Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb
and this is Joe McCormick, and we are once more
returning to the Nashi verse. This will be our fourth
Paul Nashi film on Weird House Cinema. Paul Nashy, of
course an icon of Spanish horror and just in general
like nineteen seventies grimy horror cinema. We've previously talked about. Yeah,
(00:37):
three of his films. There's nineteen seventy three's Horror Rises
from the Tomb, in which he plays no fewer than
three characters, including the undead warlock Alarak Demarnac alongside his
undead bride played by Helga Line. And then we also
talked about nineteen seventies Assignment Terror, which is a ridiculous
mostly I would say, a spy themed monster mash featuring
(01:00):
Nashi as the cursed werewolf Valdemar Daninsky.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
And then had like off brand versions of all the
universal monsters that were being recruited by alien spies to
attack Earth.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Yes, but I have to say some really fun monster
combat in that one. I had that one on Blu
Ray donated it to Future Shock Video in New Orleans,
so you can rent it there.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Yeah. I recall that one was interesting for how they
sketched out the moral character of the different monsters, like,
of course, because it was Paul Nashi playing Waldebarn Doninsky
as the werewolf. The werewolf was the more sympathetic monster.
It's just got a you know, a romantic role. Paul
Nashi as this were wolf character, which occurred in many films,
(01:44):
often played a kind of tragic romantic role. But the
really bad one was Frankenstein. The Frankenstein monster was like
the main henchmen of the bad aliens.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Yeah, that was interesting. And then we talked about nineteen
eighty one's Night of the Werewolf, a full blown of
Valdemar Doninski film in which the legendary werewolf does battle
with Lady Bathrie played by Julius Sally. All three of
these were written by Nashi as well, and he directed
Nine of the Werewolf.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
I think did he often write these under I was
gonna say a pen name, but I think it was
actually his real name, right, yesinto Molina.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Yes, yeah, generally that they would be credited to his
real name Paul Nashy is his performance name.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
Now, in case we're interested in running up the score
on recent Nashi viewings. Just the other night, my wife
and I finished watching another nineteen seventy one Paul Nashi movie.
We watched The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman, which I
acquired this past December. It has some really good gopher
style vampire fangs. You know, there are different ways you
(02:48):
can design vampire fangs. This made me think about it,
Like the kind that are actually rather slight like they
kind of hide in the mouth, and then you can
have the ones that were you know, the mouth opens
way and reveals a kind of longer snake fang, and
then you've got this style which is a kind of
fang over by this sort of chipmunk look where the
fangs go down over the bottom lip, which I don't know.
(03:12):
I think it looks pretty funny. This is, of course,
another tragic romantic werewolf part for Paul Nashy. He's reprising
his role as Waldemartin and Doninsky. I don't know how
many movies he played Dninsky, and it had to be
more than a dozen. He's doing it over and over.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
We discussed the full count in our episode on Night
of the Werewolf, but it's yeah, it's a whole slew
of them.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
Yeah, so Werewolf versus the Vampire Woman was a lot
of fun. It's mostly goofball stuff. It has a quite
wooden love story. The chemistry between Nashi and his romantic
interest is not really there, but it does have a
handful of genuinely unnerving and artful sequences. It's kind of interesting.
(03:55):
I don't know what it comes at. So like, it's
mostly a B movie, but every now and then there's
a shot that could be like, oh, that's actually quite scary,
that that could be in a in a much better film.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Yeah. I mean, that's one of the wonderful things about
films of this caliber B cinema in general, is that
you know there's gonna be some stuff that, you know,
where the either abilities or a budget wasn't quite there.
But then there'll be areas where it really shines, you know,
and it's finding those diamonds in the rough. That's that's
always the joy.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
Rachel had questions about what the audience was supposed to
understand about the romantic appeal of Paul Nashi because he's
sort of part Peter Loriie and part Clark Gable. You know,
it's it's a mix.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Yeah, it is often hard in in a way, it's
interesting because it kind of makes him a bit of
a chameleon, because he can play a werewolf, he can
play he can play Dracula, you know, he can play
an action hero, and as we're going to discuss today,
he can also play a hunchback like he you know,
he as we've mentioned before, like he was a former weightlifter,
(04:58):
so you know, you know, he's the muscular guy and
not you know, and I think you know, you can
say Paul Nashi was a handsome fella as well, but
he didn't have those kind of necessarily those like iconic
leading man good looks that were kind of like the standard,
and we have, I think an example of those sorts
(05:18):
of good looks for a male actor of the nineteen
seventies in Spanish cinema in this picture.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
Yeah, I think he can be understood as attractive in
a way, but it's more the byronic hero who's maybe
not necessarily the most classically handsome, but he has a
kind of dark, strong, brooding, complicated, dangerous appeal which goes
with his werewolf roles.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Yeah, I agree, because I've watched one or two of
the films where he plays like irresistible action Paul Nashy
without any supernatural motifs added on, and you know it's
a little harder to get behind.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
Yeah, but to the extent that he has Peter Laurie energy,
it's like buff Peter Lourie.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Yeah. So yeah, in today's film Hunchback of the Morgue,
we get to experience Nashy is a different horror movie staple,
the Hunchback. This trope, of course, has deep roots in
Gothic horror, going back to the eighteen thirty one Victor
Hugo novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, with film adaptations
of that work going back to nineteen oh five. The
(06:19):
nineteen twenty three silent film adaptation starring Lon Cheney stands out,
as well as the nineteen thirty nine talkie starring Charles
Lawton and Marine O'Hara. These have both stood the test
of time and are considered classics. The makeup as well
in these two, Like you look up stills or footage
from these films and it's still very convincing stuff.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
Now, I think the Hunchback of Notre Dame character has
been brought to screen with a number of different takes,
but usually the core of the character is that he
is someone who is rejected and outcast by others because
of his appearance, but has a good soul.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Right And there's generally like one fe male character at
least who sees him for who he really is, who
recognizes this pure heart within him. So yeah, a lot
of great actors have played this role over the years.
Some of these I've never seen and wasn't familiar with,
Like Anthony Quinn played Quasimoto in fifty six. Anthony Hopkins
played him in eighty two alongside Derek Jacobi, who I
(07:20):
believe played the villain in that one. Mandy Patinkin played
him in nineteen ninety seven. I vaguely remember that one.
I think it was a TV adaptation opposite Samahayak and
Richard Harris. We also have the nineteen ninety six Walt
Disney film adaptation animated, and I'm not sure where the
project stands, but there was talk of Idris Elba starring
(07:40):
in and directing a Netflix adaptation of the Hunchback of
Notre Dame. Sadly, I think fate has probably robbed us
of our chance to see Big driss as Quasimoto.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
That would have been something. Don't even know if I
can imagine it, but sorry, I just had to go
over and look at the I had to look up
the story because I remember the name of the villain
from the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the archdeacon, the church official.
But that was Archdeacon Frolo or Frollo. I don't know
how you say it, but yeah, this character. It's funny
(08:12):
because I misremembered what this character was supposed to be,
and thinking back on him, I had been thinking of
him more as a I don't know, a character more
like Javert and Limius, a rob and another Victor Hugo novel,
who is a kind of misguided, overly strict enforcer of
the rules, who you know, kind of fails to see
(08:35):
ways in which strict enforcement of the rules can be
harmful or you know, can do more harm than good.
I don't know if that's actually what this character is.
It seems like in the novel at least he is
a He is a weird sort of outsider figure in
the church who people think he might be some kind
of wizard. He's doing alchemy experiments, and he's a lecherous creep,
(08:56):
which is funny because that means there's there's maybe some
overlap betwe between that character and one of the main
villains in The Hunchback of the Morgue.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
That's a great point. Yeah, Now, given Paul Nashy's love
for universal monsters and classic gothic horror, yeah, it was
only a matter of time, I guess, until he did
a Quasimoto like character. Though it is important to stress
here this is not another retelling of the Hunchback of
Notre Dame. Instead, we have a largely original story involving
grave robbing, doomed love, mad science, and just a splash
(09:29):
of lovecrafty and horror.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
Set in the modern world at the time of the film.
Or is it questions about that this one was temporally confusing.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Yes. Now you had a great note as well about
the likely inspiration for this. I mentioned Nashi was, of
course a big fan of the universal horror movies, all
the classics that he grew up on, and you brought
up the character of Fritz.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
Oh yeah, well, because this movie to me seemed you
could definitely interpret it as Franken's not so much to
the novel, but the first James Whyale movie, the first
universal Frankenstein from Fritz's perspective.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
That's a great point. Yeah, Fritz, of course, being the
hunchback esque sidekick to the doctor.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
In the first film, played by Dwight Fry.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Yeah, so yeah, I could see there's some Fritz. DNA
did this as well, for sure, and maybe a little
I Gore in there as well, though I Gore, of
course pure villain.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
So I guess a real question about this movie is
how sympathetic are we supposed to think Paul Nashy's character is,
because it's clear he's being portrayed, at least in the beginning,
as mostly sympathetic. I mean, the story is basically told
from Paul Nashy's character's perspective, and we see all of
(10:49):
his loves and disappointments and humiliations we identify emotionally with
his struggles. We see and other characters repeatedly tell him
that despite the fact that he is outcast, he has
a good heart and he means well. But we also
just see him carry out murder after murder and not
just murders like live later in the movie, kidnappings of
(11:13):
live human subjects to be fed to some kind of monster.
Speaker 4 (11:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Yeah, And in a sense, it's the murders have the
sort of standard trajectory of any kind of at least
initially sympathetic killer in a film, because the initial victims
will all be dirt bags, and then later on you're like, oh, well,
they're not really that much of he's straight over in
the less dirt bag territory. But this film doesn't really
(11:40):
make much out of that. We can observe it in
comment on it, but the film doesn't really spend a
lot of time with the fact that, yeah, he's increasingly
just murdering and kidnapping people to feed them to a monster.
And yet at the same time, I do feel like
the movie encourages us to feel sympathy for Gotho the
Hunchback the whole time. So yeah, it's it's weird and
(12:02):
different characters speak about him in ways where it's like, oh,
none of this is his fault, and I'm like.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
I don't know, if he's got some responsibility in there,
he knows what he's doing.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Yeah, So yeah, we'll discuss as we proceed here. But
as far as the elevator pitches go, I would say
my elevator pitch would be I would do anything for love,
up to and including murder and grave.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
Robbing, including after my love is long dead.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Yes, all right, Uh, let's let's hear a little bit
of the trailer audio. I'm not sure we're going to
be busting out some English trailer audio or Spanish trailer audio,
but either one will give you a taste you every one.
