31 Nights of Halloween: Guru the Mad Monk

As part of this year's wrap-up this year's 31 Nights of Halloween at Cinema Steve, here's a film you  should be happy to not have seen.

Guru the Mad Monk (1970)
Starring: Neil Flannigan, Judith Israel, Jacqueline Webb, Jack Spencer, and Paul Lieber
Director: Andy Milligan
Rating: Two of Ten Stars

An innocent woman (Israel) gets trapped in the web of lies, murder, and madness spun by the priest in charge of an isolated church and prison (Flannigan) and the vampire witch that is his ally (Webb).

"Guru the Mad Monk" might have been suitable Halloween viewing if you were looking to have a Bad Movie Fest as part of your celebration. It's got a creepy location, a hunchbacked assistant to a vile villain, witchcraft, a vampire, a damsel in distress... everything you need for a classic cheesy horror movie.

Unfortunately, the director took these elements and made one of the dullest movies you ever will have suffered through if you check it out. It has a few moments of tension and growing horror, but invariably those are ruined by weird cut-aways, awful dialogue, or the atrocious acting on the part of the cast--which are so bad that I was starting to think that Judith Israel was a great actress, until I took a step back and realized she only seemed to be because everyone else around her is so awful. She's passable... but given the rest of the cast, she seems like she could out-act any Hepburn you care to mention.

The Two Stars I've given it are perhaps generous, but they are based on the occasional bit of creepiness that the film manages to conjure up, as well as the unintentional comedy (mingled with a glimmer of horror or two) that we're treated to in the films final 10 minutes when we discover exactly how unhinged the title character really is. Getting to those 10 minutes means sitting through 40 minutes of unevenly paced, badly acted dreck.. and only the most motivated or desperate to be entertained viewers will make it that far.

"Guru the Mad Monk" is one of the films featured in the "Pure Terror" 50-movie DVD set. As such, it's harmless filler that you can save for last.

It's a Pit of a Movie

Bloody Pit of Horror (aka "A Tale of Torture", "The Scarlet Hangman", and "Crimson Executioner") (1964)
Starring: Mickey Hargitay, Walter Brant, Luisa Barrato, and Ralph Zucker
Director: Massimo Pupilo
Rating: Two of Ten Stars

A photographer (Zucker), writer (Brant), and their publisher/editor head with four sexy models and a production assistant (Barrato) to a supposedly deserted castle to take racy pictures intented to illustrate the covers of horror novels. It turns out, the place is not deserted, but is the home of a body-builder (Hargitay) who has retreated from the world, and who wants nothing more than to live life alone... well, alone aside from the trio of professional wrestlers (who dress like pirates) that share the castle with him. Soon, people start dying, as the restless ghost of the Crimson Executioner is unleashed upon the world again.

This is one of those "why ask why?" movies. As in, "why ask why these people caravan for days, hauling all that photography equipment AND darkroom equipment (including paper stock and chemicals) to this castle when they could have done far better, cheaper and efficient shoots in a studio?" or "why didn't they start taking the arrows from the crossbow in the hugely elaborate, spider-themed death trap instead of crawling under the trip-wires?" or "are we supposed to like ANYONE in this movie?"

I've seen many, many horror movies were the victims being killed by the psycho/ghost/demon/whatever are set up as more or less deserving what they get (in a twisted poetic justice kind of way), but this film goes so far overboard in making just about everyone so unlikeable that the viewer doesn't care if they survive the slaughter.

To makes matters worse, the film is generally more boring than scary, and snicker-inspiring rather than terrifying. Further, every fight scene in the film looks like it was staged by Vince McMohan of the World Wrestling Entertainment network (hence my wrestling comment above); We also have really terrible actors performing scenes that have been dubbed by even worse voice actors. And the syncing to dialogue to image is worse than anything I've ever seen. And the film's score--my God. It has GOT to be among the worst ever used in a film released to the public, and that's not even taking the terrible editing into account. (It's not usual to loop the same short bit of music several times during a scene, but it is unusual to have a static "pop" at the start/end of the loop.)

'Bloody Pit of Horror' is a pit of a movie. The only remotely clever part of the film is the spider-themed torture trap mentioned above--and even it falls into the "why ask why?" category, because like everything else, there's no sensible reason for it to exist.

The only reason to watch this film is if you're getting together with a group of friends intending to watch bad movies and mock them as they unfold. For THAT purpose, this is a perfect movie. Watching Micky Hargitay make an ass of himself in a red mask is especially hilarious. Like so:

For everything else, it's barely worth the effort to take it out of the DVD case.

I've no doubt Bigfoot has cursed this film

Curse of Bigfoot (1978)
Starring: Bob Clymire, Augie Tribach, Bill Simsonson, Jan Swihart, Ruthann Manella, and Ken Koepfler
Director: Don Fields (aka Dave Flocker)
Rating: Zero of Ten Stars

After viewers are subjected to boring stock-footage, a cranky Bigfoot researcher (Clymire) relates the story of how he and a group of high school students inadvertently awakened a monster from ten thousand years (give or take a millennium) of magic-induced slumber.

"Curse of Bigfoot" is one of the most slip-shod movies I've ever had the misfortune of seeing. The fact that Bigfoot appears nowhere in the film is the least of the offenses committed by the filmmakers.

"Curse of Bigfoot" came about when director/producer Dave Flocker took a bad movie he'd made with his brother in 1958, chopped it up a bit, inserted what looks footage from a misbegotten educational film and a little bit of new film involving a high school teacher (Augie Tribach) preparing his class for a visit by his friend and Bigfoot expert Roger Mason. The goal was to bring "Teenagers Battle the Thing" up the minimum length needed for syndication to broadcast television and cash in on what I assume must have been a Bigfoot craze, because there seem to be quite a few films featuring the hairy beast from the late 1970s. The result is a film that stinks worse than a pile of Bigfoot droppings.

