Venomous Vixens: Britt Nichols

Born in Guarda, Portugal, May 29th, 1951, the delectable and very statuesque Britt Nichols (born Marìa do Carmo da Resurreição de Deus) has enjoyed a successful fashion modeling career in Argentina for over 35 years under her more common name Carmen Yazalde, and, looking better than ever, she continues to model to this day, hosting cable TV shows and appearing frequently in the media.

A former Miss Portugal, Nichols married an Argentinian soccer player on July 16th, 1973, European Golden Shoe winner Héctor Yazalde, and moved from Portugal to Argentina in 1977 and has stayed there ever since.

When reading articles about the fashion model Carmen Yazalde on the web, as far as I could tell, there didn’t seem to be any mention of her cinema career in the early ‘70s. As I have found on a thread from the Latarnia Forums, she apparently does not wish to discuss that period of her career but claims to still be proud of the films she has been in; the bulk of which consists of films directed by the late, great Jess Franco. She also appeared in Amando De Ossorio’s Tombs of the Blind Dead and a giallo by Juan Bosch, The Killer with a Thousand Eyes.

Nichols left cinema behind shortly after getting married, but her relatively small body of work in film is fondly remembered and embraced by Eurocult movie fans. She is commonly seen in Franco films with Anne Libert (our favorite woman-in-black) and is perhaps heavily remembered as the sapphic vampire lead in Daughter of Dracula and more so as the bizarre, living-dead bombshell haunting the ancestral castle of the title character in A Virgin Among the Living Dead.

Macabre / Macabro (1980)

Lamberto Bava’s first movie is a brilliant deviation from the more-formulaic giallo. It lives up to its title and is a twisted treat that doesn’t nearly rise to the campy heights of the director’s more popular work, Demons. Unfortunately, due to Macabre being poorly received at the time of its release, by the public, it took three years before Lamberto could direct another film. It almost seems like he took a safer route with his next film, A Blade in the Dark, an impressively violent, though by-the-numbers, giallo that seemed like a stopping point to the interesting new direction Lamberto was going with Macabre.

Too bad, really, because as much as I do appreciate Demons and Blade, I really do think a different type of Italian thriller was blooming with Macabre (possibly only comparable to D’amato’s Buio Omega). It’s also something that Mike and the bots of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 wouldn’t be able to riff so easily, as they did with one of Lamberto’s other films, Devil Fish (season 10, episode 11).

After suffering from severe shock from losing her lover, Fred (Roberto Posse), in a car accident and finding out her son had drowned, all on the same day, Jane Baker (Bernice Stegers) is admitted to a mental hospital for a year. After getting out, her relationship with her husband damaged, she chooses to live in the flat where she used to have her, not so secret, affairs with Fred. The blind man who maintains the house, Robert (Stanko Molnar), regularly hears Jane at night upstairs in her room copulating with someone she is calling Fred.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970)

A lot of times when watching a surrealist film it’s a lot like watching a dream, but when viewing the Czech fantasy/horror Valerie and Her Week of Wonders it really feels like I’m the one that’s dreaming, wondering when someone is going to wake me. Here, the thoughts and images of the subconscious mind pervade, and the effect is that of surrealist automatism applied to film making. Saying the film is beautifully dreamlike, disorienting, and hallucinatory should not be mistaken as fan-boy code for a beautiful looking inept film with a messy plot. It’s actually quite the artistic achievement. The music and imagery are magical, to say the least, and the events are the stuff of dreams and nightmares of the child’s mind in the early stages of maturity, the accumulated fantasy-influenced imagination gathered during childhood coupled with the fears and wonders of a young girl’s coming-of-age.