Speaker 5 (12:42):
You got three colors, no wish, no, no, no.
Speaker 4 (12:54):
Never before as a motion picture told such a story
in which love and horror race hand in hand so
their final consequences. Never has love been so terrifying, Never
has horror been more romantic. Close your eyes tightly if
you're unable to look at the terrifying scenes of this
motion picture interpreted by Paul Nashy, Rosana Yanni, Vic Winnard,
(13:19):
Alberto Delbiz, and Maria Pushy.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
All right, rob Speaking of the English and Spanish dubs,
I have to report that I had a slightly chaotic
viewing experience with this movie because the streaming version that
I found to watch. I don't know if I should
call out the platform it was the one that's on
the shout Factory streaming collection only had one. Maybe this
(13:50):
is my fault. Maybe I just didn't figure out how
to set it up correctly or something. But at least
when I was watching it, I could only figure out
how to use one audio option, and that audio option
was both the English and Spanish dubs playing simultaneously, which
was somewhat maddening, but I was still able to enjoy
the movie.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Yeah, that can always be confusing. If you've never, of course,
played around with this, you might easily make the mistake
of thinking, well, the dub and the subtitles are going
to be identical, right, No, very often they are not.
If they're even if they're just a little off it,
you can feel your your brain hemispheres becoming like moving
(14:29):
away from each other, you know, your brain splitting in half.
Speaker 4 (14:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
Yeah, it's like creating the dial tone noise. Yeah. But
so I was watching it with both of the audios
playing simultaneously, and then looking at the English subtitles. So
the amusing. When I reference lines in the film, I'm
referring to the English subtitles.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Mostly I watched this one in Spanish with the English
subs I checked out the English dub at first, because
it's important to note, especially filmed films from this era
Spanish cinema, they're almost always dubbed, even in Spanish. It
was just sort of the standard. It wasn't until later
that there was more of an emphasis on getting Spanish
(15:12):
actors to use their.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
Own voices, in the sense that a lot of times
the movie would not have live sound from the set,
even in the language it was shot in. They would
do they would record their lines later.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Yeah, and I think maybe part of it too, is like, yeah,
you're bring in a voice actor. They're like, they're better anyway,
bring them in. But I listened to a little bit
of the English dub and I'm like, no, this Gotho
doesn't sound right. So I just switched to the Spanish version,
but I watched it on the screen. Factory released Paul
(15:44):
Nashi Collection Volume two, which is a pretty great Blu
ray set. It contains a number of Paul Nashi films,
including The Werewolf and The Yetti, which is really fun.
That's another Doninsky film in which he travels to Tibet.
I believe, so a lot of fun stuff in that.
The disc offers two different versions of The Hunchback of
(16:06):
the Morgue, regular and uncensored. I've only watched the uncensored version.
I rewatched it, and I watched it originally a few
years back while I was like deep in COVID, and
I think the only difference is like one or two scenes.
There's not like a huge difference between the censored and
the uncensored as far as I understand it. But this
is a great collection worth checking out. If you live
(16:26):
in Atlanta. You can rent it from Videodrome. Great quality,
great stuff, a few extras as well on the disc.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
From what I could detect the uncensored version, there was
only really one scene of brief mild nudity that was
on a completely different film quality than the rest of
the movie.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
That stands out. That's the main scene that stands out.
Is being added on.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
This feels like it was from somewhere else.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
All right. Well, let's get into the people involved here.
The director of this picture, and they also have a
screenplay credit, so I think they had some influence on
the screenplay. It's Javier Aguiri, who lived nineteen thirty five
through twenty nineteen, Spanish film director whose films include a
trio of seventy three horror pictures. Hunchback of the Morgue.
(17:21):
Of course, another Paul Nashy film, Dracula's Great Love and
the Killer, is one of thirteen. He worked in multiple
genres and was well regarded for his short films. He's
one of these directors that I believe did some more
experimental short film work early on.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
The Killer is one of thirteen. Don't know anything about
that one, but it sounds by the title like a Jallo.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
I looked into it briefly when it was like a
Friday the Thirteenth episode publication, and I was like, we
should do something with thirteen in the title. So I
was looking into it. It looks it looks it looks
like it might be good, but I haven't seen it.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
If the name of the movie is a complete sentence,
there's a good chance it's a jallo.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Yeah. Or if it has something cryptic about like the
moth with the sapphire plumage or whatever. You know, there
are a number of those that sound like like your
auto generated jallo title.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
Twenty seven Daggers for the Owl Queens, Yes.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
All right. There's also a screenplay credit for Alberto S.
And Sua dates unknown who also worked on tract It
was Great Love and the Killers one of thirteen, but
the main screenplay credit goes to Paul Nashi, who of
course also plays our hunchback Wolfgang Gotho. So yeah, Paul Nashi,
the legend himself. We've of course talked about Paul Nashey
(18:35):
on the show before. Real name Jacinto Molina Alvarez, he
was an aspiring architect turned bodybuilder turned horror writer, actor,
and eventually director. He grew up idolizing the universal monsters
he saw at the cinema and eventually got to become them.
He worked in various genres in addition to horror, including action, comedy,
and history, though history I think you know, with some
(18:58):
obvious horror elements. Well, but his horror work is what
has become legendary and has found an international audience, And
clearly this was his deepest love. Several of his films
certainly explored the darker side of human nature, but his
most iconic role, that of the werewolf Voldemart de Doninski,
(19:19):
embodies a clearly heartfelt sense of tragic love and doom,
and we see elements of these sensibilities and other roles
as well, including this one. And I think that when
we're talking about sympathy for Gotho, I think I think
doom is important, Like there is a strong doom vibe
to everything here with him, Like, you know, he he
(19:39):
is a doomed individual. He's a tragic individual. He stands
outside of the laws. He's been pushed outside of society,
and therefore he also has a sort of liberation in
being completely untethered from those laws and moral standards.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
Yeah. There are even scenes that communicate essentially that idea
in the movie. Yeah, but it seems over and over
again across his career. Nashi liked to play characters whose
love was more powerful than anything in the universe and
who in the end are destroyed by their love.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Yes. Yeah, so it's always.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
Like in the werewolf role, he's always got to get
stabbed in the heart with the silver cross by the
one woman who truly loves him.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Yes, there's a great quote from Nashie that I read
in the last Nashi film we covered Knight of the Werewolf,
where he's talking about Night of the Werewolf in some
of the plot elements, and he says, the claustrophobic castle
the gothic tombs, the ill fated love affair, the menace
of the undead, the ostracism of someone who is despised
for being different, in the albravating shadow of death. All
(20:43):
of these elements go to make up my personality and my.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
Work sounds about right.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
And yeah, these characters, these films like these were the
soul of Paul Nashy. So yeah, he in this film,
I say, I think he gives a great performance at
once sympathetic and menacing or altering between the two depending
on the scene. And his physicality works really really well.
Here he's playing a hunchback, which is you know, he's
hunched over, he's shambling as he moves from scene to scene,
(21:10):
and I just have to say, this must have just
been physically exhausting. I am not an actor, but I
played a character in a video series, a mad scientist
talking about science called Anton Jessup, and I had like
a slightly hunched over posture for the shoot. And this
was just like a few hours on a couple of days,
and I just felt like my body was racked after
(21:32):
from having to hold like a posture that I wasn't
accustomed to. And you know, It's probably not good posture
at all. And you know, for someone to play a
character like this and shamble about and maintain this kind
of posture and gait, yeah, this must have just absolutely
wrecked him.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
Yeah. I would say you can even see the strain
on him in certain scenes. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
All right, well let's get into the love interest for
old Gotho here. First of all, we have Ilsa. This
is Gotho's initial doomed crush, played by Maria Elena Apron
born nineteen forty eight, Spanish actress whose other credits include
sixty nine Is the House That Screamed, Armando Dios Aarrio's
first Blind Dead movie, seventy two's Tombs of the Blind Dead,
(22:14):
and nineteen to seventy four's The Fish with the Eyes
of Gold. Now there's a job title for you.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
Yeah, yep.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
She was also in the seventy three Western Tequila exclamation Point,
and she was only active during the late sixties early seventies.
But she's good. I mean, it's as far as roles
where someone mostly plays a corpse, this was pretty physically demanding.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
Yeah, I know, I already said there are several things
that are temporally confusing about the setting of the film.
We'll keep coming back to that, especially throughout the plot.
This is set in the modern times, it's set in
the nineteen seventies, but this character feels like something out
of a Victorian novel. She very much just has a
story based disease. That's kind of Oh I die now.
(23:01):
I don't even know which story in particular I'm thinking of,
but she feels like a Victorian character.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
I love that your sample cough there was clearly the
cough from Black Sabbath. Sweetly.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
You know, my daughter heard that song for the first
time the other day and she proclaimed, it's heavy.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
That is quite heavy.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
She didn't originate that terminology. I had instructed her what
heavy means awesome.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
All right. So this is the doom the initial doomed
crush of Gotho. But then Gotho is going to get
a new love interest, and that is the character Elki,
played by Rosanna Yanni born nineteen thirty eight, Argentinian born
actress active from the early sixties to the early two thousands.
She was in Count Dracula with Great Love same year.
She was also in sixty eight's Frankenstein's Bloody Terror. That's
(23:48):
another Dninsky picture. And she's also in nineteen sixty nine
Spangs of the Living Dead that was directed by Diasorrio,
which she also had a production credit on. Oh, and
she was in a very interesting looking nineteen three Amazonian
warrior peplam film that also featured Helga Line, titled War Goddess,
and it was directed by Terrence Young, the guy who
(24:09):
directed several of the early James Bond pictures.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
Oh, Okay, that's funny because I can just see her.
I'm not saying she was in one, but I could
see her in a James Bond movie. She looks like
she would fit right in and a I don't know,
in a blackjack scene in a casino.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
She's really tall and of course gorgeous, and I feel
like her height really helps in this picture opposite Gotho,
because again it's Paul Nashew, I think, is already shorter
than her, and then he's stumped. He's stooped over as well,
so I don't know, like her very vertical alignment like
makes him even more hunchbacky.