If you want to see an example of how not to do a day-for-night shot, this is worth checking out--you will see why you shouldn't shoot footage of the sun shining through the trees if it's supposed to be night.

If you want to see an example of how not to assemble a film from the carcasses of other motion pictures, then this is worth checking out--you'll see why you might want to reserve some time in a sound studio to loop some voice overs, so you don't have the situation where a character says in one scene that he is telling a tale that happened many years ago, but when the flashback starts, a narrator tells us the events happened last year.

If you want to see an example of how not to build suspense through padding your movie, then this is worth checking out--you'll see two yahoos wandering through a forest in a long, loong, looooooooong absolutely pointless sequence, and you'll get to see the world's most well-behaved teenaged boy and girl taking a moonlight stroll through a monster-haunted lemon grove in search of soda pop.

If you want to see a film that features examples of every kind of incompetent filmmaking you can think of, then this is worth checking out.

Somewhere in this fetid garbage pile, there are a couple of good ideas that hadn't quite been done to death in 1958 and which can form the basis for intriguing horror films even now--not to mention do form the basis for three out of five movies with the tagline "A Sci-Fi/Syfy Original Picture." The idea of ancient Native Americans subduing some monstrous creature and binding it in a cave through magical rituals is an intriguing one and the discovery and recovery of the creature is the only vaguely interesting part of the movie. A lot could have been done with this, in the hands of filmmakers who knew what they were doing, but it is unfortunately mostly squandered here.

My desire for the promise held in that ancient monster almost made me inclined to cut this movie some slack. Coupled with the fact that the one bit of serious thought that seems to have gone into the production resulted in the same actor playing the Bigfoot researcher both in the "present" and the "flashback" parts of the film. It's a nice bit of coherence that is otherwise lacking in the production, and it even lends a touch of realism as the actor, like the character he plays, has aged 20 years.

(Near as I can tell, the only film work that Bob Clymire was in this film and in the original "Curse of Bigfoot" production. I could find next to no information on him in the 10-15 minutes I bothered to spend on researching him, but I am curious what his connection is to this production and to the Field/Flocker Brothers. Perhaps this repackage was his idea?)

If you're looking for a teaching aid to demonstrate how not to apply a particular filmmaking technique or how to structure a film, or anything at all, then this is perfect. For everything else, you need to avoid it. And if you ever see it listed in a multi-DVD pack with viewer than ten other films, you need to rethink your purchase.

The undertaker should get pals to bury this one

The Undertaker and His Pals (1966)
Starring: Rad Fulton (aka James Westmoreland), Ray Dannis, Warrene Ott, Marty Friedman, and Sally Frei
Director: T.L.P. Swicegood
Rating: One of Ten Stars

A crooked undertaker (Dannis) and his psychopathic greasy-spoon-owning friends drum up business by invading the homes of beautiful young women and murdering them. The cooks take parts of bodies and serve them in the restaurant, while the undertaker overcharges the families for buring the remaining remains. It's a great scheme, until they target the secretary of private eye Jim Glass (Fulton) and twin sex-pots Thursday and Friday (Ott).

Writing that summary is about all the time I intend to spend on this movie. I almost feel apologetic that I made you read it. You've probably never heard of or seen this miserable failure at making a black comedy, and I encourage you to keep it that way.

To say this movie is crap is an insult to fertilizer. The One Star rating is very generous, and it's based solely on the fact that the film does have a couple of good gags... but they are the sort of gags that a 12 year old would think up scribbling in his notebook while bored in class.

This has probably been used in torture sessions

Dungeon of Harrow (1962)
Starring: Russ Harvey, Helen Hogan, William McNulty, Maurice Harris, and Michele Buqour
Director: Pat Boyette
Rating: One of Ten Stars

A shipwrecked nobleman (Harvey) finds love and lepers in the castle of the insane, torture-obsessed Count DeSade (McNulty).

If anything, "Dungeon of Harrow" shows clearly that Pat Boyette made the right call when he stopped making movies in favor of a career as a painter and comic book artist; this goes double if it was Boyette who painted the artwork for the promotional poster for this film as it's the best thing about it. This film is Boyette's in every way--he helped write it, produce it, direct it, edit it, and even scored the music for it. The only thing that isn't terrible about it is the voice acting present in the narration, which was also done by Boyette, and which aleviates some of the pain of sitting through stretched-out scenes of actors wandering, sitting, or lounging around.

Every other actor in the film is as stiff and unnatural as the dialogue they deliver. Boyette was clearly going for an Edgar Allan Poe vibe with this movie, with the narrator looking back on horrible events, rampant madness, florid dialogue, and a storyline that will remind well-read viewers of "The Oblong Box", "Fall of the House Usher", and "The Raven" in equal measure.

Unfortunately, none of Boyette's actors have the chops to deliver the lines with the amped up melodrama present in the Corman Poe-inspired pictures from the same period and instead perform as though tye are under sedation for the entire film; I don't think there's ever been a movie about torture and madness with a more subdued set of performances ever released for viewing by the general public. Time and again, the lethargic actors turn what could and should have been frightening or dramatic into a test of patience so severe it would be out-and-out torture if forced upon a captive audience.

It's equally unfortunate that no-one seems to have taken the script further than a first draft, nor read it from beginning to end at any point during rehearsal, filming or editing. If someone had, they would have noticed characters behaving in contradictory and inconsistent fashions (not counting the batshit crazy DeSade), and several plotlines and characters appear and are dropped seemingly at random.

The film has two worthwhile and scary scenes--one where the Count believes he is being visited by a demon, and another where the main character is chained in the dungeon with an insane leper--but they are not worth sitting through the crap that surrounds them.