The plot centers entirely around thirteen year old Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerová) and her first day (or week, I can't quite tell) of being a woman. She loves flowers, birds, and fruit, and her safety and security are connected to her magic earrings given to her by her mother, whom she knows to be deceased along with her father. She lives with her Grandmother (Helena Anýzová), and frequently consoles with a boy named Orlik (Petr Kopriva), whose creepy father, the Weasel (Jirí Prýmek), a boogeyman and one of the antagonists of the story, is a dead ringer for Nosferatu. Her world is like that of a fairytale, and her innocence and purity as well as her own wellbeing are threatened by a lecherous religious leader, Gracián (Jan Klusák), and vampires. Thankfully she has those magic earring pearls.

Baba Yaga (1973)

Comics have had their fair share of controversy, dating back to the ‘40s and ‘50s, most notably with the book Seduction of the Innocent by Fredric Wertham in 1954, where mature comics were practically demonized and said to contribute to juvenile delinquency. Wertham’s status as a respectable child psychologist gave his book merit, resulting in a national boycotting of comics, and so the Comics Code Authority seal-of-approval came about. The seal was used on the cover of comics to assure parents that the stamped comic complied with the censorship standards and guidelines set forth by the Comics Magazine Association of America. Nevertheless, this restriction put numerous comic companies out of business, and the industry took a huge blow.

Italy had its own comic code stamp introduced in 1962, known as the “Garancia Morale” seal-of-approval. However, when the comic series Diabolik was created by sisters Angela and Luciana Giusanni of the Astorina publishing house in 1962, they avoided being restricted by the boundaries that adhering to a moral stamp-of-approval would cause by declaring outright on the cover that the material was for adults. Ultimately, the dark, murdering antihero Diabolik was a huge hit and numerous similar title characters (usually with a K in the title) sprang up, such as Kriminal, Mister X, Sadik, and Satanik, and the fumetti neri genre eventually became increasingly more violent and erotic. It ultimately grew to be very controversial, so much as to create moral panic, with the publishers of Diabolik eventually facing criminal charges.

The fumetti neri genre that started with Diabolik, nonetheless, paved the way for adult themed comics. One of the most popular controversial Italian comic artists of the time was Guido Crepax, and the erotic comic series he’s most known for, Valentina, was adapted to film by Corrado Farina as Baba Yaga, a cult Eurohorror that’s a real surreal oddity.

A Bell from Hell (1973)

Grey, colorless, and at times very Gothic looking, this Spanish thriller, A Bell from Hell, from director Claudio Guerin Hill has an oppressive, gloomy undertone in its look and feel that, along with the story, feels like a melancholic reminder of a golden past: ruined, overtaken, and killed by treachery and hypocrisy.

After being involuntarily committed to a mental clinic for three years, John (Renaud Verley) is released on probation and given a summons for his case coming up in two months. At the start of his probation, he moves into his deceased mother’s dusty old house, finds a brief job at a cattle slaughtering house, and visits with his aunt, Marta (Viveca Lindfors) and her three lovely daughters. Himself unsure if he’s insane, John alludes to suspicions that his aunt paid a great deal of money to have him committed in order for her to keep his inheritance. Amidst a rather carefree lifestyle and a penchant for practical jokes, some of John’s activities strongly suggest he’s planning something horrible as payback for what his relatives supposedly did to him.

This is indeed a pleasing Spanish thriller. Though it adheres to the commonly used plot devices of vengeance and family inheritance, the story is still well written and kept interesting thanks to the quirky dynamics of the young, mischievous, and darkly humorous protagonist, John. Whether or not viewers end up liking him, John is still an entertaining, multidimensional character, a man-child that’s part hero and part villain. 

Deep Shock (2014)

A new horror short written, directed, and co-produced by Italian filmmaker Davide Melini, titled Deep Shock, is currently in pre-production with a targeted release date for sometime in 2014 as part of a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the giallo film; which is considering Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace from 1964 to be the starting point, as it is the film that set forth a lot of the immortal giallo tropes we know and love.

I covered two of Melini’s previous horror shorts, The Puzzle and The Sweet Hand of the White Rose, back in May of last year, and if you caught those articles, you’ll know that I am pretty enthusiastic about Melini’s work.