Speaker 3 (24:44):
She's good in the role. She plays a doctor, so
she has a very very caring and therapeutic kind of
presence her kindness, however, just not in her performance, but
the way the character is written, her kindness and level
of understand goes to such lengths that it becomes a
kind of hilarious naivete. At the end of you know,
(25:05):
there's like murder after murder, and she's like, he's really
very good.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
Yes, yeah, yeah. There are a lot of characters who
see the good in Gotho to the point where they're
clearly overlooking a lot of crimes.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
Yeah, all right.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
We mentioned that this has a mad scientist in it,
and that is the character to doctor or La, who's
a real treat played by Alberto Dalbis who lived nineteen
twenty two through nineteen eighty three. Yeah, he's our chief
antagonist are mad scientist Argentine film and television actor who
worked a lot in horror, Jallo, crime and westerns. Something
(25:43):
of a Spanish horror icon himself, and yet this is
the only role that he ever had in a Nashi film.
He pops up in no fewer than eleven Jess Franco films,
so his credits include the likes of seventy three's The
Erotic Rights of Frankenstein. I'm not sure if it's the
monster of the doctor that has the erotic rights here,
and that's rights like sacred rights, not like legal.
Speaker 3 (26:06):
Rights, satanic rights of Dracula.
Speaker 4 (26:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
Yeah, But he also appeared in the sci fi action
sci fi action films like sixty seven's Danger to Exclamation Points,
Death Ray and the seventy two Telesavahas film Pancho Villa,
which we've talked about on the show before.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
He is an interesting and different kind of mad scientist
if you follow me here. So, I don't know, I
feel like the mad scientists we see in movies are
more often of either the Colin Clive kind of coming
apart of the seems nervous energy variety, or they might
be more like Doctor Septimus pretorious and Bride of Frankenstein
(26:44):
and be a kind of oh, I don't know, beyond
good and evil libertine, of weird obsessions and all that.
This guy instead has more of a kind of academic,
masculine bully energy. He feels like the guy, like the
guy in an academic department who has a kind of
(27:04):
charisma and authority and likes to boss other people around
and always get his way.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
Yeah. I think that's a good read on the character,
and it does make him stand out, Like he has
some great villain monologues, but they're not about ruling the
universe or anything like that. It's largely about like, yeah,
some real scientific advancements you are going to come out
of this work. So yeah, I thought Doctor Orla was
a lot of fun here.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
Yeah, I like him too. I don't know exactly how
I got here. He doesn't look a whole lot like
this guy. But the comparison I kept coming to in
my mind is he reminded me of the American actor
Richard Thomas, who played John Boy on The Waltons, And
it's a bunch of other roles since then. He was
in the adult half of the nineteen ninety eight, and
(27:52):
he had a role in The Americans, which is a
great espionage TV show. If there's a slightly more science
oriented version of that kind of energy, that's what I
got from this guy.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
He has a great, smoldering, hateful glare that put me
in the mind of Powers Booth and Michael Shannon.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
M Okay, I can see that too, all right.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
So we have our love interests set in place here,
we have our sympathetic monster, and we have our mad scientists.
We have a few other parts here to round out
the cast. I mentioned that there would be traditional handsome
in this picture, and the traditional handsomeness is provided by
Victor Barrera credited as Vic Winner or Vic Wiener as
(28:34):
I think it depends on which trader you watched exactly
how it is pronounced, But he plays doctor Frederick Togner.
He is the second author on the forthcoming study that
doctor Orla is working on.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
He is is he a mad scientist? And not really?
But he I don't know. I think he, on one hand,
is kind of a nice guy who means well, but
he also comes across like a he just keeps getting
talked into doing bad stuff by Orla.
Speaker 4 (29:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
Yeah, he's here for the applications of this study, and
it seems willing to turn a blind eye to some
of the horrors. That being said, I feel like his
character is really the only decent male character in the film.
The vast majority of the men we meet in the
picture are belligerent, drunken, hateful bullies. One character is a
(29:25):
mad scientist, then there's Gotho, a tragic figure who murders
everyone else. Even the children are just the absolute worst.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
Yeah, I guess the only really truly good and pure
characters are Ilsa and then Elkie, and then I guess
you could argue about Tauchner here and then also about
doctor Meyer his fiance.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
That's right. Yeah, all the women are fine, but of
the men, only Fred Here is decent. Now Barrera or Winner.
He worked in a few different Nashi pictures. We talked
about him, I think briefly before because he pops up
in Horror Rises from the Tomb. He's also in Count
Dracula's Great Love. So yeah, pretty standard stuff here, but
(30:08):
you know he plays his part well, yeah, all right,
we mentioned doctor Meyer, doctor Maria Meyer. This is doctor
Fred's fiance, played by Maria Percy, who lived nineteen thirty
eight through two thousand and four. Persciy Here was an
Austrian born actress whose biggest film was likely nineteen sixty
four Is Man's Favorite Sport. She was billed third in
(30:29):
that film. It starred Rock Hudson and was directed by
none other than Howard Hawks in his fourth to last film.
She appeared in five films with Paul Nashey. She was
also in the third Blind Dead picture, The Ghost Gallion.
Now a brief note on special effects because I have
to say I thought that the gore in this movie
looks pretty good, Like it's really fun blood and slime.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
Yes, you know, I'm not primarily a gorehound by nature.
It's not the first thing I'm looking for in a movie,
but I but I do appreciate better gore, and this
is better gore than much.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Yeah, some good disembodied heads in this picture. For example.
The special effects credit goes to one Pablo Perez, Spanish
effects artists who also worked on such films as seventy
two's Horror Express, which we previously talked about and had
some very fun effects in its Yeah. Yeah, Count Dracula
(31:21):
was great. Love Luccio Fulciese nineteen seventy three White Fang adaptation.
What I didn't even know that existed as well as
seventy three is The Vampire's Night Orgy, a movie I
haven't seen, but it's on my radar because there's a
scene in the picture and it's featured on promotional materials,
including the poster that shows Helga Line as a vampire
(31:42):
carrying a male victim, which is a nice inversion of
the horror movie poster trope in which a male monster
carries a female captive. So the movie may just be
absolute trash, it may not be good. I don't know,
but bravo for doing the gender flip on this iconic
bit of poster sleeves. I love it.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
Yeah, and it looks good.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Yeah yeah, I mean I think she's really carrying him here.
Speaker 3 (32:06):
Yeah, I mean they've they've posed him just right, showing
off the thighs and all that.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
Yeah. Yeah. And then finally, the music here is by
Carmelo A Berniola, who lived nineteen twenty nine through two
thousand and two. Highly influential Spanish composer who also worked
in film and TV scores. He won some Spanish Film
(32:33):
Awards for a few different pictures, including seventy four's Tormento.
His other scores include The House Without Frontiers and Cutthroat
nine and seventy two and three Nashy films from seventy three, Hunchback,
count Dracula's Great Love and Horror Rises from the Tomb.
I would say, good melodramatic score on the whole.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
Yeah, I would agree with that, though I will say
it's not that the music is bad, especially early in
the film. There is a lot of use of music
that is really not my favorite style. Yeah, but it's
not the music's fault. It's just not there's a lot
of like, I don't know, marches with heavy horns and
Octoberfest style music that's I don't know, I get that
(33:14):
that's that's some people's thing.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
They they lean heavily on the score right as the
movie opens to let you know that this is Germany,
it's Germanic, or it's Austria. It's somewhere. It's somewhere that
has Octoberfest. And later on in some things we see
like Octoberfest posters on the walls and so forth. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
Yeah, so well, speaking of that, should we jump right
into the plot.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
Yeah, let's let's hit the poke music.
Speaker 3 (33:40):
So, yeah, this is the music we're getting while we
see the credits play. It's not exactly it's not polka music.
I think this might technically be a march of some kind.
I don't know the music term, but it's Yeah, it's
a lot of horns. It's like blasting. It's really loud
on the soundtrack, like going into the red and you know, yeah,
the Octoberfest zone. But this is playing while the camera
(34:03):
pans over the beautiful landscape of wherever this is. I
think it's supposed to be Germany. There are mountains in
the distance, hills in the foreground covered in forests. The
leaves are going orange for the autumn, and then we
see green, clear expanses of farmland. So it's a very
beautiful landscape.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
Yeah. Yeah, most of this film was filmed in Spain,
but there are some shots from Austria, and I think
some of these zoom in on the town shots are
definitely Austrian.
Speaker 3 (34:30):
Oh yeah, maybe it's supposed to be Austria, but it
feels like one of those feels like Germany or Austria
or something. Anyway, we zoom in on one sleepy town
somewhere in these hills now here. I want to come
back to the issue of how someone could easily be
confused about when this movie is supposed to take place,
because some of the sets and plot elements really imply
(34:53):
this is supposed to take place in the nineteenth century
or even earlier. But that can't be because there are
contemporary cars, and some of the characters but not others,
are wearing nineteen seventies clothes, So this has to be
set in the nineteen seventies. But again we will just
see things here and there, like some interior decoration, some
(35:14):
clothes and things like that that make it seem like
it's from another time. And I don't know what contributed
to that weird anachronism, but there it is.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
Yeah, I mean, some of it probably has to do
with the locations and the sets, where on one hand
you'll have mad science equipment, but then on the other
hand you'll have these tremendous ruins and stone hallways with
straw strewn on the ground. So yeah, some temporal confusion
does ensue.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
Yeah, So in this town we see an empty street.
It is empty except for Paul Nashy who's wandering along
the cobblestones in his hunchback costume. And this is our protagonist, Gotho.
I'm going to call him Gotho because that's how it's spelled.
I think when I was hearing the characters say it,
this might have been more in the Spanish stub they
were calling him more like go Toe, but I think
(36:07):
Gotho is easier for me to remember to say. So
Gotho makes his way toward I think this place would
be called a beer haul in the cultural context. It
is a drinking establishment with tables and chairs. It's got
an accordion player, and it serves beer in comical, almost
gallon sized glasses. And inside we meet several bar patrons.
(36:30):
There is a young Foppish man with shaggy brown hair
wearing an olive green sweater. This might be a commando sweater,
I'm not sure, but he's carousing with two women, also
in temporally confusing outfits. They're dressed to bar maids like
the Saint Paul girl. And this guy is named Udo,
and he's just partying with these ladies. They're like swaying
(36:52):
back and forth wildly, drunkenly to the accordion music, laughing
at nothing, just clinking their mugs together about again, apparently nothing.
And then this guy Udo rudely yells at the accordion
player to play something different. He says they're getting bored.
The accordion player stops, plays a different song which sounds
exactly like the first song. And then Paul Nashy watches
(37:16):
this scene play out. So he's peeking in through the
beer hall window. At a table nearby, there are a
couple of other young louts. Somebody says that they are students,
and they challenge Udo to a drinking contest by saying,
this was the line, can you handle your beer as
well as it can handle your girls? I don't know.
