for control of his metallic-skinned monster (Fernando Bilbao) and the radical technology that created him: the scientist’s daughter, Vera (Beatriz Savon), and the immortal wizard Cagliostro (Howard Vernon), who is assisted by a blind bird-woman with an unquenchable thirst for blood (Anne Libert). With THE EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN, controversial filmmaker Jess Franco merged his fondness for old-school horror with his unique and perverse tastes in sex and violence, partly inspired by the garish adult European comics of the early 1970s.Read More »
In the Austrian Alpine town of Holfen, a young woman is found murdered. Theo and Hansel, two wood-cutters, stop off at a bar where they tell Dr. Kalman, an academic studying local folk tales, about the history of the von Klaus family, in particular the murderous cruelty of the first Baron von Klaus, whose 17th century ghost is said to haunt the mists and quagmires of the surrounding countryside. Soon after, the wood-cutters discover the dead body of another young woman. The current patriarch of the von Klaus family, and chief suspect for the murders, is Max, who lives with his elderly sister Elisa. Elisa is dying, which prompts a visit from her son Ludwig, accompanied by his fiancee Karin. Elisa reveals to Ludwig the whereabouts of a key to the von Klaus dungeon which has been locked for many years. She begs him to end the family curse for all time and to take his fiancee far away. Ludwig enters the dungeon and finds a memoir written by the original Baron von Klaus, expounding his amoral philosophy…Read More »
The film stars Mabel Karr as Irma Zimmer, a surgeon who creates a machine that turns people into zombified slaves. Ms. Zimmer is the daughter of a Professor Zimmer (a disciple of Dr. Orloff), who was hounded to his death several years earlier by four of his scientific associates. Zimmer uses the machine to control an erotic dancer named Miss Muerte (Estella Blain) who uses her long poison-tipped fingernails to murder the people Ms. Zimmer holds responsible for her father’s death.Read More »
