Movies

Who Wants to Kill Jessie? (1966) Directed by Vaclav Vorlicek, a bizarre and extremely inventive Czech comedic fantasy. A scientist develps an experimental serum to banish nightmares and give people good dreams. The first experiment is on a cow, and by using a dream-viewer we are actually shown a cow's dreams! Using her home dream-viewer, the scientist finds that her engineer husband is dreaming about the beautiful heroine of a comic strip he read in a technical journal at work so she injects him with her serum, not knowing that a side effect causes the dream images to manifest in reality. The scantily-clad heroine and her nemeses, the Superman and the Cowboy who are trying to wrest from her the secret of the anti-gravity gloves, soon appear and chaos results. Being cartoon characters, they continue to speak in speech balloons which pop up above their heads. Any movie which requires this many sentences just to outline the basic concepts is a work of mad genius. Truly original and very entertaining. 9/10

Snake Woman's Curse (1968) Directed by Nobuo Nakagawa. A tenant farmer and his family are driven one by one to misery and death by a cruel landowner and his rape-happy son, resulting in vengeance from beyond the grave. I am very impressed by what Nakagawa and his crew achieve with simple stories and effects. The cinematography is precise and beautiful, the fantastic elements striking and original, and the total experience is emotionally stirring. I also appreciated the depiction of the activities and industries of a large self-sustaining country household of the late 19th century. 8/10

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974) Nonsensical Anglo-Sino kung fu vampire movie. This Chinese guy goes to Transylvania to get Dracula to come to China and revive the 7 Golden Vampires (6 actually since one got burned up from touching a Buddha statue) and Dracula suddenly remembers he can just take the form of another person and not be burdened by all that vampire stuff of avoiding sunlight and sleeping in his old coffin etc. which he somehow never thought to do before. So these Chinese vampires are mummy sort of guys with gold skull masks that ride horses around and chop people up with swords and rip women's shirts off exposing their bare breasts, and then they take them to the temple where the Chinese Dracula lives and bite them and let the blood flow into a bubbling cauldron. Luckily Peter Cushing is there as Dr. Van Helsing to eventually make Dracula crumble into dust for about the millionth time. Well you knew it was going to end that way. Julie Ege appears in a thin undershirt which does not get torn off by a Chinese Vampire. Lots of that phony kung fu fighting which people seem to like so much - occasionally it is ridiculous enough to be amusing but mostly I find it boring. Lots of bright colors. 3/10

Countess Dracula (1971) Countess Elizabeth Bathory discovers that bathing in the blood of virgins restores her youth but it only lasts a couple of days and every time it wears off she looks even more horrible than before. Any lifestyle that requires one to commit murder a couple of times a week is unsustainable. A pretty lush production for a late Hammer film, and quite a bit of female nudity. The one thing I couldn't bring myself to accept was that a beautiful Gypsy fortune teller from a traveling circus could possibly be a virgin. Fairly entertaining for this sort of costume shocker. 5/10