(37:37):
So they order four huge beers. You just gigantic beers.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
These beers are so huge, the glasses are so huge,
and the quantity of beer is so huge that like
you almost feel like the humans are shrinking, or that
you're in some sort of a surreal sequence, Like, surely
beer is not served in quantities this vast.
Speaker 3 (37:58):
It's when they go to the pub and and Lord
of the Rings, Yeah, it comes in pints.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
Yeah, it's like if you're a hobbit and you're drinking
a human sized beer. I mean, I guess this is legit.
I have no reason to believe that they they faked this.
I just and I'm not a beer drinker. So it
just seems like, wouldn't it just become so warm by
the time you get to the bottom of that glass.
Speaker 3 (38:18):
Well not if you drink it like Udo in this
other guy, because they just chug it all at once.
So they have a drinking contest. Udo goes toe to
toe with one of the students, a tall guy with Sideburns,
And I would say this bar scene is good to
watch if you want to convince yourself to quit drinking alcohol.
It makes alcohol look absolutely revolting. These two guys. So
(38:40):
they're drinking the giant beer as they're drooling everywhere, they're
spitting little flecks of froth. They end up with their
faces and clothes covered in some kind of gleaming mucus
from the chugging process. So they're not just wet, you know,
They've got drool and wet going down their shirts and
on their pants. But then their face are covered with
(39:01):
this mucusy like shining stuff. And when I say their faces,
I don't just mean their mouth. It's like their forehead
and their eyebrows are wet. It's disgusting.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
Yeah, just sweaty, toxically masculine beer guzzling. It seems to eventually,
it seems to destroy both their sex drives and their
internal organs. Yes, because after you're done drinking at this place,
you're just like, I have to leave now and fall
in the street.
Speaker 3 (39:25):
Yeah, yeah, that's right. So Udo wins the drinking contest
because kids sideburns here falls unconscious and then smashes his beer,
steining on the floor, Udo mocks him and then announces,
soaking wet, that it's time he has to go home.
The ladies dressed up like the Saint poly girl or
they're like, no, Udo, don't go. I think the implication
(39:45):
is that Udo is the life of the party. He's
very handsome and charismatic, and they want him to stay
and party. But you know, how's he going to stay
in party? He's like soaked in beer. So he gets up.
He wanders outside by himself, stumbling and staggering back and
forth as he makes his way down the street. Now
from the shadows nearby, Gotho watches Udo leave and then
(40:08):
follows him at a distance, looking concerned. At some point
while he's going down the street, Udo drops something I
think it's his wallet, and Gotho sees this and runs
to pick it up. He calls out, Udo, you dropped this,
but Udo does not appreciate Gotho's help. Instead, he hits
Gotho and then he says, like Gotho, you monster, what
(40:29):
were you going to do? Rob me? One direct quote
from this part from the subtitles is he says to Gotho,
your fart face turns my guss. But in this altercation,
Udo drops a photograph of a woman signed with a note.
Gotho picks it up and it says to Udo, with
all my love Ilsa, and Gotho reads this to himself
(40:50):
clearly in pain reading it. It's just it's wounding him emotionally. Meanwhile,
Udo is walking on ahead, but suddenly he starts coughing
and gagging and clutching his stomach and he just collapses
on the street and apparently dies.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:07):
I was confused about this, but I don't know. We
can check in on this in a minute, but first
we have to say. We go to a second location
that we're told in a subtitle is Feldkirch Hospital or
feldkirk It's about feld k Rch Hospital, and so it's
a clinic situated up on a slope overlooking the town.
(41:28):
It's surrounded by elegant, well kept gardens and a fountain courtyard,
and tonight the rain is pouring. We see the rain
pouring into the fountain outside. But suddenly we are in
the morgue of the hospital. It's a room with white
tile walls, lockers for body storage, and autopsy tables, and
here we see Udo laid out I think, already dead
(41:49):
on one of the tables. And then Gotho is here,
wearing a heavy leather apron. He approaches. He approaches Udo's
body with a knife in hand. It's rinning, and Gotho says, now, Udo,
your skin is pale white. You no longer have that
handsome olive complexion the women like so much. You were
so proud of your good looks. You made fun of
(42:11):
the hump on my back. You never realized you would
end up as a pile of meat at the hands
of bungling students. Then Gotho takes the knife and proceeds
to I think it's not exactly clear what all happens here,
but I think he cuts off Udo's head, hands, and
feet and puts them in a bag in his cart.
While he's doing this, he's singing song lyrics to himself
(42:35):
that go the dead will never rise again. The crows,
they sing and sing. So it's a little ambiguous what
happened here, Like, how did Udo die? Was he already
dead when the cutting happened?
Speaker 2 (42:48):
I think, I assume yeah, I mean, because he's in
the morgue. My understanding is he just straight up like
died of alcohol poisoning in the street.
Speaker 3 (42:56):
He drank so much beer that he died in the
middle of the street.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (43:01):
Anyway, Gotho, after this, he takes his little cart, presumably
full of Udo's organs, like his head and his hands
and stuff, and he wheels it out of the morgue,
going past a couple of doctors who work in the morgue.
And these guys stink as Gotho's coming in there in
the middle of some misogynous knee slapper, and they stop
Gotho to insult him and yell at him. They call
(43:23):
him a gorilla. They tell him he's not welcome in
the dissection room. One of them says, you know that
the students have a special dislike for your baboon face.
So what's worse here, baboon face or fartface. We've already
gotten both, but I do want to emphasize here. Many
times characters comment on the ugliness of Gotho's face, But
(43:44):
he doesn't have any special makeup. Really. He has a scar,
but that's about it. Otherwise it's just Paul Nashy face.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
Yeah. Yeah, So, on one hand, it is always a
little jarring where you're like he doesn't look that on
that ugly guys. He just looks like Paul Nashy. But
on the other hand, I guess it's it's kind of
nice that it makes the performance pure Nashy, you know,
like there's no potentially distracting makeup getting between you and
(44:13):
the performance.
Speaker 3 (44:14):
Yeah. So, anyway, Gotho goes about his business. I don't
know what he's doing with this with the Udo Organs,
but he At one point he stops in a hallway
to gaze longingly at the photograph of Ilsa that Udo dropped,
And it's obvious that Gotho is in love with Ilsa.
Whoever she is.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
She's single, now, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (44:33):
That's true. So we're about to meet her. You see,
Ilsa is actually a patient at this hospital where Gotho works,
and they have a relationship, not a romantic one, but
a friendship. Ilsa is here with a very Victorian movie disease.
It causes her to appear pale and go into fits
of weak, dry coughing. When we meet her, the doctor
(44:54):
tells her she's gonna be fine, But then after they
leave the room, Gotho hears the doctor and the nurse
talking about how she actually has no chance whatsoever, and
the doctor says her lungs are practically destroyed.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
I feel like they're barely out of your shot when
they say that. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (45:09):
Yeah, So Gotho comes into the room to visit Ilsa
and brings her flowers that he picked from the gardens outside,
and Ilsa is obviously glad to see him. She thanks
him for the flowers and they talk about a number
of things. They talk about the death of her boyfriend Udo.
Gotho tells her not to cry because Udo died dreaming
of her. I mean, this does raise questions, like, does
(45:39):
it make sense to you that Ilsa and Udo or
an item. I know, listeners, you haven't gotten to know
Ilsa all that well yet, but Ilsa is going to
be presented as just an angel on earth, a kind
of impossibly pure, kind and perfect soul. And Udo, in
the short time we get to know him, is presented
as just overtly vain, stupid, hostile, and violent.
Speaker 2 (46:02):
Yeah yeah, I agree that the only read I have
on it that makes sense as well, we only got
to see Udo at his absolute worst, Like maybe he's
just drinking really heavily right now because he knows that
his girlfriend is dying, and so, yeah, we caught him
at his worst, being drunk and belligerent and hateful in
the street. And maybe he has other qualities. We're just
(46:22):
not privy too.
Speaker 3 (46:23):
Yeah, I don't know. I guess they do say he's
very handsome. That's the one redeeming quality we know about.
So Gotho promises to bring Ilsea flowers every day. She
tells him that he's the only one who visits her,
the only one who cares. It seems ILSA's family have
all died and she has no one else, so Gotho's
her only friend. She asks Gotho to describe the countryside
(46:46):
while she closes her eyes. She wants to sort of,
you know, do some mental travel with Gotho narrating for her.
And she seems to know that she's going to die,
even though the doctor has told her otherwise. Ilsa kind
of knows everything. She's a little bit mild on missions.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
This is, of course, the first scene in which we
see Gotho entering a room with flowers, and there's I
love every sequence that he has is because there's generally
this just look of complete optimism as walking into a
terrible situation he somehow thinks everything is going to be okay,
And yeah, I love it. I want to make Valentine
(47:21):
cards this year with images of Gotho holding flowers.
Speaker 3 (47:25):
He makes a very very adorable face. It's almost I
made you a cookie, but I ate it.
Speaker 2 (47:30):
It levels Yeah.
Speaker 3 (47:40):
So after this, there's a scene where Gotho is wandering
the streets of the town melancholy, I think because of
ILSA's health, and there are school children who appear to
taunt him. They call him a dirty monkey, and he
shakes his fist at them, and then the kids pelt
him with rocks, like hitting him in the head and
causing him to bleed, and then they all run away.
Evil children.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
Yeah, Like they basically stone him in the streets. And yeah,
this reminded me. There's a scene in seventy three's Return
of the Blind Dead same year, in which children pelt Murdo,
the outcast character in that film, with rocks.
Speaker 3 (48:16):
I don't know, Brave Dirigger.
Speaker 2 (48:18):
Yeah, yes, I don't know if these films were both
riffing on the same reference point, but at any rate,
there's a lot of kids throwing rocks at outcasts in
nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 3 (48:29):
Well, anyway. Immediately after this, Gotho is helped to his
feet by a woman who seems to appear out of nowhere,
a tall, elegant woman. She's blotting his wounds with a handkerchief.
This woman tells Gotho to come with her for treatment
because she is a doctor, and we will learn that
this is Elkie. So they go on a walk to
Elkie's house and she and Gotho get to know each other.
(48:52):
She hears the story of Gotho's history with Ilsa. They
were friends as children. She played with him, even though
the other children said he was ugly and frightening. Then
later he found out that she was ill in the
hospital and he began to visit her every day. And
Elkie infers from listening to all this that Gotho is
in love with her, But he asks her, and Gotho
(49:12):
says he doesn't know. He doesn't know whether he's in
love with her. He just knows that he does care
for her and he wants her to be well. So
they go to Elkie's home and she treats his wounds
and he thanks her. In fact, he doesn't just thank her.