The plot synopsis for Deep Shock goes like this: “Sarah can't completely overcome the deaths of her grandfather and her older sister. The trauma and lack of sleep cause her to embark on a strange journey of apparitions and murders, apparently caused by her mind…” -IMDB/Deep Shock

I love the look of the official movie poster, mainly thanks to the fabulous art, by Cristina Gómez Rosales. It has a nice classic look, which is suitable for what Melini is shooting for with this film: a desire to bring back the ideas used during the golden age of giallo film making, during the ‘60s and ‘70s, and deliver them with new technology to be appreciated by new and longtime fans. The tagline “Italian giallo is ready to make its return” sounds bold, but based on Melini’s previous work, I'm pretty excited about this upcoming new short, and I’ve got a feeling that the writer/director will deliver.

Melini plans to have six actors total. The music in the film will be realized by the Gothic Italian band Visioni Gotiche (multiple samples of their work can be heard on the band’s MySpace page Here). The shooting location will be Málaga, Spain, and it’s possible that a teaser will be released sometime this month or in April.

Deep Shock: Facebook Page 

Deep Shock: IMDB Page

The Beyond (1981)

I’ve always considered Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond to be the definitive Italian horror experience, and it’s the one I’d recommend most, even over Suspiria, if anyone ever asked me what a real good Italian horror is. No one ever has, though, and most anyone remotely familiar with Italian horror already knows about The Beyond. When I first saw it, this gross, gory but beautifully nightmarish picture had awoken something in me that completely turned my attention to Italian horror, with an unwaning interest, and it changed my previous negative opinion of Fulci’s Zombi 2 into an entirely positive one.

Presently I can’t figure out why, but I had loathed Zombi 2 for quite some time, so when a local theater that specialized in cult and independent cinema advertised a screening of an old Zombie film, Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond, I immediately recognized the director and thought, “oh no, not that guy” (I was severely of the uninitiated at the time). But, since I regularly attended the weekly midnight screenings at this theater, I thought it’d be fun to go and watch this movie in a dark room full of strangers and observe the general response. Despite numerous riffing and laughter from the audience, there was something about the film that entertained and terrified me. Those moments with the grieving widow in the morgue and every time someone went into room 36 were real intense for me, and the scene with the blind ghost girl, Emily, surrounded by the zombies from Hell gave me a nightmare that night. The characteristics of The Beyond reminded me of Zombi 2, in a good way, and the gore, as indicated by the screams and waves of laughter in the audience, was a real crowd pleaser.

From Beyond (1986)

While Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond is known as an adaptation to H.P. Lovecraft’s short story of the same name, the movie is nonetheless its own beast, with the original literature being more like a seed to what Gordon and his team developed in this FX heavy, gory ‘80s shocker. The pre-credits intro is more or less the component that is primarily adapted from Lovecraft’s ultra-short, seven page story, while the rest of the film continues on as an imagining of what could’ve happened had the original story not ended so abruptly. Whether or not Gordon got it spot-on is arguable, but Lovecraft’s ideas in From Beyond did have a lot of unexplored potential, and Gordon took liberties to explore this potential and, at the same time, do things his way, by including those far-out sexual elements á la Re-Animator (the Barbara Crampton escapades), some of the coolest grotesque interdimensional creatures and transformations since John Carpenter’s The Thing, and a face full of the good ol’ nauseating gore; most of which didn’t make it past the censors at the time of its initial release.

Due to the success of Re-Animator, Gordon wanted to do another Lovecraft film, and he wanted to reuse the key actors from Re-Animator, Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton, who all ended up being extremely successful and welcome returns. However, I remember really wanting to see this when I found out that Ken Foree was in it, my favorite zombie killer (Dawn of the Dead). Here, Foree still has that likability he had as Peter in Romero’s film, but his character in From Beyond just wasn’t as skilled with handling interdimensional creatures, as Peter was with zombies, to make it all the way through this one.