He bows down on the floor and kisses her feet,
and I was like, man, it's good to show appreciation.
That's a little too thankful, buddy. You need a dell
(49:33):
it back just a little bit. I don't know. It
might be appropriate in some other cultural context. To hear it,
it reads at a little much.
Speaker 2 (49:39):
Yeah, I think Gotho has no sense of proportion.
Speaker 3 (49:41):
But also I just wanted to linger here for a
second because Rob I had to take a photo of
the screen. Did you stop to get a good look
at this room in Elkie's house? What is going on here?
There's a random handrailing in the middle of the room,
not apparently attached to any darrs or anything. There's a
green treasure chest, very busy floral print upholstery on the furniture,
(50:07):
a golden, highly decorated almost Buddhist temple style archway over
the exit from the living room. There are animal pelts
and a crossbow hanging on the wall. And then here's
the real topper, two severed human hands on a table
in the foreground. This is so easy to miss. I
did not even catch it the first time I saw
(50:29):
this scene, but then the second time I was like, wait,
what we get no explanation at all.
Speaker 2 (50:36):
Yeah, I did not notice these hands in either of
my viewings, So maybe these are supposed to be anatomical models.
Speaker 3 (50:42):
Why are they bloody then? Why do they have bloody stumps?
Speaker 2 (50:45):
I don't know. My other read is that maybe this
was Nashi's home or apartment at the time, Like that
would make more sense with the pelt and the crossbow.
Speaker 3 (50:53):
Oh, I mean it was shot there because I think
this is supposed to be Elkie's home.
Speaker 2 (50:57):
It is supposed to be Elkie's home. But I'm just wondering, like, was, yeah,
did they build this, did they put all these odd
things together? Or it is just just this is just
like a snapshot of someone's home. Maybe Paul nash Shey's home.
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (51:10):
I could believe this was Paul Nashi's home in real life.
But yeah, why the severed hands. I mean, she is
a doctor, But would it be normal for doctors to
have severed hands in their houses?
Speaker 2 (51:20):
Yeah, mean at least keep those in the fridge, right.
Speaker 3 (51:22):
So, next scene, Gotho is taking Ilsa for a walk
around the pleasant little gardens outside the hospital. She's in
a wheelchair. He's pushing her, and she's talking about how
she knows her life is fading, but Ilsa says she
likes to look at the roses in the garden. So
these visits where Gotho pushes her around to look at
the flowers, they're really helping her feel better. And then
when she says this, Gotho cuts one of the roses
(51:45):
from the garden and brings it to her, and she says,
we can't do that. Cutting the flowers is forbidden, and
then Gotho has a great line.
Speaker 2 (51:54):
Yeah, he says, it's okay. Everything is forbidden from me,
and yeah, obviously it speaks to Gothos outside status, but
it also helps us understand why Gotho does the other
things that he does, i e. The murders and the
dismemberments and the grave robbing. He's been pushed outside of
society and therefore its rules no longer apply to him.
So he still has this, deep down a heart of gold,
(52:16):
but he has already been pushed over the line in
terms of society's laws and norms.
Speaker 3 (52:23):
Yeah, yeah, that's right. So Ilsa says, these roses are
my last happiness. If only I could have a bouquet
every day, And then Gotho said, promises her he says,
you'll have them, and then from this sweet scene, the
sweet sad scene, we cut straight to something else. Now
we're told we're in the Feldkirch Women's Reformatory, so it
(52:45):
seems this is some kind of mental hospital for women.
And the first thing we see is a couple of
women in a dormitory room here engaging in what seems
to be recreational whipping of each other with a leather strap.
Speaker 2 (53:00):
Yeah, just spankings all around here in a scene that
really feels like it was just here to spice up
a grindhouse trailer, yeah, or lead to more exploitive content
regarding these two characters. But it really doesn't. It's just
we get this one moment.
Speaker 3 (53:13):
Yeah, really doesn't go. We don't see any more of this.
We do see these characters later in the movie when
when there's a creature that needs to eat human flesh,
but that's it.
Speaker 2 (53:22):
Yeah, they show up later as victims, but that's about it.
Speaker 3 (53:24):
Yeah. Anyway, so this is going on, and suddenly Elkie
comes in the door and she's like, what is the
meaning of this and takes the strap out of the
patient's hand and she's like, Okay, we're going to you know,
you know what this means, We're gonna have to separate
you too. And I'm telling doctor Meyer. So apparently Elkie
is a doctor here, but I think not the head doctor.
I think she's working for doctor Meyer. So we cut
(53:45):
from there to meet doctor Meyer. In fact, we're going
to meet a couple of major characters, doctor Meyer and
doctor Tauchner. We learned that they are engaged to be married,
So there are a couple and they're both professionals here
at the hospital, but they're also kind of scheming. They're
talking about some secret research that Tauchener is involved in
which they don't want the trustees of the university to
(54:07):
find out about. And this is the research of doctor Orla,
a character we haven't met yet. But when Elki comes in,
doctor Meyer I think she says something like, oh, Elkie,
this is my fiance, doctor Tauchner. You may remember him
because he was your mentor in school. And then she
explains that Elki has a talent for criminal psychiatry. So
(54:29):
after this, there's a scene, another scene of Gotho in
the garden, but this turns into a fight scene. He's
not here with Ilsa this time. Instead, she's in her
room and he's out here cutting roses from the garden
to take to Ilsa. And then a bunch of the
hooligan medical students come out and just start harassing him
and insulting him. One of these guys is kids Sideburns
(54:49):
from the bar in the opening scene, and they're mocking him.
They're saying, you are the prince of monkeys, you are
ugly and so forth, and Gotho I think he's used
to this, but then they really escalate when the dude
insults Ilsa. He says something like, I hope you're h
I wrote this down. He says, I hope your princess
can become impregnated by the fragrance of roses.
Speaker 2 (55:12):
Yeah, we lost in translation there.
Speaker 3 (55:15):
I guess, Well, whatever it means, it's clearly supposed to
be insulting to her and him. And this sends Gotho
over the edge and he attacks. He's like choking the
med student and the fight turns into a four on
one against Gotho and he gets badly beaten. They kick
him on the ground until Tauchner and another doctor arrive
to stop.
Speaker 2 (55:35):
It, but Gotho puts up a good fight, and there's
absolutely there's an absolutely beautiful moment in this fight where
Gotho pushes one of the hooligans into a bush and
the hooligan bounces off of said bush like it's a
wrestling ring rope, right back into a kind of back
body drop from Gotho, and I was like, oh, man,
that's inspired.
Speaker 3 (55:55):
The next scene Gotho, I guess he goes straight from
here to ILSA's room, but uh oh, Ilsa is dying.
She's talking to the nurse here about Gotho bringing her
beautiful flowers and then she dies. And then Gotho gets
there right after she dies, and the nurse tells him.
She's like, oh, she died, too bad, you were outside
getting wailed on, or you would have been here for it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (56:16):
So these heartbreaking scenes of Gotho arriving too late for
Ilsa and it'll happen again. These are too much and
also just morbidly hilarious again entering the room with those flowers,
all the optimism in the world and only to be
greeted with like worse and worse news.
Speaker 3 (56:30):
Yeah. So Gotho is left alone with ILSA's body here,
and he is first overwhelmed with grief, and then you
can see with rage. I think he's angry at the
students who were attacking him because they robbed him of
this moment with Ilsa. So from here we go to
the next scene, which is that later that night, Gotho
is waiting alone in the morgue and the two dissection
(56:53):
specialists wheel Ilsa in on a cart and they're like, hey, Gotho,
here's your one true love. We just wanted to make
you aware that we're immediately going to rob and desecrate
her corpse. So they like they're going to steal the
gold crucifix from her neck. They're saying they can sell
it and buy themselves a round of drinks, and Gotho
(57:13):
freaks out and attacks them. In fact, he doesn't just
attack them, he starts beating them, but then he grabs
an axe and why is there an axe in the morgue?
But he grabs an axe and he decapitates one guy
and disembowels the other. The decapitation is single stroke with
what looks like a fire axe.
Speaker 2 (57:34):
Yeah, this sequence is just amazing, just an absolute blood
bath of a scene, and the gore effects hit all
the right nineteen seventies hard notes. You know what I'm saying, Like,
there's just a certain way the blood looks, the way
the bodies come apart here absolutely perfect.
Speaker 3 (57:49):
So Gotho grabs his flower bouquet and he quickly wheels
Ilsa out of the morgue. He's going to take her
to his secret hideaway. So what is this place. It's
a place we have not seen in the movie yet.
It is some kind of dungeon or passageways. I think
maybe better to call it catacombs. It's just like lots
of these passageways and rooms underneath the hospital grounds, which
(58:11):
Gotho accesses by way of a hatch under a garden path.
So he lowers Ilse's body inside on a rope and
then descends himself and he lays her body out on
a large table or slab which is covered in cobwebs, chains, rags,
and bones, which he awkwardly has to push away. And
I don't know. At first, I was like, what is
(58:32):
this place? He's got skeletons all along the walls, dressed
in robes and hoods, some are in coffins. There are
just racks of weapons and torture instruments, and there are
torches already burning in here. So somebody must regularly use
this place. I think, since Gotha's the only character we
meet who knows about it, it must sort of be
(58:52):
Gotho's residence.
Speaker 4 (58:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (58:54):
I think he puts out fresh straw on the ground
and he lights all these torches. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (59:02):
So Gotho tells Ilsa that she must rest now and
he will find a way to take care of her.
But first, he says he has some business to take
care of. He says, I have to deliver a bouquet
of roses to one who doubted your beauty.
Speaker 2 (59:16):
I love Gotho's outfit here as well. It's kind of
like a black poncho, but also like it's kind of like,
I guess, like a morgue's a mortician smock or something.
Speaker 3 (59:26):
Yeah. Yeah, so we're going to go back to the
disgusting beer hall. I don't think I mentioned this the
first time. Another unpleasant thing about this place is the lighting.
This is a bar with off white walls that is
extremely well lit inside. Just imagine that for a second
for a bar environment. It's the ambiance is bad.
Speaker 2 (59:46):
Yeah, Like, every sticky surface is gleaming. Most likely you
can see every dead insect in this place. It's cross.
Speaker 3 (59:55):
So all of the med students who beat Gotho up
earlier here they're getting beard up up there, being loud
and rude to servers. And then we do see one
server here who I think was one of the bar
maids who was partying with Udo the you know in
the earlier scene. She's in the middle of bringing beer
to these creeps when she looks out the window and
(01:00:16):
sees Paul Nashi, and she just starts shrieking at seeing
paul Nashi's face again. It's just Paul Nashi with the scar,
and he doesn't look scary. It's just a guy looking
in the window, but she screams. The med students turn
and look, but by then Paul Nashy's gone, so they
tell her she's hallucinating and they demand more beer. And
then the sideburns guy who was leading the mockery earlier.
(01:00:39):
He's once again disgustingly drunk and just glazed with some
kind of beer drool. He announces that he has to
go home. We learned that his name is Hans and
he stumbles out and they say be careful Hans, don't
bump into the devil on your way home, And just
like in the earlier scene, we watch we watch Hans
go down the street and we watch Goto follow him
(01:01:00):
at a distance. Eventually Hans makes it back home. Gotho
sneaks in and then murders Hans in his bed by
cramming a bouquet of roses into his mouth. And Gotho says,
experience the aroma because it will be the last smell
of your life.
Speaker 2 (01:01:17):
It's this murder is less impressive, but it's you know,
the gimmick is nice. He kills them with the flowers
that he was bringing to also, so fair enough.
Speaker 3 (01:01:28):
Now we're going to check in with some police investigators
who I think ultimately don't play that big of a
role in the plot. But there's a mustache guy and
then a guy who looks like he could be a
bishop of some kind, but he's just a police inspector
in a suit, and they're talking about the crime scene
in the morgue. One of them says, you couldn't imagine it.
It was terrible. The two cadavers were absolutely destroyed, and
(01:01:52):
they discuss how Gotho, the clerk in charge of the
Morgue has disappeared, but they rule him out as a
suspect because their inquiry has revealed that he is harmless
and passive. And I was just thinking, wait, did anybody
ever follow up on the issue of Udo's body getting
chopped into pieces on Gotho's watch?
Speaker 2 (01:02:13):
Yeah, no clue. Maybe that one got kind of like
swept under the rug, you.
Speaker 3 (01:02:18):
Know, Yeah, maybe I don't know. But then the inspectors
discuss how ILSA's body has also disappeared, and they say,
once again, their inquiry has revealed that Gotho was in
love with Ilsa. Where are they getting all this information? Also,
this is literally supposed to be the same night. This
is all the same night, so the murder has must
(01:02:38):
have just happened within the past few hours and they're
here talking about it, and they already know all this
stuff about Gotho enough to rule him out.
Speaker 2 (01:02:45):
And do they know about Hans yet?
Speaker 3 (01:02:48):
Oh, they're just about to find out. So the cops
find out about a second crime, this is the murder
of Hans with the sideburns rip, and then they find
out oh wait, no, they are you know this also?
So they've got all this information, they're like, oh, this
guy was fighting with Gotho earlier today, so it's got
to be Gotho. We got to put out an APB
(01:03:08):
even though we rolled them out. Okay, finally enough evidence
has accumulated. Later that night, Gotho comes home to the
dungeon to find uh, oh, there are rats swarming all
over ILSA's body, taking bites out of her, and then
he has to fight them off with fire. And this
scene is a bummer because well, Rob, you can talk
(01:03:29):
about it. We know apparently there was some animal cruelty
on the set in the shooting of this scene.
Speaker 2 (01:03:34):
Yeah, it's unfortunate, but this film does entail scenes of
live rats on fire, capping off what sounds like a
series of bad production decisions. They apparently set fire to
some of the actual sewer rats that were captured for
use in these scenes, including the scenes where they attack Nashi,
who had to get a bunch of shots beforehand to
keep from getting sewer rat diseases. However, I've read that
(01:03:56):
the rats we see on the corpse here of Ilsa
are actual guinea pigs that were dyed brown. Okay, I
didn't really have the stomach to really analyze these sequences.
But this is what I have read. This is not
our first film with flaming rats in it would that
it was our last. Nash She would later express regret
that they filmed the scenes this way, but at the
(01:04:18):
time it was just presented as the way you did things.
So we talked about this before. You know, on pictures,
you know. Unfortunately you do see this sort of thing
turn up and pictures from prior decades, and some of
it's not as visible, Like there are a number of
things that are now considered animal cruelty regarding horse stunts,
for example that not being a horse person myself, I
(01:04:39):
tend to not even notice. So I don't know how
many times I've seen horse cruelty without just having the
expertise to recognize it. That being said, with this film,
there's no doubting what's going on here. These are clearly
live rats on fire. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:04:52):
Now, if not for knowing about the animal cruelty, there
would be some pretty funny things about this scene because
it has rats like leaping at Gotho from the floor,
like as if they're just jumping right off the ground
onto his neck to attack him. Obviously there's people throwing
either rats or fake rats. But plot wise, Gotho is like, wow,
I guess I shouldn't have left her in the rat room.
(01:05:15):
So he relocates her to another room, which is now
which the second room is full of torture equipment. It's
got a rack. I think I see an iron maiden,
and he like puts her on the rack table. I mean,
he doesn't stretch her, but it's just that's her resting place.
Speaker 4 (01:05:29):
Now.
Speaker 3 (01:05:38):
Now, from here we get more of the police investigators.
They go to visit a new character who will become
a major character, Professor Orla, who has a nice, expensive home.
He's got a proper butler. So Orla is an authority
figure here, and he admits the police to his comfortable study.
He greets them confidently, and we can already see in
this kind of cozy environment that Orla radiates a sort
(01:06:01):
of intimidating power and sense of authority. He can he's
the kind of person who can talk people out of
their suspicions. Like the two police investigators quiz him about
Gotho and the murders. He denies Gotho could be involved
and says he doesn't know where he is. But from
here we follow Orla back to the hospital because of course,
(01:06:22):
you know, the night is long and he has much
work to do, and it seems his work is mainly
chopping up cow organs with a scalpel and then looking
at things under a microscope. But here in the lab
Gotho comes into Orla. He actually he starts off hiding
under a sheet on one of the cadaver tables, and
he pops up like as if you know, a kind
(01:06:42):
of like scene in the fog where the corpse is
rising up under the sheet. But then he tells Orla
that he needs help, and here begins some negotiation. Gotho
has something that Orla could use. He shows Orla his
underground hideaway. They sort of tour all the passageways together,
and he asked for Orla's help, and Orla says, I
(01:07:05):
can help you, but that means you work for me.
Now you must do everything I tell you to do.
And then they make the trade more explicit. Orla promises
that he can bring Ilsa back to life for Gotho,
but Gotho must transfer all of Orla's laboratory equipment down
to this secret torture chamber and help him with his
work and This is good timing for Orla because we
(01:07:27):
learned that Orla has just received a notice from the
university that he's got to stop his research at once.
He will no longer have access to the hospital facilities.
And there's a scene there are actually many scenes like
this in the second half of the film, where Orla
is talking with Tauchner, who has been helping him in
the project. And Orla is like, these neuro minded fools,
you know, they're terrified of anything that's new, beautiful and
(01:07:49):
possesses true genius. So what's the project they're working on
that's so important but that the university, the narrow minded
fools are afraid of.
Speaker 4 (01:07:58):
Why.
Speaker 3 (01:07:58):
It's to create artificial life. Of course, what else would
it be. Now Orla and Tauchener are debating what to
do next, and Orla reveals that he has Gotho working
for him. Tauschener is like, wait, you know he's accused
of three murders, right, and Orla is I probably didn't
do it. Tauchener then says, this is an actual quote
I took down. Dealing with a killer is not only repugnant,
(01:08:21):
it might also causes complications.
Speaker 2 (01:08:25):
Well, yeah, you'd have to list those in the complications
section of your peer reviewed study. Yeah, you know, at
the bottom it's like potential complications. We did work with
a murderer.
Speaker 3 (01:08:35):
Yeah, yeah, he's an evil stain on humanity. Also, he
might throw sand in the gears.
Speaker 4 (01:08:41):
Now.
Speaker 3 (01:08:41):
In the end, Orla puts pressure on Tauchner and persuades
him to keep working with him on the Artificial Life
project for the time being, and they head out for
a tour of the dungeon. There's some quite beautiful location
shots here as they go into the nearby abbey that's
one of the access points for the catacombs. I wonder
where they shout this part because I mentioned earlier that
(01:09:02):
I just watched this other Nashy movie, The Werewolf Versus
the Vampire Woman from seventy one, and there is an
abbey location in that movie that looks almost identical to this.
I wonder if they used the same place.
Speaker 2 (01:09:15):
Yeah, I mean, they might have. It also reminds me
of some of the ruins from the Blind Dead movies,
so likely they use the same Spanish locations here. But then,
on the other hand, like this part of the world,
there are a lot of castles, a lot of ruins.
I looked around briefly, wasn't able to find a good answer,
but I did find evidence of In twenty seventeen, there
(01:09:36):
is a tour company called ECS Tours and they did
something called Classic Spanish Horror Film Location Tour, a Paul
Nashi tribute Whoa. I was like, oh, man, that sounds great,
do it again please?
Speaker 3 (01:09:48):
So Tauschener gets read in on the whole operation, including
Orlo's promises to go Tho that he will cause Ilsa
to wake up. This does not sit well with Tauchner
for multiple reasons. He says, you know, it's not fair
to lie to Gotho and manipulate him like this. Also,
he could kill again. And Orla argues, you know, but
science must sometimes use dubious methods because the ends will
(01:10:10):
justify the means, and he says success is waiting. So
there's more Dark Knight of the Soul with Tauchener. Here,
Tauchener goes and talks to doctor Meyer. We learn her
first name is Marie. About his work with Orla, I
guess they've both sort of been working with Orla, but
mainly Tauchner, And he's like, yeah, I've got reservations, but
(01:10:31):
I'm also inclined to push ahead because of the great
potential for scientific discovery. But Marie tells him there is
something about Orla in his work that has begun to
frighten her. He may be a great scientist, but he's
willing to destroy anything and anyone who gets in his way.
Speaker 2 (01:10:45):
Yeah, that's always a red flag.
Speaker 3 (01:10:47):
Yeah, So we get a look after they've been working
on setting up the lab in the dungeon. We get
a look at it. So there's a lot of beeps
and boops kind of equipment, beakers full of pink liquid
that's burbling, and then a giant sulfuric acid pit in
the floor.
Speaker 2 (01:11:03):
Yes, yes, much like the one from nineteen seventy Scream
and Scream again, which we previously talked about on the show.
It looks wonderful.
Speaker 3 (01:11:11):
Also, it appears that Gotho or somebody has hired movers
to get all of the equipment. And now there are
just other people involved in the like three other guys
involved in this. Is this really a top secret laboratory?
There's more and more people coming in.
Speaker 2 (01:11:24):
Well, it's gonna be as we find out. With this
crew of labor as they brought in.
Speaker 3 (01:11:29):
That's right. So Orla tries to promise Gotho that he
will be famous for his contribution to this very important
science project. But Gotho just wants to know when Orla's
gonna wake Ilsa up for him, and he's like, oh,
real soon, Gotho, Real soon. So we follow Gotho as
he goes out still every day to pick flowers for
Ilsa in the abbey ruins. So it's still very sad.
(01:11:51):
We follow him and we see his pain that he's
you know, he's hoping, he's hoping against hope that she
can be revived somehow. Now I mentioned that they the movers.
I don't know who these guys are, but we see
them later and they're three guys just like playing cards
and cursing and drinking schnops in the lab. They seem
like real, no good, low life. They're they're complaining about
(01:12:12):
the smell of rotting meat while they're pounding liquor on
a torture rack, and they decide to fix the problem.
They're like, oh, the problem is this body over here.
It's Ilse's body. She's stinking up the place. So they
take initiative, and they chuck the decomposing body of Ilsa
into the sulfuric acid.
Speaker 2 (01:12:30):
Tank because clearly that will smell better.
Speaker 3 (01:12:33):
Yes, So of course Gotho walks in while they're doing this,
he sees it happen, and then he flips it once again.
He's here too late. He flips out and starts attacking
the dudes. Two of them get different kinds of deaths
by acid. One guy he throws straight into the sulfuric
acid tank alive. The other guy gets smashed in the
(01:12:55):
face with a beaker of acid. And then the third guy, Gotho,
slams inside an iron maiden.
Speaker 2 (01:13:01):
Yeikes, nice, Yeah, this is a great kill. All these
were great kills, but the iron Maiden that was the
real topping on the cake.
Speaker 3 (01:13:07):
So right after this, here comes Maria wandering into the catacombs.
She's checking up on the project. So again this place
is really not as secret as it first seemed, and
she sees some rats and screams and runs away. But
also we see Orla and Tauchiner here around the same time.
They're getting on with their research. They're making exciting progress,
(01:13:28):
occasionally stopping to wonder what happened to those three men
who worked for us hm hm, and Orla says something
like the fewer witnesses the better.
Speaker 2 (01:13:38):
Yeah, it maintained secrecy.
Speaker 3 (01:13:40):
But Maria is still running around in the catacombs here,
and she encounters a zombie like creature with a burned face.
So I was confused about what happened here. But I
think this is supposed to be the guy that Gotho
hit with the acid beaker. He's either reanimated or somehow
sort of zombified, and he just wanders past Maria. But
(01:14:02):
then Gotho arrives and is like, oh, hey, you know
you know me?
Speaker 2 (01:14:06):
Yeah, So I think it's the taller of the acid
burn guys with one of the other acid burn guys
strapped to his back. Yeah, And it's unclear whether the
guy on his back is alive or dead at this point.
Clearly the zombified guy is barely alive in a very
bad state of mind, but it's uncertain whether like tall
(01:14:28):
guy is trying to escape and bring his buddy with him.
I'm more inclined to think that what happened here is
that is that Gotho, in an act of cruelty, has
strapped one to the other and just sort of like
kicked him in the butt and send him off to
wander the ruins until they die.
Speaker 3 (01:14:45):
You know, I noticed this about the werewolf versus the
Vampire Woman as well. A lot of Nashy movies have
a random zombie type figure with gross face makeup that
appears only for one or two scenes and is not explained.
It all exactly the same in this other movie. There's
like a zombie and the Abbey Ruins in that movie,
and we never learn what he is or why.
Speaker 2 (01:15:07):
Yeah, you gotta go a little little bit undead in there,
part of his soul.
Speaker 3 (01:15:10):
Yeah. So anyway, here, Maria joins Orla and Tauchiner in
the lab and they talk more about the progress of
the artificial life that they are incubating, and Orla says,
you know, they're right on the cusp. It will be
assuming a definite form any day now. But Meyer points
out something. She says, you don't know what form the
life will take, which means it could be a human
form or a monstrous mutation. And Orla tells her off.
(01:15:34):
He's like, I know what I'm doing. But by the way,
the life at this point is in a big vat.
It's in like a big glass jar.
Speaker 2 (01:15:43):
Yeah. So we begin to see lots of shots of
bits of meat and gore, like pulsing and throbbing inside
of the vat. Yeah, it's great.
Speaker 3 (01:15:54):
It looks like a glass stock pot stuffed with blood
clots and huge throbbing oysters. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:16:00):
And you got to throw some stuff in there, like frogs,
live frogs.
Speaker 3 (01:16:03):
Yes. So obviously Gotho is really down and out. Now
he goes to talk to Orla and he's like, well,
Ilsa has been disintegrated, so now I have no hope.
I can't work this job anymore. So I'm going to
go turn myself into the police. And Orla tells him, no, no, no, no,
don't do that. I need you and let's see, I'll
create a new Ilsa for you.
Speaker 2 (01:16:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:16:25):
Yeah, that's right, a whole new one. And somehow Gotho
goes for this. He's overjoyed. He's like, you do that
for me, professor, and Orla says, yes, yes, yes, I
will do that, but I need you first to go
to the morgue and swipe some fresh body parts for me.
I need a head. You've got to get me a
human head. So Gotho says, all right, and he goes
to the morgue and he saws off a human head
(01:16:47):
and it looks pretty realistic.
Speaker 2 (01:16:49):
Yeah yeah, Now I've read that the filmmakers had the
chance to use a real corpse here, but nobody ended
up having the stomach to go through with the shoot.
I'm unsure person if this is true or if this
is more sort of movie myth making. So you be
the judge, But at any rate, this is a fake head.
This is an effect. But it looks amazing like it
(01:17:11):
has the big old Man ears on it and all
very well done.
Speaker 3 (01:17:14):
So Gotho gets chased with the head by some kind
of night watchmen or police who were wearing I don't know,
they're wearing sort of those straw hats, like like Harold
Hill the music man, and he escapes by climbing onto
rooftops and running over the rooftops through the town, eventually
making his way I don't know if this was intentional
or by accident, but he makes his way into the
window of Elki's apartment, and she's here in her night
(01:17:38):
gown reading a book. I was trying to see what
book that is. I wanted to look it up, but
I couldn't quite make out the title or the author.
But anyway, she confronts him. She's like, well, at first,
she says, you know, oh, you shouldn't be jumping through
my window with a head and a bag at this
time of night. But then comes a knock at the
door and it's the police, and Elkie hides Gotho from
the police. She lies to them cover for Gotho and
(01:18:00):
they leave, and Gotho was appreciative, but he asks her,
why did you do it? You heard them I'm a
killer now. Remember Elki has a great talent for criminal psychiatry,
as doctor Meyer told us earlier, and she says, yeah,
you might be a killer, but you're not a killer killer.
I know why you did it. If only I could
have someone who loved me as much as you loved Elsa.
(01:18:22):
And I was like when I first got to this,
I was like, wait a minute, where is this going?
But Elkie explains that she doesn't care that everyone else
finds him ugly and frightening. She says, sometimes faithfulness and
love surpassed beauty. So Gotho kisses her feet once again,
(01:18:42):
and then Elki kisses Gotho on the mouth.
Speaker 2 (01:18:45):
They're hitting it off.
Speaker 3 (01:18:46):
They're hitting it off, so some more mad science stuff
going on into the lab. He goes back, and Orla
throws the human head into the vat full of oysters
and organs. He just drops it right into the tank.
Speaker 2 (01:18:57):
I love how he's like, I should really take the
brain out first, but I'm just so excited to carry
on with the project, and d goes in.
Speaker 3 (01:19:04):
That's right, so Orla quickly sets Gotho to some more
grave robbing. They go out digging up graves. While Aurla's
standing there making speeches at him, Gotho's digging. They end
up killing a security guard at the cemetery, and Gotho
is horrified at what he has done, like he hits
him with a shovel, kills the guys like, oh no,
But Orla says, oh, you know, sweet bonus bodies. They
(01:19:27):
take both of them back now. Next there is a
hitch in the project because Orla starts to think that
the artificial life's growth is slowing down, and the problem
is it doesn't want dead body parts. It needs a
live human.
Speaker 2 (01:19:40):
And who's going to supply those live humans or at
least very fresh humans. Well, you know, it's got to.
Speaker 3 (01:19:45):
Be Gotho, that's right. So oh and at some point,
kind of without much fanfare, the new creature is suddenly born.
Like Orla and Gotho are in the lab and they
quickly lock the tank behind a heavy wooden door to
one of the cells in the dungeon because Orla he
detects that it's about to transform. But we don't get
to see what it is initially. We just like hear
(01:20:07):
a commotion inside the room and we see them looking
through a little peep hole in the door, and they're thinking, Wow,
that's amazing, but we won't see it until the very end.
Speaker 2 (01:20:16):
Yeah, they describe a little bit. They're like, oh, it
broke the tray, it broke the table, and so forth.
And we hear the sounds, which is great because it
builds up in our imagination of what this might be,
especially when we have sort of conflicting ideas about what
it's going to be. It sounds like a monster, but
Orla is eventually going to talk about it in terms
of some primordial goddess that is being reborn in this
(01:20:39):
artificial biological state.
Speaker 3 (01:20:43):
That's right. So we get more scenes of discussing the
ethics of the projects between Tauchener and Meyer. Meyer is
again the voice of reason here. She's like, there's just
something wrong about the way that you are ignoring the
impact on people's lives, especially the abuse of Gotho. It's wrong.
Meyer says, all the crimes of the Hunchback are really
the crimes of Orla. He's the one responsible, which to
(01:21:05):
some extent is true. Maybe not all of the crimes,
but some of the crimes.
Speaker 2 (01:21:09):
Yeah, I mean Gotho still he has agency. Yeah, you
can't pin all of the son Orla.
Speaker 3 (01:21:15):
Yeah. Orla clearly shares a lot of the blame, but
she breaks through to Tauchner and convinces him to abandon
the project. However, whoops. Tauchner goes to Orla and he's like,
I'm done, can't do this anymore. And this leads to
a fight where Orla gets Gotho to knock Tauchner unconscious
and lock him in a cell in the dungeon. Orla
(01:21:37):
tells Gotho that he will have need of Tauchner for
a thing. Now Here, we start to see a bunch
of these scenes where Gotho has to go out and
kidnap living people to bring to feed the artificial life form.
So he starts kidnapping women from the women's reformatory. He
brings one lady down screaming into the dungeon, where he
(01:21:57):
and Orla throw her into the life form cell. Don't
see what's happening, but we hear it eating her. Gotho
goes back to Elk's apartment at some point, and Gotho
is torn because he not so much about what he's
doing on the project. He's torn because he is falling
for Elki, but he feels guilty, like he's betraying ILSA's memory.
(01:22:17):
And Elkie tells him that if Elsa could see them together,
she would approve, And Okay, I think that's all the
convincing Gotho needs.
Speaker 2 (01:22:24):
Yeah, because also Gotho believes that any day now he's
going to get that new Ilsa and she can approve
in person.
Speaker 3 (01:22:31):
Oh yeah, that's right. And obviously Elk is super into Gotho.
I think Gotho is like, yes, I like Elki too,
So yeah, they start kissing and there's like a full
Gotho Elkie love scene. I don't know if I should
say full there's a brief Gotho Elkie love scene.
Speaker 2 (01:22:46):
Yeah, and this is the scene that is a noticeably
different film quality. I've read that the original I've read
two different stories about the original Newde footage here. One
was that it was destroyed by Spanish censors and also
at now she had a naked hump effect on his
back that ended up not looking all that great and
(01:23:06):
they scrapped it and had to redo it. At any rate,
the uncensored version here just features a very brief, poorer
quality segment of all this with Elkie topless and Gothos
still wearing your shirt, but very brief, especially as these
movies go.
Speaker 3 (01:23:22):
Yeah, but there's no ambiguity. Now, it's not just a
crush like they're having a full on love affair. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:23:27):
Is it doomed love?
Speaker 4 (01:23:28):
Well?
Speaker 2 (01:23:28):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (01:23:28):
Probably probably. Yeah. Now there's another scene where doctor Meyer
comes down to the dungeon. I think she's looking for
her fiance who has been locked in a cell, and
she confronts Orela and finds out, uh oh, that we've
been feeding ladies from the hospital to this creature. She
looks through the peepole and the cell door to see
the creature and says that's horrible. It has completely devoured her,
(01:23:52):
and Orla starts monologuing about his plot, but Meyer wisely
whacks him from behind with a pipe and then runs
around calling out for Touchner try to find him. Instead,
she finds Gotho. And what does Gotho do with her?
I think he just crams her in a cell. Gotho's
kind of all in on the evil plot now he
wants that new ilsa. Yeah, So Gotho just keeps kidnapping
(01:24:13):
women to bring to the tank. Being in this section,
there are some very funny edits because there will be rapid,
abrupt cutting back and forth between Gotho, like doing an abduction,
and then suddenly we go back to the dungeon with
Orla standing at the cell door listening to the creature,
and the creature is constantly unleashing these sound effects, these
(01:24:35):
rage groans. It's just in the cell going.
Speaker 2 (01:24:41):
Like a rampaging ogre on the Muppet Show, sort of
a sound yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:24:44):
Yeah, and they just are constant. Elkie. She looks out
the hospital window at one point and just sees Gotho
taking kidnapped women to the dungeon. So she just like
directly witnesses it, and it's like, oh, that's not good.
So she climbs down follow him. So I think we're
building up to a final showdown, aren't we.
Speaker 2 (01:25:03):
Yeah. Yeah, Now we do get a nice villain monologue,
one of many villain monologues from Orla, but I really
like this one where he's talking about the creature that
is growing. He says, quote from the subtitles, the creature
is a primordial one of the beings that inhabited Earth
before the human race. Her race is the oldest books
(01:25:24):
like the Necronomicon and the old treaties of magic and
alchemy are full of references concerning this entity. That creature
holds the secrets of every ancient civilization, and she will
share them with us. The world will kneel before us. Okay,
So it does get a little more into the megalomaniac
side of things with you know, will rule the world
so forth, But most the last five minutes, yeah, yeah,
(01:25:45):
he's beginning to awaken to that possibility. But mostly they're like,
we're going to learn so much from this breakthrough. And
I also just love the idea that their eventual peer
review journal article on all of this will also reference
the Necronomicon.
Speaker 3 (01:25:58):
What does the citation on that look like, Well.
Speaker 2 (01:26:01):
What's his name? Alhazard reference Alhazzard. And I guess I'm
hoping that Gotho would also get an author credit on this.
I mean, he's putting in the work.
Speaker 3 (01:26:12):
Yeah, but guess what Orla thinks the creature needs more
of to reach its final form, needs more food, needs
some more living flesh. So oh, and here comes Elki
following Gothot into the catacombs. So what's it going to be.
He's like, go get me, Elkie. We're going to feed
her to the creature. Gotho does bring her to the lab,
but when Orla commands him to put her inside the cell,
(01:26:33):
Gotho refuses. He's He's like, no, not her. She was
kind to me. I have to protect her. So this
turns into a Gotho versus Orla battle. And what do
you think. Of course, the monster is going to come
into play.
Speaker 2 (01:26:45):
Absolutely, that monster is going to get loose. It's going
to rampage, and we're here for it.
Speaker 3 (01:26:49):
Yeah. So well, actually, first there's an interlude in this
fight in the lab where Gotho lets Meyer and Tauchner
out of their cells. And she asks them to take
Elki to safety. So the three basically good people run away.
They get to you escape and be all right. But
this is right before the primordial escapes itsel and it
attacks Orla and there's this whole fight here. I think
(01:27:13):
it's a pretty awesome looking monster. Kind of a muddy,
melted candle slash oily maniac design.
Speaker 2 (01:27:20):
Yeah, like a green, brown sludge monster that looks especially
great in this setting with this film quality. And it
also benefits us that we don't see much of it.
We've just been leading up to this moment, and so
that we don't see enough of it to where we
really begin to see the seams or anything. Yeah, it's scary.
It's a great design. I love it.
Speaker 3 (01:27:41):
Yeah, I think it's really good. It kills Orla, and
then in the final the tragic ending that we probably
knew was coming, Gotho and the Primordial sort of lock
arms and they fall into the sulfuric acid pit together.
Bubble bubble the end.
Speaker 4 (01:27:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:27:55):
In fact, the words the end appear over the site
of blood colored sulphuric acid bubbling in the acid vat.
I wonder how much we're supposed to read into this
this kind of here we have like the tragic masculine
figure of Gotho and this perhaps monstrous feminine, pre human
deity type figure, if you believe everything Oil has been saying,
(01:28:18):
also falling into the acid with him. I'm probably reading
too much into the scenario.
Speaker 3 (01:28:23):
Oh yeah, what does that mean? The oily maniac goddess
and Gotho meet their fates together.
Speaker 2 (01:28:28):
Yeah, I mean it's but Gotho. To be clear, redeems
himself fully here. He has saved all of humanity and
we are in his debt. There can be no argument
over that.
Speaker 3 (01:28:40):
He did nothing wrong. He's fine, now.
Speaker 2 (01:28:42):
Yeah, well he did several things quite wrong, but he
saved us all in the end. He came through in
the end, and that's what matters.
Speaker 3 (01:28:50):
That's right, because who knows what the primordial could have done.
If it truly was kind of a Goser type figure,
a lost god from ancient times, it could have swept
over the earth and ruled us all.
Speaker 2 (01:29:01):
Yeah. I don't get the sense that this thing was
really interested in sharing ancient civilization secrets like Orla was
talking about, Like, it's not gonna I can't imagine having
a conversation with it with it where you're like, so,
what's up with the Egyptian neck rests? How did they
use that those when they slept? And it would be like, well,
let me tell you all about it. No, no, no,
this thing wants to eat and grow and do god
knows what else.
Speaker 3 (01:29:22):
It would just eat us all. Yeah, yeah, all right,
Well that was Hunchback in the Morgue.
Speaker 2 (01:29:27):
Yeah, yeah, you know, rats aside. I think a real
strong picture in the Nashi verse filmography here. You know,
it's got all the all the elements you want out
of a Nashy picture, you know, some great effects, some
ridiculous moments, you know, has it all?
Speaker 3 (01:29:43):
I would be interested to collect the examples of Nashi's filmography,
I guess, especially the movies that he had a hand
in writing or directing that don't have an element of
doomed love in them, doomed tragic love, like, because it
seems like he's almost always doing that. So like, what
what were his other main interests? You know, what are
(01:30:05):
what are the characters' emotional motivations when it's not.
Speaker 2 (01:30:08):
That well there definitely seemed to be a number of
pictures I've seen a few of them recently. Watch Panic Beats,
which brings the Warlock all Iraq back in an altered form,
but is largely a picture about like how awful people are.
But I'm not sure like how much of this is
like the example of this film like speaking I think
maybe to a certain extent, speaking a where speaking to
(01:30:29):
where like Nashi's mind was at the time, and sort
of his views on the state of humanity, but also
probably representing we're talking about like early eighties by this point,
representing changes in the horror market, and I understand there's
like less of a demand for gothic horror at that time,
and like clearly, you know, that's where his heart was.
So in order to still do a film about undead
(01:30:50):
you know, murderous Nights and so forth, you had to
sort of couch it in these you know, newer slasher
tropes and so forth.
Speaker 4 (01:30:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:30:58):
Yeah, so at some point in the future, well, maybe
we'll have to come back and do a Nashy picture
where he's sort of playing against type a bit. But
then on the other hand, the ones where he's playing
a true Nashy you know, tragic, doomed character, those are
so good it's hard to resist though, So it would
be very hard to pass up one of his monster
roles in favor of one of these other pictures.
Speaker 3 (01:31:19):
I'm just imagining a Paul Nashi themed Valentine card that's like,
will you stab me in the heart with a silver cross.
Speaker 2 (01:31:26):
There's something you could do a whole series of them.
I'd love to see it. Someone may have done it.
I mean that Nashi's a big enough horror icon at
this point, somebody may have created those already. If so,
please someone send me a link and in general right
into us with your thoughts on a Hunchback of the Morgue,
other Nashi pictures, or you know, favorite Spanish horror films,
(01:31:47):
favorite Hunchback movies. Everything is fair game. Just a reminder
that Stuff to Blow your Mind is primarily a science
and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
but on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns just
talk about a weird film on weird house cinema, such
as this picture. And if you want to see a
list of all the films we've covered thus far, and
sometimes a peek ahead at what's coming up next, go
(01:32:09):
to letterbox dot com. Our user name there is weird.
Speaker 3 (01:32:13):
House, Huge Things. As always to our excellent audio producer Jjposway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
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Speaker 1 (01:32:33):
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